History Of Emotions Research Articles

Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States by Erin Austin Dwyer

Reviewed by: Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States by Erin Austin Dwyer Laura McCoy (bio) Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States. By Erin Austin Dwyer. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Pp. 320. Cloth, $39.95.) Erin Austin Dwyer’s intriguing new book brings together the histories of slavery and emotions to illuminate how Black and white southerners alike deployed emotions as “a currency of power” (3). Dwyer reads slave narratives alongside and against documents of enslavers to reconstruct people’s emotional lives. While it is never possible to know how other people truly felt, Dwyer analyzes the rhetoric used to discuss emotions, what emotions were expected of whom, motives for feigning or hiding specific emotions, and differences between emotional norms and actual emotional practices. In doing so, she uncovers “what people thought emotions could actually accomplish” (13)—in short, how power operated through emotions in both slavery and Emancipation. From the outset, Dwyer makes clear that the stakes of these affective politics were not even. For enslavers, deviating from emotional norms most commonly risked public scrutiny and potential loss of capital, while enslaved people “risked the whip, the auction block, or even death” (3). While historians of slavery have separately explored affective relations among the slaveholding class or enslaved communities, Dwyer considers affective relations between the two groups. This approach enables her to interrogate how individuals navigated power hierarchies through emotional expression and to convincingly contend that attending to emotions sharpens our understanding of how white southerners perpetuated and Black southerners resisted the politics of white supremacy during the years before and after the Civil War. The first chapter broadly explores how enslavers constructed their emotional lives and social identities through enslaved people and, in turn, how enslaved people could manipulate slave owners’ feelings and relationships to survive and resist enslavement. The second chapter explains how southerners learned the emotional politics of a society organized around slavery. Slaveholding parents actively taught their children how to master their own emotions and those of the people they enslaved. From enslaved adults, trickster tales, and the process of play, enslaved children learned how to mask sadness, read slaveholders’ emotions, and identify emotional allies—all affective strategies that could mean the difference between life and death. Together, these chapters emphasize that the emotional politics of slavery were socially constructed and thus intentionally reinforced or resisted. [End Page 246] The third and fourth chapters consider the rhetorical importance and literal commodification of emotions in a society dominated by market forces. For instance, members of the planter class linked the appearance of contentment to profitability, worrying that “sulky” slaves were poor workers and that crying or lashing out on the auction block depreciated an enslaved person’s value. Because trustworthiness had market value, enslaved people could strategically display honesty and loyalty to gain benefits like greater mobility. These chapters demonstrate how the market values of happiness and trust constrained enslaved people’s freedom of emotional expression while simultaneously providing opportunities for enslavers and enslaved people to negotiate their daily lives and material conditions. Chapters 5 and 6 explore the contours and consequences of affective discipline as a means of social control. Enslavers assumed the authority to coerce displays of desired emotions from enslaved people and punish them for expressing an emotion deemed inappropriate or threatening, such as grief or anger. The goal of affective discipline was not just to control enslaved people’s emotional expressions, but also to punish them for how they had made slaveholders feel. The final chapter examines Emancipation as “a seismic shift in the emotional terrain of the South” (162), in part because the planter class fretted over losing the power to affectively discipline Black people. Formerly enslaved people made clear that they believed being free meant the ability to pursue happiness and freely express emotions that had been restricted in bondage. Members of the planter class felt threatened by this emotional liberation and employed both legal and extralegal tactics to reassert the emotional hierarchies of slavery, especially the authority to control Black people’s emotions. The power of Mastering Emotions rests on Dwyer’s patient and nuanced readings of conflicting perspectives and...

Introduction: Healthcare Practitioners' Emotions and the Politics of Well-Being in Twentieth Century Anglo-America.

