State of the Field: The History of Emotions

KATIE BARCLAY
University of Adelaide

Emotions have appeared in histories, and associated writings, for

centuries. History writing has sometimes valued the emotional; in
eighteenth-century Europe, the centrality of the idea of sympathetic
exchange to communication ensured that many historians of the period
sought to produce feelings in their readers.1 The emotions of historical
subjects too have long been of interest. For some early twentieth-century
theorists, often building on the stadial histories of human development
of the eighteenth century, human emotions became more refined over
time, evidencing the ‘civilisation’ of different nations.2 Others resisted
such Whiggish accounts of progress for histories of private life and
mentalities. The latter was most notably developed by the Annales school,
where a study of emotion contributed to debates about human behaviour,
motivation and cultural variety.3 These ideas were returned to in the 1980s
by Carol Stearns and Peter Stearns, building upon the new social history
of the previous decades but attending to emotional life as a significant
dimension of society and culture. Their work was especially significant
in theorising emotion as historically and culturally contingent, and as a
sociological process.4 Historians’ own feelings have also been subject to
analysis. In the mid-twentieth century, the emotions of historians were
often suspicious, interfering with an ‘objective’ study of the past. More
recently, scholars have sought to explore emotion as a productive lens of
analysis, a dimension of cognition and decision-making, and something
to be embraced, rather than avoided.5 The history of emotions, as it has
emerged in the last twenty years, therefore has plenty of precedent.
This article explores the shape that the history of emotions has taken
in recent decades, particularly as it has emerged as a distinct field with
1
Mary Spongberg, Women Writers and the Nation’s Past 1790–1860: Empathetic Histories (London,
2018).
2
Norbert Elias, The Civilising Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (Oxford, 2000);
David Lemmings and Ann Brooks, ‘The emotional turn in the humanities and social sciences’, in
David Lemmings and Ann Brooks (eds), Emotions and Social Change: Historical and Sociological
Perspectives (London, 2014), pp. 3–18.
3
See for example the series of volumes on the History of Private Life edited by Georges Duby and
Philippe Ariès, originally published in the late 1980s by Harvard University Press and with re-editions
thereafter.
4
Peter Stearns and Carol Stearns, ‘Emotionology: clarifying the history of the emotions and
emotional standards’, American Historical Review, 90/4 (1985), pp. 813–36.
5
Katie Barclay, ‘Falling in love with the dead’, Rethinking History, 22/4 (2019), pp. 459–73; Thomas
A. Kohut, Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past (London, 2020).

© 2021 The Author(s). History published by The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use,
distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
 KATIE BARCLAY 457

its own methodologies and conceptual apparatus. It highlights some of

the underpinning frameworks used within the field, before offering an
overview of current research. The key premise of the history of emotions
is that emotion varies across time and place and so has a history that
can be explored by scholars. Where it extends an earlier generation of
research is through its often radical anti-universalism. Early historical
scholarship on emotion, especially in the twentieth century, generally
relied on the idea that the human body was largely the same across
time and space. Communities might give emotions different names and
encourage or discourage particular feelings through their systems of
reward and punishment, material conditions and socialisation, but the
human condition had some substantial similarities over time that could
be traced. For a generation of scholars in the 1970s and 1980s, this even
allowed for the application of modern psychological theories to past
peoples and events.6 While contemporary historians of emotion vary in
their opinions around the role of biology in emotional experience, they
generally do not rely on a universal human nature as the foundation of
emotional life. Rather, they emphasise the way in which our embodied
experience is itself a product of culture.
In this, the field is very much of its own historic moment. An interest
in emotion now permeates a broad range of research fields and reflects
broader social and cultural trends that place heightened emphasis on
emotion in everyday life, sometimes captured by reference to living in
an ‘age of anxiety’.7 The emotional turn as it has been termed within the
academy has influenced not only history but an array of humanities and
social science disciplines as it seeks to place emphasis on emotion both
as culturally distinctive and as agentic in shaping social conditions and
relationships. The latter is especially significant in moving understanding
of emotion from a biological ‘response’ to an external, and thus more
important, stimulus to an active component of experience and so
something to be explained and which in turn helps us explain events.
Scholars from many disciplines now contribute to this project, often
drawing on sympathetic biological sciences such as neuroscience and
cultural psychology that emphasise the plasticity and environmental
adaptability of the body and mind.8 The history of emotions, which
sits in conversation with other scholars working under the umbrella of
the emotional turn, is therefore markedly interdisciplinary and is often
used in reference to literary scholars, linguists, art historians, dramatists,

