Introduction: Emotional Histories — Beyond the Personalization of the Past and the Abstraction of Affect Theory

Abstract

This editor’s introduction to the special issue analyzes some of the historical, semantic and disciplinary differences between the terms “feelings,” “passions,” “emotions,” “sentiments,” and “affects,” and assesses their usefulness in the study of medieval and early modern culture, and within the disciplinary frame of the “history of emotions.” The “affective turn” — both in cultural theory and in the autobiographical impulse in the humanities — is a strong impulse in much modern scholarship but as the essays in this special issue show, the discipline of the history of emotions offers rich and promising insights into the social, political, and cultural frameworks in which medieval and early modern individuals navigated, narrated, and performed emotional and social relationships.

Keywords:

• emotion
• affect
• history of emotions
• passions
• medieval culture
• early modern culture

Notes

1 See Leys for a wide-ranging account of current theories of affect.

2 Seigworth and Gregg share some of their concerns about the “fate of affect as a fashionable theory” (17–18), and Thrift remarks that “The affective moment has passed in that it is no longer enough to observe that affect is important: in that sense at least we are in the moment after the affective moment” (289).

3 Clough 206, though she herself wants to differentiate affect from its links with subjectively felt states, and focus rather on the “biomediated” body.

4 A symposium was held on this topic at the University of Adelaide in 2011: a collection of essays drawn from this event will appear as a volume edited by David Lemmings and Ann Brooks, Emotions and Social Change: Historical and Sociological Perspectives, Routledge, 2014.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stephanie Trigg

Stephanie Trigg is Professor of English Literature at the University of Melbourne and one of ten Chief Investigators of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.

Correspondence to: Stephanie Trigg, School of Culture and Communication; ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, The University of Melbourne, Grattan Street, Parkville, Victoria 3010, Australia. Email: [email protected]