“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
2
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
3
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.
4
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
1
See Leys for a wide-ranging account of current theories of affect.
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action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and
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 premodern 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 farreaching implications for the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity between premodern, 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
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.
3
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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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