6
An example of this is David Hunt, Parents and Children in History: The Psychology of Family Life
in Early Modern France (London, 1970); this continues in a more sophisticated form today: Christian
Tileagă and Jovan Byford (eds), Psychology and History: Interdisciplinary Explorations (Cambridge,
2014).
7
See, for example, the title of Anthony M. Wachs and Jon D. Schaff, Age of Anxiety: Meaning,
Identity and Politics in Twenty-First-Century Film and Literature (Lanham, 2019).
8
See discussions for example in William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the
history of emotions (Cambridge, 2001); Barbara Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling: A history of
emotions, 600–1700 (Cambridge, 2015).

© 2021 The Author(s). History published by The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
458 STATE OF THE FIELD

sociologists and so forth who study emotions within past societies and
cultures. This rich interdisciplinary body of research has produced a
sophisticated methodological apparatus that enables emotion to be
historicised.
Historians of emotion emphasise that emotions are products of their
cultural environments. They build upon a philosophical tradition that
highlights the relationship between language and human experience,
where the words we use give form and shape to our worlds. This is not
to deny that humans are also material: that we have bodies and those
bodies act as constraints in some important ways on our experience.
But it places particular significance on how humans name and frame
those experience, how societies and cultures regulate and value them,
and how our embodied experience is a product of socialisation processes.
From this perspective, the experience of love is not a biological universal,
but something that must be named in order to exist within a particular
culture, and which is shaped by ideas of love that direct our physical
sensations and feelings and how we understand, evaluate and respond to
such sensations.9
The relationship between culture and the body is at the heart of many
of the methodological discussions within the field. William Reddy, for
example, drew attention to the ‘emotive’, where the act of naming or
vocalising a feeling in the body was part of what produced it. Using
the metaphor of navigation, he suggested the experience of emotion was
recursive, such that we might view a beloved, feel a bodily sensation, name
it as love, and then realign our sensations to map them better onto cultural
norms of what love should feel like. In this way our embodied experience
and culture reinforced each other, and the ‘emotive’ was the emotion term
whose use (in this case love) enabled that experience to happen.10 Monique
Scheer, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, alternatively
suggested that emotions were a form of practice: things that we did and
which having learned them from infancy we experienced as naturalised
‘responses’. Like Reddy, she too suggested that the process of naming
and identifying emotion directed our embodied experience.11 Many others
have offered perspectives on this question, although they largely share the
same root epistemological framework.12
One of the results of these ideas is that the history of emotions
particularly attends to how emotions are defined, described, and applied

9
For an extended introductory discussion of these ideas see Katie Barclay, The history of emotions:
A Student Guide to Methods and Sources (Basingstoke, 2020).
10
Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling.
11
Monique Scheer, ‘Are emotions a kind of practice (and is that what makes them have a history)?
A Bourdieuian approach to understanding emotion’, History and Theory, 51/2 (2012), pp. 193–220.
12
Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, 2011); Katie
Barclay, Men on Trial: Performing Emotion, Embodiment and Identity in Ireland 1800–1845
(Manchester, 2019); for a survey of the development of these ideas see: Katie Barclay, ‘New
materialism and the new history of the emotions’, Emotions: History, Culture, Society, 1/1 (2017),
pp. 161–83.

