Barbara H. Rosenwein and Riccardo Cristiani, Department of History
Loyola University Chicago
In her contribution to this issue, Ute Frevert writes, “To trace today’s surge of emotional politics back to former times means to highlight their peculiarities and to investigate the contextual forces responsible for such tendencies.” But how exactly have historians of emotions accomplished this task? What methods have they used? And what are their newest approaches? These are the topics we essay in this brief survey (for a fuller discussion, see Rosenwein & Cristiani, 2017).
Original approaches
There is a centuries-long “prequel” to the current ferment in the history of emotions (see Plamper, 2015; Boddice, forthcoming 2018). Nevertheless, it is fair to say that the modern field began in 1985 with an article written by Peter and Carol Stearns. According to them, historians had to shift their focus from people’s “real” feelings to people’s changing “attitudes or standards […] toward basic emotions and their appropriate expression.” (Stearns & Stearns, 1985, p. 813.) The Stearnses termed the study of changing standards “emotionology,” and they proposed to investigate it mainly through advice manuals and other normative sources.
In the wake of this article, the field took off, as witnessed not only by this special feature in Emotion Researcher, but also by an avalanche of new books and articles on the topic each year. These are supported by a number of academic centers and other institutions, which sponsor important initiatives to foster research in the field. (Rosenwein & Cristiani, 2017, pp. 110-11.)
Among the reasons for the “big bang” represented by emotionology were changes in psychological theories of the emotions. Early theories made emotions bodily phenomena, unrelated to thought, and inborn (Darwin, 1872; James, 1890). In the 1960s these assumptions were challenged by a newly vigorous cognitivist view, which conceived of emotions as kinds of judgments or assessments that something was– or was not– for one’s wellbeing. Here is a simple example from Magda Arnold, a pioneer of this theory: “If I see an apple, I know that it is an apple of a particular kind and taste. This knowledge need not touch me personally in any way. But if the apple is of my favorite kind and I am in a part of the world where it does not grow and cannot be bought, I may want it with a real emotional craving” (Arnold, 1960, 1:171). We call that particular emotion “desire.” Even though cognitivists maintain that emotions are mental, they agree that they produce bodily alterations; in the case of the apple, such changes might include a throbbing heart and salivating.
Cognitivist (or appraisal) theories generally focus on the individual, pointing out that “if two people differ in their appraisals” of the same event, they will have different emotions, with the corollary that “the same appraisals lead to the same emotions” (Moors et al., 2013, p. 121). But in the 1970s, philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists turned the spotlight onto the ambient environment, proposing that society itself constructs emotions, which are produced and managed by social rules and norms. Thus, the social constructionist (or constructivist) position contends that some societies may value an emotion that other societies do not, or even avoid. One example is amae, a Japanese emotion that cultivates a feeling of dependency and childlike love that Westerners tend to eschew. (Morsbach & Tyler in Harré, 1986).
The social constructionist position formed an important backdrop to the Stearnses’ article in 1985, which was in effect a call to revive the history of emotions. Although their formulation of emotionology spoke of “basic emotions” (inborn and universal), nevertheless it was also social constructionist in that the Stearnses considered social needs the primary determinant of emotional standards. For example, Americans decried the expression of anger among family members during the period before 1850 or so; but, from the 1920s on, responding to the requirements of the anger-free workplace, they made their homes the only context for acceptable outbreaks of rage (Stearns & Stearns, 1986, p. 11).
Soon after the Stearnses wrote, William Reddy saw a way to put both cognitive and social constructionist theories together (Reddy, 2001). He hypothesized that emotions were assessments of what was for or against one’s well-being (in that sense cognitivist); that those assessments were fluid and changeable (he used the word “emotives” to describe their chameleon-like character); and that “emotional regimes” determined which emotives would be permitted (in that sense social constructionist). By “emotional regime” he meant the emotives that were explicitly or implicitly mandated by those in power. Under restrictive regimes, people were boxed into feeling certain ways. Under free regimes, people were allowed greater liberty to change their assessments and goals. Reddy saw history as the unfolding of reactions against regimes too emotionally controlling.