From the stress of burnout to the gratification of camaraderie, medicine is suffused with emotions that educators, administrators, and reformers have sought to shape. Yet historians of medicine have only begun to analyze how emotions have structured health care work. This introductory essay frames a special issue on health care practitioners' emotions in the twentieth-century United Kingdom and United States. We argue that the massive bureaucratic and scientific changes in medicine after the Second World War helped to reshape affective aspects of care. The articles in this issue emphasize the intersubjectivity of feelings in healthcare settings and the mutually constitutive relationship between patients' and providers' emotions. Bridging the history of medicine with the history of emotion demonstrates how emotions are instilled rather than innate, social as well as personal, and, above all else, change over time. The articles reckon with the power dynamics of healthcare. They address the policies and practices that institutions, organizations, and governments have implemented to shape, govern, or manage the affective experiences and well-being of healthcare workers. And they point to important new directions in the history of medicine.

Feeling Feminism: Activism, Affect, and Canada’s Second Wave by Lara Campbell, Dawson Michael and Catherine Gidney (review)

Reviewed by: Feeling Feminism: Activism, Affect, and Canada’s Second Wave by Lara Campbell, Dawson Michael and Catherine Gidney Nancy Janovicek Campbell, Lara, Michael Dawson, and Catherine Gidney, eds.–Feeling Feminism: Activism, Affect, and Canada’s Second Wave. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2022. 324 p. Feeling Feminism is a fascinating collection of essays about second-wave feminist activism in Canada because it centres the very thing that has been used to justify women’s exclusion from politics for centuries: emotion. Drawing on feminist political theory that rejects the dichotomy of emotional feminine reaction and rational masculine reason, the editors explain that the essays are not about ‘emotional’ women but, rather how women “used emotion for control” (p. 18). Informed by affect theory and the history of emotion, the essays examine diverse organizations and actions to demonstrate how women mobilized their emotions to challenge gendered inequalities. Following critical race theorists (in particular bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Patrician Hill Collins, and Gloria Anduzula), the essays demonstrate that emotions can be productive because they create activist communities based on shared experiences. But emotional bonds among activists can also be exclusionary; to be a useful lens for analysis, historians must be aware of how emotions are shaped by hierarchies of power. The essays are attentive to how bonds of connectedness forged in passionate activism often shame those who do not meet—or may reject—activists’ ideals and imaginations of equality. [End Page 200] A central theme of the book is that emotions are both individual and public. Contributions by Whitney Wood and Cheryl Krasnick Warsh use letters to examine women’s emotional responses to maternal health and potential threats to their children’s health. Drawing from her research on pain in childbirth, Wood examines letters mothers wrote to Grantly Dick-Read, who promoted “natural childbirth” to counter the medicalization of childbirth in the postwar era. Women expressed pride that they had endured the pain of childbirth, shame if they did not, and anger if they believed that unwanted medical intervention had robbed them of the experience. Krasnick Warsh uses mothers’ “fan mail” to Frances Oldham Kelsey thanking her for preventing thalidomide from being approved in the United States. She argues letters to well-known people is a unique epistolary form because the intent is to direct action. Individual letters produced collective anger about male control over childbirth and the threat to children’s health fuelled the women’s health movement. Activism entails a range of emotions, often simultaneously, because of the various gendered and racialized life experiences of organizers. Essays by Kevin Brushett and Josette Brun et al. examine women working in male-dominated spaces. Using the Company of Young Canadians (CYC) to reassess the origins of the second wave in the New Left, Brushett argues that the burnout and isolation that CYC women experienced informed their feminist practice of understanding the connections between the personal and the political. Disempowerment in a male-dominated environment helped them envision a different way of doing politics based in developing a nurturing community. Using the 1981 Women’s Journalists’ Conference in Quebec, Josette Brun, Laurie Leplanche, and Sophie Doucet examine the emotional tension in the discussions about succeeding in a male-dominated profession based on competitiveness while trying to adapt the profession to accommodate women’s familial responsibilities. While proud of their accomplishments, women at the conference also talked about the shame, guilt, and embarrassment caused by time away from children. Alienation and isolation were common experiences in women-only groups, too. Funké Aladejebi examines black teachers’ anger and frustration in the Federation of Women Teachers’ Association of Ontario. Her analysis of white women’s inability to hear black women’s discussions of racism within the profession demonstrates how hierarchies of emotions could exist within a group and also for the need to centre race in affect theory. Sarah Nickel draws on Dian Million’s theorization of “felt knowledge” to examine a range of emotional responses in British Columbia Indigenous women’s activism and argues that “political work is emotional in nature, just as emotions are, in fact, labour” (p. 74). Activists mobilized mourning, exhaustion, and loss to make critical interventions into the colonial legal...

