exemplaria, Vol. 26 No.

1, Spring 2014, 3–15

Introduction: Emotional Histories —

Beyond the Personalization of the Past
and the Abstraction of Affect Theory
Stephanie Trigg
University of Melbourne, Australia

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

keywords emotion, affect, history of emotions, passions, medieval culture,

early modern culture

“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 differ-
ently inflected. Research is often more historically oriented, concerned with the
history of emotions and feelings and their relationship to social change. Work in this

© W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2014 DOI 10.1179/1041257313Z.00000000043

4 STEPHANIE TRIGG

field analyses changes in the discursive representation of emotions and the terminol-
ogy 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 do not 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 pub-
lic. 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. Inter-
disciplinary research centers, journals, and conferences attest to the rich possibilities
here. Not least is the sense that medieval and early modern Europe has much to con-
tribute to the longer history of emotions, passions, and affects. 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 demonstrates, 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 neu-
rohistory 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
between the fields of philosophy and political science, for instance, or literature
and psychoanalysis. Some other conjunctions are more intractable. The insights of
 EMOTIONAL HISTORIES 5

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 discuss-
ing — is problematic, partly because the key terms, “passions,” “feelings,” “emo-
tions,” “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
interchangeably, though it is also true that specialists will want to preserve distinctive
terms and usages on historical or methodological grounds, claiming ontological
priority for one or another.
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,
for example (though other languages will tell a different story) 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 dom-
inant terms (in Raymond Williams’ sense) in different social, cultural, and historical
contexts. “Affect” has an emergent specialized sense in contemporary theory, as we
will see shortly, 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”). I will 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. This seems to be emerging as one of the
distinctive contributions of emotion studies in medieval and early modern culture.
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
6 STEPHANIE TRIGG

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 consti-
tutive 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 socio-linguistic fixing of the quality of an experi-
ence which is from that point onward defined as personal. Emotion is qualified intensity,
the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semi-
otically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function
and meaning. It is intensity owned and recognized. It is crucial to theorize the difference
between affect and emotion. (88; 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 untheorized 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 constructivist or deconstructive emphasis on the
linguistic and discursive framing (or construction) of emotion. On the other hand, the
affective turn is sometimes seen as pursuing the emphasis of poststructuralism and
deconstruction on subjectivity, identity, and the body.3
 EMOTIONAL HISTORIES 7

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 number
of scholarly and 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 mate-
rial 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 histori-
cal, 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 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; 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
passions have longer term affective orientations than emotions. Following the
nineteenth-century French psychologist Théodule Ribot, Charland suggests that it
is passions that organize and orient feelings and emotions, and that are thus the
dominant form.
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
8 STEPHANIE TRIGG

be able to press the strongest claim here (and in French, “affectivité” has indeed
served in this way, though there is no record of English “affectivity”); not only as the
more recent current term, but for its insistence that in addition to conscious, discur-
sive forms, we must also take account of preconscious, 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 sense
of inquiry into historical change, historical emotions, and the history of the term and
concept of the “emotions” themselves. 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 (the Centre studies the period 1100–1800). And
given that a number of members of that Centre are represented in this special issue
of Exemplaria, it seems doubly appropriate to use that phrase to frame 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, house-
hold 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.
With its emphasis on habit, ritual, and daily practice, the work of the Annales
historians usefully introduces 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 sits 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 Rosen-
wein has modeled the ways we can excavate quite precise “emotional communities”
 EMOTIONAL HISTORIES 9

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 transla-
tion 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. 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, Scheer avoids the
word “affect,” citing Leys’ critique 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 and 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 and 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 orienta-
tion 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)

