1 Emotions and Temporalities: Entangled Concepts

The development of the history of emotions has been one of the most significant in historical practice over recent decades. This essay reflects on the future of the field by asking about its intersections with another significant field, that of the history of temporalities. The overlap between emotions and time is, of course, far from arbitrary. Histories of emotion are always necessarily embedded in temporalities – understood as the intersecting physical, social and phenomenological dimensions of time in which human life is situated. Many scholars of emotions in the past decade have agreed with Monique Scheer that emotions are practices, or practice-like.¹ But this is not the full story of why emotions have a history – to recall the other half of Scheer’s title in her programmatic intervention in the field. Emotions have a history because humans, the tellers of histories, have pasts, and nothing we experience happens outside of history. There are no emotions that are experienced or categorised outside of temporal duration and sequence – even if some of them seem to defy or suspend otherwise normative categories of ‘before’ and ‘after’. Systematic theories of emotions, too, have typically involved narratively patterned time, whether that be, for example, in humoral explanations of bodily predisposition and activation; Aristotelian-influenced models of pre-passions growing into passions and sedimented as habits; Judeo-Christian narratives of doleful captivity and joyful redemption; or post-Darwinian models of stimulus and response. As this suggests, an underlying sense of temporal extension exists not only in accounts of ‘emotion’ in a narrow sense. Indeed, even those versions of affect theory which suggested an object of inquiry which is pre-cognitive and not linguistically coded – in opposition to the supposedly neater scripts and classifications of emotions – even they posited subjects existing in time, touched or overwhelmed or crossed or surged through by affects which come and go, or indeed remain and settle, in time.

Making the temporal dimension of emotions history explicit and working through its ramifications continues to be a promising area of inquiry. Coming from the other direction of this disciplinary pairing, it must be admitted that historians of temporality are not always attentive to emotions. Temporality is increasingly acknowledged as an essential concept for historical practice.² Numerous recent publications have turned to examine temporalities across geographies and chronologies, crossing the fields of intellectual, social, cultural, literary, political and economic history, and more. The focus on human experience and perception has rightly brought affect and emotion into dialogue with time. Yet the steady appeal of the changing technologies of timekeeping – clocks, watches, calendars – has sometimes meant that emotions felt at, say, the tolling of an hour have seemed less interesting to scholars of time than the workings of foliots and escapements. But the implication of the new history of temporalities is to require histories of our feelings about the times we live in, the kinds of feelings that emerge in relation to structures of time such as calendars, life stages, genealogies and histories. And, of course, vice versa: our histories of emotions need to include the whole temporal architecture within which an emotion is felt, communicated, enacted, and the temporal horizon with which the emotion seems to be concerned (in the sense that a present pleasure imagined as poignantly fleeting is different from a present pleasure imagined as a long-term one).³ There is much to do for this newly energised and wide-ranging field to understand feelings in time and feelings about time. This is how we can frame the close but often inexplicit relationship between emotions and temporalities in the most general way.

All this suggests a rosy future for emotions history, hand in hand with temporalities. But beyond observing this general prospect, it is important to stress that historians are not simply wanderers in rose gardens, gathering more and more rosebuds while they may. Nor are they simply travellers, looking for fields that have not yet been covered and proceeding to cover them like Isaiah’s multitude of camels (60:6), to the greater glory of the discipline. Rather, we have choices to make about what areas of new inquiry demand or provoke our efforts. Here, too, emotions and temporalities intersect as we reflect on our possible futures. Near the start of the boom in emotions scholarship, Susan James wrote an illuminating intellectual history of passion in seventeenth-century thought, Passion and Action, outlining the early modern belief, founded on classical precedent, that passions were the spur to action.⁴ Rather than entity-like abstractions (as the lay reader might assume from some lists and taxonomies of passions), or intimate ‘states’ that are experienced most strongly in a ‘personal’ or ‘private’ domain (as in some notions of, say, romantic love, or of aesthetic emotions), this view emphasises that passions are responses to the world but also movers and shakers in it. One might think here of David Orr’s bon mot that ‘hope is a verb with its shirtsleeves rolled up’ which ‘comes with an imperative to act’.⁵ Whether hope counts as an emotion or not is less important, in plotting a path for historians now, than the question of whether and how we can find emotions of our own – or passions, or affects, affections, feelings, moods – with up-rolled sleeves. And, to qualify the overtones of a Protestant work ethic or wartime mobilisation that this image might seem to be encouraging, the question is also whether and how our future scholarship might avoid ‘cruel optimism’ – self-defeating attachment to unattainable goods – and ravel up the tired sleeve of care.⁶ What new directions in emotions history might bring the kind of consolation and restoration that are as necessary as drive and cheerleading in staving off exhaustion, anxiety, despair and perfectly reasonable hopelessness? Then again, what space do we want to allow to anxiety, anger and grief as future-oriented actions in the world, as well as perfectly reasonable responses to it?