The work of medievalist Barbara Rosenwein came in the wake of Stearns and Reddy. (Rosenwein, 2006). Her approach was cognitivist because it, too, anticipated that emotions would change with assessments of well-being; it was social constructionist in assuming that co-existing groups (she called them emotional communities) might value differing emotions and express them in disparate ways. More than Stearns and Reddy, she attempted to draw up lists of the emotion words that people used, as well as to see which ones were emphasized, which deplored, and how they were expressed. In that sense, she adopted the idea of emotionology, but without using advice books to reveal the standards. Unlike the other approaches, she highlighted the great variety of emotional communities in every society, even those living side-by-side during the same period of time.
Finally, like Stearns, Reddy, and Rosenwein, medievalist Gerd Althoff, too, considered emotions to be largely cognitive. (Althoff, 1996.) Unlike Stearns, Reddy, and Rosenwein, however, he stressed the role of the body, focusing on the emotional displays of medieval rulers. His point was not that the body was the seat of emotions, but rather that in the Middle Ages people in power used their bodies to communicate their policies, their religious piety, their favor and disfavor.
The bodily turn
The foregoing has briefly summed up the ideas of what we might call the “original school” of the history of emotions. More recent directions may be styled as a turn to the body, a turn that rejects cognitivism’s sway. Not that the newer work is right back to Darwin and James. Rather, it considers the body itself to be socially constructed. Of course, the human body has consisted—and no doubt always will–of nerves and muscles, hearts and stomachs, skin and bones. But how those elements are understood, shaped, experienced and assessed have never been stable. They are subject to the same social, environmental, and epigenetic factors as every other element of human life and behavior.
It is impossible to cover here the many and diverse ways in which historians have explored the topic of emotions and the body. We have instead chosen four issues: a) the body in pain; b) the practices of the body; c) the affective body; and d) the gendered body.
The body in pain is among the things that modern scientists and clinicians tried (and try today) to objectify. At the doctor’s office, people are asked to assess their pain on a scale of 0 to 10, as if a number could measure the feeling and as if the lower number were always better. Yet, historians know very well that pain has had many meanings and has been valorized as well as avoided (Moscoso, 2012; Boddice, 2017). In the Western Middle Ages, Christian religious discourse made pain and suffering desirable because they recalled and imitated the tormented body of Christ. In their recent book on the history of emotions during the medieval period, Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy make Christ’s body the stable element of an otherwise changing emotional landscape (Boquet & Nagy, 2015). It is as if Christ’s body—or, rather, changing perceptions and interpretations of it—determined the emotionology of the entire period. Beginning with the “Christianization of emotions,” their book continues with the monastic communities that institutionalized what Jean Leclercq famously termed “the desire for God” (Leclercq, 1961). Monks exercised the right emotions in the right ways and for the right purposes. The practices of the monastery then opened out to the rest of 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 of prayer, theology, and medicine allowed for enriched emotional possibilities.
The body in pain involved in histories of emotion such as this is not the physiological body of James nor the posturing body of Darwin. Joanna Bourke points out that “the body is never pure soma: it is configured in social, cognitive, and metaphorical worlds.” (Bourke, 2014, p. 17.) Today we tend to separate the mind and the body, though for centuries these were seen as a unified whole. Bourke finds a way around the current mind-body dualism by conceptualizing pain as a “type of event,” as a “way-of-being in the world” (p. 8). 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” (p. 17). Bourke notes 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 organization (p. 19).
Thus, although her focus is the body, Bourke is very much a social constructionist. But in her hands, it is not just thoughts and emotions that are socially constructed but the very ways in which people experience and use their bodies. Further, while not speaking of emotional regimes per se, she is very much interested in how the powerful determines what we will feel. Here she pays careful attention to words, in this instance not so much for how they express emotions as for how they are used to elicit them.
Bourke’s conceptualization of pain as a “way-of-being in the world” takes us to the “practicing body.” Already Althoff’s interest in performance was compatible with this view. But Althoff did not go as far as practice theorist Monique Scheer, for whom emotions are generated and enhanced by the very practices of the body, not just expressed through them. Scheer faults the old schools for removing the emotions from the body. Feelings are “felt” not by following ideal emotionologies or by saying emotion words such as “I am angry,” but rather by the experiences of the body as it acts. In turn, the body is not a biological given but is shaped by its very practices. Scheer gives the example of the religious rituals of the German Methodists who followed Christoph Gottlob Müller (d.1858). (Scheer, 2013.) Müller spent some time in England, where he became a Methodist, and adopted the bodily practices mandated by the religion—constant singing, sitting, standing, and kneeling. These, along with emotionally intense sermons, implied a particularly strong affective commitment. When Müller returned to Germany, he introduced this style of worship to people who already had some of this “bodily knowledge” as it had been shaped by their local Pietism. But the Methodists had forms of pious practices beyond Pietism—at church meetings penitents wept, sighed, groaned, fell to the floor—and Müller attempted to make those behaviors habitual and thus automatic.
