Historians Of Emotions Research Articles

Emotion and Conversion on the Early Modern Spanish Stage

ABSTRACT Historians of the religious culture of early modern Spain have long paid attention to the emotional and sensual valences of their subject. Yet it is only recently that Hispanists have begun to fully exploit the systematic theoretical approaches offered by historians of emotion and the senses. This article examines two literary representations of conversion—one successful and one failed—in order to demonstrate how close attention to seventeenth-century concepts of emotion and sense can help us better understand the social dynamics of conversion and religious experience in the period. Both Lope de Vega’s Bautismo del príncipe de Marruecos and Calderón de la Barca’s Nuevo palacio del Retiro explicitly link conversion to the body’s sensory and emotional capabilities. Though they take quite different approaches, both suggest that physical revelation must precede intellectual enlightenment. Faith was, in their presentations, a matter of the eyes, ears, and heart. The author argues that future scholarship on the religious cultures of early modern Spain must take account of the ways in which contemporary authors paid so much attention to emotion and sensory experience in their depictions of conversion and of religious experience more generally.

‘Her Work of Love’: Forced Separations, Maternal Grief, and Enslaved Mothers’ Emotional Practices in the Antebellum US South

ABSTRACT This article considers enslaved mothers’ emotional responses to the separation of their children. While slavery studies scholars have discussed the individual impact sales had on enslaved people, and historians of emotion have explored white communities’ understandings of both white maternal love and enslaved emotion, few studies have explored how events such as sale shaped enslaved women's own emotional understandings, practices, experiences and expressions. Guided by enslaved women's own testimony, this article argues that enslaved women created their own, gendered, emotional worlds in response to their experiences of sale – their own conceptions of love and grief, ways of expressing their emotion, and collective emotional practices in the aftermath of separation. Not only individual responses to emotional pain, their collective emotional practices must also be viewed as acts of refusal to submit to slave trading practices, white emotional standards and racialized emotional ideologies. Through loving and grieving actively, enslaved women maintained their maternal bonds in the face of both practical and ideological attempts to decimate them.

Follow the Hatred: The Production of Negative Feeling in Emily Brontë'sWuthering Heights

Follow the Hatred: The Production of Negative Feeling in Emily Brontë's<i>Wuthering Heights</i>

Emotions and Mediaeval Monasticism: Introduction

Pakistan Journal of Historical Studies, Vol. 5 • Summer & Winter 2020, pp. 1–10 Copyright © 2020 Khaldunia Centre for Historical Research. doi:10.2979/pjhs.5.1_2.01 Emotions and Mediaeval Monasticism : Introduction Barbara H. Rosenwein Loyola University Chicago Riccardo Cristiani independent scholar If the history of emotions itself is a fairly new project, its application to the topic of mediaeval Western monasticism is newer still. True, the devotional fervour involved in twelfth and thirteenth-century Cistercian monasticism (in particular) has been well explored.1 True, too, that each of the authors involved in this collection has studied various individual monasteries for their emotional tenor. Nevertheless, the present work is perhaps the first to place various monastic communities side by side for direct comparison and contrast. We expected this juxtaposition to reveal some of the myriad possibilities of emotional continuity and change from the sixth to the thirteenth century. Yet, while we may indeed find somepatterns,theyarefarlessstrikingthanthefrictionofdifferenthistoriographical approaches, each suited to a particular monastery and each largely dependent on the sources being investigated. In short, we think that the essays in this collection are useful above all because they provide a sampling of the sorts of methods that historians may use to tease out the emotions in extant documents and material objects. Along with the traditional modes of inquiry that historians normally apply to primary sources, historians of emotions must add many new questions, each aimed at a particular analytical issue. What constitutes an emotion for the writers (or creators) and their audience(s)? What attitudes do the sources have about particular emotions and how they are expressed? To whom are emotions attributed and why? Are 2 Pakistan Journal of Historical Studies, Vol. 5 • Summer & Winter 2020 the authors emotional in their self-presentation? What expectations do the authors have about the emotions and emotional reactions of others? How are emotions used to make moral judgments or impose behaviours and attitudes? Are emotions expressed or expected to be expressed differently by men and women? And, very importantly, historians should also ask themselves what sorts of emotional assumptions they, as professional researchers, bring to the sources and to what extent they are justified. The first question concerning what constitutes an emotion is perhaps the most problematic. The worst answer is to look for the words and practices that we today consider to be emotions or emotional and assume that they had the same significance in the past. By what criteria, then, may we identify an emotion? Methodologically speaking, the essays in this collection are grounded in the long tradition that connects the ancient Greek word pathos to the Latin passio. In the Middle Ages, the pathe were commonly termed passions (passiones), perturbations (perturbationes), affects or affections (affectus, affectiones). A fifth-century monk, John Cassian, repackaged many of the negative passions (e.g., anger, sadness, lust) as vices, starting a tradition that equated emotions with sinful thoughts and behaviour . Around the same time, Augustine of Hippo offered an even more comprehensive way to consider the emotions of the ancient world within a Christian world-view. For Augustine, emotions were movements of the soul that were put into action by the will. Mankind, fallen from Eden and mired in sin, habitually willed all the wrong things, all the vices. But with God’s help, men and women could turn their wills around and convert them and their wrong-headed emotions in the right direction toward God. Thus, anger on behalf of God, sadness at one’s sins, lust turned into the desire for God were good emotions. Much later, in the twelfth century, philosophers and theologians offered useful theories of the emotions, and in the next century, Thomas Aquinas wrote a comprehensive treatise on the topic. Today’s mediaevalists, therefore, have a fairly good idea of what people in the Middle Ages considered to be emotions and emotional. Rosenwein and Cristiani / Emotions and Mediaeval Monasticism 3 Monasteries were designed to separate monks and nuns from the families, towns, and courts whence they came and, accordingly, to shape their emotional repertoire so that it conformed to the standard mandated by the Rule they followed. But even one Rule, as in the case of the sixth...

