“Emotional Histories: Beyond the Personalization of the Past or the Abstraction of Affect

Theory”

Stephanie Trigg

ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, University of Melbourne

“How are you feeling, Stephanie?” In late 2012, when Facebook altered its prompt

question for status updates from a generic question about thought — “What’s on your

mind?” — to this personally directed inquiry about my emotional state, it seemed the

social networking site was tapping into current scholarly interest in emotions,

feelings, and sensibilities. This “affective turn” has taken many different forms across

various branches of the sciences, social sciences, philosophy and cultural studies. The

phrase is usually understood as naming a renewed emphasis on philosophical and

phenomenological relations between cognition, experience, and feeling: the

embodied, sensate aspects of mental and emotional states. Research in these fields is

often accompanied by a critique of the mind/body hierarchy that has conventionally

privileged mental over physical process. In the humanities, the emphasis is differently

inflected; research is often more historically oriented, concerned with the history of

emotions and feelings, and their relationship to social change. Work in this field

analyses changes in the discursive representation of emotions and the terminology

used to describe them. It is interested in the expression of individual, collective,

private, and public emotions, and in the developing sense that emotions and passions

can be governed or manipulated, whether individually or collectively. While the study

of emotions and passions in historical context is not new, the field has recently been

given added institutional impetus and energy. In the same way it tracks my posts and

feeds me “appropriate” advertisements, Facebook seemed to be responding to my own

research interests.

On the other hand, it might be argued that Facebook — a perpetual invitation

to accumulate millions of fragments of personal feeling and thought — is itself a

symptom of such an affective “turn.” For many of its users, their emotions, feelings,

thoughts, opinions, and preferences don’t feel truly real until they have been posted,

shared and “liked” by others. Beyond the networked online community, too, it seems

that personal emotions are appearing more and more frequently, and openly, in public.

One has only to consider the dramatic changes in our male politicians’ willingness to

show emotion before the television cameras to acknowledge this recent, heightened

appetite for feeling, emotion, and their public expression and management.

But how much of the scholarly and popular concern with emotion and affect is

really new? If the turn to affect seems novel to philosophers, psychologists and social

theorists, literary critics and artists might well respond that their business has always

been about feeling. Cultural endeavors such as art, music, literature, and drama are

often inspired by the expression of emotion, feeling or sensibility. Yet in these fields,

too, the “history of emotions” names a relatively new frame of critical inquiry.

Interdisciplinary research centers, journals and conferences attest to the rich

possibilities here. Unlike many other critical movements in literary studies, interest in

the history of emotions is shared equally across many different periods: it is not

unique to medieval, or early modern, romantic or modern literary studies. There is

moreover something about feeling and the emotions themselves that implies newness,

freshness, or novelty in their study: this is the perpetual human desire to make new

sense of, and to bring new insights to the human condition — how it feels, whether as

an individual or as part of a group, to be in the world. As the success of Facebook

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shows, there is no end to our interest in that question, and the myriad new “feelings”

of its global denizens.

Across the many scholarly fields concerned with affect or emotion —

philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, political theory, biomedicine,

literature, history, architecture, art, cinema and cultural studies, and newer fields such

as neurohistory or neurogeography — there is a dizzying array, or network, of

competing and complementary terms, definitions and practices. The number of

possible starting-points is immense, let alone the range of approaches, methods, and

inevitable disciplinary blind spots, as well as the open avenues that allow us to cross

over the fields of philosophy and political science, for instance, or literature and

psychoanalysis. Some other conjunctions are more intractable. The insights of

cognitive psychology, that chart electrical impulses in the brain that correspond to

particular emotions, cannot easily be assimilated to the production of medieval

literature, for example. Nor is there even much uniformity or consistency about

terminology, critical presuppositions or methodology.

