It is fair to say that the modern field of the history of emotions began in 1985 with an article on “emotionology” written by Peter and Carol Stearns.1 Thereafter, the field took off, and it is now enjoying success, each year witnessing new books and articles and important initiatives by centres devoted to the topic.2 To understand the Stearnses’ contribution, some scientific background is required given that their article depended on some changes in psychological theories of the emotions.
1 Science
Early scientific theories of the emotions certainly emphasised the role of the body, but in ways unhelpful for historians. Charles Darwin (d. 1882) argued that emotions were “innate and instinctive” in both animals and humans.3 They were the result of strong excitations of the senses which, in turn, produced a strong “nerve force” that was expressed in bodily movements—very often shown on the face. These movements were originally useful for the survival of the species, and remained habitual even when ceasing to be serviceable. So, for example, in the case of rage, the pulse accelerates, the face reddens, “respiration is laboured, the chest heaves, and the dilated nostrils quiver,” and
Soon after Darwin wrote, William James (d. 1910) proposed that emotions were nothing other than physiological changes in or on the body: If we fancy some strong emotion, and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its characteristic bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind, no ‘mind-stuff’ out of which the emotion can be constituted, and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all that remains. [...] What kind of an emotion of fear would be left if the feelings neither of quickened heart-beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor weakened limbs, neither goose-flesh nor of visceral stirrings, were present. Like Darwin, James thought that these bodily changes were automatic. Excited by some perception, “the bodily changes follow directly … and our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion.” It follows that “we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble.” The names that we give these feelings—sorrow, anger, fear—are by themselves “pale, colourless, destitute of emotional warmth.” Only the body really knows the emotion.5
Both these theories made emotions bodily phenomena, unrelated to thought, and inborn. In the 1960s, they were challenged by cognitivist theories of the emotions that made these a kind of judgment or assessment that something was or was not for one’s wellbeing.6 To give an example, cognitive theory says that if, while I am driving, the person behind me honks, and I judge the sound to be loud, I am certainly assessing it, but not emotionally. However, if I judge the honk to be harmful to my well-being, as for example, if I take it as an insult to me and my driving, then that is an emotional judgment. We call it anger. The emotion is mental and absolutely related to thought—indeed, according to cognitivist theory, emotions are kinds of thoughts, although they often produce bodily changes, such as yelling back out the window at the honking driver.
Cognitivists nevertheless agree with earlier theories in saying that emotions are inborn, in the sense that any stimulus that we judge to be insulting will
2 Original Approaches
Social constructionism is the background to the Stearnses’ article of 1985, which was in effect a programme to reinvigorate the history of emotions. There had been earlier attempts, to be sure. For example, in the 1940s, Lucien Febvre was already calling for histories of emotions.10 However, such ventures were stillborn. The Stearnses asked historians to look at what they called “emotionology,” defining it as “the attitudes or standards that a society, or a definable group within a society, maintains toward basic emotions and their appropriate expression.”11 The Stearnses argued that historians need not worry about how people “really felt.” Rather, they should study which emotions were expressed and how, according to the standards of their time. Those standards were made clear in advice books, and, as the Stearnses maintained, that advice changed—often dramatically—over the years. The Stearnses’ method consisted of collecting books on good manners or child rearing, seeing when the advice changed, and finally assessing whether real behaviour changed to follow the advice. This method was quite social constructionist, even though the Stearnses adhered to the view that there were innate “basic” emotions, for they postulated that social standards could work to exaggerate, diminish, or even ignore the inborn
Soon after the Stearnses wrote, William Reddy saw a way to put universalist, cognitive, and social constructionist theories together.13 He hypothesised that emotions were assessments of what was for or against one’s well-being (in that sense cognitivist). However, in his view, people changed their goals and thus their assessments continually. He used the word “emotive” to describe the (universally) chameleon-like character of emotions as well as their impact on both their objects and their subjects. Thus, as we express our anger, we change both ourselves and those against whom we aim our spleen; our goals and theirs are theoretically in constant flux. However, emotional regimes—normally the same as political regimes—determine which emotives will be permitted (here Reddy was social constructionist). Under free regimes, many emotives are allowed, meaning that people can change their assessments and goals quite freely. Under repressive regimes people are locked into only feeling and expressing very few emotives.
