Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction
Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction
Books in the Early Modern Themes series are aimed at upper level undergraduate and
postgraduate students who are looking more deeply at thematic topics in the early
modern period. They combine chapters offering a synthesis of the topic as it stands,
the key historiographical debates, and the cutting edge research which is driving the
field forward.
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Contents
Figures xiii
Tables xv
Acknowledgements xvi
Notes on contributors xviii
Introduction by Susan Broomhall xxxvi
SECTION I
Modern theories and models of emotions 1
I.5 Materiality 17
SARAH RANDLES
II.2 Emotion 36
PATRICIA SIMONS
II.6 Grammar 48
ROSS KNECHT
II.7 Mood 50
R.S. WHITE
II.8 Love 53
DANIJELA KAMBASKOVIC
II.9 Melancholy 56
ERIN SULLIVAN
II.10 Fellow-feeling 61
KATHERINE IBBETT
II.14 Contemplation 74
CHRISTOPHER ALLEN
II.15 Sensibility 78
KATRINA O’LOUGHLIN
Contents vii
II.16 The expressive face 81
LINDA WALSH
SECTION III
Sources and methodologies for early modern emotions 87
III.1 Poetry 89
DIANA G. BARNES
III.2 Drama 92
KATHRYN PRINCE
SECTION IV
Focus topics for the early modern period 177
Spaces 225
Beliefs 277
This volume has benefitted from the financial support and fellowship provided by
the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions
(project number CE110001011). The Centre has enabled many of the authors to
meet and exchange ideas, and to contribute to this work. Colleagues at the Centre’s
headquarters at The University of Western Australia have provided valuable support
and assistance, as well as shared ideas and thoughts on emerging research. I am
particularly grateful to Joanne McEwan for her dedicated editorial assistance. I would
also like to thank all the participants in this volume for their enthusiasm about this
project, their willingness to engage with its core ideas and their patience with its editor.
Publishers’ acknowledgements
The Publishers would like to thank the following for their permission to reproduce
copyright material: Beinecke Rare Manuscript Library, Yale University; Coram;
London Metropolitan Archives; The Mary Rose Trust; The Metropolitan Museum
of Art; The National Gallery of Art, London; Staatsbibliothek, Berlin; the Tate Britain;
the Victoria and Albert Museum; Zentralbibliothek, Zürich.
Notes on contributors
The subject of historical emotions is a growing area of interest and one with which
many scholars and students are keen to engage. This presents a need for an introduction
to the wide range of current research from scholars primarily of early modern Europe,
from varied disciplines, which can offer an entry point to their questions, to the
concepts, approaches and sources that currently are, or might be, used in the analysis
of early modern emotions, and to the potential perspectives that the history of
emotions can offer early modern history more broadly. This volume therefore offers
short, accessible commentaries from period experts, which are intended to assist a
beginner to history of emotions approaches to begin investigating topics of interest.
The aim of the present work is to provide a straightforward and introductory textbook
that can help students and scholars to understand the state of the field and allow them
to translate and apply its approaches and ideas into their scholarship.
The history of emotions is a burgeoning area of research. Major research centres
for the historical study of emotions worldwide have proved a catalyst to the pro-
duction of carefully-nuanced monographic texts as well as large-scale, collaborative
volumes, and indeed to innovative practitioner-based and community-oriented
research practices for the humanities. A range of book series with scholarly presses
worldwide now captures the current scholarly interest in emotions in history, historical
emotions and the emotional practices of specific time periods.
The scholarship on emotions in the early modern period is already vast, stimulated
perhaps particularly by the fact that two influential theorists, Barbara H. Rosenwein
and William M. Reddy, have grounded their conceptualizations of historical emotional
practice in concrete study of medieval and early modern Europe.1 The breadth of early
modern emotion scholarship calls for a student-level text to assist a newcomer to the
field to bring together what currently exists, the methodologies by which it has been
undertaken to date, potential avenues of future interests and the kinds of findings that
these approaches are producing. This text’s title ‘Early Modern Emotions’, makes clear
the understanding taken by the contributors – that emotions themselves are cultural
and social practices that change over time.2 We start from the assumption that
emotional display and practice are culturally- and historically-specific, and should be
understood as expressions of early modern society. The choice of the term ‘emotion’,
however, is entirely pragmatic. It locates the text in the current ‘history of emotions’
scholarship, and as part of a wider series of such introductory texts that will span other
time periods. In doing so, it avoids the dilemma of which of varied emotion terms
from the period itself should be given pride of place over others – passions, sentiments,
affections among them – each defined by distinct discursive contexts.
