History and Theory 53 (February 2014), 69-78 © Wesleyan University 2014 ISSN: 0018-2656 DOI: 10.1111/hith.10695 REVIEW ESSAYS MODERNITY: A PROBLEMATIC CATEGORY IN THE HISTORY OF EMOTIONS EMOTIONS IN HISTORY: LOST AND FOUND. The Natalie Zemon Davis Lectures. By Ute Frevert. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011. Pp. iv. 255. ABSTRACT Emotions in History: Lost and Found by Ute Frevert is a lively introduction to some of the issues that historians must address when writing about emotions. Emotions in History notes some of the uses emotions have had in both public and private life, and it charts the changing fate of several emotions—particu larly acedia, honor, and compassion—tha t have been either “lost” or “found” over time. Nevertheless, it suffers from a notion of modernity that obscures rather than clarifies. Making “modernity” the cause of changes in emotional ideas, comportment, and feeling, it cuts today’s society off from its earlier roots and fails to see the continuities not only in emotions themselves but also in the mechanisms by which emotions have changed over time. Frevert’s assumption that only the modern world has been interested in emotions is belied by eloquent learned writings on the topic in the medieval period (though not using the term “emotions”). Further, modernity is not alone in having effective mechanisms by which ideal standards of emotions and their expression are transmitted to a larger public. Keywords: compassion, emotions, friars, love, modernity, vices, virtues Originally delivered in 2009 as the Natalie Zemon Davis Annual Lecture at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, and subsequently revised, this slim book is a lively introduction to some of the issues that historians must address when writing about emotions. A short prelude opens with the outburst by then-President Nicholas Sarkozy of France in 2010. Criticized by the European Commissioner for Justice and Fundamental Rights for his anti-Roma policies, Sarkozy retorted that the Commissioner’s comments were a “humiliation,” “out- rageous,” “disgusting,” and “shameful.” Ute Frevert uses the episode to make clear that even today emotions are on the public stage. Historians overlook them at their peril. But how to understand them? In the three chapters that follow, Frevert argues that although emotions have always been tools of power, they have changed over time (chapter 1); have served to define women as different from and (often) inferior to men (chapter 2); and have, in the case of at least one “new” emotion, compassion, ameliorated social wrongs while creating (at the same time) pernicious notions of superiority (chapter 3).