Feeling Things: From Visual to Material Jurisprudence

In this article I analyse the extent to which there has been a shift in the cultural turn in legal scholarship and specifically from visual to what I call material jurisprudence, that is from visual to material ways of knowing law. I do so through an analysis of Desmond Manderson’s edited collection, Law and the Visual: Representations, Technologies, Critique (2018a), and Katherine Biber’s monograph, In Crime’s Archive: The Cultural Afterlife of Evidence (2018b). Inspired by the material turn in the arts and humanities I apply a material lens as defined by historians of emotions (Downes et al. 2018) working within this turn to these books. Using this lens, I analyse the extent to which the authors conceptualise and analyse their primary sources in material terms. In so doing it is my intention to encourage scholars of visual jurisprudence to consider the multisensorial nature of law by considering the material as a constitutive part or instead of the visual as has happened elsewhere in the arts, humanities and social sciences, as well as to do so with greater specificity and depth.

The Odor of Disgust: Contemplating the Dark Side of 20th-Century Cancer History

This article explores how historians of emotions and historians of the senses can collaborate to write a history of emotional experience that takes seriously the corporeality of emotions. It investigates how smell, feelings of disgust, and the moral judgments associated with these feelings were interrelated in 20th-century German cancer history. It demonstrates that this complex decisively shaped the emotional experiences of cancer patients. Uncovering this dynamic is only possible by conjoining the history of emotions with a more expanded version of the history of the senses. The combination reveals that the “odor of disgust” was not an ahistorical constant, but was, both in its parts and as a whole, subject to considerable shifts.

Emotions and Mediaeval Monasticism: Introduction

Pakistan Journal of Historical Studies, Vol. 5 • Summer & Winter 2020, pp. 1–10 Copyright © 2020 Khaldunia Centre for Historical Research. doi:10.2979/pjhs.5.1_2.01 Emotions and Mediaeval Monasticism : Introduction Barbara H. Rosenwein Loyola University Chicago Riccardo Cristiani independent scholar If the history of emotions itself is a fairly new project, its application to the topic of mediaeval Western monasticism is newer still. True, the devotional fervour involved in twelfth and thirteenth-century Cistercian monasticism (in particular) has been well explored.1 True, too, that each of the authors involved in this collection has studied various individual monasteries for their emotional tenor. Nevertheless, the present work is perhaps the first to place various monastic communities side by side for direct comparison and contrast. We expected this juxtaposition to reveal some of the myriad possibilities of emotional continuity and change from the sixth to the thirteenth century. Yet, while we may indeed find somepatterns,theyarefarlessstrikingthanthefrictionofdifferenthistoriographical approaches, each suited to a particular monastery and each largely dependent on the sources being investigated. In short, we think that the essays in this collection are useful above all because they provide a sampling of the sorts of methods that historians may use to tease out the emotions in extant documents and material objects. Along with the traditional modes of inquiry that historians normally apply to primary sources, historians of emotions must add many new questions, each aimed at a particular analytical issue. What constitutes an emotion for the writers (or creators) and their audience(s)? What attitudes do the sources have about particular emotions and how they are expressed? To whom are emotions attributed and why? Are 2 Pakistan Journal of Historical Studies, Vol. 5 • Summer & Winter 2020 the authors emotional in their self-presentation? What expectations do the authors have about the emotions and emotional reactions of others? How are emotions used to make moral judgments or impose behaviours and attitudes? Are emotions expressed or expected to be expressed differently by men and women? And, very importantly, historians should also ask themselves what sorts of emotional assumptions they, as professional researchers, bring to the sources and to what extent they are justified. The first question concerning what constitutes an emotion is perhaps the most problematic. The worst answer is to look for the words and practices that we today consider to be emotions or emotional and assume that they had the same significance in the past. By what criteria, then, may we identify an emotion? Methodologically speaking, the essays in this collection are grounded in the long tradition that connects the ancient Greek word pathos to the Latin passio. In the Middle Ages, the pathe were commonly termed passions (passiones), perturbations (perturbationes), affects or affections (affectus, affectiones). A fifth-century monk, John Cassian, repackaged many of the negative passions (e.g., anger, sadness, lust) as vices, starting a tradition that equated emotions with sinful thoughts and behaviour . Around the same time, Augustine of Hippo offered an even more comprehensive way to consider the emotions of the ancient world within a Christian world-view. For Augustine, emotions were movements of the soul that were put into action by the will. Mankind, fallen from Eden and mired in sin, habitually willed all the wrong things, all the vices. But with God’s help, men and women could turn their wills around and convert them and their wrong-headed emotions in the right direction toward God. Thus, anger on behalf of God, sadness at one’s sins, lust turned into the desire for God were good emotions. Much later, in the twelfth century, philosophers and theologians offered useful theories of the emotions, and in the next century, Thomas Aquinas wrote a comprehensive treatise on the topic. Today’s mediaevalists, therefore, have a fairly good idea of what people in the Middle Ages considered to be emotions and emotional. Rosenwein and Cristiani / Emotions and Mediaeval Monasticism 3 Monasteries were designed to separate monks and nuns from the families, towns, and courts whence they came and, accordingly, to shape their emotional repertoire so that it conformed to the standard mandated by the Rule they followed. But even one Rule, as in the case of the sixth...

The concept of ‘emotion’: An historical perspective

Though the concept of ‘emotion’ is often accepted uncritically, a historical approach shows that, in the form it takes in modern psychology, it is a product of the 19th century, and replaced an earlier more differentiated vocabulary. In the 17th century there had been another significant shift in the meaning of emotion words when they came to refer to subjective feelings in a new way. There has been much controversy about the concept of ‘basic’ emotions, which is unpopular with historians of emotion. However, I am persuaded that some such distinction is needed; a distinction between primary and secondary emotions is somewhat akin to the earlier distinction between passions and affections. Emotions have various manifestations, including behavioural, physiological and subjective. These are often aligned, though they do not have to be. There has been considerable interest in the couplings between different manifestations. Most current work on the history of emotions is being done by historians but it would be good to see more psychological interest in a historical approach to emotions, and cross fertilisation between the work of historians and psychologists.

Terrorism and Ressentiment in Revolutionary Russia*

Abstract During the late nineteenth century, revolutionary terrorism emerged as a political tactic in Europe and across the world, where it formed one part of anti-colonial, anti-capitalist and national liberation movements. While its public spectacle took advantage of the new media landscape to communicate affective and political messages, terrorism was ultimately a ‘weapon of the weak’, a means for individuals and small groups to fight against the increasingly powerful modern state. The turn to insurgent violence was consequently imbricated with the experience of state violence. Focusing on a period of revolutionary unrest and heightened political violence in early twentieth-century Russia, this article takes a micro-historical approach to examine how individuals and radical parties came to explain, justify, and incite terrorist acts through narratives of vengeance and ressentiment. Drawing on recent scholarship by anthropologists and historians of emotion and bypassing psychological modes of explanation, it tracks specific articulations of political subjectivity that combine claims to (popular) sovereignty, universalism, dignity and rights with the language of honour and shame. The terrorist act was frequently justified as a sovereign right derived from the experience of state violence upon the body.

The History of Emotions: Past, Present, Future

This article briefly appraises the state of the art in the history of emotions, looking to its theoretical and methodological underpinnings and some of the notable scholarship in the contemporary field. The predominant focus, however, lies on the future direction of the history of emotions, based on a convergence of the humanities and neurosciences, and according to important observations about the biocultural status of human beings. While the article stops short of exhorting historians to become competent neuroscientists themselves, it does demand that historians of emotions take note of the implications of social neuroscientific research in particular, with a view to capturing the potential of the emotions to unlock the history of experience, and with a mind to unlocking the political importance of work in this area, namely, the shifting ground of what it means —how it feels— to be human.

‘Questo cor che tuo si rese’: the private and the public in Italian women's love letters in the long nineteenth century

Love letters are attracting increasing scholarly attention, especially from historians of scribal culture and historians of emotions. This article brings these two strands together to explore the unpublished love letters of four Italian women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Their letters, spanning a period from the 1840s up to the First World War, provide insights into the genre, and into women's lives and emotions in this period. Three of them were from the bourgeoisie orpiccola borghesiaand one, in slightly contrasting mode, was a peasant. Women of the middle class lived a secluded life, and writing was essential to express themselves, to construct an identity and to become visible. Their love letters were anything but private: they were continually supervised and scrutinised by their families, so that their letters inevitably had a public quality and were sometimes multi-authored. Single young women needed to subvert social rules in order to establish their independence and claim private space for their love correspondence.

Concluding Thoughts

Fifteen plus years into the ‘emotional turn’ in the study of contentious politics, the question is no longer ‘do emotions matter’ but rather ‘do emotions evernotmatter?’ Or, stated positively, can we grasp the phenomena that we group together under the name of collective political action without paying attention to feelings, emotions, affect? As others have argued, the factors that social movement scholars deem important for mobilisation – e.g. political opportunities, organisations, frames – have force precisely because of the feelings that they elicit, stir up, amplify, or dampen. We turn towards emotion, then, in order to understand the workings of the key concepts in the field. In addition, we need to explore feelings because they often are a primary catalyst or hindrance to political mobilisation, attenuating the role of other factors. Then there are the many other aspects of collective political action, beyond the question of mobilisation per se, where emotions play important roles, from ideological struggles to alliance formation to activist rituals to collective identity formation to community building. So, again, are emotions ever unimportant, are they ever a simply trivial aspect of what happens in and around contentious politics? Historians of emotion might take the argument further. If, as Rosenwein argues, ‘emotions are about things judged important to us’,2if emotions are indications of what matters, of what is valued and devalued, how can scholars interested inanyaspect of social lifenotconsider emotions?

“This Is 1975, Not 1875”: Despair and Longings in Women's Letters to Cambridge Lesbian Liberation and Daughters of Bilitis Counselor Julie Lee in the 1970s

I n T h e o d o r e r o e T h k e ’ s 1954 p o e m , “elegy for Jane: My Student, Thrown by a Horse,” a teacher whose beloved student has died ponders how it was possible that he could have had such a depth of feeling for her: “I, with no rights in this matter, neither father nor lover.” His poem offers an arresting commentary on the inaccessibility of the love object, outside of familial or romantic contexts, and who has the “rights,” from an emotional standpoint, to love whom. The emotional confusion evoked here could be applied to anyone who felt disconcerted, distressed, and intrigued by the boundary between emotional closeness and sexuality. Though historians of emotions and sexuality have primarily written about this sort of sensibility during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially in the form of romantic friendship, it was also a prominent, though more disparaged and less easily understood, sentiment in the midand late twentieth century.

The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter by Deborah R. Coen (review)