Introduction xxxvii
The authors of this volume seek to explore therefore what ‘emotions’ were termed
over this 300-year period, how and why such terms changed in use, the discourses in
which they were used, the sources in which we can locate emotion terms and evidence
of experiences, displays and practices. We explore what emotions did and meant in
the social and cultural practice of early modern Europe. It is hoped that this volume
will present a useful database for future comparative work with other key periods, such
as the medieval and nineteenth century, both periods about which dynamic scholarship
has been produced.3 What is ‘early modern’ about emotional experiences, terms,
practices and display will emerge when we have similar analyses for Europe in other
periods. Moreover, to capture the richness and diversity of early modern emotional
life requires not just the conventional sources and analytical contributions of historians,
but also those of literary, art and music scholars of the period as well. The inclusion
of sources and methods of a wide range of disciplines presents challenges for reconciling
different scholarly practices and methodologies but also reveals exciting new
opportunities for future multi- and interdisciplinary scholarship.
This textbook primarily concerns Western European practices of emotions but also
explores emotions created and exhibited through Europe’s interactions globally during
the period. It keenly awaits comparable volumes analysing other societies worldwide
at this period. As the ‘early modern’, broadly speaking it spans 1500 to 1800, although
some entries attend to events and sources slightly beyond these chronological
demarcations as is appropriate to their specific topics. The volume entries most
commonly concern emotions as human interactions but we also explore the possibilities
for considering human relations with material, animal, environmental and supernatural
phenomena.
The volume is largely representative of current research trends and questions in
early modern emotions research. It is not exhaustive in the coverage of topics that
could potentially be analysed in consideration of emotions, but its selection is intended
to be exemplary and representative of current study. Some entries are necessarily more
speculative than others, reflective of a slimmer basis of extant research, where analysis
of emotions constitutes a relatively new perspective for the field. Ultimately, these
entries serve as springboards to further thinking produced by individual authors rather
than definitive statements of shared approaches. The authors are experts in a wide
range of different disciplines that they bring to bear in their contributions. As historians,
musicologists, art historians, literary and architectural scholars of the period, they
provide coverage of the different ways in which early modern emotions research is
currently conducted in various scholarly communities around the globe. The wide
range of contributors intentionally showcases the diversity of approaches to the field,
the ways in which different kinds of scholars, scholarly disciplines and international
scholarly traditions employ emotions to make new interventions.
The entries to follow are categorized into four sections that are intended to assist
readers to understand the processes and practices by which history of emotions
research is presently conducted. Section I, ‘Modern theories and models of emotions’,
presents key methods, terms and concepts of emotion, considering how they have
been, or might be, applied to the early modern period. In Section II, ‘Early modern
terms, concepts and practices of emotions’, the focus turns to particular early modern
conceptualizations of, and terms for, emotions that are unique to that time or that
have meanings quite distinct from those applied at other periods. In the third section,
xxxviii Susan Broomhall
‘Sources and methodologies for early modern emotions’, authors consider a range of
potential methodologies for analysis of early modern emotions, and provide examples
applied to particular data sets at use in or available for the early modern period.
In the final section of the text, we analyse the impact of history of emotions research
for ‘Focus topics for the early modern period’. This section reflects upon the potential
for historical analyses through the lens of emotions to change how the early modern
period is considered more broadly. How do these common topics for discussion in
the period shift when emotions are placed in the foreground of analysis? This section
is further sub-divided thematically, into ‘Political Realms’; ‘Destructive Experiences’;
‘Life Stages’; ‘Spaces’; ‘Intellectual and Cultural Traditions’; ‘Beliefs’; ‘The World
Beyond Europe’ and ‘The Non-Human World’.
Each individual entry includes both key references and several annotated
recommendations for further reading on emotions research in that area. The ‘Select
bibliography’ compiles a comprehensive, though not exhaustive, list of current
scholarship pertaining to early modern emotions. Finally, a detailed ‘Index’ to the
volume serves an important role in highlighting links across the discussion within
individual entries and acts as a significant cross-referencing tool for the volume as a
whole.
Notes
1 B.H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2006); Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2015); W.M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Reddy, The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and
Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900–1200 CE (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012);
an accessible discussion of these and other perspectives from North American historians can be found
in N. Eustace, E. Lean, J. Livingston, J. Plamper, W.H. Reddy and B.H. Rosenwein, ‘AHR
conversation: the historical study of emotions’, American Historical Review 117, 5 (2012), 1487–1531.
2 For a wider analysis of methodologies for the history of emotions, weighing the anthropological relativist
position against the universalism of the neurosciences and other disciplines, see J. Plamper, The History
of Emotions: An Introduction, (trans.) K. Tribe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); and emerging
work in psychology on social contexts for emotion, B. Mesquita and M. Boiger, ‘Emotions in context:
a sociodynamic model of emotions’, Emotion Review 6, 4 (2014), 298–302.
3 For recent comprehensive study of the medieval, see the important collaborative research of Piroska
Nagy and Damian Boquet: Nagy (ed.), ‘Emotions médiévales’, Critique (2007); Boquet and Nagy
(eds), Le Sujet des émotions au moyen âge (Paris: Beauchesne, 2009); Boquet and Nagy (eds), Politques
des émotions au moyen âge (Florence: Sismel, 2010); Boquet, Nagy and Moulinier-Brogi (eds), ‘La Chair
des émotions’, Médiévales 61 (2011); Boquet and Nagy, Sensible Moyen Age (Paris: Seuil, 2015); and
for the nineteenth century, T. Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological
Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); U. Frevert, C. Bailey, P. Eitler, B. Gammerl,
B. Hitzer, M. Pernau, M. Scheer, A. Schmidt and N. Verheyen, Emotional Lexicons. Continuity and
Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling 1700–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Section I
Modern theories and
models of emotions
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I.1 Emotional community
Andrew Lynch
In the study of early modern emotions, few terms are more widely employed than
‘emotional community’. Its popularity stems from several influential books and essays
by the historian Barbara H. Rosenwein, but what ‘emotional community’ means in
its different usages can vary considerably. A close look at Rosenwein’s formulation
and practice of the term is helpful:
Imagine, then, a large circle within which are smaller circles, none entirely
concentric but rather distributed unevenly within the given space. The large circle
is the overarching emotional community, tied together by fundamental assump-
tions, values, goals, feeling rules, and accepted modes of expression. The smaller
circles represent subordinate emotional communities, partaking in the larger one
and revealing its possibilities and its limitations. They too may be subdivided. At
the same time other large circles may exist, either entirely isolated from or
intersecting with the first at one or more points.4
Further reading
Karant-Nunn, S., The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)
—considers how church leaders and preachers of various confessions in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries used different modes of emotional expression and engagement to shape a communal religious
consciousness amongst their followers.
Kuijpers, E., ‘ “O, Lord, save us from shame”: Narratives of Emotions in Convent Chronicles by Female
Authors During the Dutch Revolt, 1566–1635’, in S. Broomhall (ed.), Gender and Emotions in
Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Destroying Order, Structuring Disorder (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015),
127–46.
—analyses writings by enclosed nuns about their sufferings in the Dutch wars of religion to exemplify
communal management of emotions according to available cultural means, including familiarity with
various written genres and a shared practice of emotional ‘styles’.
Mullaney, S., The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2015)
—discusses Elizabethan popular theatre ‘as a kind of affective laboratory . . . oriented toward the location,
exploration and exploitation of those fault-lines and dissonances of feeling that characterized the
emotional communities of post-Reformation England’. (69)
Notes
1 B.H. Rosenwein, ‘Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions’, Passions in Context: Journal of
the History and Philosophy of the Emotions 1, 1 (2010), online at www.passionsincontext.de/index.php/
?id=557, accessed 27 June 2016.
2 Rosenwein (ed.), Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1998)
3 N. Elias, The Civilizing Process (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994)
4 Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006),
24.
5 B. Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the 11th and 12th
Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983)
6 Ibid., 90.
7 Ibid., 91.
8 B.H. Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling. A History of Emotions, 600–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2015), 254.
9 P.N. Stearns with C.Z. Stearns, ‘Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional
Standards’, American Historical Review 90, 4 (1985), 813–36, quote 813.
10 J. Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction, (trans) K. Tribe (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2015), 69. See Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 25.
11 W.M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 125.
12 Rosenwein, ‘Problems and Methods’, 20.
13 Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 23.
14 Plamper, The History of Emotions, 71.
15 Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 25.
16 Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling, 12.