Reddy applied this idea to explain the French Revolution which, for him, was an emotional rebellion. The repressive regime of the monarchy allowed for only a very few emotives. People sought relief in “emotional refuges” such as in salon society and the theatre, where many more emotives were allowed, all very high-flown and passionate. In the Revolution, the norms of the salons became the emotional regime. However, its insistence on certain emotions expressed at high pitch was equally repressive in turn, engendering emotional suffering. The reaction led to a regime more attuned to emotives, allowing for a variety of goals and modes of expression.
The work of Barbara Rosenwein came in the wake of Stearns and Reddy.14 It was cognitivist in that it too assumed that emotions changed with assessments of well-being, and it was social constructionist in assuming that different
Similarly rejecting the notion that emotions are automatic responses, while also seeing them as cognitive, Gerd Althoff looked at the emotional displays of medieval rulers. However, unlike the three previous theories, Althoff focused on how medieval rulers used their bodies (above all) to communicate their political will. They wept to show their piety; they fumed to demonstrate their disfavour. In short, they “performed” their emotions more often than they used words.
3 Newer Approaches
Althoff provides a bridge from the original schools of the history of emotions to the new. For, to sum up the new orientation briefly, the body is the focus, and with it a rejection of the sway of cognitivism. However, we are not right back to the Darwinian and Jamesian models of the body, which made it static. It is true that Darwin, pioneer of the theory of evolution, postulated constant biological flux and variation. However, Darwin’s work on emotions contradicted his evolutionary stance; he assumed that anger, fear, and other emotions were universal and unchanging entities, “naturally” expressed in the same ways by all peoples, and therefore most clearly by infants, the insane, and “several of the most distinct and savage races of man”: in short, by people unhampered by social conventions.15
The body postulated by the “new schools” of emotions history is, by contrast, changeable, changing, and socially constructed. Indeed, some scholars go so far as to think of it as merging into its ever-shifting social, material, and spatial environment. Their thinking is influenced by sociological theories about the “practices of the body”: as it acts, the body reinforces and even creates mental
4 The Body in Pain
Although today we ordinarily consider pain something to avoid, historians of emotion have made clear that other periods in Western culture valued pain. In the medieval period, Christian religious discourse made pain and suffering desirable because they recalled and imitated the tormented body of Christ. In the words of Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen and Karl A. E. Enenkel, referring to the period between 1300 and 1700, there was “something like a theological pain contest.”17 Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy present Christ’s body as the central fact of medieval thought, ethics, and emotion.18 As interpretations of the meaning and importance of Christ’s passion changed, so too did people’s sensibilities. In a sense, ideas about Christ’s body determined the emotionology of the entire period. Beginning with the “Christianization of emotion,” their book continues with monastic communities, which institutionalised what Jean Leclercq famously termed “the desire for God.” Monks exercised the right emotions in the right ways and for the right purposes, which included denial of many of the needs and desires of their bodies. Soon, the authors show, the practices of the monastery opened out to society at large, creating “a Christian society” that was continually reinfused by the values and emotions of newly invigorated religious groups, such as the twelfth-century hermits and the ecclesiastical courtiers who surrounded the German emperor. A sort of call and response among lay aristocrats and princes, town citizens, and specialists in prayer, theology and medicine allowed for enriched emotional possibilities that increasingly validated bodily pains, emphasising contemplation of the suffering Christ. A fourteenth-century depiction of Christ on the Cross, his body entirely red with blood gushing from every pore, sums up the intensity of the pain so coveted in the later Middle Ages. As the authors remark in their comment on this depiction: “the emotions of suffering, of love, and of joy felt
Considering pain from a wide variety of viewpoints—from scientific to anthropological to literary—Joanna Bourke points out that “the body is never pure soma: it is configured in social, cognitive, and metaphorical worlds.” She finds a way around the mind-body dualism by conceptualising pain as a “type of event,” as a “way-of-being in the world.” The meanings of such pain events changed historically. “From the moment of birth, infants are initiated into cultures of pain. What … infants in the 1760s learnt about the cognitive, affective, and sensory meanings arising from the interface between their interior bodies and the external world was very different to what their counterparts in the 1960s learnt.”20 Bourke noted that what they learned was often political, for learning is determined by those in power, whether parents or rulers. Even the names of various pains, says Bourke, lay bare the exercise of power. Today “hunger,” for instance, is less serious than “being in terrible pain,” and it calls forth less sympathy, less money, and less social organisation.