Even the question of terminology — simply naming the phenomena we are

discussing — is problematic, partly because the key terms, “passions,” “feelings,”

“emotions,” “moods,” “sentiments” and “affects” all feature in everyday colloquial

speech, and it can be quite difficult to develop and maintain more specific or technical

usages and distinctions. It can be tempting to see all these inter-related terms as part

of a synchronic network that ranges broadly across the sciences, the social sciences

and the humanities. The idea of a network is attractive in so far as it implies there is

no single “correct” genealogy, heritage or disciplinary doctrine to which we must all

adhere. We might make a case, then, for using some, if not all, of these terms

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interchangeably, though it also true that specialists will want to preserve distinctive

terms and usages on historical or methodological grounds.

If, on the other hand, our starting point is historical change and development,

the rise and fall in popularity and significance of these terms becomes an important

part of the story. We may wish to sketch some broad historical developments, then,

and remark on the way that the popularity or dominance of these terms in English can

be organized sequentially, as the term “feelings” gives way gradually, though not

exclusively, to “passions,” for example, and as “emotions” and “sentiments” each

become the dominant terms (in Raymond Williams’ sense) in different social and

historical contexts. “Affect” has an emergent specialized sense in contemporary

theory, although the signifier itself is much older and has a longer history in which it

is more closely intertwined with “emotion.”

To survey the history of all these terms would be impossible here, though I

will draw on recent surveys and critiques by Ruth Leys, Susan Matt, Monique Scheer,

Sarah Tarlow and others. Instead, I am going to focus on one of the key tensions in

terminology (between “affect” and “emotion”); then turn to consider some of the

implications of their history for the study of medieval and early modern writing, by

way of providing a frame for the five essays that follow. What differences can the

study of affect and emotion make to our reading of medieval and early modern letters,

books, performances, histories and art? These essays also share a common thread in

their close concern with the relationship between emotion, community (whether local,

geographic or national) and politics, a reminder that “emotion” is not only the

response or expression of the individual romantic subject, but can also refer to

collective feelings and passions.

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For many scholars of affect, the difference between “affect” and “emotion” is

acute and critical: a question of ontological, even physiological precedence. In such

contexts, “affect” can signify an unconscious, pre-discursive bodily response in quite

precise terms: the beat of the heart; the rush of blood to the face; the flow of tears

from the eyes. The consciousness of emotion, so often mediated by language, is seen

as secondary.1 The word “affect” is also often used in the discussion of social,

political and cultural domains, sometimes as a deliberate means of bypassing the

discussion of intention, meaning or interpretation. “Affect studies” tend to start from a

philosophical or psychological interest in embodiment, and work with large-scale

evolutionary, neurological, sociological or behavioral patterns. In Sara Ahmed’s

influential work, for example, affect is tied closely to social and cultural movements.

“I would begin,” she writes, “with the messiness of the experiential, the unfolding of

bodies into worlds, and the drama of contingency” (30). For Ahmed, affect is

constitutive not just of social beings, but also of social bodies in relation to objects,

and to each other.

Brian Massumi’s discussion of Ronald Reagan’s successful, authoritative

“affect” as a US presidential candidate, as something quite distinct from the content of

his speech, is exemplary here. In this influential essay, “The Autonomy of Affect,”

Massumi draws on a series of physiological experiments to distinguish between affect

and emotion:

An emotion is a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of

an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal. Emotion is

qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity

into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable

action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and 1 See Leys for a wide-ranging account of current theories of affect.

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recognized. It is crucial to theorize the difference between affect and emotion

(28) [my emphasis].

In literary studies, and especially those branches of literary study that draw on

psychology, “affect” has a powerful genealogy from William James through Antonio

Damasio, Silvan Tompkins, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and indeed Massumi himself. In

such contexts, it makes sense to follow Massumi and maintain the distinction between

affect and emotion.