© 2021 The Author(s). History published by The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
 KATIE BARCLAY 459

by individuals and groups. This might be seen as something of a

necessity since relatively few historians work with living subjects and
even where we do, we typically rely on discursive accounts of their
‘inner’ lives. Most historical sources are texts, objects or the material
world, rather than living and emoting bodies. Therefore, our access
point to emotion is typically mediated through our source material,
and that requires attention to the conditions in which such sources
are produced. This includes a consideration of language, genre rules,
the cultural beliefs and values that shaped their content, the material
conditions of their production, and their use by historical actors, all of
which point towards culture and community, as much as the individual
and the embodied. Many historians of emotions would also go further,
however, in suggesting that there is no ‘unmediated’ source or entry point
into emotion, firstly as emotion requires a process of naming to exist
as a cultural concept that could then be observed or measured in the
body; and secondly as there is no direct access to point to the feelings
of others. Even modern scientific experiments that attempt to capture
physiological experience nonetheless produce data that takes a cultural
form and so effectively provide another text for analysis. As our access
point to emotion requires an engagement with culture, so culture becomes
significant to the history of emotions.
Several scholars have provided ways to think about how emotions
are produced as group or cultural experiences, and how such group
understandings of emotion then come to have social and political effects
in daily life. Perhaps most significant among them is Barbara Rosenwein,
who coined the phrase ‘emotional community’, a group of people who
shared the same language and system of valuation of emotion (e.g.
whether emotions were good, bad, to be avoided or encouraged).13 Her
work has been especially influential and the grounding of many studies of
historical emotion. Other ideas have also been important. Peter Stearns
and Carol Stearns’ concept of emotional styles, for example, emphasised
how cultures promoted particular ‘styles’ of emotional life that then
became a marker of cultural difference.14 Reddy’s concept of ‘emotional
regimes’, which highlights how cultural ideas about emotion become
implicated in political systems, where people who conform to the norm
are rewarded as well as the reverse, has been similarly useful at providing
mechanisms to explain the social and political functions of emotion.15
These theories are especially significant for drawing attention to how
emotion becomes ‘active’ as a historical agent, shaping human behaviour
and at times even acting as a form of social structure itself that can be
resisted and reformed.
Such ideas are being refined by a new generation of scholars who
seek to nuance these models for particular contexts or draw out new

13
Rosenwein, Emotional Communities.
14
Stearns and Stearns, ‘Emotionology’.
15
Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling.

© 2021 The Author(s). History published by The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
460 STATE OF THE FIELD

dimensions of how emotions operate at a societal level. Mark Seymour

has suggested the ‘emotional arena’ that seeks to take account of
how different social arenas within a given culture provide spaces for
different forms of emotional expression, behaviours and associated
power dynamics; this contributes to a broader and growing conversation
about how space and place are part of emotional experiences.16 Kristine
Alexander, Stephanie Olsen and Karen Vallgårda offer ‘emotional
formations’ and ‘emotional frontiers’. The former highlights spaces
where children are socialised into particular emotion norms and the
latter describes locations where people, but especially children, encounter
different emotional cultures and learn to navigate between both.17 Katie
Barclay has offered the concept of the ‘emotional ethic’ that helps to
explain how emotional life can also be a domain of moral behaviour and
especially aspiration: we wish to love, but sometimes fail.18 All of these
ideas seek to illuminate different dimensions of emotional experience as
it is practiced and to provide an explanation for how emotion is produced
in relation to culture, society, economy and political life. As such, they can
be and are applied by a range of historians to empirical case studies.
The historiography of the history of emotions has two dimensions:
the first seeks to elucidate how emotion is understood and experienced
in different times and places; the second seeks to employ these insights
to help explain other historical events or phenomena. Here it might be
fruitful to make the comparison with gender history, where scholarship
has sought to better understand ideas of masculinity and femininity in
particular cultures and how those ideas shaped the experience of being
gendered, and to bring a gendered lens to other historical subdisciplines,
such as the history of work, empire or marriage. As this suggests, the
field has a broad scope and is continuing to grow. Until very recently,
and largely reflecting the flow of research funding, empirical studies have
been concentrated in several key areas. The first is closely associated
with the history of medicine and seeks to complicate and historicise
contemporary ideas about emotion in health and psychology by charting
the historical development of ideas about emotion, its relationship to
medicine, psychology and health workers, and current variation from
past cultures.19 The second area is in medieval and early modern social
histories, especially in relation to religious belief and practice, gender and
family life, law and politics, and in the history of ideas.20 The third area

