 One of the most important contexts for understanding the epistemic strengths and weaknesses attributed to the emotions lies in their relation to the imagination. Accounts of what exactly this faculty is changed dramatically from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries, but in one way or another, the emotions were commonly understood to interact closely with the imagination. On some views, the imagination provides a conduit between the emotions and the body. Both pre-modern and modern folk medicine held that experiencing strong emotions could affect the imagination of a pregnant woman in such a way as to leave marks on her fetus. Indeed, so close was the connection supposed to be that simply imagining emotionally-fraught situations could mark the development of the fetus, and there was a substantial literature of eighteenth-century manuals instructing mothers-to-be on the proper control of their affective states. (See Smith 2006 and Kukla 2005.) Descartes made mention of such views, and more generally saw the imagination as an important tool for managing the emotions: picturing things in the imagination could have affective results, so manipulating the imagination is an effective way of controlling our emotions and their effects. The view taken of the interaction between emotions and imagination changed with shifts in how the faculty of the imagination – and the relation between mind and body in general – were understood. Hume, for instance, considered the imagination to be the faculty of composing, decomposing, and associating ideas, in contrast to the impressions among which passions were numbered. Nonetheless, there is still some role for the imagination in producing and manipulating affects, and vice-versa. The imagination is also a crucial mechanism in the social communication of the passions, a topic considered by both Malebranche and Hume.