Although her focus is the body, Bourke is very much a social constructionist. However, for her, it is not just thoughts and emotions that are socially constructed, but the very way in which people experience and use their bodies as they make their way through life. Further, while not speaking of emotional regimes per se, Bourke is very much interested in how the powerful determine what we will feel. This is where she pays careful attention to words: not so much for how they express emotions as how they are used to elicit them.
5 The Practicing Body
Bourke’s conceptualisation of pain as a “way of being in the world” leads directly to the practicing body. Already Althoff’s interest in performance was compatible with this view. However, Althoff had seen emotions as an expressive tool for rulers; whereas in the hands of a practice theorist like Monique Scheer, emotions are generated and enhanced by the practices of everyone’s bodies, and not just expressed by them. In an early article setting forth her theory, Scheer faulted the old school of emotions history—the Stearnses,
Studying the practices of the body may depend less on texts than the older approaches. This is especially true when sources such as photographs, movies and videos become abundant, as is true in more modern periods. Researchers Margrit Pernau and Imke Rajamani looked at the emotional message of “love in the rain”—the final scene of the Bollywood film Veer Zaara (2004)—in which the lovers, after a long separation and much self-sacrifice, are reunited at last They do not say a word, and that gives Pernau and Rajamani the chance to critique all the approaches to the history of emotions that depend on texts: “The scene would be lost for a history of concepts that focuses only on language.” Practice theory tells them to listen to the melancholy music, and the lyrics of the Hindi song (here they do admittedly have some words) and look at the close-ups of the lovers’ happy, tearful faces. Finally, they consider the symbolic
6 The Affective Body
The idea that the rain or anything else surrounding a person—whether an object, a space, or another person—shapes the body as the body shapes it in turn is a tenet of “affect theory.” Affect theory itself, in its modern form, was and remains a reaction against cognitivism, a way to bring back emotions’ automaticity and irrationality à la William James. This idea of affect has been embraced in particular by scholars in cultural studies and literature. They postulate a body that “affects” everything around it even as it is “affected” in turn; it is an open and unbounded body, an integral part of the sounds, sights, smells, colours, air, flesh, warmth, cold that surround it. The frontiers that separate us from everything else are false constructions; even our biological body is nothing without its surroundings, which shape it, just as it shapes the environment in turn. Bruce R. Smith suggests that we understand this as a trick of perspective, like the picture of a vase “that can also be read as the profiles of two faces.25 The affective body feels and acts before it thinks and before we say a word. Thus, affect is ever-present in everything that we do.
Wilhelm Wundt (d. 1920) is often credited as the pioneer of affect theory. He spoke of “an affective process”: the constant flux of feelings of pleasure or displeasure, of tension or release, of strong or weak intensity. Combined with “an ideational process,”—the process by which we give them a name and all the other conscious associations that we have about them—affects become emotions (if of brief duration) or dispositions (if longer lasting). So, “joy, delight, merriness, hope are emotions in which the predominant feeling is pleasure; anger, grief, sorrow, and fear are emotions in which displeasure predominates. […] The quieting feeling combined with displeasure we call depression.”26 Silvan Tomkins (d. 1991), a later affect theorist, viewed “the affect system [as …] the primary motivational system because without its amplification, nothing
7 The Gendered Body
If bodies are bounded and isolated, they come in genders. But if they are defined in relation to others, as affect theory has it, they are more complicated. Perhaps they are gendered only by their differences from those with whom they have relations. Perhaps their gender is simply a kind of performance. The key question for the historian of emotions is whether gender determines, changes, challenges, or is irrelevant to emotional life. But what is gender? Is it the same as sex? Are there two genders, or more—or fewer? Historians have different takes on the topic, and it must be said that notions of gender are changing very fast: it is not just historians who are of different minds.