16
Mark Seymour, Emotional Arenas: Life, Love, and Death in 1870s Italy (Oxford, 2020).
17
Karen Vallgårda, Kristine Alexander, and Stephanie Olsen, ‘Emotions and the global politics of
childhood’, in Karen Vallgårda, Kristine Alexander and Stephanie Olsen (eds), Childhood, Youth and
Emotions in Modern History (Basingstoke, 2015), pp. 12–34.
18
Katie Barclay, Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self (Oxford, 2021).
19
This is especially associated with work emerging for the Queen Mary, University of London, Centre
for the history of emotions, London, often funded by the Wellcome Trust.
20
This body of work is especially related to Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence
in the history of emotions and is catalogued here: <https://www.zotero.org/groups/300219/che_
bibliography_history_of_emotions>.

© 2021 The Author(s). History published by The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
 KATIE BARCLAY 461

comprises largely modern (post-1750) European and American works

that explore emotion in relation to social and political life, not least in
the development of modern states.21
As the history of emotions has gained momentum in the last five
or so years, however, topics have expanded exponentially and are
emerging from a wide array of scholars and geographic regions. A
number of scholars are now seeking to bring global perspectives to the
field. South and East Asian research is flourishing, as are histories of
emotions in European empires and during ‘encounters’ between different
cultural groups, such as in accounts of travel for diplomacy, trade or
exploration.22 Most regions of the world now have some representation
in the scholarship, if unevenly.23 Modern social histories, particularly
of Europe or the United States, are also expanding, mirroring trends
for the early modern period, and where emotion is increasingly used
as a lens of analysis to help explain other historical phenomena.24 The
field is also being brought into conversation with some other productive
areas of research, not least the history of the senses, histories of
the body and embodiment, environmental history, and now the new
history of experience.25 Notably, all of these areas share a concern
about the intersection between the material conditions of living and how
humans imagine, describe and are produced through them, leading to

21
This work is produced by a diverse range of scholars, but includes work coming out of the Max
Planck Centre for the history of emotions, as well as scholars associated with the North American
Chapter on the history of emotions. The Max Planck publications can be found at: <https://www.
mpib-berlin.mpg.de/research/research-centers/history-of-emotions/publications>.
22
Janet Theiss, ‘Love in a Confucian climate: the perils of intimacy in eighteenth-century China’, Nan
Nü, 11 (2009), pp. 197–233; Ling Hon Lam, The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China: From
Dreamscapes to Theatricality (New York, 2018); see also the ‘Emotions and States of Mind in East
Asia’ book series edited by Paolo Santangelo and Cheuk Yin Lee, published by Brill; Margrit Pernau,
Emotions and Modernity in Colonial India: From Balance to Fervor (Oxford, 2019); Karen Vallgårda,
Imperial Childhoods and Christian Mission: Education and Emotions in South India and Denmark
(Basingstoke, 2015); Margrit Pernau, Benno Gammerl and Philipp Nielsen (eds), Encounters with
Emotions: Negotiating Cultural Differences since Early Modernity (New York, 2019); Daniela Hacke,
Claudia Jarzebowski and Hannes Ziegler (eds), Matters of Engagement: Emotions, Identity and
Cultural Contact in the Premodern World (London, 2021).
23
Katie Barclay and Peter Stearns (eds), The Routledge Modern History of Emotion (London,
forthcoming) contains survey chapters on Africa, Australia and Pacific, Latin America, East and
South Asia, and Eastern Europe.
24
See, for example, books in the ‘history of emotions’ series at Oxford University Press, Illinois
University Press, Palgrave, and forthcoming with Bloomsbury. Emotions topics now appear in many
journals, but Cultural and Social History is especially well represented, as is the dedicated journal
Emotions: History, Culture, Society.
25
J. F. van Dijkhuizen, and K. A. E. Enenkel (eds), The Sense of Suffering: Constructions of Physical
Pain in Early Modern Culture (Leiden, 2009); Rob Boddice, Emotion, Sense, Experience (Cambridge,
2020); Dolores Martín-Moruno and Beatriz Pichel (eds), Emotional Bodies: The Historical Perspective
of Emotions (Urbana, 2019); Andrea Gaynor, Susan Broomhall and Andrew Flack, ‘Frogs and feeling
communities: a study of history of emotions and environmental history’, Environment and History
(online first 2019), <https://doi.org/10.3197/096734019X15740974883861>; Dolly Jørgensen, Lost
Species in the Modern Age: Histories of Longing and Belonging (Cambridge, 2019); for more on the
history of experience, see the Tampere Centre of Excellence in the History of Experience, <https:
//research.tuni.fi/hex/>.

