State of the Field: The History of Emotions
2021; Wiley; Volume: 106; Issue: 371 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/1468-229x.13171
ISSN1468-229X
Autores Tópico(s)History of Emotions Research
ResumoEmotions have appeared in histories, and associated writings, for centuries. History writing has sometimes valued the emotional; in eighteenth-century Europe, the centrality of the idea of sympathetic exchange to communication ensured that many historians of the period sought to produce feelings in their readers.11 Mary Spongberg, Women Writers and the Nation's Past 1790–1860: Empathetic Histories (London, 2018). The emotions of historical subjects too have long been of interest. For some early twentieth-century theorists, often building on the stadial histories of human development of the eighteenth century, human emotions became more refined over time, evidencing the 'civilisation' of different nations.22 Norbert Elias, The Civilising Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (Oxford, 2000); David Lemmings and Ann Brooks, 'The emotional turn in the humanities and social sciences', in David Lemmings and Ann Brooks (eds), Emotions and Social Change: Historical and Sociological Perspectives (London, 2014), pp. 3–18. Others resisted such Whiggish accounts of progress for histories of private life and mentalities. The latter was most notably developed by the Annales school, where a study of emotion contributed to debates about human behaviour, motivation and cultural variety.33 See for example the series of volumes on the History of Private Life edited by Georges Duby and Philippe Ariès, originally published in the late 1980s by Harvard University Press and with re-editions thereafter. These ideas were returned to in the 1980s by Carol Stearns and Peter Stearns, building upon the new social history of the previous decades but attending to emotional life as a significant dimension of society and culture. Their work was especially significant in theorising emotion as historically and culturally contingent, and as a sociological process.44 Peter Stearns and Carol Stearns, 'Emotionology: clarifying the history of the emotions and emotional standards', American Historical Review, 90/4 (1985), pp. 813–36. Historians' own feelings have also been subject to analysis. In the mid-twentieth century, the emotions of historians were often suspicious, interfering with an 'objective' study of the past. More recently, scholars have sought to explore emotion as a productive lens of analysis, a dimension of cognition and decision-making, and something to be embraced, rather than avoided.55 Katie Barclay, 'Falling in love with the dead', Rethinking History, 22/4 (2019), pp. 459–73; Thomas A. Kohut, Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past (London, 2020). The history of emotions, as it has emerged in the last twenty years, therefore has plenty of precedent. This article explores the shape that the history of emotions has taken in recent decades, particularly as it has emerged as a distinct field with its own methodologies and conceptual apparatus. It highlights some of the underpinning frameworks used within the field, before offering an overview of current research. The key premise of the history of emotions is that emotion varies across time and place and so has a history that can be explored by scholars. Where it extends an earlier generation of research is through its often radical anti-universalism. Early historical scholarship on emotion, especially in the twentieth century, generally relied on the idea that the human body was largely the same across time and space. Communities might give emotions different names and encourage or discourage particular feelings through their systems of reward and punishment, material conditions and socialisation, but the human condition had some substantial similarities over time that could be traced. For a generation of scholars in the 1970s and 1980s, this even allowed for the application of modern psychological theories to past peoples and events.66 An example of this is David Hunt, Parents and Children in History: The Psychology of Family Life in Early Modern France (London, 1970); this continues in a more sophisticated form today: Christian Tileagă and Jovan Byford (eds), Psychology and History: Interdisciplinary Explorations (Cambridge, 2014). While contemporary historians of emotion vary in their opinions around the role of biology in emotional experience, they generally do not rely on a universal human nature as the foundation of emotional life. Rather, they emphasise the way in which our embodied experience is itself a product of culture. In this, the field is very much of its own historic moment. An interest in emotion now permeates a broad range of research fields and reflects broader social and cultural trends that place heightened emphasis on emotion in everyday life, sometimes captured by reference to living in an 'age of anxiety'.77 See, for example, the title of Anthony M. Wachs and Jon D. Schaff, Age of Anxiety: Meaning, Identity and Politics in Twenty-First-Century Film and Literature (Lanham, 2019). The emotional turn as it has been termed within the academy has influenced not only history but an array of humanities and social science disciplines as it seeks to place