In contrast to the newly popular word “affect,” “emotion” is the older term that

carries the baggage of “common sense” and all that this implies for what is often

taken for granted and untheorised in literary and historical studies. The fact that

“affect studies” tend to focus on contemporary culture, rather than historical or pre-

modern material underlines these temporal associations. Emotions tend to be aligned

with traditional taxonomies such as the seven deadly sins, whereas affect is aligned

with phenomenological and social inquiry. Massumi, as we saw above, registers affect

as intensity, and emotion as “qualified intensity.” In such discussion, it is hard not to

see emotion appearing somehow secondary, familiar, or taken-for-granted in

comparison with the glamorous, newly discovered phenomenon.2 It sometimes seems,

moreover, that those who insist on the difference between affect and emotion are

attempting to move beyond the linguistic and discursive framing (or construction) of

emotion. On the other hand, the affective turn is sometimes seen as pursuing the

2 Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg share some of their concerns about the “fate of affect as a fashionable theory” in The Affect Theory Reader, 17-18, and Nigel 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.” “Understanding the Material Practices of Glamour,” in The Affect Theory Reader, 289-308, 289.

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emphasis of poststructuralism and deconstruction on subjectivity, identity and the

body.3

The term “emotions” is at once, confusingly, both broader and more restricted

in range. Of all the terms it is probably the one that is used most often, across a wide

range of scholarly and especially more popular contexts. In general usage, emotion

seems as if it might serve as an umbrella term for all the terms we have been

discussing. But in contrast to the unconscious or pre-discursive emphasis of affect

theory, “emotion” emerges with a more specialized sense, referring to the way we

experience, narrate and perform what we feel. In practice, this is how that term is used

in the field named as the history of emotions. Historically-oriented studies, where we

cannot accurately map, chart or measure somatic or cognitive affect, must rely on

textual and material traces and representations of feelings and passions: the emotions

as they are processed, described, and performed by human subjects. Thus the

emphasis falls less on the mechanics of feeling than the problematic role of human

emotions in historical, social and cultural change (the key figures here have been

Peter Stearns, William Reddy, and Barbara Rosenwein). These studies have far-

reaching implications for the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity between pre-

modern, modern and post-modern culture. Historians and literary critics interested in

premodern texts, for example, start by asking how do we (a) reconstruct the emotions

of the past and find out how they worked; and (b) untangle the relationship between

emotions (or affects) and historical change? Such scholars sometimes use these two

terms — emotion and affect — as if they were interchangeable, but it is usually

3 Patricia T. Clough, “The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia and Bodies,” in The Affect Theory Reader, 206-25, at 206, though Clough herself wants to differentiate affect from its links with subjectively felt states, and focus rather on the “biomediated” body.

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because they using the less specialized sense of affect, with little regard to the

emergent field of affect studies.

When our starting-point is the pre-modern history of feeling and emotions the

dynamics and emphases of discussion are different again; and the word “emotion”

once more comes under extensive critical and historical scrutiny. Medieval and early

modern scholars work hard to find words that accord more closely with historical

usage in the period they study, since the term “emotion” is not used in English before

the sixteenth century. Sarah McNamer argues that “feeling” is a more appropriate

term than “emotion” for the discussion of Middle English literature, for example,

while “passions” is often preferred by early modern scholars (Paster; Rowe and

Floyd-Wilson; and Dixon). All these words have their own disputed histories, of

course. If the (moral) passions have been largely replaced by the (secular) emotions

(Dixon), and if the more specialized sense of “affect” has given it renewed popularity

in the last twenty years, Louis Charland has recently argued that “passions” is a term

that could usefully be recuperated for broader contemporary usage, in part because

they have longer term affective orientations than emotions. Following Ribot, Charland

suggests that it is passions that organize and orient feelings and emotions.

Each of these five key terms — feeling, passion, emotion, sentiment and affect

— has been the dominant one in English writing at different times; and they have also

trailed different ideological, physical, humoral, ethical and hermeneutic associations.

