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The introduction argues that death is central to warfare. Demonstrating that a variety of factors, including the dominant emotional economy of the war years, have meant that the dead of Second World War Britain have been largely absent from the cultural memory of this conflict, it goes on to explain why it is important to write the history of death, grief and bereavement in wartime. It sets out the numbers of the dead, considers how they died, and provides an overview of the ways that the state attempted to manage wartime death. The chapter discusses the power of emotions in wartime, focusing on the disruptive potential of grief, and places this within a brief discussion of the ‘history of emotions’. Finally it sets out the three key arguments of the book, and provides a brief introduction to the themes of each chapter.

This chapter takes a close look at Veselovsky’s 1904 work on Vasily Zhukovsky, demonstrating that Veselovsky develops a rigorous “poetics of psychological biography,” in which the emotional world of an individual is approached as a product of a given cultural-historical moment, “the age of Sensibility” (or Sentimentalism). Imported literary texts emerge as crucial to these processes of self-formation, and the objective of Veselovsky’s psychological biography is to trace the ways in which a historical individual, existing within a close-knit community of friends, is able to fashion “alien” cultural goods into an authentic expression of his emotional life. As Vinitsky stresses, Veselovsky anticipates both Lotman’s semiotic approach to “poetics of behavior” and recent work on the history of emotions. Following Veselovsky’s lead, Vinitsky offers a close analysis of one formative moment of literary appropriation: a failed dramatic performance staged by the adolescent Zhukovsky, using a sentimentalist plot to reflect on, and possibly influence, his own position as a bastard son in a nobleman’s family.

This chapter establishes three important themes of the book. First an historiographic observation: the history of emotion is in some important way a corollary to a history of personhood. Second a methodological injunction: when studying emotion, one should be able to characterize the relationship between the subject and object of analysis. Third a critique of “two cultures“: the work of humanists and scientists is not incommensurable; humanists and scientists share significant interests in emotion studies. Humanists with the epistemological commitments and training associated with interpretive method, and ethnographic, cultural, and literary readings, should recognize that their own research and critical reflection on their own methods in fact align them closely with versions of appraisal theory, emotion regulation theory, and non-modular understandings of neural functioning. Indeed those working in the humanities run the risk of placing themselves in performative contradiction when they step back and view the modern science of emotion strictly as historians.

Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw an extraordinary proliferation of theoretical ideas about the nature and meaning of emotion, and this introduction offers a survey of the sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory, intellectual and aesthetic traditions that helped shape this debate. It responds to previous work in the field that has focused primarily on medical humoralism and makes a case for a more pluralistic view of emotion in the period. Renaissance literary texts provide compelling evidence that emotions were not a passive phenomenon, acting upon people’s bodies, but an active, imaginative and philosophical process. Characters in early modern texts often express dissatisfaction with a purely medical understanding of emotion, looking instead to other complex systems of knowledge – including religion and philosophy, rhetorical and language theory, and drama and performance – to articulate and reflect upon their emotional experiences. The introduction thus proposes a rereading of emotional texts from this period with a more pluralistic model of affective experience in mind, paying greater attention to how individuals in this period interrogated, cultivated and performed emotional experience in active and often self-defining ways.

This chapter establishes Blackstone's prominence, discusses his influence on Enlightenment thought about law and justice, and reveals his investment in legal emotions as related to harmonic justice. In a reading of his early poem “The Lawyer's Farewel,” it introduces Blackstone's poetics and illustrates methods of both close and surface reading common to literary analysis. The chapter argues that although Blackstone has been the subject of historical study, both Law and Humanities and history of emotions approaches can further illuminate Blackstone's method and impact. The chapter argues for a curatorial approach to Blackstone's work that takes into account his exercise of affective aesthetics and its impact on the history of emotions in law. It closes with a summary of the chapters to come and an argument in favor of foregrounding aesthetics and emotion in legal studies.

Sets the framework of the book within contemporary theories of the history of emotions and the history of morality, making a case for the use of ‘moral economy’ as an analytical category that connects theories of the biological evolution of civilized emotions to scientific practices of those theories. The Darwinian explanation of sympathy thus becomes a scientific practice of sympathy, both defining the self and the meaning of scientific moral action, and a raft of public policies and research agendas.

Men and women of letters used the description of vaporous fits to exemplify the relationship between body and mind irrespective of medical concerns. This chapter examines how the Republic of Letters itself adopted and challenged the theme of vapors. In works by Diderot, La Mettrie, C.J. de B. de Paumerelle, Le Camus, and Chassaignon, vapors and hysteric affections were called upon to name inner turmoil, distress, embarrassment, and physiological disorders. These terms were also ways to consider modernity, the human species, women, or even literary creation. Because of their spectacular symptoms, the vapors are repeatedly invoked in these texts as an ideal tool to manipulate either the sufferer’s entourage or his or her own faculties, which are pushed into unexplored domains. The force of the vapors is made to exemplify or stimulate the role of the body in sensibility and creativity. Using these notions, men and women of letters were participating in a move to fashion sensibility and acknowledge contradictory conceptions of physiological phenomena.