Reviewed by: The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter by Deborah R. Coen Andrew Jenks (bio) The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter. By Deborah R. Coen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. 360. $35. Earthquakes are physical and seismic events, but also mental and metaphorical phenomena. This fascinating study examines the boundaries between science and society through the history of modern earthquake science. Indeed, observing and recording earthquakes were not simply about the earthquakes themselves; it also involved the metaphorical shaking and collapsing of sureties in an age of rapid change. Chief among the mysteries of the modern era was (and is) the proper way of understanding the earthquakes themselves. The book looks at four case studies from the long nineteenth century—the French Revolution to World War I—where citizens were enlisted in the project of observing seismological activity: California, Switzerland, Scotland, and Austria. The introduction and conclusion relate the book’s findings to the more recent history of seismology and earthquakes, especially to the earthquake that precipitated the Fukushima disaster. Along the way, the author examines tensions between scientific expertise and the perceptions and observations of nonscientists. In the long nineteenth century leading up to World War I, the emerging field of seismology enlisted the help of everyday citizens as collectors of data—their observations and experiences during earthquakes—as a way of understanding the phenomena. It was a rare moment when the public itself had been recruited into the development of a scientific field. The author uses the term mass science, a phenomenon later associated with Mao’s China, when the masses helped gather data on various natural phenomena for scientists; or the Soviet Union and its emphasis on tapping into the wisdom of the folk to come up with new ways to improve agricultural yields and engineer human beings socially. Seismologists, however, constantly wondered about the objectivity and usefulness of folk wisdom. Moreover, they wondered how such observations, across various times and places, could be compared and made commensurate. The seeming incommensurability of disasters, as well as the difficulty of categorizing the destructive power of a tremor, bedeviled the earthquake observers throughout the nineteenth century—and even to this day. In the twentieth century, notions of objectivity and precise measurement made seismologists increasingly wary of nonscientists as observers. People seemed to observe themselves as much as they observed the earthquakes themselves—and that seemed, well, unscientific. In the “short” twentieth century, particularly as the technocratic mindset came to dominate politics and society during the cold war, human earthquake observers were progressively replaced by the modern instruments of seismology. As a result, “human experiences of disaster no longer counted as scientific evidence” [End Page 982] (p. 267). The current era thus presents a sharp contrast to the long nineteenth century in which the divide between science and the public— between expert and layperson, techie and fuzzy—was far less pronounced. The book comes with a sophisticated methodological apparatus—and one that makes for more difficult reading in places. The discussion engages the literature on risk studies, which like so much else that was supposedly objective and beyond politics turned out to be a social construct. Examining the “cultural determinants of risk” (p. 15), the author makes the important point that earthquake risks were both an objective fact—a result of concrete seismological conditions—and a social construction existing independently of the actual threat of an earthquake. Building on historians of emotions, the author also traces the popular construction of fear—both its alleviation and augmentation—through the emerging science of seismology and its discussion of potential looming disaster. While the ability to precisely measure seismic activity has improved, seismological science has not kept up with advances in the human-built world—a point driven home by the Fukushima disaster. Scientists, much less the public at large, have little sense of how vulnerable the components of infrastructure in modern civilization are to earthquakes (and to their aftereffects, such as tsunamis). It is also not clear how human activities, in turn, might trigger earthquakes. This is a smart book that has much to say to a variety of audiences: historians of technology, science...

The Archaeology of Emotion and Affect

The literature on the archaeology of emotion and affect is mostly quite recent and is not extensive. This review considers the main lines of approach taken so far and explores how different understandings of what constitutes an emotion underlie the work of archaeologists in this area. A distinction is made between past emotion as a subject of study and examination of the emotional subjectivity of the archaeologist as a method. The potential contribution of archaeology to emotion studies in the future includes bringing a sense of contextual historicity to the discussion and developing our knowledge of how material things and places are involved in shaping and expressing emotion. Inspired by some historians of emotion, a focus on shared emotional meanings, values, and codes seems a more productive direction than the exploration of idiosyncratic personal emotional experience.

Sentir la historia. Propuestas para una agenda de investigación feminista en la historia de las emociones

En este trabajo me propongo plantear un mapa orientativo y personal del conjunto de debates y dilemas en los que navegamos hoy en día quienes indagamos en la historia de los sentimientos. En lugar de exponer una historiografía de las emociones circunscrita al territorio que trazan las escuelas tradicionales en historia, he planteado una topografía de debates porque, como argumento en este trabajo, permite presentar cuestiones que presentaré como historiográficas, pero que, además, ayudan a tomar conciencia de diversos dilemas vitales de nuestro presente particularmente trascendentes en la vida de las mujeres.

George S Rousseau, Nervous acts: essays on literature, culture, and sensibility, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, pp. xii, 395, £17.99 (paperback 1-4039-3454-1).

George S Rousseau, Nervous acts: essays on literature, culture, and sensibility, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, pp. xii, 395, £17.99 (paperback 1-4039-3454-1).

‘An Angry and Malicious Mind’? Narratives of Slander at the Church Courts of York, c.1660–c.1760

This article explores the role and significance of the emotion of anger in slander litigation in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century church courts. It argues that existing historiographies place insufficient emphasis on the shaping mechanisms of legal and court process in the production of narratives of complaint. For rather than being incidental or ‘background’ information to dispute, the existence of an ‘angry and malicious mind’ was fundamental to the definition of slander under ecclesiastical law. This claim has implications for historians of emotion more generally, as it reveals the complex traditions of emotion beliefs in specific discursive fields in the past, and the (related) difficulties of accessing or interpreting individual ‘feelings’ through the historical record. Yet in proving the existence of ‘anger’ in slander disputes, contemporaries cited as evidence a range of communicative displays – from the volume and pitch of voice used by the defendant to the physical distance between disputants – that have seldom been considered as part of emotional embodiment. Analysis of such strategies allows us to explore the meanings of anger as socially constituted in and through the realm of practice.