© 2021 The Author(s). History published by The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
462 STATE OF THE FIELD

a growing interest in materialist and phenomenological approaches to

understanding the past.26
Within these concentrations of research, the historiography has
ranged across a number of themes. Exploring emotion has necessitated
understanding how different groups have named it, described its
sensations and effects, and valued its role in society. This has led to a study
of emotion words, like love, hate, or anger, in different languages, tracing
their emergence, use, meaning, and on some occasions demise.27 This is
still a growing area of research, as can be seen in expanding histories of
emotions like happiness, loneliness, anger, fear, boredom, and so forth,
which in offering histories of the uses and meanings of such terms
within particular historical contexts enable a greater attention to issues of
causation and periodisation within emotional life.28 How such emotion is
depicted in cultural forms has been a significant point of discussion, often
led by art historians and literary scholars, who seek to highlight emotions
gestures, facial expressions and behaviours as they are represented for
audiences.29 The relation between emotion and particular cultural events,
such as death, marriage or war, has allowed for the nuances and variation
of emotional expression within particular contexts to emerge.30 The wider
cosmological systems of emotion have also been a topic of discussion,
whether that is the theology that framed the passions, the psychological
model of modern medicine or the flows that governed Chinese Qi.31
Here emotions are placed within their explanatory frameworks, often but
not exclusively tying feelings to underlying physiological processes that

26
Barclay, ‘New materialism’.
27
Uta Frevert et al., Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling
1700–2000 (Oxford, 2014); Anna Wierzbicka, ‘“Happiness” in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural
perspective’, Daedalus, 133 (2004), pp. 34–43.
28
Some highlights on these growing topics include: Darrin McMahon, Happiness: A History (New
York, 2006); Fay Bound Alberti, A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion (Oxford,
2019); Margrit Pernau, ‘Male anger and female malice: emotions in Indo-Muslim advice literature’,
History Compass, 10/2 (2012), pp. 119–28; Jeffrey Auerbach, Imperial Boredom: Monotony and the
British Empire (Oxford, 2018).
29
Kathryn Woods, ‘“Polite” face: the social meanings attached to facial appearance in early
eighteenth-century didactic journals’, ÉPISTÉMOCRITIQUE – Eighteenth-Century Archives of the
Body. Conference Proceedings of the International Workshop “Archives of the Body. Medieval to
Early Modern”, Cambridge University, 8–9 Sept. 2011, pp. 43–66; Susan Broomhall, ‘Facemaking:
emotional and gendered meanings in Chinese clay portraits of Danish Asiatic Company men’,
Scandinavian Journal of History, 41/3 (2016), pp. 447–74; Katie Barclay, ‘Performing emotion and
reading the male body in the Irish court, c.1800–1845’, Journal of Social History, 51/2 (2017), pp.
293–312; Beatriz Pichel, ‘From facial expressions to bodily gestures: passions, photography and
movement in French nineteenth-century sciences’, History of the Human Sciences, 29/1 (2016), p.
27048; Miri Rubin, ‘Gestures of pain, implications of guilt: Mary and the Jews’, Past and Present,
203, Supplement 4 (2009), pp. 80–95.
30
For example, Peter N. Stearns (ed.), The Routledge History of Death since 1800 (London, 2020);
Sally Holloway, The Game of Love in Georgian England: Courtship, Emotions and Material Culture
(Oxford, 2018); Stephanie Downes, Andrew Lynch, and Katrina O’Loughlin (eds), Emotions and
War: Medieval to Romantic Literature (Basingstoke, 2016).
31
Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category
(Cambridge, 2006); Halvor Eifring, ‘Introduction: emotions and the conceptual history of Qing ’,
in Halvor Eifring (ed.), Love and Emotions in Traditional Chinese Literature (Leiden, 2004), pp. 1–36.