emphasis on emotion both as culturally distinctive and as agentic in shaping social conditions and relationships. The latter is especially significant in moving understanding of emotion from a biological 'response' to an external, and thus more important, stimulus to an active component of experience and so something to be explained and which in turn helps us explain events. Scholars from many disciplines now contribute to this project, often drawing on sympathetic biological sciences such as neuroscience and cultural psychology that emphasise the plasticity and environmental adaptability of the body and mind.88 See discussions for example in William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the history of emotions (Cambridge, 2001); Barbara Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling: A history of emotions, 600–1700 (Cambridge, 2015). The history of emotions, which sits in conversation with other scholars working under the umbrella of the emotional turn, is therefore markedly interdisciplinary and is often used in reference to literary scholars, linguists, art historians, dramatists, sociologists and so forth who study emotions within past societies and cultures. This rich interdisciplinary body of research has produced a sophisticated methodological apparatus that enables emotion to be historicised. Historians of emotion emphasise that emotions are products of their cultural environments. They build upon a philosophical tradition that highlights the relationship between language and human experience, where the words we use give form and shape to our worlds. This is not to deny that humans are also material: that we have bodies and those bodies act as constraints in some important ways on our experience. But it places particular significance on how humans name and frame those experience, how societies and cultures regulate and value them, and how our embodied experience is a product of socialisation processes. From this perspective, the experience of love is not a biological universal, but something that must be named in order to exist within a particular culture, and which is shaped by ideas of love that direct our physical sensations and feelings and how we understand, evaluate and respond to such sensations.99 For an extended introductory discussion of these ideas see Katie Barclay, The history of emotions: A Student Guide to Methods and Sources (Basingstoke, 2020). The relationship between culture and the body is at the heart of many of the methodological discussions within the field. William Reddy, for example, drew attention to the 'emotive', where the act of naming or vocalising a feeling in the body was part of what produced it. Using the metaphor of navigation, he suggested the experience of emotion was recursive, such that we might view a beloved, feel a bodily sensation, name it as love, and then realign our sensations to map them better onto cultural norms of what love should feel like. In this way our embodied experience and culture reinforced each other, and the 'emotive' was the emotion term whose use (in this case love) enabled that experience to happen.1010 Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling. Monique Scheer, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus, alternatively suggested that emotions were a form of practice: things that we did and which having learned them from infancy we experienced as naturalised 'responses'. Like Reddy, she too suggested that the process of naming and identifying emotion directed our embodied experience.1111 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, 51/2 (2012), pp. 193–220. Many others have offered perspectives on this question, although they largely share the same root epistemological framework.1212 Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, 2011); Katie Barclay, Men on Trial: Performing Emotion, Embodiment and Identity in Ireland 1800–1845 (Manchester, 2019); for a survey of the development of these ideas see: Katie Barclay, 'New materialism and the new history of the emotions', Emotions: History, Culture, Society, 1/1 (2017), pp. 161–83. One of the results of these ideas is that the history of emotions particularly attends to how emotions are defined, described, and applied by individuals and groups. This might be seen as something of a necessity since relatively few historians work with living subjects and even where we do, we typically rely on discursive accounts of their 'inner' lives. Most historical sources are texts, objects or the material world, rather than living and emoting bodies. Therefore, our access point to emotion is typically mediated through our source material, and that requires attention to the conditions in which such sources are produced. This includes a consideration of language, genre rules, the cultural beliefs and values that shaped their content, the material conditions of their production, and their use by historical actors, all of which point towards culture and community, as much as the individual and the embodied. Many historians of emotions would also go further, however, in suggesting that there is no 'unmediated' source or entry point into emotion, firstly as emotion requires a process of naming to exist as a cultural concept that could then be observed or measured in the body; and