If we kept these historical and cultural variations in mind, any one of these terms

might potentially serve as an umbrella term for all these others. “Affect” may indeed

be able to press the strongest claim here (and in French, “affectivité” has indeed

served in this way); not only as the more recent current term, but for its insistence that

in addition to conscious, discursive forms, we must also take account of preconscious,

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non-discursive, non-narrated instances of feeling. Understood in the most general

way, the scope of “affect” is widest.

Nevertheless, for studies that are more longitudinal or historical in orientation,

the phrase “the history of emotions” suggests a complex and productively layered

senses of inquiry into historical change, historical emotions, and the history of the

term and concept of the “emotions.” As a discipline, or as an institutional frame, the

history of emotions allows fruitful and intriguing connections to be made between the

present and past, as well as encouraging dialogue and interchange across the network

of terms such as feelings, passions, emotions and affects. The Australian Research

Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions considered these questions

and precedents set by other English and European Centers when deciding on its own

name, and decided to use “emotions” as its umbrella term, even though it does not

reflect medieval usage, for example. And given that a number of members of that

Centre are represented in this special issue of Exemplaria, it seems appropriate to use

that phrase to name our inquiries here.

Interest in the emotions or feelings of the past is hardly new. In a recent

review of emotional historiography, Susan Matt characterizes the “emotional turn” in

history that began with the Annales school and its interest in the history of mentalité,

of feelings and emotions: that is, history written not from the official records of royal

chronicles, but from the testimony of law courts, inquisitions, village records,

household architecture, the patterns of village, family and religious life. The central

issue in such study is the social, cultural, and emotional practice of daily life, not

political, ethical or religious theory or the policy decisions and squabbles of the rich

and powerful.

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With its emphasis on habit, ritual and daily practice, the work of the Annales

historians usefully frames the idea that the history of emotions can often be found in

the interstices between intention and practice. What is the difference between late

medieval and early modern prescriptions for emotional behavior as recorded in

conduct literature, reported human practice and imaginative or dramatic texts? To

what extent were people in this period willing or able to control or modify their own

emotional practices? There has been an important set of debates about the

interpretation of Norbert Elias’s work and his argument that early modern people

were learning to control and discipline the somewhat childlike, unrestrained emotions

of the medieval past.4

One of the assumptions that sit behind all the essays in this special issue is that

the language of emotions, passions, affections, and feelings warrants careful attention,

and can never be taken for granted. In a series of influential studies, Barbara

Rosenwein has modeled the ways we can excavate quite precise “emotional

communities” that share particular emotional phrases and expressions, while William

Reddy’s emphasis on “emotional utterances” or “emotives” draws attention to the role

of language in simultaneously expressing and describing emotions (104-5).

Emotives are translations into words about, into “descriptions” of, the ongoing

translation tasks that remain in the queue, overflowing its current capacities. …

emotives are similar to performatives (and differ from constatives) in that emotives do

things to the world (105).

Such emphasis on the role of language and society, and the “navigation” of

emotional feeling is an important form of critical practice.

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.

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But historically oriented studies can also draw fruitfully on other theoretical models.

For example, Monique Scheer has recently shown how Bourdieu’s understanding of

the habitus can be used to shape an understanding of emotions as practice.

Interestingly, Sheer avoids the word “affect,” citing Leys’ critiques of this concept

when it is used to force an artificial division between mind and body; she uses

“emotions” and “feelings,” “not in Damasio’s sense, but interchangeably” (Scheer

198).

In this way, in contrast to studies that insist on the ontological priority of

affect, or that try to untangle the competing claims of mind, body, brain and language,

Scheer emphasizes “the mutual embeddedness of minds, bodies, and social relations

in order to historicize the body and its contributions to the learned experience of

emotion” (199). Even though her interest is not primarily historical, Scheer’s

approach seems particularly useful for historical and literary study, because it allows

us to work across highly individualized literary texts; the texts, bodies, objects and

practices of everyday life; as well as broader patterns of social movements and

cultural change. Bourdieu’s habitus does not constrain emotion, but provides a

framework, an orientation for feeling. For Scheer, “Emotions can thus be viewed as

acts executed by a mindful body, as cultural practices” (205). As she explains:

the habits of the mindful body are executed outside of consciousness and rely on

social scripts from historically situated fields. That is to say, a distinction between

incorporated society and the parts of the body generating emotion is hard to make. …

the feeling self executes emotions, and experiences them in varying degrees and

proportions, as inside and outside, subjective and objective, depending on the

situation (207).

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The historical study of emotion raises a further methodological question,

however: how much of our selves do we, or should we bring to the study of the

habitus?

In addition to naming a new interest in the relation between feeling and

knowing in the cognitive sciences, the “affective turn” in academic work also refers to

scholarship that foregrounds the emotional work performed by cultural and social

commentary, and our variable degrees of emotional investment in our chosen objects

of study. Through the work of its sister discipline — medievalism studies — medieval

studies has been made powerfully conscious of its own institutional history, and the

shaping forces of its own cultural traditions and social ideologies. Many such studies

work by foregrounding the authors’ personal responses, whether to the medieval text,

their predecessors, or their colleagues and students.

In 2010 D. Vance Smith published a provocative — and provocatively titled

— short essay, “The Application of Thought to Medieval Studies: The Twenty-First

Century,” in Exemplaria. Smith is riffing on A.E. Housman’s bracing essay, “The

Application of Thought to Textual Criticism” (1921). Without being as acerbic as

Housman, Smith is critical of a number of medieval scholars who appeal to or deploy

a personal or affective mode in their reading of medieval texts: Nicholas Watson,

Carolyn Dinshaw, Caroline Walker Bynum and Julia Kristeva. Smith sees many of

these scholars as unconsciously and uncritically privileging a personally expressive

mode, instead of, for example, a model based on a more communal sense. He

acknowledges that the turn to affect — in the sense of an emphasis on personal

feeling or individual modern response to the historical past — has been especially

productive for feminist scholarship in its “double critique of the exclusionary methods

of medieval and modern institutions while working toward the reuperation of a logic

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of affective representation” (87). But he remains critical of, for example, Dinshaw’s

famous appeal to the idea of touching the past (by uncovering the long history of

queer representation, politics and critique) as potentially illusory. Smith’s critique of

the ethnocentrism of the affective turn is passionate:

Especially as an African who grew up with limited contact with Europeans, it

strikes me as an ethnocentric mechanism that preserves the interests of

ethnocentrism itself. To begin with partial beings, partial in every sense of the

word, founded on feeling, emotion, inclination, is at heart a narcissistic

project, and one founded on the European post-Enlightenment project of the

elaboration of a pedagogy of sentiment. It brackets out polity, obligation,

responsibility, responsiveness, the communal values that locate being in and as

networks of social relations in most African groups. But on a philosophical

level, the positing of affect as a route to the past assigns to it a kind of

authenticity that goes far beyond its usefulness as a rejoinder to histories that

keep the past from us as radically other to our categories of understanding and

experience (89).

Here, “affect” in the form of personal response is only a partial and untrustworthy

“route to the past,” though Smith himself opens this paragraph with an appeal to the

authenticity of self and of his own past: “as an African who grew up with limited

contact with Europeans,” a self-positioning moment that has become a feature of

much post-colonial and feminist criticism. This personal note indicates how deeply

the autobiographical turn has taken root in contemporary critique, when it is used, as

it is here, to critique the affective turn in medieval studies.

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Yet there is no doubt that the scholars Smith mentions, along with many others

who have been willing to foreground the personal, ideological, and institutional

dimensions of their work in medieval studies — for example, Karma Lochrie, Alan

Frantzen, Jeffrey Cohen, Eileen Joy — have made a distinctive contribution to that

field by insisting on breaking down many of the conservative ideologies that would

preserve the medieval past as inviolate and homogenous. The personal, or affective

turn, then, is rarely only personal; it often carries freight that is both epistemologically

as well as politically laden.