© 2021 The Author(s). History published by The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
 KATIE BARCLAY 463

change over time and place. Such research has been significant not only
in historicising the experience of emotion, but because it has provided the
foundations for research on emotional experience in other contexts, and
as it is often the space where the greatest interdisciplinary engagement
has occurred, not least with psychology and sociology. If what we feel
is shaped by culture, then definitions and theories of emotion within a
particular culture can be helpful when interpreting the emotional lives of
those who lived in such cultures.
From here, historians have sought to highlight the emotional
experiences of individuals and groups. Histories of intimacy and family
life have been especially significant here, partly as rich sources often
survive for family relationships that allow us to explore emotions in this
domain, but also because scholars have been influenced by contemporary
ideas about the family as central to emotional socialisation and adult
psychology. The family therefore has been thought to give important
clues to how people ‘learn’ their emotions.32 Children and childhood have
similarly been a domain of interest for this reason, expanding emotional
socialisation beyond the home to the school, the overseas mission, the
institution, and also to children’s ‘spaces’, such as the playground or
personal letter.33
Families have distinctive cultures, but so do other social groups.
Large categories, like gender, race, class and nationality, have often been
significant dividing lines in emotional life, where different categories
of people are assumed to emote differently, socialised to feel in ways
appropriate to their status, and punished or rewarded accordingly.34
Historians have been interested in how these ideas have overlapped with
identity, with emotion acting as a dimension of how people express
themselves and so perform, for example, gender or race. They have also
highlighted the limits of such categorisations, as stereotypes that do not
always conform to individual experience or desire.35 Group cultures are
also an important location for emotion, allowing people to form ‘refuges’
of feeling within systems where they were excluded (such as in some gay

32
Barclay, Caritas; Joanne Bailey, Parenting in England, 1760–1830: Emotion, Identity and Generation
(Oxford, 2012).
33
Katie Barclay, Ciara Rawnsley and Kim Reynolds (eds), Death, Emotion and Childhood in
Premodern Europe (Basingstoke, 2016); Vallgårda, Alexander and Olsen (eds), Childhood, Youth and
Emotions; Stephanie Olsen, ‘The history of childhood and the emotional turn’, History Compass,
15/11 (2017), e12410; Claudia Jarzebowski and T. M. Safley (eds), Childhood and Emotion across
Cultures 1450–1800 (London, 2014).
34
Katie Barclay, ‘Love and friendship between lower order Scottish men: or what the history of
emotions has brought to early modern gender history’, in Elise Dermineur, Virginia Langum and Åsa
Karlsson Sjögren (eds), Revisiting Gender in European History, 1400–1800 (London, 2018), pp. 121–
44; Jane Lydon, Imperial Emotions: The Politics of Empathy across the British Empire (Cambridge,
2019); Ramesh Mallipeddi, Spectacular Suffering: Witnessing Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century
British Atlantic (Charlottesville, 2016); Erin Austin Dwyer, ‘Mastering emotions: the emotional
politics of slavery’, PhD dissertation (Harvard University, 2012).
35
Susan Broomhall, Gender and Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Destroying Order,
Structuring Disorder (London, 2015); Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-
Century Britain and France (Baltimore, 2006).

© 2021 The Author(s). History published by The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
464 STATE OF THE FIELD