This chapter draws on Leo Marx and Peter Stearns in tracing America's rhetoric of the technological sublime, with a particular emphasis on its intersection with the history of emotion. A belief in the uniqueness of the new American frontier played a fundamental role in the country's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century technological and emotional rhetorics. This larger history fed into the technological and emotional rhetorics of the early twentieth-century United States, which is described as high-speed and chaotic, with automobiles and other developing technologies contributing to such perspectives. This sense of intensity established a belief in the uniqueness of the period that encouraged the strong rhetorics of sublimity, which then pervades various discussions of technology and emotion. It was this sense of emotional and technological power that set the stage for the era's growing wave of media physicalism.

The Introduction critiques the methodological frameworks available to the historian of medieval emotions, arguing for the enduring value of the social constructionist approach and the need to simultaneously respond to the theoretical principles associated with the linguistic turn. Relevant crusades scholarship is then surveyed, including the long historiographical tradition of seeking to reconstruct participants’ beliefs and ideologies from historical narratives, before outlining the book’s structure and arguments. An overview of the core sources which form the backbone of this study follows, with the intention of introducing uninitiated readers to the breadth and diversity of sources available to historians of the crusades.

Why was China’s entrance into the modern age accompanied by a laugh track? The early twentieth-century Chinese press is replete with invective, self-mockery, and sarcastic commentary, as well as word games, jokes, and parodies. Writers compiled jokes in columns they called “histories of laughter,” which appeared alongside “histories of pain,” as well as other genres indicative of an outlook that viewed China’s past, present, and future primarily in terms of emotion. This book explores the modern history of laughter through the Chinese vocabulary of mirth. The Chinese phrase for “to break into laughter” (shixiao), taken literally, for example, means “to lose laughter.” One fictional “history of laughter” from the 1920s even tells a story of the loss of spontaneous mirth. This book, too, reveals a lost history—one overshadowed by a discourse of trauma. If focuses on the various intonations of laughter of late Qing and Republican China, the cultures they fostered, and their influence on the course of modern Chinese history.

This Introduction sets out the intentions of this book: to use the rich witch-trial records from the early modern duchy of Württemberg in south-western Germany to explore the central themes of emotions, gender, and selfhood. It provides an overview of the key historiographical debates on witchcraft persecutions in the early modern period, and suggests new questions that need to be asked. It also provides a methodological and theoretical framework in which to address these questions, and provides an overview of the current state of the field of the history of emotions, and, by drawing on psychological approaches to listening to self-narratives, it suggests ways in which historical studies of emotions can be pushed further by incorporating the body and subjective states. It also sets out the legal, political, and religious framework of the Lutheran duchy of Württemberg, in order to put the witch-hunts in this region into context.

The introduction shows that the historical parallels between cities in Europe and the Middle East during the nineteenth century are an underresearched topic in history, demonstrating that Eurocentric tendencies have led to a separation between historical studies on cities in these two regions. It shows how a comparison between Berlin and Cairo contributes to the study of potential parallels between cities in Europe and the Middle East. It is in this context that the history of emotions opens up a new perspective. While older comparative studies have focused on the origins of urban change, the introduction argues that a history of emotions shifts the focus towards the study of how contemporaries negotiated urban change. In this way, the history of emotions helps to overcome Eurocentric pitfalls and offers the possibility of a more global urban history, in which the histories of Berlin and Cairo begin to speak to each other.

This chapter gives an overview of the state of cross-disciplinary research into objects and emotions. It considers major intellectual works from the fields of archaeology, anthropology, art and design history, history, literary studies, philosophy, and psychology from the perspective of the history of emotions, in order to assess which current major directions in these fields may be most useful for those seeking to write affective histories of the material world. By investigating the critical history of objects and emotions and reflecting on the state of the field today, the authors offer an interdisciplinary frame for the essays that follow, outlining various methodologies and their implications for emotions research in the humanities in general.

The face is a vital site of embodied emotional display. By examining descriptions of facial pallor in a range of Chaucer’s works, Downes explores the poet’s representation of the face as an affective text, which launches an interpretative challenge to both the medieval and the modern reader of fiction, as well as deepening our understanding of cultural expressions of feeling in the pre-modern era.

This chapter examines the disputed place of children’s pain around the dawn of the twentieth century from the perspective of the history of emotions. It explores how the emotional expression of children’s suffering (cries and screams) was interpreted differently by various professional bodies with the performative authority to shape its meaning. Focusing on written texts and photographic practices, it compares the perspectives of scientists and psychologists with those of pediatricians, showing how the former claimed children were essentially insensitive to pain while the latter used pain to help diagnose children’s sickness. This paper questions whether specific expressions correspond mechanically and invariably to certain emotions, and shows how screams and cries created different “emotional bodies” in the pediatric and laboratory contexts.

Elizabeth Robertson brings together Keats’s ‘snail-horn perception’ with medieval theory of the senses, especially optics, and medieval theology, to analyse the first tenuous encounters between Troilus and Criseyde. During their sensually-charged optical exchanges, both physiological and psychological processes are at work to create great emotional force in the text and impact on the text’s readers.

The Introduction offers a brief overview of Paul Slack’s contribution to early modern history, distinguishing between an earlier phase concerned with social policy and the ideas which informed it, and a later phase concerned with the history of political economy, and particularly the shifting discourse of happiness which, he argued, informed it. It then explores recent interest in the history of emotions, distinguishing a variety of approaches to that subject. Reviewing three broad approaches taken by the contributors to the volume, it goes on to suggest that the history of emotions is most stimulating when seen as a focal point for different kinds of history rather than as a discrete subject of enquiry. A further implication is that a variety of forms of expertise need to be brought to bear.