‘A great pedestrian’: John Stuart Mill, the Walking Philosopher

Abstract Walking was an essential part of John Stuart Mill’s education, working life, and leisure. As a boy, James Mill schooled his son on daily walks; as an adult, Mill made an 11-mile round trip across London on foot to work and back each day; for recreation he went on walking tours; his passion for botany led him to walk regularly in rural Britain; later in life he undertook walking tours across France, Spain, Italy, Greece, and Turkey. Mill, in short, was ‘a great pedestrian’. But this aspect of his life remains under appreciated by historians. By combining insights from the history of emotions, cultural history, and cultural geography, with the burgeoning literature on the significance of walking, this article will demonstrate that Mill’s walking – including where he walked, and how he walked – is not only worthy of attention, but can help us to better understand both his identity and his thought. The article not only connects Mill to the peripatetic and romantic pedestrian traditions, but also seeks to demonstrate that walking aided the process, and helped to shape the content, of Mill’s philosophy. In particular, the article argues that an appreciation of Mill’s walking can contribute to the development of a new perspective on the thorny question of Mill’s understanding of higher and lower pleasures.

Revisiting space and emotion: New ways to study buildings and feelings

AbstractIn her 2014 History Compass article, Margrit Pernau issued a call for scholars to consider entanglements between history of emotion methodologies and space. She argued that ‘bodies are necessarily situated in space, and they bear the imprint of the spaces they are moving through and have moved through.’ Nine years after the publication of Pernau's article, this study engages with developments in the field of history of emotions to posit that emotional methodologies provide important opportunities for scholars of the urban built environment, adding additional lenses that can help to push the boundaries of urban history. Extending Pernau's thesis by borrowing theoretical and methodological muscle from affect theory and the combined field of slavery and gender studies, via the concepts of atmospheres, reconstruction, and critical fabulation, this article explores new avenues for research that aims to understand and analyse marginalised groups in urban history. The explorative analysis is tested on a macroanalysis of social processes among the Irish diaspora in nineteenth century Melbourne and Chicago and a microhistorical study of a Pietist orphanage in nineteenth century Stockholm and thus showcases the possibility of the approach to go beyond spatial‐emotional management and reach contradictory and alternative strategies and experiences.

The History of Cancer and Emotions in Twentieth-Century Germany

Bettina Hitzer, Heisenberg Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies at the Technische Universität Dresden and Privatdozentin at the Freie Universität Berlin, has written what may fairly be called a definitive history of cancer in twentieth-century Germany. The special merit and value of Hitzer’s book is, as she puts it, the analysis of ‘three modes of the disease’s relation to emotions [...] the genesis of scientific, and above all medical and psychological concepts of what emotions are [...] the shifts in different types of knowledge about emotions and cancer [...] and the role that emotions played in clinical, preventive, palliative, and private approaches towards cancer and those diagnosed with it’ (p. 359). The coverage of the topic is exhaustive, indeed complete. While sometimes involved—given the many complexities of the history and the author’s analysis of it—the writing is clear. The translation is also quite satisfactory, apart from the occasional choice of informality (‘Sure, these concepts’, p. 4) or odd usage (‘clipped the plausibility’, p. 37; ‘impressing testament’, p. 105; ‘Allied bomb raid’, p. 288). The author’s choice of a thematic organization by chapter in the place of an overall chronological approach is, with a couple of exceptions noted below, very effectively deployed and realized.

Feeling the Revolution: The Emotional Regime of Russian Empire’s Penitentiaries in the Development of Protest Communication

This article examines the problem of the special emotional regime of hard labour prisons in the Russian Empire in the early twentieth century in the context of the social construction of emotions characteristic of a revolutionary community. The paper aims to identify the determinants of the success of the revolutionary movement in the events of 1917. The author focuses on the mechanisms of communication of political prisoners and the role of the emotional component in the formation of a stable system of social interaction in a revolutionary environment. Employing the methodology of the history of emotions and comparative analysis, the author studies both previously known historical sources (letters of F. E. Dzerzhinsky) and archival materials (perlustration of letters from prisoners of the Smolensk convict prison) which have not been studied before. The article demonstrates how the special conditions of imprisonment shaped the emotional regime of hard labour prisons and contributed to the formation of a revolutionary community. With classical communication mechanisms limited, prisoners developed alternative means of communication. Also, the author pays special attention to the peculiarities of the written language of political prisoners and its evolution in conditions of hard labour and interaction with the criminal environment. The main results of the study are related to the term “emotional code” as a characteristic communication mechanism (“friend or foe” system) within a revolutionary community. In the context of the social processes of the beginning of the century, the opposition to the growing social melancholy on the part of the revolutionary community stands out. It was not only able to build communication mechanisms that were reliable and closed to external analysis based on similar emotional patterns but also used emotional constructions for agitation and propaganda in the public environment. Specific images of the future and the positive emotions associated with it have become a constructive alternative to the negative phenomena that prevail in the public consciousness during the last years of the empire’s existence. The main “weapon” of the revolutionary community in 1917, along with propaganda, was empathy, highly developed emotional intelligence, and the ability to accurately capture the emotions of one’s surroundings. The article concludes that labour prisons were “laboratories of emotions” which played a significant role in the crystallisation of the revolutionary community and the formation of its mobilisation potential.

Bettina Hitzer, The History of Cancer and Emotions in Twentieth-Century Germany. (Emotions in History.) Oxford, Oxford University Press 2022

Bettina Hitzer, The History of Cancer and Emotions in Twentieth-Century Germany. (Emotions in History.) Oxford, Oxford University Press 2022

Migration, gender, and emotions. A reflection on global care chains and circuits of care in the context of migration from Bolivia to Argentina

The intersection between the history of emotions and migration studies highlights how motherhood and care practices are transformed during migration. In this article, through the example of Bolivian migration to Argentina, we shed light on diverse emotional experiences around care work that cannot be understood if we analyze them through the classic approaches of global care chains and the circulation of care. In this study, we set out to analyze care practices and the emotional dynamics that are connected to them from a situated perspective that focuses on different geographic locations to those studied in these two classic approaches. We call into question essentialist views of motherhood, care, and emotions by conducting a historical analysis of human mobility between two countries in the Global South: the waves of migration from Bolivia to Argentina that took place between the 1970s and 1990s.

Frank Biess. German Angst: Fear and Democracy in the Federal Republic of Germany.

German Angst: Fear and Democracy in the Federal Republic of Germany is a revised and updated English version of Republik der Angst, which attracted a lot of interest in Germany following its publication in 2019. The book provides a sweeping history of the Federal Republic of Germany from the perspective of a history of fear. Discussing topics that run the gamut from fears about nuclear war to changing theories of the self, Frank Biess brings together a remarkable array of insights. More than colleting disparate vistas, however, he offers a reconsideration of some of the dominant narratives about West Germany’s past between 1945 and 1989. In the introduction, Biess lays out the theoretical foundations of his approach to emotions and German history. Biess argues that a focus on fear can counter overly teleological success stories of the Federal Republic of Germany. Rather than pathologizing the fear that contemporaries voiced in moments of crisis as “hysterical” or “neurotic,” he proposes to look at fear as historical force in its own right. In doing so, the author uses approaches from the history of emotions. Biess draws, for instance, on William Reddy’s concept of “emotional regimes” to explain how historians can conceptualize emotions as social and individual. The analysis of shifting “emotional regimes” shows how societies fostered or discouraged certain emotions in a specific period.

Clio in the Operating Theatre: Historical Research, Emotional Health, and Surgical Training in Contemporary Britain.

Drawing on my experience working as a postdoctoral research and engagement fellow on the Wellcome Trust-funded project, Surgery & Emotion, this article reflects on this innovative model of historical research and professional engagement, explores the challenges posed by crossing disciplinary boundaries, and interrogates the practical and theoretical utility of bringing historical research into the operating theatre. How do surgeons specifically engage with the history of their profession? What can the history of emotions offer to the training of medical students and surgeons? What obstacles interfere in this type of cross-disciplinary engagement? What peculiar opportunities and challenges do the United Kingdom higher education system and National Health Service pose to the teaching of medical history in clinical settings? Bringing Clio into the operating theatre provides surgeons with an alternative narrative to that which they have come to expect about the emotions they ought to feel and express in their work. It allows them to explore the high feelings of their professional lives at a remove and offers an array of possible solutions to the current emotional health crisis in British medicine. History allows surgeons to imagine an alternative world: one where the pervasive and persistent models of emotional detachment - damaging to both patient experience and professional wellbeing - dissolve.

Between Concealment and Disclosure: Approaches to the History of Privacy in Knowledge-Making

Between Concealment and Disclosure: Approaches to the History of Privacy in Knowledge-Making

Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea: Between Genealogical Time and the Domestic Everyday

Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea: Between Genealogical Time and the Domestic Everyday

Book Review: Emotional histories in the fight to end prostitution: Emotional communities, 1869 to today by M. R. Greer

Book Review: <i>Emotional histories in the fight to end prostitution: Emotional communities, 1869 to today</i> by M. R. Greer

Unsettling Affect

Unsettling Affect Pamela K. Gilbert (bio) Despite long-standing critiques of dominant theories of emotion, the basic structure of emotions is persistently considered by many commentators and even researchers, such as those in the social sciences and artificial intelligence, to be largely settled. Our understanding of emotion and affect is indebted to universalizing physiological theories emerging from the Enlightenment, and subsequently, from evolutionary science. Each of the authors in this forum is interested in unsettling our sense of how feelings work and signify. Alisha Walters and Zachary Samalin detail how the history of emotions depended upon nineteenth-century beliefs about embodied racial and civilizational hierarchies. Such beliefs about emotion were also undergirded by and instrumentalized in the imperial context, as Samalin, Walters, and Sukanya Banerjee show. Often they relied on definitions of modernity that imposed the burden of anteriority and primitivism on racial alterity. Sympathy was and is both centered and critiqued as a mode of community building and bridging racial divides. Rachel Ablow, Banerjee, and I each examine some of its prerequisites, opposites, and alternatives. Finally, although several of the essays here examine particular feelings, or histories or assemblages of feelings, the concept of affective potential has a history as well, as Elisha Cohn demonstrates. By exploring oppositions swirling around these terms and structures, these essays collectively invite us to consider the affordances of those histories and to question their deployment in the present. Samalin limns the history of Darwin’s research in “Affect Theory’s Colonial Sources.” Whereas Darwin’s liberal universalist project still underlies much discussion of emotion, so too do Enlightenment liberalism’s investments in racial [End Page 592] hierarchy and domination. Darwin’s sources all over the world were steeped in racial theories which, as Samalin shows, were tightly connected to “assertions of civilizational difference”; in turn, stadial theories of development tended to be organized around concepts of affect (562). Together, these two types of theories mediated the nexus between individuals and cultural groups. The study of emotion has long claimed objective universality while simultaneously relying on appeals to feeling itself as evidentiary, as Walters makes clear. In “James Hunt, Robert Knox, and the Feelings of Empirical Race Science,” Walters argues that while race science called for a future of objectivity, it depended upon a present of “unruly” feelings (555). She discusses the Celtic section of Knox’s The Races of Men (1850), in which race comes to be defined through the feelings marking the dangerously emotional Celtic body and its supposed proclivity for violence. The period mobilized such feelings in the service of an imperial modernity. Banerjee’s “Loyalty” notes the importance of that feeling in Adam Smith’s writing as a precondition for sympathy. She explores the ways in which loyalty is positioned as uneasily contractual and performative yet natural and customary, deriving from deliberate alliance on the one hand and on predefined allegiance on the other. Arguing that loyalty is fundamental to modernity’s many-layered institutions—the family, the state, the economy—Banerjee shows how this “associational attachment” must also insist upon exclusions in turn grounded in loyalty itself (qtd. in Banerjee 568). Sympathy has of course long been an important term—perhaps even the most important—in discussions of the history of emotion as well as in literature and aesthetics. Saidiya Hartman, among other current critics, has taught us to be less trusting of sympathy, which at best “fails to expand the space of the [Black] other but merely places the [white] self in its stead” (Hartman 20). Yet, as Ablow observes, the importance of sympathy as a generator of social action is still a fundamental assumption underlying present social science discussions. But the critique of sympathy’s centrality was nascent in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers; then, too, the question of what alternatives might inspire action often swirled around questions of race. Ablow shows us how the counter discourse against the effectiveness of sympathy extended into the literary world. In “Unsettling Sympathy,” Ablow shows how Martineau avoids such appeals in her novel about the Haitian revolution, emphasizing instead the “insane contradictions” created by slavery (qtd. in Ablow 576). Ablow argues that the text incites only horror in the...

Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States by Erin Austin Dwyer

Reviewed by: Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States by Erin Austin Dwyer Lindsay A. Silver Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States. By Erin Austin Dwyer. America in the Nineteenth Century. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Pp. x, 284. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8122-5339-9.) In Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States, Erin Austin Dwyer insightfully demonstrates how emotions shaped, maintained, and challenged the institution of slavery by examining the power dynamics of real and performative feelings between people who were enslaved and slave owners. At the same time, Dwyer emphasizes the prominence of emotions in proslavery defenses and abolitionist critiques, further underscoring the centrality of sentiments to many of the arguments seeking to uphold or destroy slavery in antebellum America. As a book about the power of emotions and feelings, Mastering Emotions primarily focuses on relationships between enslaved people and slaveholders. Dwyer draws on a wide variety of sources while making particular use of first-person accounts. These sources, which include slave narratives alongside the journals and diaries of white southerners who owned enslaved people, enable Dwyer to expose and explore the feelings and emotions that established, maintained, and even challenged the power dynamics within slavery. Dwyer’s work is deeply rooted in an extensive historiography of American slavery that acknowledges the prevalence of such sentiments among enslaved Blacks and slaveholding whites. What stands out about Mastering Emotions is that Dwyer is the first to seriously and methodically analyze the significance of feelings and emotions to the institution of slavery. Dwyer accomplishes this goal by applying the framework established by scholars of the history of emotions to the history of American slavery. As a result, the reader revisits many familiar scenes and stories from nineteenth-century narratives of enslaved people and slaveholders, but with a new understanding of how power dynamics operated between them, due to Dwyer’s emphasis on the importance of emotions in these relationships. Mastering Emotions covers considerable ground, examining a number of emotions from multiple angles and perspectives. Dwyer successfully demonstrates how the roles of enslaved persons and slave owners were culturally constructed, learned, reinforced, and challenged through emotions both real and performative. Included in the wide range of emotions Dwyer examines are trust, happiness, fear, and the enjoyment of freedom. In her discussion of fear and punishment, the author highlights how scholars have traditionally focused on physical punishment inflicted on enslaved people and have ignored or downplayed the role of emotional or affective discipline. By shifting the focus away from physical punishment and examining the role of emotions, Dwyer successfully demonstrates a greater understanding of “the lived experience of slavery and . . . the critical place of emotional mastery in discipline” (p. 139). Additionally, Dwyer exposes the contradictions in proslavery literature that argued that enslaved people did not have the capacity to feel emotions as strongly as white people, even as emotional punishments designed to break up enslaved families became a common form of control—one that enslaved people often felt was much more painful than physical violence. [End Page 142] In order to fully demonstrate the significance, power, and legacy of the emotional politics of slavery, Dwyer concludes with a brief but important overview of how emotions have shaped Black and white race relations in America since emancipation. In doing so, Dwyer outlines how different emotions, particularly fear, have tragically impacted the joys of freedom for Black Americans from the Jim Crow era to the present. Importantly, Dwyer’s conclusion makes a strong case for further academic and cultural work to better understand the power dynamics of emotions within race relations since the abolition of slavery more than 150 years ago. Lindsay A. Silver Texas A&M University–San Antonio Copyright © 2023 The Southern Historical Association

Dangerous or Goodly Passions: The Role of Emotion in Parliament and Politics

Dangerous or Goodly Passions: The Role of Emotion in Parliament and Politics

The Political Mistress: Intimacy, Emotion, and Parliamentary Politics in the Late 18th Century

AbstractBetween c.1796 and 1809, Lady Harriet Ponsonby, Countess Bessborough and Lord Granville Leveson Gower were embroiled in a passionate affair. Their liaison created tensions in aristocratic society because they belonged to rival political parties, the Whigs and the Tories respectively. In the early years of their relationship, Leveson Gower was emerging on the political scene, while the countess was already well‐versed in the complexities of party politics. Leveson Gower thus solicited her advice and support and Bessborough duly shared her knowledge and insight into the political world, which created an unusual dynamic that scholars have yet to explore. This article examines several letters that Bessborough wrote to Leveson Gower to analyse how she supported her lover's fledgling parliamentary career and how she navigated their political differences. I argue that Bessborough adapted a rhetoric of affection, deference, duty, and loyalty, that was typically used by aristocratic wives, to justify her interest in her lover's career and her passion for parliamentary politics. This article contributes to scholarship that explores aristocratic women's political participation by examining the strategies a political mistress could employ to exert influence over men. It also illustrates the value of using methodologies from the history of emotions to investigate the drives and passions that shaped interactions in the late 18th‐century political sphere.

Compassion as an Agent of Historical Change

Abstract Compassion plays a significant role in many historiographies because of its capacity to explain human motivation and action. Within the history of judicial punishment in particular, compassion is a key agent of change—a feeling with explanatory power for historians. With its call to historicize feeling, the history of emotions troubles such accounts, undercutting the human universalism that compassion’s explanatory power relies on. This article argues that an emotions history of early modern compassion leads us to draw quite different conclusions about not just the operation of early modern punishment but especially what changed with the decline of corporeal punishment and the rise of human rights in the eighteenth century. It reminds historians that the history of emotions is important not just for those in this subdiscipline but for any who use emotion to explain historical events.

Tears and Contrition in Early Modern Iberian Inquisitorial Trials (1560–1610): A Preliminary Study

Abstract The History of Emotions has been establishing itself as a field of historical research since the 1980s, but, to date, almost no attempt has been made to approach the study of the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions through the history of emotions. Focusing on the period 1560–1610, which followed the conclusion of the Council of Trent, this essay endeavours to offer a preliminary analysis of Iberian inquisitorial trials for the history of emotions. The first section examines the case study offered by the trial of the Spanish soldier Bartolomé Domínguez, who was prosecuted in Portugal for committing sacrilege in 1589. Having lost all his money gambling, Bartolomé drew his sword and slashed at a wayside cross. This public act of sacrilege led to Bartolomé’s arrest and an investigation by the Inquisition. The surviving inquisitorial trial dossier provides an interesting insight into the role played by emotions in inquisitorial justice and social disciplining in the early modern Iberian Peninsula. The second section examines a limited sample of trials that have been edited and seeks to find references to tears and weeping in such sources. It discusses what such references reveal about the attitudes of inquisitors towards tears within the legal context of inquisitorial trials, and whether tears were always seen as evidence of genuine contrition. The third and final section focuses on investigating how the context of post-Tridentine spirituality might have played a role in the increased attention that the inquisitors paid to other physical signs of contrition beyond tears.