History of Emotions: Where Are We?

As we celebrate the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the CHE, the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotion (initially focusing on Europe 1100–1800 and with the late Professor Philippa Maddern as its founding Director) and the fifth anniversary of the launch of the journal Emotions: History, Culture, Society (founding Editors: Katie Barclay, Andrew Lynch, Giovanni Tarantino), it is only pertinent that we look back and assess our efforts by hearing from some prominent emotions scholars who contributed in different ways and capacities to this pathbreaking intellectual journey.

Academic Emotions

The University is an institution that disciplines the academic self. As such it produces both a particular emotional culture and, at times, the emotional suffering of those who find such disciplinary practices discomforting. Drawing on a rich array of writing about the modern academy by contemporary academics, this Element explores the emotional dynamics of the academy as a disciplining institution, the production of the academic self, and the role of emotion in negotiating power in the ivory tower. Using methodologies from the History of Emotion, it seeks to further our understanding of the relationship between the institution, emotion and the self.

Introduction

This chapter describes the largest historical, theoretical, and methodological claims of Passion’s Fictions: that in the early modern period a rhetoric of the passions destabilized a received faculty psychology, only to be itself absorbed into new natural histories of the passions; that the concept of passion in the early modern period was crucially shaped by rhetoric, with its account of passion as a situated, worlded, object-oriented mode of cognition; that the rhetoric of the passions centered on an account of narrative as a mode of the knowledge of the passions in their world-bound particularity; that rhetoric also shaped emerging forms of literary production, from Shakespeare’s drama to the rise of the novel; and that literary studies needs to attend to the active role of its own material in the history of the psychology of the passions. The chapter also situates the arguments made in Passion’s Fictions with respect to a series of related areas of inquiry: the history of emotion; affect theory; cognitive cultural studies; the history of philosophy; and the history of science. Overall, it aims to show the intimate links between literature and the sciences of soul and mind through the whole period from 1500 to 1800, and it makes the case that literary history is a crucial territory for investigating changing ways of thinking about the passions, not just in the rarefied space of philosophical and scientific debate but also in broader areas of discourse and culture.

A Strategic Compromise: Universality, Interdisciplinarity, and the Case for Modal Emotions in History of Emotion Research

Historians of emotion largely agree that their research can be usefully informed by interdisciplinary engagement with disciplines like psychology and neuroscience. There is, however, an immediate barrier to such interdisciplinary work: researchers in the affective sciences largely believe that human emotions are meaningfully universal, while historians of emotion overwhelmingly reject the concept of emotional universality. The current essay argues that, despite this fundamental difference, it is still possible for historians of emotion to learn from universalist affective science. This can be done, I suggest, by taking a cue from Klaus Scherer’s concept of ‘modal emotions’, which provides a roadmap for how historians of emotion might make a strategic compromise with universalist science – one that would allow them to access a much wider pool of interdisciplinary opportunity, but would not require them to sacrifice their anti-universalist beliefs. My paper proposes that emotion history will be better served by expanding the scope of its interdisciplinary borrowings, and offers a model for how this might be responsibly done.

Erasmus and the Emotions of Death

This article investigates the presence of emotion, primarily fear, in Erasmus’ work on death and dying. How did Erasmus approach the fear of death, how did he believe people should face this fear, and what were his own personal beliefs on the matter? These questions are addressed here. The recent growth of the study of the History of Emotion has shown just how central to the development of thought and belief in the late medieval and early modern periods the emotions were, and this is no less true of the development of thought and belief concerning death and dying. The various ars moriendi works of the period were fully aware of the natural fear of death that people had, and they approached this fear in several ways. By the time Reformed Protestant artes moriendi began to appear, readers were taught that the fear of death could only be overcome by the constant meditation upon death. In certain respects Erasmus, with his De Praeparatione, bridged the gap between Catholicism, Early Lutheranism, and Reformed Protestantism, and as such his work, and its use of and engagement with fear, is investigated in detail here.

Categories

This chapter explores five musical emotions, describing their behavioral properties in analytical detail across Baroque, Classical, and Romantic styles. It begins by reconsidering the popular circumplex model of musical emotion. It then develops the attitudinal theory by bringing into play the notion of cognitive processing styles (after Galen Bodenhausen): the idea that emotions are also ways of thinking and hearing—indeed, that thinking and hearing are types of behavior. The major part of the chapter then uses these tools to analyze five musical emotions. Each section constitutes a “very short history of emotion” focusing on a basic emotional category (happiness, anger, sadness, tenderness, and fear) and ranging across analytical examples from the entire common practice period, in broadly chronological order.