Studying the practices of the body depends less on texts than the older approaches. This is especially true in the modern period, when visual sources (such as photographs and movies) became abundant. Taking up the Bollywood film Veer Zaara (2004), for example, Margrit Pernau and Imke Rajamani explore the emotional message of the final scene, “love in the rain.” (Pernau & Rajamani, 2016). Here the lovers, after long separation and much self-sacrifice, meet in a song sequence. They do not say a word, and that allows Pernau and Rajamani to critique the earlier historiography for its emphasis on texts and words: “The scene would be lost for a history of concepts that focuses only on language” (p. 64). Practice theory entails listening to the melancholy music and the words of the Hindi song (here there is admittedly a reliance on words) and looking at the close-ups of the lovers’ happy, tearful faces. Finally, it involves considering the symbolic meaning of the reunion context: “the monsoon [is] a season of erotic love”; its heavy rain – or anything else that surrounds a person — shapes bodies and is itself a sort of physical body.
Historians of emotions are increasingly interested in the ways in which a different conception of the body may redefine their research. They rely on affect theory, which was and remains a reaction against cognitivism, as a way to bring back emotions’ automaticity and irrationality. The affective body is “contagious,” open and unbounded, constantly sharing itself with the world of things, people, sounds, and smells around it and absorbing them in turn. It is so involved in the world that the boundaries between “you” and “I” are erased. Yes, we have a biological body; but it is nothing without its surroundings, which shape it, just as it shapes the environment in turn. Think of a Rubin vase: a vase that is defined by two faces and at the same time consists of two faces that are defined by a vase. This is how affect theorists—at least some of them—see the body’s interaction with the world around it. The affective body feels and acts before it thinks and before any words are sounded. Thus, affect is ever-present in everything that we do. It is what George Bernard Shaw called the Life Force that makes us do one thousand things—and all unconsciously. As Silvan Tomkins, a key affect theorist, wrote: “I view affect as the primary innate biological motivating mechanism, more urgent than drive deprivation and pleasure, and more urgent even than physical pain” (Tomkins, 1984, p. 165). Yet affect theorists must use words, and when it comes to describing the affects, those words are hard to distinguish from what others call emotions. Tomkins’s list of affects include excitement, joy, terror, anger, shame, contempt, distress, surprise. Other affect theorists have added to the list: for example, boredom, comfort, discomfort, and despair.
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 less? 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 about it.
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, as a sort of parallel, the American Psychological Association set up a division on the Psychology of Women. The most straightforward historical studies of the gendered body and its emotions ask quite simply whether the emotional lives of women were different from those of today. For example, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg wrote about passionately affectionate female relationships in nineteenth-century America. “My darling how I long for the time when I shall see you,” wrote one woman to a dear friend, using language that today we might associate with erotic love. Smith-Rosenberg rejected that interpretation. She thought that amorous feelings between such women was socially constructed and served the important social function of ratifying the “rigid gender-role differentiation within the family and within society as a whole” (Smith-Rosenberg, 1975, pp. 4, 9).
The problem with this sort of history is that it tends to code emotion female and reason male. The solution is to research male emotional life alongside female: to see both as interdependent and constructed together. Susan Broomhall, who has edited numerous books touching on this issue, speaks of the ways in which hegemonic groups—usually male– assert their authority by “ordering” and “structuring” different emotions for boys and girls, men and women (see, for example, Broomhall, 2015). But, inevitably, some of the articles in her edited books problematize that approach, showing similarities in the emotions fostered in men and women; or they suggest that class may be more important than gender in the socialization process.
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Where, then, is the history of emotions today? And what does the future hold? The answer to the first question is quite clear: the body currently predominates, though for a variety of 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 are connected to the revolution in gender and gender relations taking place today. Finally, there is the undeniable importance of the body in determining our birth and our death, as well as much of what is in between. Yet, as historians, we cannot but note that Western thought has tended to oscillate between privileging the mind and giving primacy to the body. Historians of emotions, with their vision over the long haul, are well-positioned to point out –and this is our hope for the future–that emotions are (and have always been) a compound of both.
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