Until the 1970s or so, historians—and scientists as well—made the male subject the standard. This changed with the women’s movement. Studies of women in history appeared, and, in a sort of parallel, the American
Same-sex friendship was (and still is) a lively topic in the history of emotions, generally linked to the issue of homosexuality. When John Boswell found rituals that bound men together in what he called “obviously the same-sex equivalent of a medieval heterosexual marriage ceremony,” he denied that these ceremonies were proof of homosexuality. Rather, he thought that the distinction between “heterosexual acts and relationships and homosexual acts and relationships was largely unknown to the societies in which the unions first took place.”32 C. Stephen Jaeger argued that in the Middle Ages, love among men could be expressed with the most erotic language and yet have nothing to do with sex—and everything to do with ennobling virtue.33 Alan Bray’s history of same-sex friendships downgraded the importance of the nuclear family—mother, father, children—documenting “other kinds of kinship formed (as marriage is) by ritual and promise.”34
Similarly, historians have shown that gender roles themselves have varied over time. Consider weeping. Piroska Nagy found that for much of the Western Middle Ages, crying was understood as a virtuous act of moral purification for both men and women. It was, indeed, often considered a gift of God.35 The chivalrous knight, as Ruth Mazo Karras has revealed, was known to weep: “it
However, is gender itself an essential category? Historians are now asking whether there are only two genders. This follows changes within society at large: in the United States, one must start a discussion with young people by asking what pronoun they use: he (the singular for a male), she (the singular for a female), or zie (one of the many singular gender-neutral pronouns). Transgender, multigender, intergender, and agender people call for new studies attuned to their emotions. Already psychologists are considering this question as they work toward effective support therapies.38 Caroline Bynum’s pioneering article, “Jesus as Mother,” pointed the way for much subsequent research from a historical point of view. Cistercian theological writings talked about Jesus as a woman; Bynum explored the significance of this new “emphasis on breasts and nurturing, the womb, conception, and union.”39 More recently, Kathryn Ringrose has suggested that, since the Byzantine court welcomed eunuchs, “Byzantine society was not wedded to a rigid bipolar gender structure.”40
In conclusion, we may say that the body currently predominates in today’s histories of emotion, though for different reasons and in different ways. Some of the reasons have to do with the frisson of automaticity, irrationality, of emotions out of control and overwhelming us. Others concern the revolution in gender and gender relations taking place today. Finally, there is the undeniable importance of the body, as we all know. Yet, we are also struck by a sort of
Peter N. Stearns, Carol Z. Stearns, “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards,” American Historical Review 90 (1985), 813–36. The authors wish to thank Polity Press for permission to reuse here some parts of our What Is the History of Emotions? (Cambridge, Eng., 2017).
For example, at the Max Plank Institut für Bildungsforschung in Berlin (<
Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (New York, 1898), p. 15.
Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions, p. 74.
William James, Principles of Psychology, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Eng., 1890), 2:446–85, at 452, on-line at <
A key pioneer of this theory was Magda B. Arnold; see her: Emotion and Personality, 2 vols. (New York, 1960).
See: Rom Harré, ed., The Social Construction of Emotions (Oxford, 1986).
See: James R. Averill, Anger and Aggression: An Essay on Emotion (New York, 1982) and, for the medieval period, Barbara H. Rosenwein, ed., Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, 1998).
Robert Knox Dentan, The Semai: A Nonviolent People of Malaya (New York, 1968).
Lucien Febvre, “La Sensibilité et l’histoire. Comment reconstituer la vie affective d’autrefois,” Annales d’histoire sociale 3 (1941), 5–20; translation: Lucien Febvre, “Sensibility and History: How to Reconstitute the Emotional Life of the Past,” in A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre, ed. Peter Burke, trans. K. Folca (New York, 1973). For more on the early pioneers, see: Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction, trans. Keith Tribe (Oxford, 2012), pp. 40–60.
Stearns, Stearns, “Emotionology,” p. 813.
Carol Zisowitz Stearns, Peter N. Stearns, Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in America’s History (Chicago, 1986), p. 211.
William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge, Eng., 2001). See also his application of similar ideas in his discussion of love in: William M. Reddy, The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900–1200 ce (Chicago, 2012).
Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History,” American Historical Review 107 (2002), 821–45; Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, 2006); Barbara H. Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700 (Cambridge, Eng., 2016).
Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions, pp. 16–17.
See especially: Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” Economy and Society 2 (1973), 70–88; Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford, 1990).
Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen, Karl A. E. Enenkel, eds., The Sense of Suffering: Constructions of Physical Pain in Early Modern Culture (Leiden, 2008), p. 10 (emphasis in original).
Damien Boquet, Piroska Nagy, Sensibilities: A History of Emotions in the Middle Ages, trans. Robert Shaw (Cambridge, Eng., 2018).
Boquet, Nagy, Sensibilities, Plate 9.
Joanna Bourke, The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers (Oxford, 2014), p. 17. See also: Keith Wailoo, Pain. A Political History (Baltimore, 2014); Javier Moscoso, Pain: A Cultural History, trans. Sarah Thomas, Paul House (New York, 2012); Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (Oxford, 1985).
Monique Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion,” History and Theory 51 (2012), 193–220, at 219.
Monique Scheer, “Feeling Faith: The Cultural Practice of Religious Emotions in Nineteenth-Century German Methodism,” in Out of the Tower. Essays on Culture and Everyday Life, eds. Monique Scheer, Thomas Thiemeyer, Reinhard Johler, Bernhard Tschofer, trans. Michael Robertson (Tübingen, 2013), pp. 217–47.
Scheer, “Feeling Faith,” p. 227.
Margrit Pernau, Imke Rajamani, “Emotional Translations: Conceptual History beyond Language,” History and Theory 55 (2016), 46–65 at 63.
Bruce R. Smith, Phenomenal Shakespeare (Chichester, 2009), p. xviii.
Wilhelm Wundt, An Introduction to Psychology, trans. Rudolf Pintner (London, 1912), p. 61.
Silvan S. Tomkins, “Affect Theory,” in Approaches to Emotion, eds. Klaus R. Schere, Paul Ekman (Hillsdale, 1984), pp. 163–95, at 164.
See the critique in: Ruth Leys, The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique (Chicago, 2017).
See, for example, James A. Russell, “My Psychological Constructionist Perspective, with a Focus on Conscious Affective Experience,” in The Psychological Construction of Emotion, eds. Lisa Feldman Barrett, James A. Russsell (New York, 2015), pp. 183–208.
Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” Cultural Critique 31 [= The Politics of Systems and Environments, part 2] (1995), 83–109, at 85.
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs 1/1 (1975), 1–29. See also: Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton, 2007).
John Boswell, Same-sex Unions in Premodern Europe (New York, 1994), pp. x, xxv. In response to Boswell, see: Claudia Rapp, Brother-Making in Late Antiquity and Byzantium: Monks, Laymen, and Christian Ritual (Oxford, 2016).
C. Stephen Jaeger, Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility (Pennsylvania, 1999).
Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago, 2003).
Piroska Nagy, Le don des larmes au Moyen Âge. Un instrument spirituel en quête d’institution (ve–xiiie siècle) (Paris, 2000).
Ruth Mazo Karras, From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia, 2003), 65.
George J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 1992); for the nineteenth century, see: Holly Furneaux, Military Men of Feeling: Emotion, Touch, and Masculinity in the Crimean War (Oxford, 2016).
Douglas Schrock, Daphne Holden, Lori Reid, “Creating Emotional Resonance: Interpersonal Emotion Work and Motivational Framing in a Transgender Community,” Social Problems 51/1 (2004), 61–81; Stephanie L. Budge, Joe J. Orovecz, Jayden L. Thai, “Trans Men’s Positive Emotions: The Interaction of Gender Identity and Emotion Labels,” The Counseling Psychologist 43/3 (2015), 404–34.
Caroline Walker Bynum, “Jesus as Mother and Abbot as Mother: Some Themes in Twelfth-Century Cistercian Writing,” Harvard Theological Review 70 (1977), 257–84, especially 262.
Kathryn M. Ringrose, The Perfect Servant: Eunuchs and the Social Construction of Gender in Byzantium (Chicago, 2007), p. 31.