secondly as there is no direct access to point to the feelings of others. Even modern scientific experiments that attempt to capture physiological experience nonetheless produce data that takes a cultural form and so effectively provide another text for analysis. As our access point to emotion requires an engagement with culture, so culture becomes significant to the history of emotions. Several scholars have provided ways to think about how emotions are produced as group or cultural experiences, and how such group understandings of emotion then come to have social and political effects in daily life. Perhaps most significant among them is Barbara Rosenwein, who coined the phrase 'emotional community', a group of people who shared the same language and system of valuation of emotion (e.g. whether emotions were good, bad, to be avoided or encouraged).1313 Rosenwein, Emotional Communities. Her work has been especially influential and the grounding of many studies of historical emotion. Other ideas have also been important. Peter Stearns and Carol Stearns' concept of emotional styles, for example, emphasised how cultures promoted particular 'styles' of emotional life that then became a marker of cultural difference.1414 Stearns and Stearns, 'Emotionology'. Reddy's concept of 'emotional regimes', which highlights how cultural ideas about emotion become implicated in political systems, where people who conform to the norm are rewarded as well as the reverse, has been similarly useful at providing mechanisms to explain the social and political functions of emotion.1515 Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling. These theories are especially significant for drawing attention to how emotion becomes 'active' as a historical agent, shaping human behaviour and at times even acting as a form of social structure itself that can be resisted and reformed. Such ideas are being refined by a new generation of scholars who seek to nuance these models for particular contexts or draw out new dimensions of how emotions operate at a societal level. Mark Seymour has suggested the 'emotional arena' that seeks to take account of how different social arenas within a given culture provide spaces for different forms of emotional expression, behaviours and associated power dynamics; this contributes to a broader and growing conversation about how space and place are part of emotional experiences.1616 Mark Seymour, Emotional Arenas: Life, Love, and Death in 1870s Italy (Oxford, 2020). Kristine Alexander, Stephanie Olsen and Karen Vallgårda offer 'emotional formations' and 'emotional frontiers'. The former highlights spaces where children are socialised into particular emotion norms and the latter describes locations where people, but especially children, encounter different emotional cultures and learn to navigate between both.1717 Karen Vallgårda, Kristine Alexander, and Stephanie Olsen, 'Emotions and the global politics of childhood', in Karen Vallgårda, Kristine Alexander and Stephanie Olsen (eds), Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History (Basingstoke, 2015), pp. 12–34. Katie Barclay has offered the concept of the 'emotional ethic' that helps to explain how emotional life can also be a domain of moral behaviour and especially aspiration: we wish to love, but sometimes fail.1818 Katie Barclay, Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self (Oxford, 2021). All of these ideas seek to illuminate different dimensions of emotional experience as it is practiced and to provide an explanation for how emotion is produced in relation to culture, society, economy and political life. As such, they can be and are applied by a range of historians to empirical case studies. The historiography of the history of emotions has two dimensions: the first seeks to elucidate how emotion is understood and experienced in different times and places; the second seeks to employ these insights to help explain other historical events or phenomena. Here it might be fruitful to make the comparison with gender history, where scholarship has sought to better understand ideas of masculinity and femininity in particular cultures and how those ideas shaped the experience of being gendered, and to bring a gendered lens to other historical subdisciplines, such as the history of work, empire or marriage. As this suggests, the field has a broad scope and is continuing to grow. Until very recently, and largely reflecting the flow of research funding, empirical studies have been concentrated in several key areas. The first is closely associated with the history of medicine and seeks to complicate and historicise contemporary ideas about emotion in health and psychology by charting the historical development of ideas about emotion, its relationship to medicine, psychology and health workers, and current variation from past cultures.1919 This is especially associated with work emerging for the Queen Mary, University of London, Centre for the history of emotions, London, often funded by the Wellcome Trust. The second area is in medieval and early modern social histories, especially in relation to religious belief and practice, gender and family life, law and politics, and in the history of ideas.2020 This body of work is especially related to Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in the history of emotions and is catalogued here: . The third area comprises largely modern (post-1750) European and American works that explore emotion in relation to social and political life, not least in the development of modern states.2121 This work is produced by a diverse range of scholars, but includes work coming out of the Max Planck Centre for the history of emotions, as well as scholars associated with the North American Chapter on the history of emotions. The Max Planck publications can be found at: . As the history of emotions has gained momentum in the last five or so years, however, topics have expanded exponentially and are emerging from a wide array of scholars and geographic regions. A number of scholars are now seeking to bring global perspectives to the field. South and East Asian research is flourishing, as are histories of emotions in European empires and during 'encounters' between different cultural groups, such as in accounts of travel for diplomacy, trade or exploration.2222 Janet Theiss, 'Love in a Confucian climate: the perils of intimacy in eighteenth-century China', Nan Nü, 11 (2009), pp. 197–233; Ling Hon Lam, The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China: From Dreamscapes to Theatricality (New York, 2018); see also the 'Emotions and States of Mind in East Asia' book series edited by Paolo Santangelo and Cheuk Yin Lee, published by Brill; Margrit Pernau, Emotions and Modernity in Colonial India: From Balance to Fervor (Oxford, 2019); Karen Vallgårda, Imperial Childhoods and Christian Mission: Education and Emotions in South India and Denmark (Basingstoke, 2015); Margrit Pernau, Benno Gammerl and Philipp Nielsen (eds), Encounters with Emotions: Negotiating Cultural Differences since Early Modernity (New York, 2019); Daniela Hacke, Claudia Jarzebowski and Hannes Ziegler (eds), Matters of Engagement: Emotions, Identity and Cultural Contact in the Premodern World (London, 2021). Most regions of the world now have some representation in the scholarship, if unevenly.2323 Katie Barclay and Peter Stearns (eds), The Routledge Modern History of Emotion (London, forthcoming) contains survey chapters on Africa, Australia and Pacific, Latin America, East and South Asia, and Eastern Europe. Modern social histories, particularly of Europe or the United States, are also expanding, mirroring trends for the early modern period, and where emotion is increasingly used as a lens of analysis to help explain other historical phenomena.2424 See, for example, books in the 'history of emotions' series at Oxford University Press, Illinois University Press, Palgrave, and forthcoming with Bloomsbury. Emotions topics now appear in many journals, but Cultural and Social History is especially well represented, as is the dedicated journal Emotions: History, Culture, Society. The field is also being brought into conversation with some other productive areas of research, not least the history of the senses, histories of the body and embodiment, environmental history, and now the new history of experience.2525 J. F. van Dijkhuizen, and K. A. E. Enenkel (eds), The Sense of Suffering: Constructions of Physical Pain in Early Modern Culture (Leiden, 2009); Rob Boddice, Emotion, Sense, Experience (Cambridge, 2020); Dolores Martín-Moruno and Beatriz Pichel (eds), Emotional Bodies: The Historical Perspective of Emotions (Urbana, 2019); Andrea Gaynor, Susan Broomhall and Andrew Flack, 'Frogs and feeling communities: a study of history of emotions and environmental history', Environment and History (online first 2019), ; Dolly Jørgensen, Lost Species in the Modern Age: Histories of Longing and Belonging (Cambridge, 2019); for more on the history of experience, see the Tampere Centre of Excellence in the History of Experience, . Notably, all of these areas share a concern about the intersection between the material conditions of living and how humans imagine, describe and are produced through them, leading to a growing interest in materialist and phenomenological approaches to understanding the past.2626 Barclay, 'New materialism'. Within these concentrations of research, the historiography has ranged across a number of themes. Exploring emotion has necessitated understanding how different groups have named it, described its sensations and effects, and valued its role in society. This has led to a study of emotion words, like love, hate, or anger, in different languages, tracing their emergence, use, meaning, and on some occasions demise.2727 Uta Frevert et al., Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling 1700–2000 (Oxford, 2014); Anna Wierzbicka, '"Happiness" in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective', Daedalus, 133 (2004), pp. 34–43. This is still a growing area of research, as can be seen in expanding histories of emotions like happiness, loneliness, anger, fear, boredom, and so forth, which in offering histories of the uses and meanings of such terms within particular historical contexts enable a greater attention to issues of causation and periodisation within emotional life.2828 Some highlights on these growing topics include: Darrin McMahon, Happiness: A History (New York, 2006); Fay Bound Alberti, A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion (Oxford, 2019); Margrit Pernau, 'Male anger and female malice: emotions in Indo-Muslim advice literature', History Compass, 10/2 (2012), pp. 119–28; Jeffrey Auerbach, Imperial Boredom: Monotony and the British Empire (Oxford, 2018). How such emotion is depicted in cultural forms has been a significant point of discussion, often led by art historians and literary scholars, who seek to highlight emotions gestures, facial expressions and behaviours as they are represented for audiences.2929 Kathryn Woods, '"Polite" face: the social meanings attached to facial appearance in early eighteenth-century didactic journals', ÉPISTÉMOCRITIQUE – Eighteenth-Century Archives of the Body. Conference Proceedings of the International Workshop "Archives of the Body. Medieval to Early Modern", Cambridge University, 8–9 Sept. 2011, pp. 43–66; Susan Broomhall, 'Facemaking: emotional and gendered meanings in Chinese clay portraits of Danish Asiatic Company men', Scandinavian Journal of History, 41/3 (2016), pp. 447–74; Katie Barclay, 'Performing emotion and reading the male body in the Irish court, c.1800–1845', Journal of Social History, 51/2 (2017), pp. 293–312; Beatriz Pichel, 'From facial expressions to bodily gestures: passions, photography and movement in French nineteenth-century sciences', History of the Human Sciences, 29/1 (2016), p. 27048; Miri Rubin, 'Gestures of pain, implications of guilt: Mary and the Jews', Past and Present, 203, Supplement 4 (2009), pp. 80–95. The relation between emotion and particular cultural events, such as death, marriage or war, has allowed for the nuances and variation of emotional expression within particular contexts to emerge.3030 For example, Peter N. Stearns (ed.), The Routledge History of Death since 1800 (London, 2020); Sally Holloway, The Game of Love in Georgian England: Courtship, Emotions and Material Culture (Oxford, 2018); Stephanie Downes, Andrew Lynch, and Katrina O'Loughlin (eds), Emotions and War: Medieval to Romantic Literature (Basingstoke, 2016). The wider cosmological systems of emotion have also been a topic of discussion, whether that is the theology that framed the passions, the psychological model of modern medicine or the flows that governed Chinese Qi.3131 Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge, 2006); Halvor Eifring, 'Introduction: emotions and the conceptual history of Qing 情', in Halvor Eifring (ed.), Love and Emotions in Traditional Chinese Literature (Leiden, 2004), pp. 1–36. Here emotions are placed within their explanatory frameworks, often but not exclusively tying feelings to underlying physiological processes that change over time and place. Such research has been significant not only in historicising the experience of emotion, but because it has provided the foundations for research on emotional experience in other contexts, and as it is often the space where the greatest interdisciplinary engagement has occurred, not least with psychology and sociology. If what we feel is shaped by culture, then definitions and theories of emotion within a particular culture can be helpful when interpreting the emotional lives of those who lived in such cultures. From here, historians have sought to highlight the emotional experiences of individuals and groups. Histories of intimacy and family life have been especially significant here, partly as rich sources often survive for family relationships that allow us to explore emotions in this domain, but also because scholars have been influenced by contemporary ideas about the family as central to emotional socialisation and adult psychology. The family therefore has been thought to give important clues to how people 'learn' their emotions.3232 Barclay, Caritas; Joanne Bailey, Parenting in England, 1760–1830: Emotion, Identity and Generation (Oxford, 2012). Children and childhood have similarly been a domain of interest for this reason, expanding emotional socialisation beyond the home to the school, the overseas mission, the institution, and also to children's 'spaces', such as the playground or personal letter.3333 Katie Barclay, Ciara Rawnsley and Kim Reynolds (eds), Death, Emotion and Childhood in Premodern Europe (Basingstoke, 2016); Vallgårda, Alexander and Olsen (eds), Childhood, Youth and Emotions; Stephanie Olsen, 'The history of childhood and the emotional turn', History Compass, 15/11 (2017), e12410; Claudia Jarzebowski and T. M. Safley (eds), Childhood and Emotion across Cultures 1450–1800 (London, 2014). Families have distinctive cultures, but so do other social groups. Large categories, like gender, race, class and nationality, have often been significant dividing lines in emotional life, where different categories of people are assumed to emote differently, socialised to feel in ways appropriate to their status, and punished or rewarded accordingly.3434 Katie Barclay, 'Love and friendship between lower order Scottish men: or what the history of emotions has brought to early modern gender history', in Elise Dermineur, Virginia Langum and Åsa Karlsson Sjögren (eds), Revisiting Gender in European History, 1400–1800 (London, 2018), pp. 121–44; Jane Lydon, Imperial Emotions: The Politics of Empathy across the British Empire (Cambridge, 2019); Ramesh Mallipeddi, Spectacular Suffering: Witnessing Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic (Charlottesville, 2016); Erin Austin Dwyer, 'Mastering emotions: the emotional politics of slavery', PhD dissertation (Harvard University, 2012). Historians have been interested in how these ideas have overlapped with identity, with emotion acting as a dimension of how people express themselves and so perform, for example, gender or race. They have also highlighted the limits of such categorisations, as stereotypes that do not always conform to individual experience or desire.3535 Susan Broomhall, Gender and Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Destroying Order, Structuring Disorder (London, 2015); Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore, 2006). Group cultures are also an important location for emotion, allowing people to form 'refuges' of feeling within systems where they were excluded (such as in some gay subcultures), or giving shape to the dynamics of particular environments, whether the workplace, the convent or the football field.3636 Benno Gammerl, 'Affecting legal change: how laws impacted same-sex feelings and relationships in West Germany since the 1950s', in Mark Seymour and Sean Brady (eds), From Sodomy Laws to Same-Sex Marriage: International Perspectives since 1789 (London, 2019), pp. 109–21; Claire Walker, 'The experience of exile in early modern English convents', Parergon, 34/2 (2017), pp. 159–77. Histories of group emotions have therefore explored how these communities display and regulate feeling, as well as the evolution of emotional cultures over time. Group emotions are not the same as collective feeling, where people feel the same thing at the same time. The possibility of the latter has been quite contested among scholars. Nonetheless, that emotions might be contagious, travelling from person to person, and that group feeling seems to extend beyond the individual, such as in a rock concert or riot, has meant that collective feelings have been a topic of research. Historians who wish to explain riots, revolutions, crowd behaviours or similar activities have often found collective feeling and its associated concept of 'affect' (unnamed, sometimes unconscious feeling) as a useful proxy for more direct evidence of what people felt during such events, something that often does not survive in other forms and where individual accounts of such behaviour often lose the sense of the group operating as a whole. Whether or not such extension of feeling beyond the self can be explained scientifically, it has certainly been a popular concept within many cultures and interesting to study for this reason.3737 Steven Connor, 'Collective emotions: reasons to feel doubtful', The history of emotions Annual Lecture given at Queen Mary, University of London, 9 Oct. 2013; Emma Hutchison, Affective Communities in World Politics: Collective Emotions after Trauma (Cambridge, 2016); Piroska Nagy, 'Collective emotions, history writing and change: the case of Pataria (Milan, Eleventh Century)', Emotions: History, Culture, Society, 2/1 (2018), pp. 132–52; Merridee Bailey and Katie Barclay, 'Emotion, ritual and power: from family to nation', in Merridee Bailey and Katie Barclay (eds), Emotion, Ritual and Power in Europe, 1200–1920: Family, Church and State (Basingstoke, 2017), pp. 1–20. From collective feelings, historians have also turned their attention to social structures. As noted above, many accounts of how emotions operate emphasise their role as a norm and so therefore are important to giving shape to group dynamics. As Barclay has argued, in some contexts, the significance placed on some emotional ideals, such as love, comes to offer a disciplinary framework for behaviour and ideas about the self.3838 Barclay, Caritas. Emotion can therefore explain the operation of power and group dynamics. Emotion has been shown to play a role in political life, nation-building, and even processes of modernity and globalisation.3939 Ilaria Scaglia, The Emotions of Internationalism: Feeling International Cooperation in the Alps in the Interwar Period (Oxford, 2020); Nicole Eustace, 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism (University Park, 2012); Nicole Eustace, Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power and the Coming of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 2008); Pernau, Emotions and Modernity; Barclay and Stearns, Routledge History of Modern Emotions. That cultures can have 'emotional styles' has been identified as not only part of how nations come to think of themselves, but in shaping human well-being and success.4040 Peter N. Stearns, American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style (New York, 1994). The concept of the 'happiness index' that measures and compares the feeling of different nations has therefore become significant when defining and contrasting the effectiveness of different forms of governance.4141 Nicholas White, A Brief History of Happiness (Oxford, 2006). Within such historiography, understanding emotion becomes a necessary part of explaining dynamics of power from the local to the international, often situated as the 'missing link' in accounts of how the individual is mobilised as part of something larger than the self. The history of emotions is currently flourishing. Some current work is expanding studies of emotion to new times, places