2 Diversitas temporum

There are no single answers to these ethical and strategic questions for the field. Like expressions of joy and sorrow, which, some medieval thinkers argued, should and must vary according to ‘person, time and place’, so too our responses should and must vary as to where we direct our energies (and how we find them in the first place!). We have touched elsewhere on the appeal of this older thinking about variability or ‘diversity of times’ for current scholarship.⁷ Those arguments related to music, and we will return to them briefly here. In making the case for the ‘diversity of times’ or diversitas temporum, medieval writers drew, inter alios, on Augustine – and his borrowings from classical rhetorical theories of aptum or decorum – to think about the permissibility of music. Augustine and his followers famously worried about the ethical value of music, and concluded that it had no single moral quality. The same song in the mouth of one singer could be sinful and distracting, and in the mouth of another pious and contemplative. As one medieval writer, the Dean of Cambrai Cathedral Gilles Carlier, wrote, proper responses to music changed according to ‘rank, person, time and place’.⁸

Time makes a crucial difference here to affective charge: a Christmas carol feels different in July from in December. Place makes a difference: if a carol is heard in the shopping mall, in a school band concert, or around a manger. Person clearly matters, if we extend this to a whole embodied personhood with its rich intersections of identities, memories and habits. Contemporary historians might be tempted to drop ‘rank’ from Carlier’s list: surely this outdated term has everything to do with classical hierarchical thinking and nothing to do with the aptness, goodness or usefulness of our affects and of our democratised attention to our objects of study? And yet rank, in the sense of hierarchy and power, cannot be avoided in our thinking about the future of the history of emotions. To make an obvious point clearer: rank in our academic worlds is real, and how we feel and how we choose our directions will always be affected by our social positions in all their complexity. This might be the future-oriented feelings of a salaried academic juggling responsibilities and weighing up the costs and attractions of putting together yet another emotions-themed grant application; or of a precarious scholar looking forward to the rare opportunity to share research with like-minded scholars, and perhaps frustrated about doing so in their so-called spare time; or of a PhD student excited to immerse themselves in the archives but nervous about a future reckoning when someone – in a university or otherwise – asks them about the relevance and significance of their esoteric pursuits.⁹ These three very limited scenarios are intended to suggest the ways that differences in ‘rank’ as well as more individualised senses of person, time and place will affect the future directions of the field.

Articulating these scenarios suggests two issues worth further discussion, as dimensions of the future of the field that deserve special consideration and advocacy: mixture or complexity, and scale.

3 Mixed Feelings

First, we note the mixed feelings that our immediate futures are likely to hold, simply at the granular level of the attention we give to the next application, the next conference paper, the next day in the library. Mixed feelings are ineluctable, and we arguably have a way to go in understanding them – and their temporal dimensions – as historical formations as well as present experiences. One of the futures of the history of emotions will be to better understand feelings involved with mixture, ambivalences and uncertainties. Many disciplines may productively interact with history here, but to indicate the complexity of temporalities in dialogue with emotions, it is hard to go past literature and its archives of feeling.¹⁰ Take for instance a passage in Henry James’s 1903 novel The Ambassadors, in which the focalised character, an American in Paris, begins what he expects to be his last visit to the home of a woman he has greatly admired, and who, for him, sums up the allure of the ‘old world’. He registers afresh the objects of her home:

No, he might never see them again – this was only too probably the last time; and he … should soon be going to where such things were not, and it would be a small mercy for memory, for fancy, to have … a loaf on the shelf. He knew in advance he should look back on the perception actually sharpest with him as on the view of something old, old, old, the oldest thing he had ever personally touched; and he also knew, even while he took his companion in as the feature among features, that memory and fancy couldn’t help being enlisted for her. She might intend what she would, but this was beyond anything she could intend, with things from far back – tyrannies of history, facts of type, values, as the painters said, of expression – all working for her and giving her the supreme chance, the chance of the happy, the really luxurious few, the chance, on a great occasion, to be natural and simple … or if it was the perfection of art it would never … be proved against her.

What was truly wonderful was her way of differing so from time to time without detriment to her simplicity.¹¹

Like some emblem of diversitas temporum, the passage takes its cue from the supposedly changeable (yet unified) woman at its centre and parses out the times intersecting in a single preparatory moment – before the conversation of the scene proper begins: the present moment; the past occasions of which it is apparently the last instance; the future; the encounter with a deeper past (‘old, old, old’) which he expects to remember as an intimate personal experience; the impersonal pasts congealed in discourses of ‘history’ and ‘value’. It embeds these temporalities in multiple registers of experience with different degrees of realisation or actuality (expectation, fancy, memory, supposed intuitive knowledge, immediate perception, proof, internalised discourses of history, of social ‘types’, of aesthetics and so on). And it implies through them a mixture of feelings attached not only to objects and people but also to their perceived position in time: anticipated regret (for things now seen); apprehension (about returning to the place ‘where such things were not’); hope (for small mercies); irresistible admiration (for his time-full companion); ambivalently gratifying insights (does his perception of her really exceed ‘anything she could intend’ or not?); lightly ironised emotional attitudes towards history (tyrannical) and other codified discourses; longing and faint envy (of the happy few); a vague air of suspicion, referred to a hypothetical future in which that ugly emotion will remain delightfully uncorroborated (‘it would never … be proved against her’). Articulated by a narrator separate from the American himself, this shimmering texture of mixed feelings has only an attenuated location in a single perceiving subject, and it offers, of course, a still more mediated perspective on the woman at whom he marvels. This is very far from a full interpretation of this heteroglossic passage, but its very partiality raises the question of what historical methods are adequate to the kind of complex relation between temporality and ‘emotion’ evident here.

Mixture is also at stake in our methods themselves: the ways we combine historical concepts and focus analysis. Historians are used to bringing new concepts together for analysis: the analysis of gender and emotions, or time and space. But it is harder to move to a more conceptually rich practice: the analysis of gender, time and emotions together; of time, the body, politics and emotions; or of sound, space, gender, time and emotions. The history of everything is hard to write! This is partly a difficulty of presenting arguments in ways that address with sufficient complexity the fullness of our worlds. And it is partly a difficulty of attention – that is, our current temporal regimes. It is harder to write an 8,000–10,000-word journal article that attempts this greater entangling of concepts.¹² And it is harder to write these fuller histories if the academic and economic conditions in which we write leave us less space for detailed reflection on the intersections of multiple strands of human experience. Our knowledge suffers under the conditions of attention-lite academia.

Here we want to briefly call in a premodern theorist to the conversation: the polymath philosopher-theologian of the fifteenth century Nicholas of Cusa.¹³ For our purposes, we want to invoke him not only for his thoughtful analysis of the grounds and limits of our knowledge, but as a reminder that premodern theorists are a resource for our current theoretical reflections. It has become rather fashionable (sometimes quite correctly) to critique ‘modern’ or ‘Western’ linear temporalities, but this critique can conjure up an unrealistically monolithic view of past temporalities.¹⁴ In fact, the critique of linear temporality requires us to step back from progressivist narratives about our own theoretical advances, and to listen with attention to voices from the past that can continue to enrich the present. Theory, that is, if it meaningfully engages with its own critiques of linear temporalities, should be careful not to erect borders that shut out the theorisations of past generations.¹⁵ Enlarging our affection for the past and allowing it to trouble the present is one of the great purposes of history. (So is critique; but for the moment, we will stay with a hermeneutic of love.) Nicholas of Cusa’s theory of learned ignorance (docta ignorantia) develops an account of the ever-greater sense of how much we do not, and cannot, know as our knowledge develops through comparison.¹⁶ This is an experience with which historians of emotions are familiar. Even as we have a sense that we have caught some small detail of an emotion in the past, we are immediately cast into a sense of our own unknowing, as we find the ‘emotion’ neither an emotion in our sense, nor accessed without multiple layers of mediation. One way, then, into the future of the history of emotions is to continue to press on these mediations, while acknowledging the fundamental ignorance – our incapacity to trace the fullness of historical experience – that lies at the heart of our search for truth about the past. Nicholas offers the image of attempting to turn a polygon into a circle through endless refinement of its angles: more and more sides are added, yet the polygon never becomes a perfect circle. An approach towards a ‘full’ understanding of the past resonates with this experience.¹⁷ Yet, to turn the image another way: there is a greater approximation to experience that becomes possible the more vertices and sides we allow to our analysis, the more multifaceted we allow our analysis to be.

And so, a moment of manifesto: the future of the history of emotions is a multifaceted, polygonal history that includes combinations of concepts beyond the binary, allowing mixtures, intersections, entanglements, blurs and multiplicity to account for the inescapable plurality of human situation in space-time.

4 Scales

Second, we can acknowledge that it looks daunting to zoom out from the micro-scales to the futures of an emotional community, a field, a profession, a society or a planet, in a year, a decade or a generation. Yet it is precisely a flexible approach to scale that we need to build into the ‘diversity of times’ that all of us face, both collectively and with our different (individual) histories and historical resources. Cultural history has always been fascinated by the relationship between the microhistory and the histoire totale, individual ‘events’ and the glacial changes affecting larger ‘structures’, to recall Braudel’s terms.¹⁸ Such classifications of different scales of time have been challenged and modified over the last decades. But the fact that these fundamental questions of scale are built into the methods of the Annales reminds us that, as a field strongly shaped by cultural history, emotions history has significant resources for thinking about the experience of temporal scale and the sometimes dizzying sensation of switching scales.

Indeed, alongside our primary archives and our ‘sponsoring’ or tributary disciplines, one of our resources in this task is now the history of emotions itself. Following scholarship of the last three decades or so, we now have a far greater understanding of ‘how emotions shape history’, to use the tagline of the influential Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. Over this period, we have seen a significant expansion in the methodological toolkit of emotions historians. The history of emotion words and emotional communities – championed by Barbara Rosenwein in a series of influential books and articles – has been enriched by a variety of concepts drawn from other domains of historical practice.¹⁹ These include theories of emotional performance based on speech-act theory (emotives), most associated with the work of William Reddy; work on emotional styles; the integration and challenge of affect theory; and perhaps the most important theorisation in recent years, the theory of emotional practices, the subject of the influential article by Monique Scheer mentioned earlier.²⁰ The emergence of the journal Emotions: History, Culture, Society, the outlet of the International Society for the History of Emotions, has further cemented the institutional presence of emotions in the field of history, while providing a space for continued dialogues across disciplines and chronologies. As well as developments in method, we have seen an astonishing proliferation of articles, collections and monographs that have addressed emotions in particular times and places. We have also seen a multiplication in histories of shifts in conceptualisations of things we might include under the catch-all umbrella of emotions (but which we still feel worried about).²¹ These studies were, in part, pioneered by Thomas Dixon’s important early work From Passions to Emotions.²² Dixon’s fundamental methods and insights remain a provocation: is our talk about emotions still trapped in fundamentally reductive accounts of the human (inherited from nineteenth-century science or elsewhere)? The continued importance of Dixon’s approach is witnessed by his excellent 2020 essay and responses to it in this journal that highlight how a study of emotions needs to be undertaken across multiple domains of history, and needs to include the self-reflexive role of the (emotional) historian.²³

Among the short responses to Dixon’s article, the psychologist W. Gerrod Parrott’s astute intervention repays further attention, first because it points to an area of considerable growth for emotions history that demands careful attention, and second because it returns us to the question of scale. Parrott rightly diagnoses the problem that too often ‘the historical claim that social, cultural and linguistic factors can shape emotions becomes implausibly stretched to being that emotions are shaped only by these factors’.²⁴ Parrott suggests the need to think in a more material, comparative and (potentially) more-than-human way, drawing on the long evolutionary histories of human bodies and those of our closest relative species. We face here something of the challenge of dealing with emotions as things that are given and made, the same challenges faced in historically conceptualising a range of other concepts, time included. Seen in this light, the history of emotions might have much to learn not only from its close neighbouring disciplines – such as cultural anthropology – but also from psychology and neuroscience. If emotions have a history, then psychologists like Parrott encourage us to remember that this includes a deep evolutionary history.²⁵

Admittedly, psychologists of different stripes have been making this kind of argument for a long time, with very changeable ideas about what evolutionary history and biological development look like (one thinks of Freud’s thoughts about cellular development and the pleasure principle, or Ferenczi’s theory of genitality), and changeable ideas about what connections we can trace between the more speculative depths of biological history and more immediately observable presentations of human emotions and drives.²⁶ Not unlike Freudian psychology in its heyday, neuroscience initially seemed to promise much to the humanities. But it seems to us that the fundamental historical insights of figures such as Dixon were not so easily understood by many of those undertaking the often quantitative study of emotions in neuroscience and psychology labs. The history of emotions should have a future with these disciplines, but historians may need to be more direct in their critique and more open to leading neuroscience into a partnership where the insights of history and the historical method have the capacity to shake certain assumptions of neuroscientific methods. In other words, questions about a longer scale of embodied psychohistory are open for discussion. Certainly, historians should be just as ready to write histories of the emotions in neuroscience and psychology as we are to learn from these high-profile and high-status disciplines.