subcultures), or giving shape to the dynamics of particular environments,

whether the workplace, the convent or the football field.36 Histories of
group emotions have therefore explored how these communities display
and regulate feeling, as well as the evolution of emotional cultures over
time.
Group emotions are not the same as collective feeling, where people
feel the same thing at the same time. The possibility of the latter has
been quite contested among scholars. Nonetheless, that emotions might
be contagious, travelling from person to person, and that group feeling
seems to extend beyond the individual, such as in a rock concert or
riot, has meant that collective feelings have been a topic of research.
Historians who wish to explain riots, revolutions, crowd behaviours or
similar activities have often found collective feeling and its associated
concept of ‘affect’ (unnamed, sometimes unconscious feeling) as a useful
proxy for more direct evidence of what people felt during such events,
something that often does not survive in other forms and where individual
accounts of such behaviour often lose the sense of the group operating as
a whole. Whether or not such extension of feeling beyond the self can
be explained scientifically, it has certainly been a popular concept within
many cultures and interesting to study for this reason.37
From collective feelings, historians have also turned their attention
to social structures. As noted above, many accounts of how emotions
operate emphasise their role as a norm and so therefore are important
to giving shape to group dynamics. As Barclay has argued, in some
contexts, the significance placed on some emotional ideals, such as love,
comes to offer a disciplinary framework for behaviour and ideas about the
self.38 Emotion can therefore explain the operation of power and group
dynamics. Emotion has been shown to play a role in political life, nation-
building, and even processes of modernity and globalisation.39 That
cultures can have ‘emotional styles’ has been identified as not only part
of how nations come to think of themselves, but in shaping human well-

36
Benno Gammerl, ‘Affecting legal change: how laws impacted same-sex feelings and relationships
in West Germany since the 1950s’, in Mark Seymour and Sean Brady (eds), From Sodomy Laws to
Same-Sex Marriage: International Perspectives since 1789 (London, 2019), pp. 109–21; Claire Walker,
‘The experience of exile in early modern English convents’, Parergon, 34/2 (2017), pp. 159–77.
37
Steven Connor, ‘Collective emotions: reasons to feel doubtful’, The history of emotions Annual
Lecture given at Queen Mary, University of London, 9 Oct. 2013; Emma Hutchison, Affective
Communities in World Politics: Collective Emotions after Trauma (Cambridge, 2016); Piroska Nagy,
‘Collective emotions, history writing and change: the case of Pataria (Milan, Eleventh Century)’,
Emotions: History, Culture, Society, 2/1 (2018), pp. 132–52; Merridee Bailey and Katie Barclay,
‘Emotion, ritual and power: from family to nation’, in Merridee Bailey and Katie Barclay (eds),
Emotion, Ritual and Power in Europe, 1200–1920: Family, Church and State (Basingstoke, 2017), pp.
1–20.
38
Barclay, Caritas.
39
Ilaria Scaglia, The Emotions of Internationalism: Feeling International Cooperation in the Alps in the
Interwar Period (Oxford, 2020); Nicole Eustace, 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism (University
Park, 2012); Nicole Eustace, Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power and the Coming of the American
Revolution (Chapel Hill, 2008); Pernau, Emotions and Modernity; Barclay and Stearns, Routledge
History of Modern Emotions.

© 2021 The Author(s). History published by The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
 KATIE BARCLAY 465

being and success.40 The concept of the ‘happiness index’ that measures
and compares the feeling of different nations has therefore become
significant when defining and contrasting the effectiveness of different
forms of governance.41 Within such historiography, understanding
emotion becomes a necessary part of explaining dynamics of power
from the local to the international, often situated as the ‘missing link’ in
accounts of how the individual is mobilised as part of something larger
than the self.
The history of emotions is currently flourishing. Some current work is
expanding studies of emotion to new times, places and peoples, and that
work will be significant in diversifying and complicating current accounts
of human experience that remain western-centric. There remain many
emotions, not least across different language groups, which await their
own histories and which may open up old ways of feeling for modern
audiences. The intersection with material culture studies, particularly
reflecting on the emotion work done by objects, has the potential to
develop exponentially, and intersects with new research on the history of
emotions in capitalism, such as in relation to consumption and worker
feelings.42 That emotions themselves have economies has been theorised
by Sara Ahmed, but now it is the emotions of economic systems that are a
growing area of study, reflecting a return in history to material structures
and superstructures.43 Emotional attachments to things can also be seen
in a growing interest in our affective connections to the past – for example,
our attachments to inherited objects, statues or historic buildings – as well
as recognition of emotion as significant to explaining memory.44 Memory
studies tends to focus on contemporary feeling for the past, but sometimes
past emotions travel to the present, and such questions are underpinning
research in transhistorical emotion and histories of how historic emotions
are engaged with today.45