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 the domain of academic study also
refers to scholarship that foregrounds the emotional work performed by cultural and
social commentary as well as 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 institu-
tional history and the shaping forces of its own cultural traditions and social ideolo-
gies. Many such studies work by foregrounding the authors’ personal responses,
10 STEPHANIE TRIGG

whether to the medieval text, to their predecessors, or to 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 — 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 and their discourses while working toward the recuperation of
a logic 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, even when it is
used, as it is here, to critique the affective turn in medieval studies.
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 — such as Karma Lochrie, Allen
Frantzen, and the lead contributors to the In the Medieval Middle blog, Jeffrey Cohen
and 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
 EMOTIONAL HISTORIES 11

past as inviolate and homogenous, and encourage a bloodless, depoliticized tone of

neutral commentary. The affective turn, then, can sometimes be personalized in a
narcissistic way, as Smith suggests, but it 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 prac-
tice, 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
be channelled into research or conservation, bad because it persuades us that we under-
stand 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 psycho-
logical 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.
Reflecting on this paradox, Emma Mason and Isobel Armstrong write:
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
structural problem for the history of emotions, as well as of affects.
12 STEPHANIE TRIGG

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 forward and backward in time, too.
There are no easy divisions here between “medieval” and “early modern.” Epistemic
shifts 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 Rebecca
McNamara and Juanita Ruys 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 power-
fully 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. Similarly, the 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 differen-
tial 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 relent-
lessly social sense of emotions in the medieval and early modern period. This is par-
ticularly evident in Jessica Rosenfeld’s study of Margery Kempe and the sociality of
her spiritual envy. Rosenfield 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 Kempe’s descriptions of envy are both calculated and authentic,
drawing closely on penitential discussions of envy. But Rosenfeld’s essay is also
 EMOTIONAL HISTORIES 13

concerned with the social: Margery’s Book illustrates the essential role of the emo-
tions — and envy in particular — in the formation of community, through shifting
comparisons of the likeness of herself with others, whether Kempe 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 essay
complements Dinshaw’s most recent affective reading of Kempe in How Soon is
Now? (Duke UP 2012) but focuses 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 Dave-
nant’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; where 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 offers an impor-
tant historical context for the problematic 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” in order 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 as Chua and Ibbett trace, 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 discus-
sion, 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 particu-
larly entrancing to children. As Ibbett notes, “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. 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.”
14 STEPHANIE TRIGG

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, as active agents in social life. In an age in which
Facebook invites the perpetual expression of individualized feelings, it is tempting to
apply the same individualizing methods to the emotions of the past and to dramatize
our own responses to the past. As I have argued, such responses have the potential
to illuminate our institutional and epistemological dealings with that past. But
the essays in this special issue push toward a more complex understanding of the
political, cultural, and social factors that shape emotions, both individually and
collectively, and across periods of historical change. The history of emotions, then,
helps us understand not just medieval and early modern individuals but also the
social, cultural, and political frameworks in which they experienced, performed, and
narrated their emotions.

Notes
1 3
See Leys for a wide-ranging account of current
theories of affect.
2
Seigworth and Gregg share some of their concerns
4
about the “fate of affect as a fashionable theory”
(17–18), and Thrift remarks that “The affective
moment has passed in that it is no longer enough
to observe that affect is important: in that sense
at least we are in the moment after the affective
moment” (289).
Clough 206, though she herself wants to differenti-
ate affect from its links with subjectively felt states,
and focus rather on the “biomediated” body.
A symposium was held on this topic at the Univer-
sity of Adelaide in 2011: a collection of essays drawn
from this event will appear as a volume edited
by David Lemmings and Ann Brooks, Emotions
and Social Change: Historical and Sociological
Perspectives, Routledge, 2014.

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Notes on contributor
Stephanie Trigg is Professor of English Literature at the University of Melbourne
and one of ten Chief Investigators of the Australian Research Council Centre of
Excellence for the History of Emotions.
Correspondence to: Stephanie Trigg, School of Culture and Communication; ARC
Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, The University of Melbourne,
Grattan Street, Parkville, Victoria 3010, Australia. Email: sjtrigg@unimelb.edu.au