and peoples, and that work will be significant in diversifying and complicating current accounts of human experience that remain western-centric. There remain many emotions, not least across different language groups, which await their own histories and which may open up old ways of feeling for modern audiences. The intersection with material culture studies, particularly reflecting on the emotion work done by objects, has the potential to develop exponentially, and intersects with new research on the history of emotions in capitalism, such as in relation to consumption and worker feelings.4242 Stephenie Downes, Sally Holloway and Sarah Randles (eds), Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions through History (Oxford, 2018); Katie Barclay, 'The emotions of household economics', in Susan Broomhall and Andrew Lynch (eds), The Routledge Companion to Emotions in Europe: 1100–1700 (London, 2019), pp. 185–99; Sally Holloway, 'Love, custom and consumption: Valentine's Day in England, 1660–1830', Cultural and Social History, 17/3 (2020), pp. 295–314; Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (Cambridge, 2007); Eva Illouz (ed.), Emotions as Commodities: Capitalism, Consumption and Authenticity (London, 2018); Arlie Hochschild, The Commercialization of Intimate Life and Other Essays (Berkeley, 2003). That emotions themselves have economies has been theorised by Sara Ahmed, but now it is the emotions of economic systems that are a growing area of study, reflecting a return in history to material structures and superstructures.4343 Sara Ahmed, 'Affective economies', Social Text, 22/2 (2004), pp. 117–39. There is ongoing work on this by Susan Matt and Katie Barclay. Emotional attachments to things can also be seen in a growing interest in our affective connections to the past – for example, our attachments to inherited objects, statues or historic buildings – as well as recognition of emotion as significant to explaining memory.4444 Jennifer K. Ladino, Memorials Matter: Emotion, Environment and Public Memory at American Historical Sites (Reno, 2019); Gönöl Bozoğlu, Museums, Emotion and Memory Culture: The Politics of the Past in Turkey (London, 2020); Alicia Marchant (ed.), Historicising Heritage and Emotions: The Affective Histories of Blood, Stone and Land (London, 2019). Memory studies tends to focus on contemporary feeling for the past, but sometimes past emotions travel to the present, and such questions are underpinning research in transhistorical emotion and histories of how historic emotions are engaged with today.4545 Louise D'Arcens, 'Feeling medieval: mood and transhistorical empathy in Justin Kurzel's Macbeth', Screening the Past, 41 (2016), e1–e10, ; Louise D'Arcens and Andrew Lynch, 'Feeling for the premodern', Exemplaria, 30 (2018), pp. 183–90. This survey only touches the surface of emerging research, and there are no doubt lots of new and imaginative ways in which the insights of the history of emotions can be applied to other historical case studies. A number of scholars have now produced resources to aid with teaching the history of emotions and to approaching research in the field, especially for students or novices to the topic, with the goal of enabling easy access to methods and approaches needed to conduct this work.4646 Barclay, The history of emotions; Katie Barclay, Sharon Crozier-De Rosa and Peter Stearns (eds), Sources for the history of emotions: A Student Guide (London, 2020); Rob Boddice, The history of emotions (Manchester, 2018); Jan Plamper, The history of emotions: An Introduction (Oxford, 2015); Ute Frevert, Emotions in History: Lost and Found (New York, 2011); Susan Broomhall, Jane W. Davidson and Andrew Lynch (eds), A Cultural history of emotions (6 vols; London, 2019); Barbara Rosenwein and Riccardo Cristiani, What is the history of emotions? (Cambridge, 2018); Susan Matt and Peter Stearns (eds), Doing Emotions History (Urbana, 2013). An important contribution at our current moment is the possibility for the history of emotions, through its anti-universalism, to aid in the project of decolonising history and the wider academy. Through comparison across time and place, the history of emotions has the potential to destabilise and de-centre western assumptions about human behaviour and how it is/should be valued (not least critiquing the globalising tendency of contemporary science), to offer explanations for how practices of colonisation have shaped the subject and the emotional mechanisms through which indigenous groups have resisted such processes, and to celebrate the richness, diversity and political importance of cultural practices of emotion for particular groups. As this is a field that is continuing to gain momentum, there may yet be unexpected directions, both in terms of new methods and concepts, and fruitful areas of further study. Indeed, we hope this is the case. The capacity of the history of emotions to help make the explanatory link between individuals and groups, between personal choices and social structures, between the micro and the everyday, and the larger discourses and the structures that shape our lives, is offering a rich reward to the discipline of History and ensures that the field still has some distance to travel.
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