Sarah Tarlow is an archaeologist who also works with the emotions. In an

article published in 2005 on the study of graveyards and pre-twentieth-century

memorial monuments she brings to the foreground the affective charge of her subject

material. Such graveyards are often still sites of active burial and remembrance, with

powerful local and family attachments. Like many forms of medieval religious and

ritual practice, then, the emotional practices of the past often share important

continuities with the present. Because they are designed to stretch and resonate

affectively into the future, the content of memorial inscriptions can themselves

become emotionally charged for the scholar:

working with memorial monuments provokes an emotional engagement which

is more powerful and more affecting than with most other types of later

historical material. There is a terrible poignancy in the lists of names of

children and babies following their siblings to the grave. The empathetic

instinct has brought most graveyard recorders with whom I have spoken to the

point of tears at least once; this profound sense of engagement with the past

people is both a good and a bad thing: good because an emotional interest can

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be channelled into research or conservation, bad because it persuades us that

we understand gravestones, that their meanings are transparent to us, and

perhaps does not force us to probe as deeply as we otherwise might (163).

Tarlow does not pursue these insights in detail, but it is still a relatively unusual

concession to make.

Others attempt to keep their emotions out of their scholarly work. Last year I

attended a talk by an expert historian charting a history of loss and the destruction of

her subject matter in the English reformation. In question time she was asked how she

felt about that loss. “I’m a historian,” she replied, “it’s not my job to feel.” And yet

her talk had been nothing if not evocative, so that her audience, at least, had been

encouraged to feel something of this loss. It would not be difficult to put

psychological pressure on such a disavowal, to show how emotive language still seeps

into our most professional and objective discourse. My main point, though, is not that

emotions are unavoidable, but that language as a form of reflexive practice is both

unavoidable and a rich source of understanding in the study of historical emotions.

Emma Mason and Isobel Armstrong reflect on this paradox:

To be in emotion is to be immersed in (or “imprisoned” as Hegel put it)

immediate experience and to be alienated from language. However, as soon as

you are with emotion you are reflecting on it by means of equivalents for it.

You can only talk about emotion by talking about something else (2).

We might argue this is as true of the neurosciences as it is of art and literature, and

that this perpetual displacement, across layers of historical change, is a necessary

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structural problem for the history of emotions, as well as of affects.

The essays in this special issue represent some of the detailed archaeological,

archival and methodological contributions that the study of medieval and early

modern emotions can make to these broader debates. In general, these authors do not

foreground their own personal or affective responses to their material, but all five

essays are organized around the question of emotive language, the way it shifts and

moves, and is itself often the subject of contention and division. The essays range

over six centuries of writing in Latin, English, French and Italian, across a range of

genres and geographical areas. Many of the essays move forwards and backwards in

time, too. There are no easy divisions here between “medieval” and “early modern.”

Divisions and changes tend to be registered, rather, in political, theological or ethical

terms.

Sometimes the emotional subject of pre-modernity is difficult to read. As

Juanita Rays and Rebecca McNamara show, there is still a tremendous amount of

work to be done on the discourses of emotion around suicide in the medieval period.

It is easy to see suicide as an emotional practice, but this essay shows in detail how

powerfully medieval suicide is framed by various forms of legal and religious

regulation. These documents are often quite resistant to naming particular emotions

but they do sometimes speculate after the fact about the mental and emotional state of

the victim. We are familiar with the medieval idea of the art, or practice, of dying

well; this essay encourages us to think of suicide as another form of emotional

practice, but one that is not always straightforward to read or interpret. Again, the

question of temporality produces several layers of interpretation: the community

interprets the suicidal person’s emotions to make sense of their act and to make

eschatological predictions about the state of their soul in the afterlife; just as the

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modern commentator also tries to interpret the historical and predictive language of

past emotions.

