Sources for the History of Emotions

A Guide

Katie Barclay, Sharon Crozier-De Rosa, Peter N. Stearns, Katie Barclay, Sharon Crozier-De Rosa, Peter N. Stearns

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000073331
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Offering insights on the wide range of sources that are available from across the globe and throughout history for the study of the history of emotions, this book provides students with a handbook for beginning their own research within the field.

Divided into three parts, Sources for the History of Emotions begins by giving key starting points into the ethical, methodological and theoretical issues in the field. Part II shows how emotions historians have proved imaginative in their discovering and use of varied materials, considering such sources as rituals, relics and religious rhetoric, prescriptive literature, medicine, science and psychology, and fiction, while Part III offers introductions to some of the big or emerging topics in the field, including embodied emotions, comparative emotions, and intersectionality and emotion. Written by key scholars of emotions history, the book shows readers the ways in which different sources can be used to extract information about the history of emotions, highlighting the kind of data available and how it can be used in a field for which there is no convenient archive of sources.

The focused discussion of sources offered in this book, which not only builds on existing research, but encourages further efforts, makes it ideal reading and a key resource for all students of emotions history.

Part I

Introducing the history of emotions

1 Introduction

A guide to sources for the history of emotions

Katie Barclay, Sharon Crozier-De Rosa and Peter N. Stearns

Historical research on emotion has been gaining ground steadily over the past three decades, becoming a significant subfield in the discipline and tackling a growing range of topics. Major scholarly centres have emerged in a number of places, including Britain, Germany and Australia, sponsoring a variety of publications and conferences. In recent years, historians of emotion have begun to apply their interests to teaching as well as research. Both undergraduate and graduate students now have many opportunities to do work in the field, not only in formal classes but through their own research projects as well.

An increasingly visible research field and the growing involvement of students create an obvious opportunity to discuss the kinds of sources available for historical work on emotion – and this is the purpose of this collection. Historians of emotion have been using a number of types of evidence, and many of the categories are fairly accessible – another reason to provide some guidance in finding and utilising the building blocks for further historical work.

Primary sources are essential for all types of historical research. History is, at base, an empirical discipline, and historians get their facts from materials created in past periods – written records most obviously, but also artistic materials, artefacts, and for contemporary history oral and digital archives as well. With rare exceptions, these primary sources were not produced with any eye towards an audience in the future – and certainly not an audience composed of twenty-first-century historians and history students. (What historians call secondary sources, in contrast – books and articles by scholars in the field – do have this kind of audience in mind, and therefore, at least in principle, are much easier to interpret.) Thus primary sources may involve police reports – for example, on the history of crime or protest; or parish registers, where births and deaths are recoded; or personal diaries and letters; or statements by political parties; or – the list here is a long one. In the essays that follow, a wide variety of types of sources are covered, correctly suggesting that emotions history requires a considerable range of evidence.

Utilising primary sources offers two challenges: the first, self-evident, is finding them in the first place, which can sometimes be difficult. But the second challenge centres on figuring out what they mean, given the fact that they were usually created for specific purposes in the past and so their meaning is shaped by that context, reflecting the concerns and interests of the author. Deriving meaning from primary sources is one of the most enjoyable tasks for a study of history, but it is not always an easy assignment.

Emotions history is no different from any other field of history in needing primary sources, but it may involve some unusually difficult interpretive issues. For, at base, historians of emotion are trying to figure out what people felt in the past, and this is a really ambitious goal. People often have trouble figuring out what others are feeling right now, in the present; multiply this complexity by adding in the dimension of the past, and it is clear that the emotions history field can require some really complicated assessments of available evidence.

Historians of emotion make several basic arguments, as they work to define what their new field is all about. First, and most obviously, they contend that we will get a much richer picture of the past if we include emotional experience. People are, after all, not simply rational actors, though rationality should not be ignored. Reflecting shifting ideas about cognition, emotion is now recognised as a central part of decision-making, which makes a study of emotion relevant for almost every area of life. When people form families or deal with children, or when they take to the streets in protest, or indeed when they go to war, they are responding to emotional spurs at least in part. Indeed, emotions history began to take shape when family historians, for example, realised that understanding past family patterns was not simply a matter of birth and marriage rates, but had to include a set of emotional interactions.¹ Other historians likewise now realise that understanding past protest movements is probably impossible if anger is not given serious attention. Once emotion gains attention, it clearly plays a role in all sorts of other historical topics, from the study of art and theatre in the past, to an understanding of disease and healing, even to the rise of sports and impassioned spectatorship in modern societies.

But arguing for the importance of emotion in dealing with the past is only step one. Most emotions historians go on to offer a more challenging contention; emotional combinations in the past are usually not the same, or at least not quite the same, as emotions in the present. It would be a mistake, for example, to look back on a group of people in the seventeenth century and expect them to have the same ideas about happiness that we do today.² Or that they would be disgusted by the same things that disgust us.³

Sometimes word use makes it particularly easy to identify emotional differences between past and present. The word nostalgia, for example, was introduced only at the end of the seventeenth century, and for quite a while it designated a serious mental disorder, requiring medical attention. It settled into its current meaning only toward the end of the nineteenth century. Another case: ‘shamefast’ was a fairly common word in English into the nineteenth century, usually designating people (particularly young women) who were very sensitive to the need to avoid any shameful behaviour. But in the nineteenth century the term began to fade away, and it is not used at all today. Experiences of nostalgia or shame in the past were clearly somewhat different from patterns in contemporary society, which adds a major challenge to the effort to understand emotions, and the impact of emotions, in earlier times.⁴

And this means, finally, that many emotions historians are also deeply interested in the process of change, when emotions or emotional standards take on new dimensions. Dealing with change brings historians into questions of causation (why did nostalgia become a new kind of problem in the late seventeenth century?) and impact (how did this new ‘problem’ influence the lives of those living then?). Some emotions historians are eager to apply the analysis of change to the emergence of contemporary emotional patterns, in trying to figure out how and why they differ from patterns in the recent past.