The problem of scale which emerges starkly in thinking about deep history is equally pressing in thinking about the future. Which future are we talking about? We might think of a desire, a hope, for an eternal future that shapes many religious traditions, and which is cultivated through repeated acts of emotional habituation. Or we might think of the anxiety or fear felt by a child walking to school, about a big, noisy dog that only appears briefly – perhaps at the next house along – and who is swiftly passed. It is an emotion of early childhood, and a fleeting one at that. Yet it, too, may feed into a less immediate future: a desire to change schools, forever; the future narration of childhood emotions; perhaps even a set against owning a dog. Different, intersecting and multiple scales of futurity need to sit at the heart of our analysis of emotional futures. And we must add the intersections of identity that will forge these senses of futurity. Whose feelings about whose futures?

To give one small example of an openness to thinking about histories of the future in dialogue with the history of emotions, we want to examine the future of heretics condemned by an inquisitor, heretics who sought out the future possibility of redemption in the midst of their condemnation and burning. This is the case of the so-called Vauderie d’Arras, a series of fifteenth-century inquisitorial trials in northern France.²⁷ In these trials, accused vaudois – a term that had come to mean demon-worshipping witches – repeatedly made future-oriented gestures and speeches at the point of their deaths at the stake. Makeshift Eucharists of grass, or words cried out in Latin, were designed to offer protection and to seek out a divinely protected future beyond their immanent death by burning. These actions involve future-oriented desires; anxieties over the future; or they might even be seen as powerful gestures of hope. Their actions also certainly acted to release other feelings towards them – an inquisitor’s fury at their perceived continued mockery of correct religion, perhaps, or compassion from the assembled crowd, a normative emotional script surrounding execution in the period.²⁸

In other cases, swift alterations in horizons of futurity could lead to strong emotional experiences for those caught up in the trials – indeed, we need to think carefully about ‘expectation management’ as part of regimes of emotional control of futurity. Some of the condemned vaudois were women who had clearly been led to believe that if they confessed they would be given lighter punishments – pilgrimages, perhaps, or other forms of penance. That these were women is not incidental: the trial records suggest that their access to reliable knowledge of their future was different from men’s in the trial. Although our knowledge about these women is incomplete, some of them were further disadvantaged by their social status as poor sex workers. When they learned at the last minute that they were condemned to death, their distress screams from the records. Expectations overturned, their temporal horizons suddenly altered and foreclosed, the release of emotion motivates their cry for a future with a different justice.

From the perspective of contemporaries who remembered the trials or read about these events, the hopeful actions of those condemned for heresy was reframed by later events. In 1491, the highest court with jurisdiction of the region, the Parlement de Paris, overturned the verdicts, ordered the documents of the trials to be destroyed, masses to be sung and crosses to be erected to protect against future judgement over what was now perceived to be the injustice of these executions. An ultimate future hangs over the Parlement’s determinations – a future which shares features with the futures imagined throughout the trial by inquisitors, accused heretics, witnesses and onlookers alike: a future where the value of human actions and our feelings about them must and can be rewritten in the light of a sovereign divine justice that renders all human judgement provisional. So, as each individual future emerges from the record, we also find common cultures of futurity, bound up with common beliefs about the coming of judgement and humans’ need to prepare to make an account of their actions on the last day.

This account of futurity in the Vauderie d’Arras is so partial. It would require far more sustained analysis to trace the multiple emotional futures of these events. Yet even in this brief sketch we can see the potentials of thinking the future of the history of emotions as a history of the relationships between futurity and affect, about expectation, desire, anxiety, hope and the horizons of possibility that these open up for historical agents, and how the control of these hopes, desires and horizons is bound up with how historical agents are able to feel in particular moments in the unfolding of history. It is clear that this is a history that has to take account of persons, ranks, times and places. And it is clear that it will have to think about the future from second to second, from time to eternity, and everything in between.

This might seem an unhelpful note to end on – that our histories of emotions and the future have to be about all times in relation to all other times. But something like this has to be the unachievable aim, if we are interested in the complex, various mixtures of possible future feelings that we must navigate both as citizens and as learned-ignorant historians: these are deep seas, sometimes calm, sometimes stormy, sometimes with clear horizons, sometimes with horizons suddenly hidden by clouds or removed altogether as our prow dips beneath the waves.