Paul James shows how Petrarch’s simple invocation of “an inexpressible

longing to return home” to “Italia” can be unpacked to reveal layers of negotiated

emotions about home, place, and what later commentators will call “nation.” James

draws on literary allusion, on peninsular topography, the movement of trans-Apennine

trade, and the differential between intellectual and popular thought to explore the

differential degrees of abstraction at work in Petrarch’s conflicted emotions about the

land of his birth. James’ model of emotional study here is rich and complex, drawing

on contradictory and competing social, cultural and political ontologies and valences.

He also tackles the relationship between “affect” and “emotion,” using the latter term

more narrowly to refer to “narrated affective performances.”

Practice is a central theme that holds these essays together, and discloses the

relentlessly social sense of emotions in the medieval and early modern period. This is

particularly evident in Jessica Rosenfeld’s study of Margery Kemp and the sociality

of her spiritual envy. Rosen field steers clear of the term “affect,” since she is

concerned primarily with the discursive effects and practices of emotion. Unlike many

affect theorists; indeed, her essay is deeply concerned with intentionality, as she

explores the paradox that Kemp’s descriptions of envy are both calculated and

authentic, drawing closely on penitential discussions of envy. But Rosenfeld’s essay

is also concerned with the social: Margery’s Book illustrates the essential role of the

emotions — and envy in particular — in the formation of community, through

shifting comparisons of the likeness of herself with others, whether Kemp is the

envying subject or the subject of envy. Rosenfeld’s reading draws on Sianne Ngai and

Freud’s reading of envy as foundation to community-formation. In many ways, this

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essay complements Dinshaw’s affective reading of Kempe (“Temporalities”), but

focusses more on the contemporaneous sociality of emotions, rather than their

affective reach across time.

Brandon Chua shows how public emotions and affections come to the fore in

moments of political crisis. Chua explores the political “affect” of William

Davenant’s attempts to harness and promote public “affection” for Charles II, after

the demise of the English monarchy in 1649 fractured not only the political system

but also the affective, familial bonds that had been thought of as holding the nation

together. Interregnum literature turned to the question of the public affections and

how to solicit and control them. These questions were particularly heightened in the

theatre; and Davenant’s Proposition for Advancement of Morality, By a new way of

Entertainment of the People demonstrates a powerful awareness of the affective

technologies of heroic theatre for national (re)building. Chua’s essay gives an

importance historical context for the relation between the terms “affect” and

“affection.”

The seventeenth-century Triomphe de la Religion studied by Katherine Ibbett

depends on a complex relationship between objects, emotions and language. Ibbett

shows how French protestants were “compelled to feel,” to move from one form of

religion to another while at the same time being forbidden to move from France. In

such political and religious contexts, the residual sense of emotion in “movement”

that is often quite violent is brought to the fore; as are the shifting temporalities that

make emotions hard to read across time, but that also play a part in their formulation,

expression and manipulation. After the death of Charles II, for example, as Chua

shows, Davenant was still cultivating public affection for the king.

Even when the language of feeling is not foregrounded in the texts under

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discussion, language is crucial to the layered archaeology of historical feeling, and the

interplay between individual or private, and public emotion: this is particularly the

case in the conversions “performed” by the Triomphe, and by the mysterious

emblematic objects at its heart: pearl, diamond, coral. The material objects of

Catholicism — its ornaments, lights, and rich textiles — were also seen as particularly

entrancing to children. “In Catholic eyes, the Protestant child’s pleasure in the

liturgical object was a sign of grace; in Protestant eyes, of corruption.” One of the

effects of the Triomphe, in Ibbett’s reading, is to destabilize our sense of what it is to

be a subject; while the king’s own gifts “represent a kind of affective labor: his

interventions both perform affect for an audience and produce affective change in

those who are compelled to look on.”

Throughout these essays, emotions and the identification of emotions circulate

between individuals and groups. The study of emotion is not just about individual

feeling — though this is of course a rich vein of exploration — but about the way

emotions mediate communities; virtually as active agents in social life. The study of

emotions, then, helps us understand not just medieval and early modern individuals,

but social and political structures, too.

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