Efforts to analyse past emotion and emotional change involve one other basic challenge that has direct bearing on the kinds of sources emotions historians use and the ways they try to interpret these sources. Ultimately, most emotions historians are eager to get as close as they can to the actual emotional experience of people in the past, trying to figure out what they felt and how their feelings affected their outlook and behaviours. But emotions historians also deal with the cultural standards that societies or groups generate about emotion, for these often are significant in their own right. In the 1920s, for example, lots of American parents were urged to pay greater attention to signs of jealousy among their young children – a new term, sibling rivalry, was introduced to designate what was now regarded as a serious problem.⁵ The cultural evaluation of jealousy, in other words, was changing. Almost certainly, this involved some change in the experience of jealousy itself – getting at emotional experiences being the ultimate target for emotions history. But the new standard was important in its own right, affecting what parents worried about and how young people interpreted jealousy in their own lives. Both emotion and emotional culture – or what some sociologists call ‘feeling rules’ – are significant candidates for historical research.

‘Emotion’ is not an easy word to define.⁶ Emotion clearly can involve some instinctive reactions, which in turn call forth chemical responses in the body: fear and anger obviously involve physiological changes including jolts of adrenaline and more rapid heartbeats. But emotion – and this is crucial for historians – also involves cognitive or mental appraisals, which quickly add to the physiological response. Should I be afraid in this situation? What will other people think of me? What will I think of myself? Emotions, in other words, are partly culturally constructed, and this is where historical factors can be fundamental. Some emotions, like shame or guilt, have an intrinsic social component as well – they involve a real or imagined audience – which adds another potential historical dimension.

Emotions research has been gaining ground in recent decades in a number of disciplines, partly because of new opportunities to study the brain but partly also because of new awareness of the importance of emotion in social interactions. The rise of the history of emotion is thus part of a wider, ultimately interdisciplinary surge, and many emotions historians interact directly with psychologists and sociologists who share similar interests. But emotions historians also deal with colleagues in other humanities areas, from philosophy to art, some of which contribute to the effort to find relevant historical sources. Figuring out the relationship between various other disciplines and the specifically historical analysis of emotion, and uncovering a wealth of sources as we do so, is an interesting and essential aspect of the field.

Research in the history of emotions

The first call for historical work on emotion came from a French historian in the middle of the twentieth century.⁷ Obviously, many historians had already been working on topics related to emotion, but the notion of explicit attention was new – part of an effort to expand historical research to provide greater understanding of daily life and the experience of ordinary people. Serious work on emotions history, however, emerged only in the 1980s and 1990s, as historians began to devote more attention to topics like the family or the nature of popular beliefs and values.⁸ Since that time, work on the history of emotions has accelerated steadily.⁹ Major academic centres have formed in Australia, Germany and Britain, but scholars in many other countries are actively involved. And while the field is still defined primarily by research efforts, it increasingly spills over into teaching as well.

Over the past three decades work on the history of emotion has been applied to a wide variety of chronological periods – which is what one would expect from a healthy and expanding scholarly interest. A number of historians have worked on emotions in classical societies (both Greece and Rome and Confucian China).¹⁰ A large group of medievalists now study emotion, obviously particularly in relationship to the impact of Christianity (like Xavier Biron-Ouellet, Piroska Nagy and Anne-Gaëlle Weber in this volume).¹¹ A number of really important contributions to emotions history have come from scholars working on the early modern period – Renaissance to eighteenth century.¹² And a variety of studies have addressed emotional issues in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into the early twenty-first.¹³

Geography has been less fully addressed than chronology, in what is still a fairly new field. A disproportionate amount of emotions history has applied to developments in Europe and ‘settler societies’ like Australia and the United States. Interest is growing among scholars dealing with other regions – particularly China and Japan, but increasingly South Asia and Latin America as well.¹⁴ Work on the Middle East and Islam is less fully developed, and the same applies to Africa.¹⁵ Some of this geographical unevenness shows up in this book, where essays on the whole offer fuller references to Western cases than to other regions, though issues of linguistic fluency are also involved since sources require often subtle capacities in language. The geography problem is widely recognised in emotions history, and a number of scholars are now working to provide better balance and even to venture some comparative work (Joseph Ben Prestel’s Chapter 14 in this collection helps us to realise the potential in this area).¹⁶

Social class and race/ethnicity offer other important challenges, and these also directly affect identification of relevant historical sources (and we discuss this in greater detail in Chapter 15 ‘Intersectional Identities’). Evidence about emotional standards and experiences is more abundant for middle and upper classes than for other groups; and the same point applies to evidence about changes over time. These were the groups most likely to generate letters or diaries, which often directly comment on emotion. These were the groups that provided the most obvious audience for authors offering advice on issues like how to raise children or how to display good manners. Here too, emotions historians are actively aware of this challenge, and increasingly use sources that provide evidence about working-class or immigrant ...