40
Peter N. Stearns, American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style (New York,
1994).
41
Nicholas White, A Brief History of Happiness (Oxford, 2006).
42
Stephenie Downes, Sally Holloway and Sarah Randles (eds), Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions
through History (Oxford, 2018); Katie Barclay, ‘The emotions of household economics’, in Susan
Broomhall and Andrew Lynch (eds), The Routledge Companion to Emotions in Europe: 1100–1700
(London, 2019), pp. 185–99; Sally Holloway, ‘Love, custom and consumption: Valentine’s Day
in England, 1660–1830’, Cultural and Social History, 17/3 (2020), pp. 295–314; Eva Illouz, Cold
Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (Cambridge, 2007); Eva Illouz (ed.), Emotions
as Commodities: Capitalism, Consumption and Authenticity (London, 2018); Arlie Hochschild, The
Commercialization of Intimate Life and Other Essays (Berkeley, 2003).
43
Sara Ahmed, ‘Affective economies’, Social Text, 22/2 (2004), pp. 117–39. There is ongoing work
on this by Susan Matt and Katie Barclay.
44
Jennifer K. Ladino, Memorials Matter: Emotion, Environment and Public Memory at American
Historical Sites (Reno, 2019); Gönöl Bozoğlu, Museums, Emotion and Memory Culture: The Politics
of the Past in Turkey (London, 2020); Alicia Marchant (ed.), Historicising Heritage and Emotions:
The Affective Histories of Blood, Stone and Land (London, 2019).
45
Louise D’Arcens, ‘Feeling medieval: mood and transhistorical empathy in Justin Kurzel’s
Macbeth’, Screening the Past, 41 (2016), e1–e10, <http://www.screeningthepast.com/issue-41-dossier/
feeling-medieval-mood-and-transhistorical-empathy-in-justin-kurzels-macbeth/>; Louise D’Arcens
and Andrew Lynch, ‘Feeling for the premodern’, Exemplaria, 30 (2018), pp. 183–90.

© 2021 The Author(s). History published by The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
466 STATE OF THE FIELD

This survey only touches the surface of emerging research, and there
are no doubt lots of new and imaginative ways in which the insights of
the history of emotions can be applied to other historical case studies. A
number of scholars have now produced resources to aid with teaching the
history of emotions and to approaching research in the field, especially
for students or novices to the topic, with the goal of enabling easy
access to methods and approaches needed to conduct this work.46 An
important contribution at our current moment is the possibility for the
history of emotions, through its anti-universalism, to aid in the project of
decolonising history and the wider academy. Through comparison across
time and place, the history of emotions has the potential to destabilise
and de-centre western assumptions about human behaviour and how
it is/should be valued (not least critiquing the globalising tendency
of contemporary science), to offer explanations for how practices of
colonisation have shaped the subject and the emotional mechanisms
through which indigenous groups have resisted such processes, and to
celebrate the richness, diversity and political importance of cultural
practices of emotion for particular groups. As this is a field that is
continuing to gain momentum, there may yet be unexpected directions,
both in terms of new methods and concepts, and fruitful areas of further
study. Indeed, we hope this is the case. The capacity of the history of
emotions to help make the explanatory link between individuals and
groups, between personal choices and social structures, between the micro
and the everyday, and the larger discourses and the structures that shape
our lives, is offering a rich reward to the discipline of History and ensures
that the field still has some distance to travel.

46
Barclay, The history of emotions; Katie Barclay, Sharon Crozier-De Rosa and Peter Stearns (eds),
Sources for the history of emotions: A Student Guide (London, 2020); Rob Boddice, The history of
emotions (Manchester, 2018); Jan Plamper, The history of emotions: An Introduction (Oxford, 2015);
Ute Frevert, Emotions in History: Lost and Found (New York, 2011); Susan Broomhall, Jane W.
Davidson and Andrew Lynch (eds), A Cultural history of emotions (6 vols; London, 2019); Barbara
Rosenwein and Riccardo Cristiani, What is the history of emotions? (Cambridge, 2018); Susan Matt
and Peter Stearns (eds), Doing Emotions History (Urbana, 2013).

© 2021 The Author(s). History published by The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd