Histories of Emotion: Modern – Premodern 9783110692464, 9783110692372

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Rüdiger Schnell Histories of Emotion

Rüdiger Schnell

Histories of Emotion Modern – Premodern

ISBN 978-3-11-069237-2 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-069246-4 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-069257-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020943593 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Anonymous, „Hatred or Jealousy“, from Heads Representing the Various Passions of the Soul; as they are Expressed in the Human Countenance: Drawn by that Great Master Monsieur Le Brun, Robert Sayer, 1765. The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1953. Open Access at The Met Collection. Printing and Binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck

www.degruyter.com

For my grandchildren Svea, Silva, and Theo Schnell, and Livia Coopmans

Contents Preface

XI

Introduction

1

I

12 Sex and Love in Medieval Marriages  Liutprand of Cremona (920 – ca. 972) 12  Ordericus Vitalis (1075 – ca. 1142) 17 20  Conclusions

II

22 Approaches and Aims  Emotions in History – History of Emotions 22  Histories of Emotion. Objects and Aims 30 35 a What is the Object of a Study of Emotion? b What is the Cognitive Interest of a Study of Emotion? 41 43 c What Methods and Theories do Emotion Studies Use?  Theses and Theories 46 a Emotionology and Communication 46 51 b Emotives vs Literacy c Emotional Communities. Illusions? 55 62 d Practices. Limited Insights e Neurohistory and Bioculture. Exaggerated Expectations? 67  The Relation and Reception of Theories 72

III Communication through Signs of Emotions

81

IV History – Histories 95  The History of Emotion – Which Historical Model? 95 101  The Master Narratives of Modernity and Text Analysis a Subjectivity/Identity/The Self 107 b Interiorisation and Privatisation/Rendering Intimate 111 112 (a) Action vs ‘Feeling’ (b) Rendering Intimate/Privatisation 116 130 c The Integration of Love and Sexuality d Parental Love 139 e Conclusions 145  Modern Perspectives – Medieval Findings. Text Analyses 146 a Medieval Table Manners 146 b Shame, Disgust, and Honour. Developments and CounterDevelopments 149  Blame and Exoneration 156

VIII

V

Contents

Histories of Terms and Concepts 162  Discourse and Experience 162 162 a The Plurality of Conceptions 165 b Learned Discourses and Everyday Experiences 166 c Premodern Terminology and Modern Languages d Conceptualisations in National Languages 174 176  Taking Stock  The Thesis 184

191 VI Premodern/Modern Emotions. Case Studies 192  Acedia – Melancholia – Depression  Disgust and Aesthetics 197  Angst/Furcht (Fear, Dread, Anxiety) 200 206  Jealousy  Shame and Love 215  Conclusions 221 VII Historical Emotion Research in 2019 223  A History of Feelings (Boddice) 224 226 a Homer’s Iliad (ca. 800 BC) b Thucydides (ca. 460 – 400 BC) 229 232 c Aristotle (384 – 322 BC) d Plutarch (AD 46 – 120) 233 235 e Plato (Socrates) (428/427 – 348/347 BC) f Augustine (AD 354 – 430) 236 g Niccolò Machiavelli (1478 – 1529), Il Principe (1513) 240 h Baldassare Castiglione (1478 – 1529), Il Cortegiano (1528) 242 I René Descartes (1596 – 1650) 243 243 j Madeleine de Scudéry (1607 – 1701), Carte de Tendre (1654) k Edward Jenner (1749 – 1823) 248 l Happiness in the Twentieth Century 249 249 m Conclusions  A Cultural History of the Emotions (ed. Broomhall, Davidson, and Lynch) 254 254 a The Object of Research b Theories and Practice in Research 257 c Theories of Emotion and Emotional Experiences 257 d Homogenisation 261 e Modern – Premodern 262 f Emotions and Expressions (Outward and Inward) 268 g Conclusions 269 VIII Perspectives of Research on the History of Emotion

272

Contents

Abbreviations

279

Select Bibliography 280 280 Primary Sources 282 Secondary Sources Indices 294 Authors 294 302 Subjects Sources 307

IX

Preface My original plan was to publish an English translation of my 2015 study Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte? Aporien einer ‘History of Emotions’. But instead, I have ended up writing a new book. This was not only because of the need to shorten the original German text, which ran to around a thousand pages, or the need to orient the book to an anglophone public; it was also prompted by my reading of new research in the field published between 2015 and 2019. While this reading reinforced my critical stance with regard to the current state of historical research on emotions, it also encouraged me to limit the number of problems in the literature on which I would concentrate my attention. My study is therefore focused on basic questions in the historical study of emotions. It is the culmination of twenty years spent working on this topic (cf. my Sexualität und Emotionalität [2002] and “Historische Emotionsforschung” [2004]). This book turns on the following question: what would the impact on the project of a ‘history of emotion’ be if the gulf separating the study of the emotions of modernity from those of premodern times were closed? Part of the answer is realising that we are only just starting to think about the possibilities and limits of the historical study of emotion. Furthermore, any such thinking has to combine theoretical reflection with the analysis of specific historical material. It is for this reason that the following study is based on extensive, and for the most part overlooked, source material. Textual analyses constitute an important part of the study. It is clear, of course, that there is a limit to the amount of scholarly work to which I can directly refer. I would like to emphasise here that where I engage critically with individual studies of emotion, I do so because I believe them to be illustrative, representative of a wider body of work. The problems I raise should be understood not as unique to particular studies but as raising general issues in contemporary scholarship on the history of emotion. I am in great debt to the sociologist Fritz Böhler for his critical reading of the entire manuscript. That this work can appear in English is owed to the skilled work of Keith Tribe, who translated most of the manuscript. Rüdiger Schnell

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110692464-001

Introduction “Do emotions have a history? Of course. All human experience has a history […].” This is how Peter N. Stearns and Jan Lewis open their collection An Emotional History of the United States. ¹ Most historians of emotions would agree with this statement.² But as long as specialists from different disciplines fail to agree on what emotions actually are,³ Stearns and Lewis will have to reckon with criticism. Writing the history of a phenomenon that is hard to define is unlikely to be easy. This circumstance raises a second question: how can it be proved that human emotions have altered during the last two thousand years? The answer supplied by Stearns and Lewis is hardly reassuring: “We may never be able to know with certainty whether men and women in the past have felt the same emotions that we experience today, or even whether what we call love or anger or fear is what people in the past understood by those terms.”⁴ If we do not know exactly whether those in earlier centuries had the same feelings as we do today, we also cannot know whether they had different feelings.⁵

 Jan Lewis and Peter N. Stearns, “Introduction”, in An Emotional History of the United States (The History of Emotions Series 4), ed. Stearns and Lewis (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 1– 14 (1).  See, for example, Steven Mullaney, The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 17 (“Like monarchies or religions or ideologies, human emotions have histories”); Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 3 (“That emotions have histories […] is one of the chief insights of contemporary interdisciplinary scholarship”). What is notable is that both Mullaney and McNamer here use the plural “histories”.  Thomas Dixon, “‘Emotion’: The History of a Keyword in Crisis”, Emotion Review 4.4 (2012), 338 – 344 (340). Kevin Walby, Dale Spencer and Alan Hunt, “Introduction”, in Emotions Matter. A Relational Approach to Emotions, ed. Spencer, Walby and Hunt (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 3 – 8, talk of “considerable disagreement amongst theorists of emotion” (4). Michael Champion and Andrew Lynch, “Understanding Emotions: ‘The Things They Left Behind’”, in Understanding Emotions in Early Europe, ed. Champion and Lynch (Turnholt: Brepols, 2015), xii, show with respect to a few examples “how irresolvable the long debate on the nature of emotions currently seems”.  Lewis and Stearns, “Introduction”, 1. Lewis and Stearns, ibid., 7, concede that for historians it is “difficult, if not impossible” to understand what human beings have felt in the past. Angelos Chaniotis, “Unveiling Emotions in the Greek World. Introduction”, in Unveiling Emotions. Sources and Methods for the Study of Emotions in the Greek World (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner 2012), 11– 36, is extremely cautious when considering the question of whether feelings have altered during the last thirty thousand years: “This is a matter of controversy and it is beyond the competence of the historian to determine this with the tools of his profession. But even if emotions might not have a history, history certainly has emotions” (15).  By contrast, Barbara Rosenwein is quite sure that emotions in the past were always different from our emotions today. Barbara Rosenwein in Jan Plamper, “The History of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein and Peter Stearns”, History and Theory 49 (2010), 237– 265 (253): “To assume that our emotions were also the emotions of the past is to be utterly unhistorical”; https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110692464-002

2

Introduction

This is the critical perspective from which my book approaches current work on the history of emotion. It first asks whether, and to what degree, the historicity of emotions has been, and is, demonstrated. Second, it seeks to outline new perspectives for future work on the history of emotion. This presumes, of course, that the gulf between macro- and microhistorical studies of emotion can be overcome. Also implied here is that a history of emotion cannot be limited to the study of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁶ Of course, one precondition for this is that the nearmoribund exchange between medieval and early modern historians be raised to a new level. It will be necessary there to deal with fundamental problems to which little attention has so far been devoted. For example, we need to interrogate the historiographical approach required for any comparison of modernity with the premodern (IV.1); we need, furthermore, to expose the presuppositions that shape the perspective of a historian of modernity when considering the premodern, something that has not yet been achieved, despite the criticism to which the work of Norbert Elias has been subjected (IV.2). We also need to take account of the fact that in premodern times a wide range of discourses, conceptions, perspectives, interests, and practices competed with one another, ruling out any unidimensional contrast of the premodern and the modern (IV.3 – 4, V.1– 2). Finally, we need to be rigorously consistent in examining the contemporary functions of the texts referred to, for this provides the necessary basis for making reliable and supportable statements regarding emotionality specific to any one era (I, II.3.c, IV.3). The temporal definition of ‘modernity’ is, of course, a matter of debate: the terminological demarcation of the different epochs of Western history is something that is highly contested in the cultural sciences. On the one hand, a distinction is made between premodernity (up to the eighteenth century), modernity (from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the 1960s and 1970s or the present day), and postmodernity (from the 1960s and 1970s on). The period from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century is also described as early modern, intervening between the premodern and modern eras. On the other hand, a distinction is made between ancient, medieval, early modern (fifteenth to eighteenth century), and modern periods. Each dis-

McNamer, Affective Meditation, 3: “That emotions have histories […] is one of the chief insights of contemporary interdisciplinary scholarship.”  What Peter N. Stearns, “History of Emotions. Issues of Change and Impact”, in Handbook of Emotions, 3rd ed., ed. Michael Lewis, Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones, and Lisa Feldman Barrett (New York: The Guildford Press, 2008), 17– 31 (23 – 25), established remains true today: that the historical study of emotion is based predominantly on three eras – the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century, and the twentieth century. All the same, the many studies of emotion from the field of classical studies should not be ignored; see, for example, Angelos Chaniotis, ed., Unveiling Emotions, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2012 & 2013). The predominance of the period from the eighteenth to the twentieth century is also evident in the three volumes of Histoire des Émotions, ed. Alain Corbin, Jean-Jacques Courtine and Georges Vigarello (Paris: Seuil, 2016 – 2017). The entire period of two thousand years from antiquity to the eighteenth century is dealt with in one volume, the other two volumes being devoted to the succeeding period up to the twenty-first century.

Introduction

3

cipline has a different story about the onset of modernity: for art history, this happens in the twentieth century; for literary historians, it begins in the later nineteenth century; for philosophy, it lies in the eighteenth century; architecture, like art history, opts for the twentieth century; sociology sees the French Revolution as the starting point, or the emergence of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie; while musicology dates modernity from the twentieth century, like art history and architecture. These temporal demarcations also involve semantic overlaps between modernity (Moderne) and modern history (Neuzeit).⁷ Since my study problematises the designation of the period from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century as a watershed in the history of emotions, any such strict temporal determination of the premodern period loses significance. In the following, epochs are referred to by name only as a form of general orientation, not as fixed periods. In any case, it is quite possible that the course of emotional history calls for other kinds of periodisation. If we accept the cultural insight that our efforts to understand the past involve at the same time the construction of this past, we can no longer exclude the possibility that, far from there being the history of emotion, there are in fact several. The formulation ‘the history of emotion’ has three semantic levels. It designates first of all a (new) discipline, ‘the history of emotion’ (corresponding to ‘the history of gender’, ‘the history of philosophy’, and so forth);⁸ but it also designates the object of that discipline.⁹ In addition, a book published as an account of work in this discipline could well be entitled The History of Emotions. ¹⁰ Talk of the history of emotions as the object of the historical investigation of emotions can also imply that there is a pre-given ontological and objectively demonstrable past history of emotions, the revelation of which requires only that we command sufficient historical material, suitable methodological tools, and appropriate theories. The history of emotions would then lie before us like an open book. Historians know that this is a questionable idea.¹¹ Nonetheless, the circumstance that the word emotion functions

 The three-volume Histoire des Émotions, ed. Corbin, Courtine and Vigarello (2016 – 2017), dates the modern period from the seventeenth century (213 ff., Âge moderne).  See, for example, Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions. An Introduction (Oxford: OUP, 2015); Barbara H. Rosenwein and Riccardo Cristiani, What is the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Polity, 2018); Rob Boddice, The History of Emotions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018).  See, for example, Benno Gammerl, “Emotional Styles – Concepts and Challenges”, Rethinking History 16 (2012), 161– 175 (161); Stephanie Trigg, “Introduction: Emotional Histories – Beyond the Personalization of the Past and the Abstraction of Affect Theory”, Exemplaria 26.1 (2014) 3 – 15 (3 – 4 and 8).  As in the three-volume Histoire des Émotions (2016 – 2017).  Rom Harré, “An Outline of the Social Constructionist Viewpoint”, in: The Social Construction of Emotions, ed. Harré (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 2– 14 (4): “This ontological illusion, that there is an abstract and detachable ‘it’ upon which research can be directed, lies behind the defectiveness of much emotion research.”

4

Introduction

both as the object of emotion research and as an analytical category calls for profound reflection on the aims and methods employed in the study of emotion.¹² It should not, therefore, be any cause for surprise that current historical research into emotions works with a variety of conceptions of ‘the’ history of emotions as disciplinary object. This variety is owed to differences in the understanding of ‘emotion’, the diverse objects of subjective experience (conceptions, rituals, discourses, practices, subjective experiences, lexical histories, actions, and so forth), a range of epistemological interests, and the differentiation of historical knowledge. This diversity is marked in turn by three sets of problems: the question of the contribution of nature (the body) and culture (understanding) to emotions; the question of the relation of inner experience (mind, feeling, emotional experience) and external expression (speech, gesture); and the question of the relation between individual and collective emotional experience.¹³ All the above factors and aspects can lead to differing constructions of the history of emotion. Hence, there is no such thing as the ‘history of emotion’, only a ‘history of emotion’ among many other histories of emotion; or, put another way, there are only ‘histories of emotion’.¹⁴ This study raises the question of the conditions for sketching a history of emotion that is adequate to the expectations attached to it. We certainly need to make clear first of all what these expectations are (II). What follows departs from previous historical studies of emotion in two ways: current historical work on emotion research is reviewed from the standpoint of literary studies, and a medievalist comments on studies in emotional history written by modern historians. (1) The following is a literary interrogation of the way in which historians studying emotions deal with texts, which are the most important source for our knowledge of emotional history. Many historians of emotion are convinced that it is now no longer possible to do research on the history of emotions without considering the findings of psychology, neurophysiology, neurobiology, social neuroscience, cultural anthropology, the philosophy of emotion, and the cognitive sciences. It is, by contrast, rare to find anyone claiming that the history of emotion is impossible without philology. Yet, even if material objects, architecture, clothing, and pictures have recently been drawn on as clues in a history of emotion, texts constitute the most important source on which to base the historical study of emotion. What insights concerning emotions can we glean from these texts, be they ones that report emotions or themselves give expression to them? The basic problem for all scholarly historical study of emotion is how we might reach conclusions about everyday emotional experiences

 Quentin Deluermoz, Emmanuel Fureix, Hervé Mazurel and M’Hamed Oualdi, “Écrire l’histoire des émotions de l’objet à la catégorie d’analyse”, Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle 47 (2013), 155 – 189.  The contributors to Frank Biess, “Discussion Forum ‘History of Emotions’”, German History 28.1 (2010), 67– 80, are aware that the emotions of individuals have to be studied in a manner distinct from that applied to collective emotions; see esp. Lyndal Roper, ibid., 70 – 71 and 78 – 79.  See II, IV, V.

Introduction

5

on the basis of emotions as described or expressed in texts.¹⁵ For those in literary studies whose work involves the representation of emotions in texts, it is the text that is the prime object of knowledge, not the emotion.¹⁶ Although there are literary scholars interested in emotions, they mainly study affective processes prompted in the reader in the act of reading.¹⁷ The literary study of emotion is likewise centred here on the text, together with the level of what is represented (actions, figures, and so forth) and the level of representation (the narrative form). No disagreement exists over the proposition that emotion research “can only supplement literary study”.¹⁸ By contrast, historians of emotion treat emotions as their historical source,¹⁹ which is understandable insofar as historical emotion research is concerned for the most part with the emotional experiences observable, and modes of behaviour practised, in everyday life. All the same, emotions cannot form the primary source for historians of emotion for the period from antiquity into the nineteenth century; instead, that source remains the texts that discuss emotions or can themselves be treated as expressions of emotion.²⁰ The corresponding history of emotions would therefore be  According to Billie Melman, “Horror and Pleasure. Visual Histories, Sensationalism and Modernity in Britain in the Long Nineteenth Century”, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 37.1 (2011), 26 – 46, the circumstance that historians of emotion gain access to emotions only through their “representation” is “one central methodological problem” of historical emotion research (32). Melman consequently indicates that while she does use the terms sensations and feeling, she is in so doing characterising “representations of inner feeling and their correspondence to the social and public repertories and vocabularies”. On the term representation, see I.3, IIIn4 below.  Rüdiger Schnell, “Gefühle gestalten. Bausteine zu einer Poetik mittelalterlicher Emotionsbeschreibungen”, Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 138.4 (2016), 560 – 606. It is significant that a literary scholar, Eugenia Lean, commented as follows in AHR Conversation 2012 (“The Historical Study of Emotions”): “Indeed, for historians, text, and thus language, is often our primary access to historical agents of the past, and we need to think critically about both how text mediates our access to affect in the past, and how language […] mediated emotional experience for our historical subjects” (1498).  See, for example, Stephanie Trigg, “Delicious, Tender Chaucer: Coleridge, Emotion and Affect”, in Emotion, Affect, Sentiment: The Language and Aesthetics of Feeling, ed. Andreas Langlotz and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet (Tübingen: Narr, 2014), 51– 66. This is also true in the study of art; see the related contributions in Performing Emotions in Early Europe.  See Martin von Koppenfels and Cornelia Zumbusch, “Einleitung” in Handbuch Literatur & Emotionen, ed. M. von Koppenfels and C. Zumbusch (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2016), 1– 36, esp. 18 – 25 (quotation at 19). Indicative is this statement on the outside back cover of a literary study: “Text is one of the most valuable and plentiful sources of information available to scholars interested in medieval emotion”; Mary C. Flannery, ed., Emotion and Medieval Textual Media (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018).  Jan Plamper, “Vergangene Gefühle. Emotionen als historische Quellen”, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 67 (2013), 12– 19. It is however also true that those studying texts see themselves as historians of emotion; Champion and Lynch, “Understanding Emotions in Early Europe”, x, maintain that “there is no direct access to the sources”, meaning by “sources” emotions in the past.  The contradiction that can be found in Trigg, “Introduction: Emotional Histories”, 11, is illuminating. There we read: “Sarah Tarlow is an archaeologist who also works with the emotions” (my emphasis). But Tarlow writes about herself as follows: “working with memorial monuments [in graveyards]

6

Introduction

a history of texts about and images of emotions.²¹ Anyone who seeks to situate emotionally relevant statements in a text historically cannot avoid engaging with the conditions and presuppositions of such texts. It would be necessary to establish the addressee(s)/recipient(s) of the text, the style sought by the author, the author’s vocabulary, writing conventions specific to the period (cultural scripts), the genre to which the text belonged, and the rhetorical and linguistic quality, narrative strategy, and moral intention of the text. This applies equally to novels, chronicles, autobiographies,²² letters,²³ court proceedings, diaries, advice books, and so on. Representations of emotions have to be located in this spectrum of factors conditioning a text. One must always keep in mind that forms of writing about, and representational models of, emotions are subject to change, not the emotions themselves.²⁴ There is no direct access to the emotions described or ‘displayed’ in a text, first because the articulation or description of emotions in a text fundamentally follows particular sociocultural or literary norms and patterns, and second because the representations of emotions perform particular functions within the text. ²⁵ Without

provokes an emotional engagement” (quoted in Trigg, 11; my emphasis). Tarlow herself says she works with monuments; Trigg, by contrast, implies that Tarlow’s direct objects are emotions.  To which might be added a history of ‘texts as the cause of emotions’, where the impact of texts is also dependent on the form of reception: by ear, by reading aloud, by silent reading. See Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 696 – 708.  In the study of self-representation, there is currently a cautious discussion developing about the degree to which autobiographical texts reveal the feelings of their authors; see, most recently, Claudia Ulbrich, “Self Narratives as a Source for the History of Emotions”, in Childhood and Emotion. Across Cultures 1450 – 1800, ed. Claudia Jarzebowski and Thomas Max Safley (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 59 – 71. Stylistic principles can change without this necessarily being related to changes in the emotions thereby represented (Ulbrich, ibid., 60). See also VI.3 below.  What is expressed in private correspondence should likewise not always be taken literally: M. Lyons, “Love Letters and Writing Practices: on Ecritures Intimes in the Nineteenth Century”, Journal of Family History 24 (1999), 232– 239; Katie Barclay, Love, Intimacy and Power. Marriage and Patriarchy in Scotland, 1650 – 1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 27– 30.  John H. Arnold, “Inside and Outside the Medieval Laity: Some Reflections on the History of Emotions”, in European Religious Cultures. Essays offered to Christopher Brooke on the Occasion of his Eighteenth Birthday, ed. Miri Rubin (London: Institute of Historical Research, 2008), 107– 129 (110 – 111); Rüdiger Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte? Aporien einer ‘History of Emotions’ (Göttingen: V & R unipress, 2015), 456. The contributions in the anthology Reading the Early Modern Passions. Essays in Cultural History of Emotion, ed. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), seek to develop the special nature of early modern passions and emotions, but in reality they ‘only’ provide, as openly stated in the introduction to the volume, representations of emotions specific to the period in question and discourses about emotion likewise specific to the period in question.  Thus, when evaluating the passionate expressions encountered in medieval (and especially monastic) letters, one should take into account the fact that these expressions do not involve actual feelings for a real person but instead serve to present an ideal of amicability: Sally N. Vaughn, St Anselm and the Handmaidens of God. A Study of Anselm’s Correspondence with Women (Turnholt: Brepols, 2002), 17.

Introduction

7

knowledge about the functions of representations of emotion in a text, we can easily be led into misinterpreting the passages involving emotion.²⁶ In general, we can say that only knowledge of the intention and function of a text permits us to make statements about the historicity of the emotions represented or ‘displayed’ in that text. This sometimes leads to the realisation that it is not the evoked or performed emotions that are specific to a temporal context, but rather how the emotions are presented: the representations and performances of emotions. Historians of emotions should consequently pay most attention to the texts, not the emotions, and this is illustrated by a recent study by Susan Broomhall (2015), in which she analyses a French tract (1586) dealing with Christian charity.²⁷ Broomhall is interested in emotions and thus declares that her essay is a contribution to the “role of emotions” (121), and talks of the “power of emotions” (159); but in reality, her study deals with the textual and visual strategies employed in a tract written by Nicolas Houel for arousing emotions in its addressees. Ultimately, Broomhall is dealing not with the “power of emotions” but instead with the power of linguistic, rhetorical, and iconographical means to arouse in readers emotions such as sympathy and charity.²⁸ Broomhall unwittingly shows that the real object of her study is, in the first instance, not emotions but a text. That historians are fixated on emotions but are compelled to do textual work is also apparent in a study by the classical historian Angelos Chaniotis, who has written an informative essay on Greek inscriptions (including inscriptions on tombs) during the fourth and fifth centuries AD. But he identifies his object of study as emotions.²⁹

 See Schnell, “Gefühle gestalten”. Even making use of the performative thesis that emotions are created in the act of their articulation, so that emotional expressions in a text are not representations of emotions but an emotional practice, not the communication of emotion but themselves part of inner emotional experience (see Katie Barclay, “Performance and Performativity”, in Early Modern Emotions. An Introduction, ed. Susan Broomhall [London and New York: Routledge, 2017], 14– 17 [15]; II.3.d below), it cannot be ignored that the articulation of emotions in those premodern texts that have come down to us is not spontaneous and ‘direct’; it is guided by all kinds of factors unrelated to the emotional state of the author: the demands of a genre, the demands of style, the predilections of a patron, or the desire for self-representation. Correspondents, autobiographers, poets, preachers in medieval times, and orators in antiquity do not write or talk as might be expected of them, but instead in a manner that will evoke a particular affective reaction.  Susan Broomhall, “Hearts on Fire: Compassion and Love in Nicolas Houel’s Traité de la Charité chrestienne”, in Ordering Emotions in Europe, 1100 – 1800, ed. Broomhall (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015), 121– 160.  These emotions serve Houel as a means to the end of garnering financial support for his poorhouse. That sympathy and charity prompt people to perform charitable acts cannot be regarded as something temporally specific. We have testimony for this from late antiquity to the twenty-first century. What is temporally specific in Houel’s tract of 1587 is the way in which this text seeks to bring about an affective reaction.  A. Chaniotis, “Moving Stones. The Study of Emotions in Greek Inscriptions”, in Unveiling Emotions. Sources and Methods for the Study of Emotions in the Greek World, ed. Chaniotis (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2012), 91– 129.

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Introduction

Chaniotis considers that inscriptions from late antiquity and the Hellenic period describe emotions, express emotions, and/or evoke emotions. Among these emotions are sympathy, gratitude, fear, sorrow, feelings of revenge, anger, dismay, hope, and goodwill. Since Chaniotis demonstrates only that these inscriptions mention emotions, or that they are supposed to evoke emotions, the yield for emotional history is very modest. The real achievement of Chaniotis’s work lies in demonstrating the rhetorical, linguistic, and poetic means by which individual inscriptions seek to prompt an emotional reaction in their reader. He elaborates the “persuasion strategy” of the texts (103 – 109, 119 – 123) and at the same time draws our attention to the difficulty of grasping any individual, personal emotional state of mind given the existence of social norms (writing conventions, emotional norms, social status, and the gender of the deceased; 109 – 111). Chaniotis’s study therefore conveys little to us about his intended object of study – emotions – but instead lends us insight into textual strategies for influencing the emotions of the reader. Both essays – that by Broomhall and that by Chaniotis – make important contributions to the problem of the linguistic and literary means with which emotions are elicited, but not to the historicity of emotions. My book, written by a literary scholar, will keep coming back to this mutual dependency of textuality and emotionality. By textuality is meant the totality of factors determining a text (the style of language, discourse, intention, function, genre, addressee).³⁰ The concept of emotionality covers all emotionally relevant statements. Nonetheless, emphasis on the textual mediation of emotions should not distract us from another literary aspect: the distinction between oral and written cultures. Anyone who claims that it makes no difference for an emotional historian whether the statement “I am happy” is made by a medieval troubadour or a twenty-first century contemporary ignores the fact that written statements come into being in a manner distinct from that of oral expressions, and so have to be dealt with differently from the point of view of emotional history.³¹ In the same way, the numerous studies that invoke Reddy’s emotives overlook the fact that Reddy developed this idea from speech act theory, meaning that the term is valid only for oral emotives. ³² Hence, there is sufficient cause for a literary scholar to join in the debate among historians of emotion. (2) The present study is marked by a second feature: a medievalist critically reviews studies of emotion written by modern historians. The intention is to bridge the gulf that exists between emotion research as practised by medievalists and as

 Susan J. Matt, “Current Emotion Research in History: Or, Doing History from the Inside Outside”, Emotion Review 3.1 (2011), 117– 124 (119), raises an important point: the fact that texts are written for a public also influences the representation of emotions.  On this, see IIn63.  William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling. A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: CUP, 2001). Reddy himself fails to distinguish between oral and written emotional expressions; see IInn125 – 133 below.

Introduction

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practised by modern historians, the latter of whom tend to arrive at mistaken conclusions about allegedly modern emotions.³³ If premodernity is the comparator against which modernity is defined, but understanding of the nature of the premodern is faulty, any resulting comparison will likewise be faulty.³⁴ Debate between medievalists and modern historians does not, however, turn on the question of whether the Middle Ages were already ‘modern’,³⁵ but on something more fundamental: do we want to, should we seek to, consider it possible that (particular) emotions, despite changing sociocultural conditions, remain unchanged? These two perspectives, of a literary scholar and of a medievalist, define this study. One of the most important findings can already be anticipated here: historical emotion research should be pursued not only diachronically but also synchronically, taking into account the plurality of discourses, text types, positions, and communicative situations within premodernity. ³⁶ As will be demonstrated, the consequences for emotion research are profound.³⁷ The rough outline of my approach given here will be elaborated in the first chapter using passages from texts drawn from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries. These premodern textual passages turn on the issue of sexual desire in marriage. Methodological questions related to textual analysis predominate here. Do these passages allow us to draw any conclusions about a specifically premodern culture of feelings? Following this study of particular extracts, the second chapter presents a systematic critical survey of the objects, cognitive interests, theories, and methods of historical emotion research. First, two distinct approaches or projects that are usually conflated will be clearly distinguished from each other: the ‘history of emotions’ and ‘emotions in history’ (II.1). The aims, objects, and methods of the ‘history of emotions’ approach will then be examined (II.2). In the process, the nature of historical emotion research will in turn be clarified. Finally, attention will turn to the cognitive benefit that the currently favoured theoretical models bring for the practical activity of emotion his-

 Unfortunately, the recent appearance of the three volumes of Histoire des Émotions, ed. Corbin, Courtine, Vigarello (Paris: Seuil, 2016 – 2017), confirms my scepticism. See also VII below.  Since Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: Norton, 2011), misrepresents the Middle Ages, his presentation of modernisation cannot be other than mistaken; on this, see Richard Newhauser, “Sin, the Business of Pleasure, and the Pleasure of Reading: Exemplary Narratives and Other Forms of Sinful Pleasure in William Peraldus’s Summa de Virtutibus”, in Pleasure in the Middle Ages, ed. Naama Cohen-Hanegbi and Piroska Nagy (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), 181– 202 (esp. 184– 187).  See Joachim Heinzle, ed., Modernes Mittelalter. Neue Bilder einer populären Epoche (Frankfurt a. M.: Insel-Verlag, 1994).  Rüdiger Schnell, ed., Text und Geschlecht. Mann und Frau in Eheschriften der frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt a.Main: Suhrkamp, 1997); Rüdiger Schnell, ed., Geschlechterbeziehungen und Textfunktionen. Studien zu Eheschriften der Frühen Neuzeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1998); Rüdiger Schnell, Frauendiskurs, Männerdiskurs, Ehediskurs. Textsorten und Geschlechterkonzepte (Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 1998).  See IV.2, IV.4, V.

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Introduction

torians (II.3), and to the reception of these models (II.4). This will make the gulf between theory-building and working practices in historical studies of emotion apparent. The third chapter takes up an issue raised in the second chapter (at II.3.a), an issue that has been neglected in historical emotion research but which, once raised, provides us with a new insight: people communicate with one another not through emotions but through signs of emotion. Hence, it is not emotions that make history, but signs of emotions. After the systematic review (II, III) comes the history (IV). The fourth chapter questions the extent to which the customary distinction made in emotional history between the premodern (pre-eighteenth century) and modernity (from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries onwards) is in need of revision. First of all, two central features of historical emotion research are discussed: the conception of history (IV.1) and the prejudices embedded in master narratives about the relation of premodern and modern emotional history (IV.2). The following section (IV.3) demonstrates that the now-widespread criticism of Norbert Elias has overlooked central literary sources that he used for his Process of Civilisation. For this reason, table manners and etiquette books of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are subjected to a fresh analysis, which in turn leads to a reassessment of ‘the’ history of emotions (IV.4). The fourth chapter is consequently devoted to some situations, constellations of persons, and modes of behaviour that all have relevance to emotional history; the fifth chapter investigates the terminology employed for the emotions that have been, and are, attributed to these situations and forms of behaviour. To what extent do this terminology and the historical conceptions of emotion provide us with insight into ‘real’ emotional experiences (V.1)? Can we construct a history of emotion from a history of conceptions of emotion? This treatment of the historical and emotional variety and contradictoriness of premodern terminology and conceptions leads to a critical assessment (V.2). At the close of the fifth chapter (V.3), the thesis is advanced that the alleged historicity of emotions is to a great extent based on the historicity of observations of emotions. It is not only objects that change, but also the knowledge and interests of the observing subject. The sixth chapter once more shifts perspective, in some respects returning to the first chapter. Here again, we examine selected fragments of various texts that describe a particular emotional constellation (melancholy, disgust, anxiety, jealousy, shame). However, the analytical approach is broadened, since the analysis of texts is now directed at one specific problem in each case. Thus, case studies are involved here: theoretical positions are examined on the basis of particular historical texts. On the one hand, we are confronted with ideas about emotion that transcend eras; on the other, we are presented with individual diversity. The seventh chapter uses two recent publications from 2019 to show that there is a considerable divergence between the explicitly stated aims of historical emotion research and the results it actually achieves. The chapter engages with the first outline of the history of emotions in monograph form, by Rob Boddice, and the first overall

Introduction

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presentation of the history of emotions in English, edited by Susan Broomhall, Jane W. Davidson, and Andrew Lynch. The eighth chapter summarises the foregoing combination of theoretical and methodological problems with textual exemplifications, and outlines perspectives for future research.

I Sex and Love in Medieval Marriages What can philology – meaning the study above all of the desiderata, conditions, and functions, the means of representation and the aims of texts – contribute to the history of emotions? Philologists are interested in, for example, narrative forms and structures, levels of style, rhetorical stylistic devices, and the traditional and innovative aspects of a text, its linguistic virtuosity and literary aspirations. Exaggerating somewhat to make the point: whereas historians of emotion are concerned more with what is narrated (or represented), emotions, the interest of the philologist is directed at the narration (or representation) of emotions (Schnell 2016). It will become clear that it is precisely philological analyses that are necessary if the significance for the emotions of two historiographical passages is to be assessed. The history of emotion and philology should work in tandem. The extracts from two works of medieval historiography discussed below are concerned with the relationship between sex and love in medieval marriages. As the two works are separated by over two hundred years, the question arises as to whether and to what extent they allow us to draw conclusions about changes in the history of emotion.

1 Liutprand of Cremona (920 – ca. 972) Liutprand’s historical work Antapodosis (958 – 962) records the following incident, supposed to have taken place in the tenth century during armed clashes between Greeks and Romans near Spoleto and Benevento: The jest, indeed the wise deed, that a certain woman did, then, we shall insert into the narrative here. For when on a certain day the Greeks went with the men of that land to fight outside a certain castle against that Tedald we mentioned before, many of them were captured by him. While he was making them eunuchs and directing them to the castle, a certain woman, inflamed by love for her husband and not a little worried about his members, left the castle enraged, with loosened hair. When she lacerated her face with bloody fingernails and cried with a loud voice before Tedald’s tent, he asked, “For what reason, woman, do you wail with such loud cries?” She responded this way (for it is the highest wisdom to simulate stupidity in the right context): “It is a new and unheard-of crime, O hero, that you wage war on unarmed women. No bloodline of ours leads back to the Amazons; in fact, given over solely to the activities of Minerva [of spinning and weaving wool], we are wholly ignorant of weapons.” And when Tedald said to her: “What hero with sound mind ever waged war on women, except in the time of the Amazons?” she answered: “What more cruel war on women could you wage, I ask, and how could you make it more uncomfortable for them, than to try to amputate the bulbs of their men, in which lies the replenishment of our bodies, and, what is most important of all, in which lies our hope for future children? For you remove not what is theirs but what is ours when you turn them into eunuchs. I ask you, does the quantity of cattle or sheep that you took from me days ago drive me to come to your castle? In fact, I praise the pillage of my animals you inflicted, but I shudder before, I flee, and I want to avoid by any means this particular great loss, as cruel as irreparable. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110692464-003

1 Liutprand of Cremona (920 – ca. 972)

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Holy gods, all of you, avert such a plague from me!” Having heard these words, all present were stirred by great laughter, and the favor of the people for her grew to such an extent that she merited to get back not just her husband, intact, but also all the animals that had been taken from her. When she left with the things she had obtained, Tedald sent after her a boy who asked what he should take from her husband if he were to come out of the castle to do battle with him again. “Those are his eyes”, she said, “his nostrils, hands, and feet. If he needs it, let Tedald remove what is his; but let him leave alone what is mine, I mean, of his humble servant.” Through the laughter and the gift of her husband she understood that the favor of the people was with her for her first speech, so afterwards she sent back that answer through the intermediary messenger.¹

This portion of text is well-suited for posing questions related to emotion. It presents a social interaction, a dialogue in direct speech, and also the apparently authentic statement of a wife about her emotional relationship with her husband – hence, it presents emotives in the sense used by William Reddy. A woman is depicted who, because of her passionate love for her husband (mariti amore succensa), seeks to rescue him from the hands of enemies. Can we therefore conclude on the basis of this passage that even during the Middle Ages, love connected those who were married to each other? We will see that this brief narrative is determined by divergent perspec-

 Liutprand of Cremona, Antapodosis, IV 10, in The Complete Works of Liutprand of Cremona, trans. Paolo Squatriti (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 146 – 147. The Latin text is from Liudprand von Cremona, Werke, ed. Joseph Becker (Scriptores rerum germanicarum in usum scholarum, vol. 41 b) (Hannover and Leipzig: Hahn, 3rd edition 1915), 108 – 109 (Antapodosis IV 10): Ludibrium autem, immo sapientiam, quam quaedam tunc mulier gessit, hic inseramus. Dum enim die quadam Greci cum ipsius terrae hominibus extra castrum quoddam ad pugnam adversus Tedbaldum memoratum exirent, nonnulli ab eodem sunt capti. Quos dum eunuchizaret eosque in castellum dirigeret, mulier quaedam mariti amore succensa, eius pro membris non parum sollicita, passis crinibus de castello exiit furibunda. Quae cum cruentis unguibus ora discerperet atque ante Tedbaldi tentorium clamosis vocibus fleret: ‘Quid causae est’, inquit, ‘mulier, quod tam sonoris vocibus quereris?’ Quae – quia stultitiam simulare loco prudentia summa est, – ita respondit: ‘Novum hoc inauditumque facinus est, heroes, ut bellum non repugnantibus mulieribus inferatis. Nostrarum ulla ex Amazonarum sanguine prosapium ducit; Minervae quippe solum operibus deditae armorum poenitus sumus ignarae.’ Cui cum Tedbaldus diceret: ‘Quis umquam sani capitis heros praeter Amazonarum temporibus bellum mulieribus intuli?’ ea respondit: ‘Quod, cedo, crudelius mulieribus bellum inferre quidve incommodius his potestis auferre, quam ut earum viris certetis orchidia amputare, in quibus nostri refocilatio corporis et, quod omnium potissimum est, nasciturae spes extat prolis? Dum enim eos eunuchizatis, non quod illorum, sed quod nostrum est, tollitis. Num, inquam, armentorum seu ovium copia, quam mihi dies ante hos abstulistis, vestra me castra adire coegit? Animalium quippe quae mihi fecistis dispendia laudo, iacturam hanc tantam, tam crudelem tamquam inrecuperabilem modis omnibus horreo, fugio, nolo. Sancti Dei omnes talem a me avertite pestem!’ His auditis nimio sunt omnes cachinno commoti tantusque in eam populi fervor excrevit, ut non solum virum suum integrum, sed et cuncta quae sibi ablata fuerant animalia recipere mereretur. Quae cum his receptis abiret, directo Tedbaldus post eam puero interrogavit, quia viro suo auferret, si ad pugnam amplius contra se de castello exiret? ‘Oculi’, inquit, ‘sunt illi, nares, manus et pedes. Si hoc egerit, sibi, quae sua sunt, auferat; quae mea, suae scilicet ancillulae, derelinquat.’ Verum quia favorem populi prima sibi locutione per risum et mariti donum adesse intellexit, haec postmodum per directum nuntium remandavit.

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tives and can be interpreted according to very different values, a circumstance that makes it difficult to arrive at any one unambiguous interpretation. There is certainly a loving wife present here. But she seems interested only in her husband’s genitals. This resembles a misogynistic topos quite commonly encountered in the Middle Ages – that women were sexually voracious and impossible to satisfy. Does this wife love her husband only because he stokes her sexual desire? Of course, this misogynistic interpretation is placed in question by the author’s introductory remark – that he wants to tell an entertaining and humorous story (ludibrium) about the cleverness (sapientiam) of a woman. Might the woman not be acting on the basis of sexual lust² but only pretending to do so, in order to achieve her aim of freeing her husband from imprisonment? The author attributes great sagacity (summa prudentia) to this woman, a sagacity evidenced by her simulated folly (stultitiam simulare). This supposed folly involves the idea that when military foes castrate men, they are waging war on their wives. For the genitals of husbands belong to their wives. This argument prompts laughter among all those present. Why is that? Because the equation of war against men with war against women involves an unanticipated comparison and hence evokes laughter. The open reference to sexual organs would have added to the laughter. The laughter of those present, as well as that of the military commander, signals sympathy with the unexpected line of argument adopted by the wife. Her little speech seems to involve a silly comparison, but it works. But what does this story tell us about love and sexuality in medieval marriages?³ Might we conclude from it that wives loved their husbands and that, furthermore, for medieval wives sexuality was the most important element in their relationships? It should be remembered that the writer of this story explained right at the beginning that he wanted to include an amusing incident in his account. In fact, the story has similarities with the genre of medieval farce: there is the motive of (female) cunning, the theme of sexuality, and finally the (misogynistic) topos of the woman fixated on the genitals of the man.⁴ Liutprand wants to lighten his account by including a far-

 See Federico Lauria and Julien A. Deonna, eds., The Nature of Desire (Oxford: OUP, 2017).  Use of the term sexuality for the Middle Ages is largely anachronistic. It is argued that during the Middle Ages sex acts were written about, whereas in modernity it is sexual identities that are central. According to Foucault, sexuality is an effect of talk about the sexual. (On this, see most recently Carolyn J. Dean, “Redefining Historical Identities: Sexuality, Gender and the Self”, in Psychology and History. Interdisciplinary Explorations, ed. Cristian Tileagă and Jovan Byford [Cambridge: CUP, 2014], 129 – 146). But the semantics of the term sexuality have today been extended to such an extent that there are points of contact between the world of premodern ideas and the conceptualisations of today. See Rüdiger Schnell, Sexualität und Emotionalität in der vormodernen Ehe (Köln: Böhlau, 2002), 41– 52 and 78 – 89.  In the misogynistic and misogamic part of his Disceptatio (1509), Heinrich Ribsch claims that the loss of her own husband’s penis was very painful for a woman (iactura enim penis legittimi magno dolore mulieres afficiuntur). If the husband turned out to be impotent (maritus male mentulatus), a wife would weep on her mother’s shoulder. See Heinrich Ribsch (Rybisch), Disceptatio an uxor sit ducenda in publica disputatione Lipsensi enarrata (Nürnberg: Weissenburger, 1509), fol. A 4v. See also

1 Liutprand of Cremona (920 – ca. 972)

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cical story. The supposed ‘female perspective’ on the affair (registered in her direct speech) is overlaid with the ‘perspective of a textual genre’ that includes misogynistic, or at least androcentric, features. Quite clearly, female needs are transformed discursively here in terms of a particular literary genre: for women, sexual satisfaction is the most important thing in their lives, or in their marriages.⁵ Even if the argument presented by the wife is only a tactical means for achieving the release of her husband, it nonetheless confirms the topos that women are sexually insatiable. The misogyny of farcical narrative is blended into the story, leaving undefined the borderline between the supposed sexual dependency of the wife on the one hand and ‘typical’ female sexuality on the other. Is the wife really fixated on the genitals of her husband, or does she merely pretend to be? The laughter of those present can support either interpretation.⁶ It could be that at the level of the characters the wife’s contention was a skilful move in her efforts to gain the release of her husband, whereas at the level of the author and recipients this female line of argument would be taken by learned clerical readers as confirmation of the widespread topos of the insatiable woman. Hence, Liutprand makes use of a misogynistic topos for the amusement of both himself and his readers.⁷ This is a dual narrative instrumentalisation of gender stereotypes: the woman pretends to be fixated on male genitalia in order to save her husband; the author, for his part, uses this female strategy to give his story a humorous twist. But that does not exhaust the comic potential of the story, since the reduction of connubial sexuality to the functioning of male sexual organs finds support in the New Testament. In 1 Corinthians 7, we find the following: “Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence: and likewise also the wife unto the husband. The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband: and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife.” The wife argues in exactly Historia septem sapientum. Nach der Innsbrucker Handschrift v. J. 1342, ed. Georg Buchner (Erlangen und Leipzig: Deichert, 1889; Reprinted Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1970), 28 and 36: because a wife was not sexually satisfied by her husband, she looked for a lover.  In a French farce (fabliau), the husband’s penis is treated as the most important part of his body for his wife: John du Val, Fabliaux fair and foul (Binghamton, N.Y.: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, University of New York, 1992), 58; see also Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe. Doing unto Others (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), 13.  Vito Fumagalli, Wenn der Himmel sich verdunkelt. Lebensgefühl im Mittelalter (Berlin: Wagenbach 1988), 56, mentions the narrated episode as a historical fact (“In the tenth century a Greek woman made a complaint near Spoleto”). Rather more cautious is Hans-Werner Goetz, Leben im Mittelalter, 3rd ed. (München: Beck, 1987), 60: Liutprand reports a “humorous episode”. See also Enza Colonna, “Figure femminili in Liudprando di Cremona”, Quaderni medievali 14 (1982), 29 – 60 (esp. 43 – 45), who refers to the particular “linguistic register” (“registro linguistico”) of this scene.  Ross Balzaretti, “Liutprand of Cremona’s Sense of Humour”, in Humour, History and Politics in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Guy Halsall (Cambridge: CUP, 2004), 114– 128 (esp. 115 – 121), is of the view that Liutprand invented the story, and that the ‘joke’ lies in how Liutprand plays with gender stereotypes but at the same time transgresses gender norms: the woman is active/the man passive; the woman talks/the man remains silent.

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this way in Liutprand’s text: the sexual parts of the husband belong to her and not to the husband. Even her comment that in the absence of the male genitalia her desire for children could not be fulfilled is a sentiment that finds support in Church writings. These held that the purpose of sexual intercourse in marriage should be limited to the conception of descendants (proles). The writer therefore puts in the mouth of the wife a fundamental principle of Church doctrine regarding sexuality,⁸ but in the context of behaviour that is comedic. In this way, Church doctrine concerning marriage is robbed of its serious and authoritative character, and becomes an instrument of female cunning, something that would have been cause for further amusement on the part of recipients of the text. ⁹ The presentation of this scene is intended, as the author emphasises at the outset, to provoke the laughter of (male) recipients and (consequently) involves misogynistic topoi; thus, it cannot tell us anything about everyday marital relationships in the Middle Ages. Nonetheless, this scene does prompt a substantive question: what is the relationship of love and sexuality in this woman’s marriage? I pointed out above that, for tactical reasons, the woman focuses her speech on the sexual. She is able in this way to persuade the enemy commander and those present of the rectitude of her case. Does sexuality even play a role in the married life of this woman? It is worth taking another look at the sentence in which the author introduces the wife: “a certain woman, inflamed by love for her husband and not a little worried about his members, left the castle enraged, with loosened hair”. Here it is not the wife but the author who is speaking about her concern for her husband’s genitals, and he links this statement with the comment that the wife loves her husband (mariti amore succensa). What are we to make of this amor mariti (‘love of her husband’)? Can this amor mariti be equated with an affectus maritalis, the Church’s definition of marital love as care for each other? I do not think so. The author writes that the wife was inflamed (succensa) by love for her husband. It can thus be assumed that we are dealing here with passionate love. But we cannot tell whether the love of this wife for her husband is based on sexual desire – and her fear that with the loss of her husband’s genitals she will lose the ‘replenishment of her body’ – or whether her love for her husband moves her to try and save him from castration. Are the love and the sexual desire of the wife inextricably combined, or does one follow from the other? It cannot be ruled out that this scene portrays the close connection of love and sexual desire. But since the entire scene is subordinated to the literary aim of the author – to insert an amusing incident into a larger historical

 On the ‘power’ of one spouse over the body of the other, see Charles J. Reid, Jr., Power Over the Body. Equality in the Family. Rights and Domestic Relations in Medieval Canon Law (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2004), 99 – 116.  Of limited use in this context is the study by Claudia Villa, “Antecedenti mediolatini. Liutprando e il riso della corte Ottoniana”, in Passare il tempo. La letteratura del gioco e dell’ intrattenimento dal XII al XVI secolo, ed. Enrico Malato (Roma: Centro Pio Rajna, 1993), 51– 66.

2 Ordericus Vitalis (1075 – ca. 1142)

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account – no conclusions can be drawn from this text regarding marital relationships in the Middle Ages as emotional experiences. The laughter of those present in the text intensifies the laughter of the recipients of the text. The behaviour of the woman in the story is rigorously functionalised with respect to this objective. On the one hand, what the wife says confirms male prejudices about the sexual behaviour of women; on the other, this female figure instrumentalises those male prejudices in order to achieve her own objective, the release of her husband. The wife in our story is a narrative ‘hybrid’.¹⁰ We have here a male joke at the expense of women – one cleric speaks with his text to other clerics – while at the same time a female figure makes use of the male construction of female sexuality for her own ends. This little scene presents a complex mixture of various fields of discourse: (1) clerical misogyny (women want sex and place this above all else); (2) the presentation of a loving wife who, on account of this love, is concerned about the fate of her husband; (3) the ambiguous recognition of female cleverness (is the woman acting on her own behalf, of that of her husband?); (4) the legitimation of a wife’s sexual claims by Church doctrine on marriage (the body of the husband belongs to his wife, and intercourse in marriage is permitted only for the conception of descendants); and (5) a farcical presentation of the story (the aim of the author is to amuse the reader). This specific functional representation of female emotional behaviour does not permit us to reach any unambiguous conclusions regarding the nature of the conjugal love of the wife in this story. The function of the story – to provoke laughter in the reader – prevents us from drawing any empirical conclusions regarding the events described.

2 Ordericus Vitalis (1075 – ca. 1142) In his Church history, the English chronicler Ordericus Vitalis reports for 1066 to 1086 that some Norman wives had demanded of their husbands that they return home at once from the fighting in Britain. They did this, he reports, not on pacifist grounds but because they were consumed by the “fire of sexual passion” (saeva libidinis face). If their husbands did not obey their pleas, “they would take other husbands for themselves” (ipsae sibi alios coniuges procurarent).¹¹ Do we also see here the function of husbands (and of marriage) reduced to the satisfaction of the sexual needs of wives? There seems to be no emotional attachment to the absent husbands. It is not said that the wives missed their husbands emotionally, that they missed their daily  For this reason, it would make no sense to ask, as in Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, whether the emotional state of the woman has changed because of her emotives (emotional expressions).  Ordericus Vitalis, Historia ecclesiastica, ed. and trans. Marjorie Chibnall, Vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 218 – 219 (book IV).

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company and support. If, however, it is only a matter of the satisfaction of sexual desire, the idea that one can swap one husband for another presents itself: that which absent husbands cannot give them, they will get from other men. Sexual satisfaction and emotional relationships seem here to have become detached from each other.¹² The wives’ letter suggests that sexual satisfaction can be found with any other man.¹³ But in this case, and quite distinct from Liutprand’s stance, a fixation on the sexual is vehemently condemned by the medieval chronicler. First, he describes the women from the outset as “abandoned to the fire of sexual desire”; second, he discusses the terrible dilemma in which the husbands now found themselves with respect to their wives’ (selfish) demands. Should they continue to serve their king and risk their wives turning to other men, and so bring shame on their families? Or should they indeed return home, and so keep their wives but fail to observe their fealty? “What could honourable men do if their lascivious wives polluted their beds with adultery and brought indelible shame and dishonour on their offspring?”¹⁴ According to the medieval historiographer, the husbands returned to their lecherous wives (lascivis dominabus suis) in Normandy to satisfy them sexually, but in so doing permanently lost their feoffs.¹⁵ We know nothing about what really happened: whether the Norman wives really did only have their sexual needs in mind, whether their relationship with their husbands really was limited to the sexual dimension, or whether the sexual relationship did have an emotional side after all. All we know is what this medieval cleric sought to convey to his readers. His message is marked by criticism of women who obstructed their husbands in the execution of their knightly duties. The only possible motive that this cleric could imagine for such reprehensible behaviour on the part of the women was available in a topos with which he was familiar: that women were sexually more or less uncontrollable. The event is therefore described from this perspective. Nonetheless, we can deduce from the cleric’s condemnation what an ideal marriage ought to be like: in it sexuality should not be assigned the highest priority. It should rank lower than other obligations (those of feudal knights) and values (of family honour). That sexual desire was not a problem for the absent men, since they had, or procured for themselves, ample opportunity for sexual satisfaction, is

 This perspective comes very close to the view taken by very many treatises of moral theology; see Schnell, Sexualität und Emotionalität, 97– 105 and 117– 135.  Ordericus Vitalis, Historia ecclesiastica, ed. and trans. Chibnall, Vol. 2, 218 – 220 (book IV). See also Didier Lett, “Les espouses dans l’aristocratie anglo-normande des XIe – XIIe siècles, d’après l’Histoire ecclestiastique d’Orderic Vital”, in Le mariage au moyen âge. Actes du colloque de Montferrand 3 mai 1997, ed. Josiane Teyssot (Montferrand: Association “Il etait une fois Montferrand”, 1997), 15 – 27 (26).  Ordericus Vitalis, Historia Ecclesiastica, ed. and trans. Chibnall, Vol. 2, 220 – 221.  Ordericus Vitalis, Historia Ecclesiastica, 220.

2 Ordericus Vitalis (1075 – ca. 1142)

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not mentioned by the chronicler, thus glossing over the patriarchal double standards with respect to morality. This second example also (at first) tells us nothing about sexuality and emotionality in social reality, but acquaints us with a discursive strategy that creates the construct ‘sexuality in marriage’. This text on Church history denounces wives who are incapable of resisting their sexual desires, place their absent husbands in a dilemma as a result, and ultimately threaten to bring shame on house and family. But if we read Ordericus’ account against the grain, against the perspective natural to a clerical chronicler, it might after all allow us some insight into a world beyond the discourse, marked by misogyny, knightly values, and hostility to sexuality, that dominates this text. The strategy of this text achieves its objective – the exposure of wives who are supposedly interested only in their own sexual satisfaction – by, first, entirely bracketing out social reality and, second, passing over competing discourses in silence. Let us assume that these wives had actually written a letter of this kind to their husbands. They would surely not have done so without the express approval of those socially close to them (neighbours and relatives). If such a letter would have resulted in disgrace, dishonour, and malicious gossip, the wives would have refrained from such an action.¹⁶ But a large number of women signed up to what was in effect a community action. In turn, this means the action of the wives found (lay) support that ran counter to the condemnation of the cleric. The text fails to alert us to the social support that the wives will have had. Our text brackets out not only social reality but also other discourses – for instance, that of medicine. During the Middle Ages there was a widespread (medical) belief that for married women (and young widows), a sudden and lasting loss of opportunities for sexual intercourse could lead to serious physical and psychic maladies that might even end in death by suffocation (suffocatio matricis).¹⁷ This idea – that women required sexual intercourse simply for reasons of health, if nothing else, because it drained their surplus bodily fluids – entirely supports the approach taken by these Norman women. They would even have been able to invoke the theological maxim that governed marriage and attributed to spouses rights of disposition over the bodies of their marriage partners (1 Cor. 7:3 – 5).¹⁸ This provided women with the right to ‘use’ the bodies of their husbands.¹⁹ In this way, different discourses in-

 There is no need to discuss here the domination of the idea of honour in the Middle Ages.  See Rüdiger Schnell, “Mittelalter oder Neuzeit? Medizingeschichte und Literaturhistorie. Apologie weiblicher Sexualität in Boccaccios ‘Decameron’”, in Gotes und der werlde hulde. Festschrift für Heinz Rupp zum 70. Geb., ed. Rüdiger Schnell (Bern: Francke, 1989), 240 – 287 (esp. 276 – 278).  As quoted above in relation to Liutprand.  It is for this reason that Canon Law regarding marriage considered whether a wife should accompany a husband who would otherwise be absent on a lengthy trading voyage, while fulfilling feudal obligations, or in imprisonment. Consequently, Ordericus Vitalis considers it necessary to explain in the passage in question, Historia Ecclesiastica, ed. and trans. Chibnall, Vol. 2, 220 – 221, why these

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tersected, so to speak, in the bodies of the women: social approval, medical justification for the satisfaction of female sexual desire, and religiously legitimated promotion of sexual intercourse with spouses on the one hand; and a rejection of the ‘recall action’ on the grounds of moral-theological objections, political obligations, and social standing on the other. The fact that this historiographical account tells us nothing about conjugal emotionality but focuses instead on the sphere of sexual relations is dictated by its aim: to denounce the course of action taken by the women. If emotional ties between spouses had been behind the letter demanding that the husbands return home, the cleric would have had greater difficulty in making his denunciation. For we can find in numerous medieval clerical texts on marriage the promotion of a close and mutual dependency of husband and wife: simply living together (cohabitatio) was one of the most important elements of the Church’s doctrine regarding marriage.²⁰ The way that conjugal ‘sexuality’ is separated from emotional ties is the author’s intention in our example, and does not necessarily reflect a medieval ‘reality’.

3 Conclusions The discussion of both these scenes from medieval chronicles raises important aspects of any historical study of emotions: the relationship between medieval conceptions with respect to a particular emotion (in this case, ‘love’: amor, diligere) and our conceptions of that emotion today; the relationship between discourse and ‘reality’; and the relationships between the body and emotionality, between love and sexual desire, between individual emotion and sociocultural institutions (in this case, that of marriage), and between narrative strategy and gender stereotypes. In both texts, it is possible to study how the construction of emotional sensibilities is linked to particular textual functions. Emotion history is not possible in the absence of historically well-founded interpretive competence. These extracts do not prove the historicity of feelings, ‘only’ the historical nature of representations of feelings. Moreover, in these two medieval passages it is less a matter of the presentation of emotions than of their interpretation and evaluation by the author. This means that mentions or descriptions of emotions are constantly infiltrated by the author’s evaluation of those emotions. The representation of the emo-

wives had not followed their husbands to England – they would not have withstood the sea passage; they were afraid of seeking their husbands in a foreign country. See n20 below.  Petrus Lombardus, Sententiarum libri quatuor (PL 192,521– 962), 915 – 916. (IV 28,3); Dionysius Cartusianus, De doctrina et regulis vitae Christianorum (Opera omnia, vol. 39 [Montreuil: Cartusia S.M. de Pratis, 1910], 497– 572), 536 – 539 (II 7). Antoninus Florentinus, Summa theologica, 4 vols. (Nürnberg: Anton Koberger, 1477– 1479), III 1,21,7, cites in connection with cohabitatio (‘living together’) the widespread doctrine of Canon Law that a wife should even follow her husband into prison or exile so as to ensure that the obligations of marriage were fulfilled.

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tions of figures in the text is subordinated to the author’s own aim of creating particular effects with his text (laughter, sympathy, disappointment, admonition, and so on). Historians of emotion are thus faced with a three-stage phenomenon: with emotions in the everyday world, first of all, which they, second, can however register only in a mediated form (through gestures, facial expressions, or language), as representations of emotions, in other words. (It should also be noted that performances of emotions often function as representations of emotions.) These everyday representations of emotions are, third, governed by the way in which they become part of a literary or historiographical text composed for specific purposes. For in these texts, representations of emotions are set to work in the service of higher-level interests. For this reason, the literary or historical staging of representations of emotions should more properly be called the ‘representation of representations of emotions’.²¹ As we can see with the two passages selected above, we are dealing with the representation and evaluation of emotions according to particular interests. The emotions involved in these texts are hard to place historically since they are doubly mediated. It is possible to make historical sense of the manner in which the emotions depicted are interpreted, or evaluated and instrumentalised, but we cannot do the same for the emotions depicted.²² We need, therefore, to distinguish emotions – representations (or performances) of emotions (by gestures, facial expressions, or language) in the everyday world – from representations of these representations (or performances) of emotions in literary or historiographical texts. Our textual analyses do, nonetheless, permit two statements to be made. First, medieval texts link the sexual interests of wives in their husbands to the word amor. ²³ And second, depending on the function of a text, the sexual interest of wives in their husbands is received with approval or loaded with criticism. The issues that have been raised in this first chapter through the analysis of specific texts will be subjected to systematic analysis in the following chapter. Two questions will be of central concern in the process. What are the objectives of studies that see themselves as contributions to the historical study of emotion? And what theories and methods do they employ in seeking to achieve those objectives? In my view, the current state of research is far from satisfactory.

 See IIIn4.  Caroline Arni, Entzweiungen. Die Krise der Ehe um 1900 (Köln: Böhlau, 2004), 15, emphasises in light of her plentiful and diverse source material, which reflects competing perspectives on the married life of a couple, that one should seek to obtain from the sources not a direct reality but instead a reality that is construed and interpreted, overlaid with social and cultural meaning. Ellinor Forster and Doris Peham express a similar view in “Emotionale Prozesse in konflikthaften Paarbeziehungen des 19. Jahrhunderts. Eine historisch-psychologische Annäherung”, Moderne. Kulturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch 3 (2007), 94– 111.  See IV.2.c.V

II Approaches and Aims Many historical studies of emotion concede that, as an object of research, ‘emotion’ is very hard to pin down, pointing to a lack of clarity about its origins, its nature, and its effects, and to the fact that this slippery phenomenon is accessible only through its representations, or through practices and performances. What follows presents the most commonly cited theses with the aid of which – so they promise – the history of this barely tangible thing can be grasped. To begin with, however, there are two approaches that are often mixed up but need to be clearly distinguished; doing so should sharpen our appreciation of what historical emotion research is really capable of.

1 Emotions in History – History of Emotions Contemporary historical emotion research asserts that all relevant studies have the same goal – to investigate the history of emotions. The impression is created that historical emotion research involves a discipline with a common cognitive aim: the ‘history of emotions’. In fact, however, it involves the blending of two distinct cognitive interests: the question of the role of emotions in history and the question of the history of emotions. The failure to clearly distinguish between these two domains has contributed to confusion in research and is responsible for the fact that very many studies of emotion do not have a clear idea of what they aim to address and thus lack the necessary orientation. The two lines of enquiry, ‘emotions in history’ and ‘history of emotions’, have different prehistories; they generate different cognitive interests, they require different methodological instruments, and they presuppose different concepts of emotion. The ‘emotions in history’ approach originated with the work of historians like Lucien Febvre, co-founder of the Annales school. The idea was to break with a version of historical science that was concerned only with diplomatic activities, with congresses and peace treaties, that assumed that political action had a rational foundation, and that furthermore saw itself as an objective science that excluded all irrationality, resulting in the prominence of wars and the biographies of rulers. Lucien Febvre and Marx Bloch were, by contrast, interested in the history of ordinary people, their festivals, customs, forms of behaviour – in short, their mentalité – and studied (individual and collective) ways of feeling and their impact on human behaviour.¹

 Lucien Febvre, “Une Vue d’Ensemble: Histoire et psychologie”, Encyclopédie française 8 (1938), reprinted in Febvre, Combats pour l’histoire (Paris: Colin, 1953), 207– 220 (esp. 219 – 220; “psychologie historique”); translated in A New Kind of History from the Writings of Febvre, ed. Peter Burke, trans. K. Folca (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973, 1– 11 (“History and Psychology”), here 9 – 11 (“historical psychology”); Lucien Febvre, “Comment reconstituer la vie affective d’autrefois? La sensibilité et https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110692464-004

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Febvre wanted to study the way feelings affect social relations. This approach, which calls itself psychohistory or historical psychology,² examines the effects of individual and collective psychological events on the biography of a person or on the action of social groups.³ It seeks to show that emotions (mentalités, sentiments) have played a significant part in the history of men and women.⁴ This orientation towards people’s inner life in history, as first elaborated by psychohistory, or the history of mentalities, has been adopted by the ‘history of emotions’.⁵ Historians of emotion have absorbed Lucien Febvre, the psychohistorian and historian of mentalities, into their own re-

l’histoire”, Annales d’histoire sociale 3 (Januar–Juni 1941), 5 – 20, translated in A New Kind of History, ed. Burke, 12– 26 (“Sensibility and History. How to Reconstitute the Emotional Life in the Past”). See also André Burguière, “La notion de ‘mentalité’ chez Marc Bloch et Lucien Febvre. Deux conceptions, deux filiations”, Revue du synthèse, 3. ser., 111– 112 (1983), 333 – 348; Stephen D. White, “The Politics of Anger”, in Anger’s Past, ed. Rosenwein, 127– 152 (esp. 127– 129); Plamper, The History of Emotions. An Introduction, 40 – 43; Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy, “Una storia diversa delle emozioni”, Rivista Storica Italiana 128.2 (2016), 481– 520.  Lloyd de Mause, ed., Psychohistory. A Bibliographic Guide (New York: Garland, 1975), already lists 1,300 books and articles. The label ‘psychohistory’ or ‘historical psychology’, of course, subsumes various lines of research; see Schnell, “Historische Emotionsforschung”, 219 – 225; Alexander von Plato, “Geschichte und Psychologie – Oral History und Psychoanalyse. Problemaufriss und Literaturüberblick”, Historical Social Research 29.4 (2004), 79 – 119. In his own text, Foundations of Psychohistory (New York: Creative Roots, 1982), Lloyd de Mause conceived psychohistory as the study of the conscious and unconscious motives of historical action: psychohistory as the science of historical motivation. For a criticism of this approach, see Friedhelm Nyssen and Peter Jüngst, eds., Kritik der Psychohistorie. Anspruch und Grenzen eines psychologischen Paradigmas (Giessen: Psychosozial Verlag, 2003).  See, for example, the study by John F. Benton, Self and Society in Medieval France. The Memoirs of Abbot Guibert of Nogent (1064?–c. 1125), ed. with an Introduction and Notes (New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco and London: Harper Torchbooks, 1970).  See, for example, Hedwig Röckelein, “Psychological History in Germany and its Problems with Obtaining Approval from Historical Science. State of Research-Perspectives”, The Psychohistory Review 27 (1999), 3 – 21; Paul H. Elovitz, “The Successes and Obstacles to the Interdisciplinary Marriage of Psychology and History”, in Psychology and History. Interdisciplinary Explorations, 83 – 108.  John R. Gillis, “From Ritual to Romance. Toward an Alternative History of Love”, in Emotion and Social Change. Toward a New Psychohistory, ed. Carol Z. Stearns and Peter N. Stearns (New York: Holms & Meier, 1988), 87– 121. Here the history of emotions and psychohistory are linked together very closely. See also Gergen, “History and Psychology”. Gergen’s “psychohistorical inquiry” (20) corresponds to the emotional approach taken by historians of emotion. Gergen’s call for psychology and the historical sciences to work together echoes that of Lucien Febvre, “qu’un psychologie historique véritable ne sera possible que par l’accord, negocié en clair, du psychologue et de l’historien”; Febvre, “Histoire et psychologie”, in Febvre, Combats pour l’histoire (Paris: Colin, 1953), 207– 220 (218; English translation in A New Kind of History, ed. Burke, 9: “It is equally obvious that no true historical psychology will be possible without a properly negotiated agreement between psychologists and historians”). Collaboration between psychologists and historians is also proposed by W. Gerrod Parrott, “Psychological Perspectives on Emotion in Groups”, in: Passions, Sympathy and Print Culture. Public Opinion and Emotional Authenticity in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Heather Kerr, David Lemmings, and Robert Phiddian (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 20 – 44.

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search history.⁶ Even today the ‘emotions in history’ approach still asks: what role have emotions played in the history of humanity and in the lives of individual people?⁷ This cognitive interest is common to all the studies of emotion that elevate emotions to the status of significant historical actors, treating them as historical ‘agents’. This promotes emotions to the status of historical subjects. There is a conviction that “emotions themselves shape history”, or that “emotions make history”.⁸ This hypostasisation of emotions suggests that human emotions are independent causal factors that determine the course of human history. The ‘emotions in history’ line of enquiry⁹ could easily stand under the rubric ‘emotions make history’. The object of interest is emotions insofar as they influence the action of individuals or groups, for example in demonstrations, in conflicts between individuals or groups, in social interactions, in rituals. Whereas Lucien Febvre was extremely interested in historical change – and attributed to medieval people a mentality distinct from ours today owing to their impoverished nutritional condi Boquet and Nagy, “Una storia diversa delle emozioni”, 484– 499. A direct line from the histoire de mentalité of the French Annales school to the history of emotions is also drawn by Sturkenboom, “Battlefield Emotions”, 272, and Alain Corbin, Jean-Jacques Courtine and Georges Vigarello, “Introduction générale”, in Histoire des Émotions, t. 1, 5 – 11 (7– 8). Only Barbara Rosenwein distances herself from the approach taken by Lucien Febvre: Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions”, 823.  See, for example, Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History” (my emphasis); Broomhall, “Emotions in the Household”, in Emotions in the Household, ed. Broomhall, 1– 37 (5: subheading “Emotions in History”; Broomhall is looking at emotions in history, and here in particular at the role emotions play in interpersonal household relations; 10: “Where do we find emotions in the past?”).  See World Congress of Historians (2015): “emotions themselves shape history” (see n42 below). Maurice Sartre, “Les Grecs”, in Histoire des Émotions, ed. Corbin, Courtine and Vigarello, t. 1, 17– 63 (21), emphasises that he is interested in “l’émotion comme agent de l’histoire” (“emotion as agent of history”). Rob Boddice, The Science of Sympathy. Morality, Evolution, and Victorian Civilization (Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2016), states “that emotions themselves are causal” and talks of the “power of emotions to make history” (143). Boddice, The History of Emotions, 83, likewise focuses on this aspect: “After all, the historian of emotions does not typically have emotion itself as the end in mind, but rather what emotions do in society” (emphasis in original). To satisfy this cognitive interest, one does not have to prove that emotions themselves go through historical transformation. Among others, Ute Frevert emphasises emotions as causal historical factors: “Angst vor Gefühlen? Die Geschichtsmächtigkeit von Emotionen im 20. Jahrhundert”, in Perspektiven der Gesellschaftsgeschichte, ed. Paul Nolte, Manfred Hettling, Frank-Michael Kuhlemann, and Hans-Walter Schmuhl (München: Beck, 2000), 95 – 111; Susan James, Passion and action, 255 (emotions/affections are said to be “antecedents of action”); Liam Riordan, “Review of Eustace, Passion is the Gale (2008)”, The Journal of American History 95.4 (2009), 1144– 1145; Susan Broomhall, “Introduction. Destroying Order, Structuring Disorder: Gender and Emotion”, in Gender and Emotions, 1– 13 (1 and 5); Cairns and Nelis, “Introduction”, 12 (“It is, however, undeniable that emotions are powerful historical forces”).  An Emotions in History series began publication with Oxford University Press in 2014, edited by Ute Frevert and Thomas Dixon. Ute Frevert herself gave one of her publications the title Emotions in History (2011).

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tions¹⁰ – current studies in the ‘emotions in history’ approach barely deal with emotional change. Instead, these studies – even though their authors do not realise it – demonstrate simply that emotions are an important element in history. The ‘history of emotions’ line of enquiry pursues a quite different aim. It originated in the 1980s, much later than the ‘emotions in history’ approach. It asks whether emotions have undergone historical change (or, similarly, whether one particular emotion or collection of emotions has undergone changes in the course of several centuries). These historical emotional changes are read out of historical lexical changes, or out of the changed evaluation of emotions, or out of changes in emotional styles or the expression of emotion, or out of the introduction of new names for emotions, among other things.¹¹ This therefore involves a different problem and different cognitive objects. Unlike the earlier approach, this one did not develop out of a reaction to a view of history that dealt only in terms of constitutions, institutions, rationality, and the like; instead, it sees itself as a reaction to universalistic and biological conceptions of emotions.¹² Adherents of this project are convinced that human emotions have altered during the course of history in line with changes in social relationships. This line of enquiry is shaped by the ideas of social constructivism.¹³ According to this perspective, human feelings are not eternally fixed, but shaped socially and culturally. The credo of this approach is not that ‘emotions make history’, as in the ‘emotions in history’ line, but rather that ‘emotions have a history’.¹⁴ This research interest is linked to resistance to the dominance of the dis-

 Febvre, “Une Vue d’Ensemble. Histoire et Psychologie” (1938), reprinted in: Febvre, Combats pour l’histore, 207– 220 (217– 218; A New Kind of History, ed. Burke, 9).  See II.2.  See, for example, Philippa Maddern, Joanne McEwan, and Anne Scott, “Introduction: Performing Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Worlds”, in Performing Emotions in Early Europe, ed. Maddern, McEwan, and Scott (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), xiii – xxx (xv): “We argue that emotions are not universal or ahistorical.”  Plamper summarises the nature–culture argument in his book The History of Emotions: An Introduction. The book is explicitly devoted (33) to this “key question”: do feelings have a history? Consequently, Plamper discusses in detail the social constructivist approaches on the one hand (75 – 146), and on the other the findings and theses of emotion research conducted in the natural sciences (147– 250). For a discussion of social constructivism and its influence on emotion research by historians, see the critical remarks in Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 23 – 29, 124– 144, 197– 258 and 657– 658. See also the special issue “Social-Constructionist Approaches to Emotion” in Emotion Review 4.3 (2012).  This aim is emphasised by Anja Laukötter on the homepage of the emotion project of the Max Planck Institut für Bildungsforschung. She states that “emotions have a history”; (accessed 2 January 2018). Nonetheless, in its description of the related research domains the editorial deals not with the historical change of emotions but rather with the effectivity of ‘emotions in history’.

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course in the natural sciences that attributes to feelings a transcendent and transcultural biological foundation.¹⁵ It is easy to demonstrate that the two approaches coexist independently of each other and can continue to do so. The effects of emotions in history can be made plausible without at the same time believing that emotions must have changed in the course of human history. Someone can be convinced of the fact that emotions have played an important role in human history without having to be of the view, or having to demonstrate, that those emotions have changed over time.¹⁶ The focus on the historical force of emotions (‘emotions in history’) is surprising, since one would have thought that a social constructivist approach would propose that it was discourses, conceptions of value and of social standards of behaviour, that move people to this or that kind of behaviour.¹⁷ It is often not emotions or feelings that shape the course taken by a person’s life or the behaviour of a group, but temporally specific ideas of emotions and feelings woven into diverse discourses.¹⁸ The anthropologist Catherine A. Lutz shares this view: she considers that it is not emotions but rather discourses of emotion that exercise power.¹⁹ There is another reason why the formula ‘emotions make history’ is a source of difficulty. Current emotion research seeks to disprove the traditional dichotomy of reason and feeling, constantly referring to principles drawn from cognitive psychology or from the philosophy of emotions that support the idea that feelings and judgements are closely related (in appraisal theory, for instance).²⁰ The insistent  Hence, for example, Mullaney, The Reformation of Emotions, 17– 22, rejects the view that emotions are transcendent and transcultural, and instead asks: “What did it feel like, to be an Elizabethan?” (17 and 23). Rob Boddice, “The affective turn”, 150 – 153, sees the prime thrust of current historical emotion research in efforts to refute conceptions of the naturally timeless quality of emotions promoted in the natural sciences.  It is evident that many nineteenth- and twentieth-century studies of emotions simply described emotional states of mind, without asking whether they might also have arisen in earlier centuries. These studies are thus mainly concerned with ‘emotions in history’ rather than the ‘history of emotions’. On this, see also Histoire des Émotions, Bd. 3 (2017).  This position is clearly stated by Mary A. Favret, “Whose Battlefield Emotion?”, in Battlefield Emotions 1500 – 1800, 197– 204 (199 – 200: whether or not the emotional experiences described by late eighteenth-century public propaganda or by soldiers were authentic at the time was irrelevant, and of decisive importance instead was the circulation in public discourse of such emotions, which even influenced the most personal forms of writing: letters and diaries. In this approach, the discourse was the motivating force).  Andreas Bähr, “Die Furcht der Frühen Neuzeit. Paradigmen, Hintergründe und Perspektiven einer Kontroverse”, Historische Anthropologie 16.2 (2008), 291– 308; Bähr, Furcht und Furchtlosigkeit (Bähr’s argument is that fear played a great role in the seventeenth century, but as a problem, not as a phenomenon; Bähr, ibid, 17); Andreas Bähr, “Magical Swords and Heavenly Weapons: Battlefield Fear(lessness) in the Seventeenth Century”, in Battlefield Emotions 1500 – 1800, 49 – 69.  Catherine A. Lutz, “Feminist Emotions”, in Power and Self, ed. Jeannette Marie Mageo (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), 194– 215 (197).  Klaus R. Scherer, “Appraisal Theory”, in Handbook of Cognition and Emotion, ed. Tim Dalgleish and Mick J. Power (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1999), 637– 663; Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals

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claim of historical emotion research that emotions have influenced historical processes implies a contrast that such research actually hopes to overcome: that it is not human rationality that determines human behaviour, as hitherto thought, but instead emotions. Put this way, however, the formulation ‘emotions make history’ threatens to contradict the intentions of historical emotion research.²¹ Using sympathy/compassion/pity as an example, it can be shown that it is not emotions that make history, but rather considerations prompted by the emotion of sympathy/compassion/pity.²² Countless people are, after all, seized by sympathy/ compassion/pity but do not act on it. Why does sympathy/compassion/pity lead one person to come to the assistance of someone, while others fail to act in this way? Quite clearly, the emotion of sympathy/compassion/pity is insufficient. It does not make history by itself. There have to be other factors at play: for example, whether someone is to blame for their fall into poverty, or the national or regional origin of a person who has experienced a major setback. The formula ‘emotions have a history’ is compatible with social constructivist premises. By contrast, the formula ‘emotions make history’ implies a conception of history that is not anticipated by social constructivist assumptions. The formula is not compatible with practice theory or with theories of performativity either. According to the former, emotions are not something that one possesses but rather some-

of Thought. The Intelligence of Emotions, eighth printing (Cambridge: CUP, 2008), representing judgment theory. See also Sabine A. Döring, ed., Philosophie der Gefühle (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2009).  This tendency is reinforced by the affective turn that the Berlin SFB 1171 project has identified; see n33. It is nonetheless true that historical emotion research seeks to overcome the long-established conception that emotion and rationality are competing determinants of human behaviour through the use of integrative models (from appraisal theory, for example); see Patrick Becker, “Rationalisierungen des Gefühls – Emotionalisierungen der Vernunft. Zum Umgang mit Emotionen in der Gegenwartsgesellschaft”, Moderne. Kulturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch 3 (2007), 63 – 78 (72).  Christoph Demmerling and Hilge Landweer, Philosophie der Gefühle. Von Achtung bis Zorn (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2007), 184– 188; Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 608 – 619. This seems also to be recognised by Suski, “Humanitarianism as a Politics of Emotion”, in Emotions Matter, 124– 136 (132 on the complex relationship between thinking and feeling). Keith Oatley, Best Laid Schemes: The Psychology of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 98, has established that emotions are prompted not directly by an event but by the evaluation of that event. This was already how Cicero defined it – Tusculan disputations, ed. and trans. E. King (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), IV 7,14: “But all disorders are, they [the Stoics] think, due to judgment and belief” (Sed omnes perturbationes iudicio censent fieri et opinione). See also Epictetus (50 – 130 n.Chr.), Discourses, Fragments, Handbook. A new trans. Robin Hard (Oxford: OUP, 2014), 288 (Handbook 5: “It isn’t the things themselves that disturb people, but the judgement that they form about them”). Thomas Aquinas, , Summa Theologiae, vol. 19, 40 (I 2 q. 24 art. 3), distinguishes between the mere feeling of sympathy (passio misericordiae) and the rational evaluation of a situation (judicium rationis). In modern appraisal theory, as in Cicero, emotions are identified with value judgements: “emotions are appraisals and value judgments”; Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 4. See also Power and Dalgleish, Cognition and Emotion, below Vln78.

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thing that one does. People ‘do’ emotions; emotions themselves do not ‘do’ anything.²³ Current work in historical emotion research often fails to separate the two approaches, the ‘history of emotions’ and ‘emotions in history’.²⁴ This is apparent, for instance, if a study presents its aim as being to demonstrate that one or more emotions have undergone historical change, but ultimately only shows that emotions have played a role in one particular situation, city, or community.²⁵ These mixed objectives are partly responsible for the lack of clarity in current research: well-founded criticism of one project (the history of emotions) is met by citing the virtues of the other (emotions in history). The objection that it is virtually impossible to demonstrate the historical change of an emotion²⁶ is met with the argument that it cannot be denied that emotions have played a major role in the history of humanity (who would want to deny that!).²⁷ But criticism of the methodological shortcomings of an enterprise seeking to demonstrate the historicity of one emotion, or a set of emotions, from antiquity to modernity (‘history of emotions’)²⁸ cannot be rebutted by ar Characteristic of this approach is the book title Performing Emotions, ed. Jarzebowski and Kwaschik; Performing Emotions in Early Europe, ed. Philippa Maddern, Joanne McEwan, and Anne M. Scott (Turnholt: Brepols, 2018).  By contrast, a clear distinction is made in Johannes F. Lehmann, “Geschichte der Gefühle. Wissensgeschichte, Begriffsgeschichte, Diskursgeschichte”, in Handbuch Literatur & Emotionen, 141– 146.  In the introduction to the impressive three-volume work Histoire des Émotions, ed. Corbin, Courtine and Vigarello (Paris: Seuil 2016 – 2017), 5 – 11 (9), the editors make clear that they do not just intend to present a synthesis of previous work in emotional history, but that they instead want to “follow, step by step, the presence of emotion in history” (“suivre pas à pas la présence de l’émotion dans l’histoire”; my emphasis), that is, to demonstrate the influence of emotion in every culture. The fact that many contributions to this Histoire des Émotions subscribe to the ‘emotions in history’ approach consequently leads the reader to repeatedly ask the same question: is the historicity of emotions really being described here? Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy, Medieval Sensibilities. A History of Emotions in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 5, want to keep both perspectives in view: “that the emotions have a role within history” and “that they themselves have a history”. But the first of these is clearly dominant (248 – 250).  This applies, for example, to Lewis and Stearns, “Introduction”, 7: “How can we know what people in the past felt? […] If people in the past did not write about particular emotions, does this mean they did not experience them?” Lewis and Stearns concede that it is “difficult, if not impossible” for historians to answer these questions (7), acknowledging that even the introduction of ‘emotionology’ can provide us only with approximations of real emotional experience.  Rosenwein and Cristiani, What is the History of Emotions?, 123, consider that they can refute the objections raised in Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, with respect to the ‘history of emotions’ approach by referring to the ‘emotions in history’ approach. They argue that it is obvious that emotions affected the behaviour of people in earlier periods as well (‘emotions in history’). Whereas Schnell’s critical questions were directed at the ‘history of emotions’ approach, and above all at its principal thesis that ‘emotions have a history’, Rosenwein and Cristiani respond with arguments drawn from the ‘emotions in history’ approach with its own principal thesis that ‘emotions make history’. But the one project can neither support nor refute the other.  Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, points repeatedly to the difficulties of demonstrating the historicity of feelings. Rosenwein and Cristiani, What is the History of Emotions?, 123, assert conse-

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guing that emotionally conditioned action has played a significant role in human history and continues to do so (‘emotions in history’). The two lines of enquiry pursue different objectives.²⁹ The ‘history of emotions’ approach is concerned with the history of emotions, that is, with possible historical changes in emotional experiences, dispositions, or rituals; with emotions specific to a particular period or ideas of emotions specific to a particular period; and with signs of (possible) emotions specific to a particular period. The ‘emotions in history’ approach, by contrast, is concerned with the supposed effects of putative emotions on historically ascertainable phenomena (treaties, wars, uprisings, demonstrations, lynch law, suicide, and so on). The ‘emotions in history’ approach has recently found additional support from two new research tendencies. First, there has been a turn away from histories of individual emotions and towards a focus on the history of emotions. ³⁰ This tendency has arisen from the insight that very many emotions are in fact sets of emotions, or mixtures of emotions, and that many affective circumstances cannot be exactly defined.³¹ Second, in Germany a thematically distinct affective turn has taken place alongside the emotional turn.³² In 2016 a new research centre was established at Berlin’s Free University (Sonderforschungsbereich [SFB] 1171), dealing with ‘affective societies’ and ‘affective studies’, and financed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).³³ The objective here is to pursue research on the power of feelings in politics, the media, and social movements. The aim is to establish the role played quently that Schnell’s book claims “emotions exist only in the living”. But I would never seek to claim any such nonsense. Rosenwein and Cristiani confuse the levels of object and of observer. Someone who doubts that emotion historians can prove the historicity of emotions (the level of the observer) does not necessarily thereby call into question the existence of emotions (the level of the object). The discussion of basic questions in historical emotion research can be extremely muddled at times.  Rosenwein and Cristiani, What is the History of Emotions?, constantly emphasise that emotions play a major role in the lives and coexistence of people (emotions in history). Proving this is unlikely to be difficult. But a quite different task faces anyone who seeks to establish whether particular emotions, or sets of emotions, have changed over the course of several centuries.  See VI.4.  Like numerous other emotion historians, Mullaney, The Reformation of Emotions, simply asserts that the lives of people are marked by feelings, referring to “affective ties”, “affective bonds”, “affective landscapes”, and “structures of feeling” (179). The nature of the individual emotions or feelings involved is not discussed; it may not be possible to identify them anyway.  And this itself leads to some confusion, since in the anglophone world the expression ‘affective turn’ is used to mean the same thing as the ‘emotional turn’. Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley, eds., The Affective Turn. Theorizing the Social (Durham and New York: Duke University Press, 2007); Rob Boddice, “The affective turn”; David Lemmings and Ann Brooks, “The Emotional Turn in the Humanities and Social Sciences”, in: Emotions and Social Change. Historical and Sociological Perspectives, ed. Lemmings and Brooks (New York and London: Routledge, 2014), 3 – 18. In Stephanie Trigg, “Introduction: Emotional Histories”, “affective turn” and “emotional turn” are used interchangeably but at the same time marked off from each other (6 – 8), since Trigg distinguishes affects (preconscious processes of the body) from emotions (cognitive processes).  (accessed 12 December 2017).

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by affect and feelings in societies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. What influence do they have on the rules of public communication, on the behaviour of political actors, on the creation of power and social structures? To what extent do affect and emotion contribute to the impression of social stability and security, and to what extent do they provoke insecurity, threatening situations, and exclusion? This research is much closer to the ‘emotions in history’ approach than it is to the ‘history of emotions’ approach.

2 Histories of Emotion. Objects and Aims Having distinguished two distinct areas of interest that are mixed up in current historical emotion research, we now turn to the ‘history of emotions’ approach and consider the objects and cognitive interests that characterise it. It is, of course, hardly possible to provide an overview of current work on the historicity of emotions if all relevant work in philosophy, art history, sociology, religious studies, ethnology, literary studies, and anthropology is to be included. The sheer variety of issues investigated by these disciplines would overwhelm any one individual: theories of affect from Aristotle through Thomas Aquinas to Descartes and Kant; the political implications of anxiety in the sixteenth century, or of empathy in the nineteenth; the iconographical expression of grief in the medieval period and in modernity; the supposed historical transformation of the semantics of terms relevant to emotion in premodern times; the literary enactment of wonder or disgust in modernity; ninth- and tenth-century theories regarding the affective impact of music; the emotional effects of the media in the twentieth century; the function of emotions in sustaining a community in the sixth century; the significance of emotions for the formation of subjectivity in the eighteenth century; or the historically specific relations of body and emotion in early Christianity. The list could easily be extended. The question arises as to whether such disparate studies share a common cognitive interest. Is there anything that brings together all this work devoted to the emotional, or affective, turn? It might be thought that the common aim of historical emotion studies is to demonstrate the existence of the historical transformation of emotions. But all these emotion studies work with widely different conceptions of what emotions actually are. The objects of these studies are also extremely diverse. For some emotion historians, emotions are inner, subjective feelings. Others dispute the existence of such inner feelings – and identify emotions with practices or with actions.³⁴ Still others equate emotions with social interactions.³⁵ Another group of emotion historians

 See nn83 – 84, II.3.d.  Michael Boiger and Batja Mesquita, “The Construction of Emotion in Interactions, Relationships, and Cultures”, Emotions Review 4.3 (2012), 221– 229; Hannelore Weber, “What is Social in a Social-

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are of the view that emotions can be identified in the values espoused by a person or in their cognitive reactions. All of these emotion historians proclaim emotions to be their object of research, but they study quite different things. In this way, a gap opens up in historical emotion research. On the one hand, the most recent trend is to cease talking about inner feelings and to investigate instead externally ascertainable phenomena relevant to emotions (practices, performances, acts, emotional expressions); on the other hand, the project of examining human feelings retains its attraction. That attraction would certainly seem to be evidenced by a number of studies that include the word feeling in their title: A History of Feelings (Rob Boddice, 2019), Spaces for Feeling (ed. Susan Broomhall, 2015), Generations of Feeling (Barbara Rosenwein, 2016), Feeling like Saints. Lollard Writings after Wycliff (ed. Fiona Somerset, 2014), and Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Cultural Expression (ed. Susan McClary, 2012). It is surprising that these studies cover feelings in premodernity, given the widespread view that today’s semantics of feeling date from the late eighteenth century at the earliest. And there is a second difficulty. Anyone who maintains that emotions are what all studies of emotion have in common ignores the point already made in the introduction to this book: that emotion historians work not directly with emotions but instead with texts and images that deal with emotion or express emotion – these are the primary sources. If, for example, someone wishes to study the affective impact of late medieval texts about the Passion of Christ on female readers, their first point of contact is with texts, not emotions. Anyone who wants to get to the bottom of Mona Lisa’s smile in Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting has to study the drawing techniques and physiognomic sketches of the Italian master, not emotions. The addressee of a love letter written around 1900 will analyse its wording to determine whether its sender really loves her. She will study not emotions but linguistic properties. But historians of emotion seem to be more interested in emotions than in the way in which texts and images function. The sheer disparity of different lines of emotion research indicates, finally, that quite different meanings can be read into the emotional turn. The impression is given that emotions, or emotional experiences, are the object of attention; but in reality, emotion studies often provide quite traditional analyses of historical discourses.³⁶ In 2014 the first issue of the new Australian journal Cerae. An Australian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies was devoted to “emotions in history”, but the individual contributions demonstrate no common understanding or common ap-

Constructionist View on Emotion?”, Emotion Review 4.3 (2012), 234– 235 (Weber argues for a variant of social constructivism specific to emotions).  Going by its title, the collection Emotionen in Mittelalter und Renaissance, ed. Christoph Kann (2014), promises insights into emotional experiences, but it actually offers – in a tried and tested manner – analyses of discourses of emotion (Thomas Aquinas, Nicolaus Cusanus), social evaluations of emotions, and literary representations of emotion. These are certainly not the insights that those who promoted the emotional turn expected.

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proach. They deal with early modern discourses of meteorology and medicine, evaluations of the relationship between passion and reason, the theological discourse about peasant violence in the works of a medieval historiographer, the musicological discourse about the expression of feelings through harp-playing in the eighteenth century, the connection between character and emotion in the figure of a female historical protagonist of a novel published in 2009, and the emotional experience of melancholy as experienced and written about by the English poet and philosopher Henry More in the seventeenth century. It is not emotions as subjective experiences that are central to this issue, but instead medical, philosophical, and moral-theological discourses about emotion. Hence, the focus of analysis has to be on words about emotions, not emotions as such. Historical discourses on affect/emotions/feelings have, of course, been the object of scholarly attention for over a hundred years. ³⁷ When it comes to philosophy and the study of literature, it would be more accurate to call the so-called emotional turn a ‘return’.³⁸ It is true that before the onset of the emotional turn, only specialists took an interest in those areas of intellectual endeavour relevant to the emotions. Today, by contrast, editors of periodicals, publishers, and those making grant applications are convinced that there is a broad interest in anything to do with historical discourses on affect/emotions/passions. Where does this new interest come from?³⁹ It would not be wrong to assume that it has to do with the rising popular interest, since the 1980s, in what (other) people think and feel – an interest that is fed and guided  To name just a selection: Franz Morgott, Die Theorie der Gefühle im System des heilgen Thomas (Eichstätt: Bischöfliches Lyzeum, 1864). Bolesław Domański, Die Psychologie des Nemesius, Münster: Aschendorff, 1900); Harry Norman Gardiner, “The Psychology of the Affections in Plato and Aristotle. II. Aristotle”, The Philosophical Review 28 (1910), 1– 26; Matthias Meier, Die Lehre des Thomas von Aquino ‘De passionibus animae’ in quellenanalytischer Darstellung (Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters 11,2) (Münster: Aschendorff, 1912); Karl Bernecker, Kritische Darstellung der Geschichte des Affektbegriffs von Descartes zur Gegenwart (Berlin: Godemann, 1915); Erhard Lommatzsch, “Darstellung von Trauer und Schmerz in der altfranzösischen Literatur”, Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 43 (1923), 20 – 67 (also on gestures); Erwin Wendt, Sentimentales in der deutschen Epik des 13. Jahrhunderts, Diss. Freiburg i.Br. 1929; Hannah Arendt, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin, Diss. Heidelberg 1929; Paul Kluckhohn, Die Auffassung der Liebe in der Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts und in der deutschen Romantik (Halle a. d.Saale: Niemeyer, 1922; 3rd ed. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1966); Harry Norman Gardiner, R.C.M. Metcalf and John G. Beebe-Center, Feeling and Emotion. A History of Theories (Westport, Conn.: American Book Co., 1937; Reprint 1975; this volume provides a survey from antiquity to the nineteenth century); Auerbach, “Passio als Leidenschaft” (s. Vn85); Raymond Lebègue, “La sensibilité dans les lettres d’amour au XVIIe siècle”, Cahiers de l’Association Internationale des Études Françaises 11 (1959), 77– 85.  Von Koppelfels and Zumbusch, “Einleitung”, 17. The sociologist Katharina Scherke also talks of an “emotional return” on the grounds that since antiquity there have been periods when the issue of emotion commanded significant scholarly attention; “Emotionen in aller Munde? Zum Wandel wissenschaftlicher Interessen”, Moderne. Kulturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch 3 (2007), 19 – 33 (19 – 20).  A similar development can be seen in art history. Iconographers have for decades studied the emotional significance of gestures, facial expressions, and posture in sculpture and painting. But now the impression is given that art history has discovered an entirely new field.

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by the media. ‘Outing oneself’ has become a new medial genre and demonstrates a publicly managed curiosity about the intimate life of persons one does not in fact know. Historical emotion research owes the generous financial support it receives for its projects to the widespread assumption⁴⁰ that historical studies of emotion allow us insight into the ‘inner’ lives of people living in past epochs, hence enabling us not only to understand their behaviour and thought but also to create a greater sense of ‘closeness’ to them.⁴¹ From that we might expect, on the one hand, to gain an understanding of the historical basis of our own feelings and, on the other hand, to identify what is specifically novel in the emotional reactions of modernity. Panel 4 at the 2015 meeting of the World Congress of Historians in Jinan, China, discussed the historicity of emotions. The panel was announced as follows: Because the history of emotions is a relatively new field, its methodologies and theoretical basis are still in a state of developmental flux. One of the most fundamental questions actually concerns the subject of our study: the internal feelings of individuals (which may be difficult to deduce accurately from historical records); the outward and communal expressions of such feelings, including the ‘emotion work’ they perform; past theories and concepts of emotion (essentially an intellectual history); social norms and regulation of emotion.⁴²

It is remarkable that, although it is later noted that “the former distinction between inner and outer emotions” has been superseded by the theory of praxis, the aim of historical emotion research is still stated to be the study of internal feelings. The emotional turn exists because of an expectation that we might learn something about the inner feelings of our predecessors. Does historical emotion research fulfil these expectations? I find it especially remarkable that the World Congress stated in its announcement that the study of earlier conceptions of emotion was really the object of “intellectual history” (Geistesgeschichte). This amounts to an admission that much of the domain of current emotion research – theories of emotion in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and early modernity – is in fact very traditional, the difference being that it presents itself no longer as intellectual history but instead under the new name of emotion history.⁴³ And in fact, very many recent books that belong to the tradition of intellectual history have titles that suggest they are part of the emotional turn.⁴⁴

 See Erin Sullivan, “The History of Emotions: Past, Present, Future”, Cultural History 2.1 (2013), 93 – 102 (94– 95) (DOI: 10.3366/cult.2013.0034).  Stephanie Trigg, “Introduction: Emotional Histories”, 4, notes that this “human desire” to know what other people experience emotionally is an important motivating factor in the emotional turn.  (accessed 2 January 2018).  A recent example is that of Rosenwein, Generations of feeling. A History of Emotions (2016). Both title and subtitle suggest that this is a study of feelings, or of emotions in the sense of emotional ex-

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Another example, representative of many others, is the collection Reading the Early Modern Passions (2004).⁴⁵ The book’s title and introduction suggest that the contributions will examine the particular characteristics of early modern passions/ emotions. But at the same time, the introduction informs the reader that the collection seeks “[to outline] the intellectual history of the emotions”.⁴⁶ The book’s title promises to present material relating to passions/emotions, and so is directed at the expectations aroused by the emotional turn. But the actual content of the book is entirely in the mould of traditional intellectual history.⁴⁷

periences. But instead, the approach taken is entirely in the tradition of intellectual history, dealing with concepts and the meanings of emotion words. Anyone who might, for example, care to look at older studies of Thomas Aquinas’ doctrine of passiones animae will not find anything substantively different from Rosenwein’s presentation (Generations of Feeling, 144– 168). Rosenwein’s discourse history belongs not to the emotional turn but instead to traditional intellectual history. Rosenwein and Cristiani, What is the History of Emotions?, 28 and 132 n. 4, do contend that Rosenwein’s Generations of Feeling integrates “theories of emotions with ‘lived’ emotions”. But there is nothing about “lived emotions” in Rosenwein’s Generations of Feeling.  See, for example, David Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks. Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), dealing with “concepts of emotions”: anger, satisfaction, shame, and envy, among others; Knuuttila, Emotions; Dixon, From Passions to Emotions; Boquet, L’ordre de l’affect au moyen âge; Daniel Gross, The Secret History of Emotions. From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Jared Poley, Devil’s Riches: A Modern History of Greed (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016). Martha Tomhave Blauvelt, “Review of Nicole Eustace, Passion is the Gale (2008)”, American Historical Review 113.5 (2008), 1528 – 1529 (1529), states that Eustace’s study should be placed “in the new history of emotion”, “but it is equally grounded in the older history of ideas”. Raphaële Garrod’s essay, “Conceptual Eclecticism and Ethical Prescription in Early Modern Jesuit Discourses about Affects: Suárez and Caussin on Maternal Love”, in Ordering Emotions in Europe, 180 – 196, deals explicitly with the “intellectual history” of maternal love (180 – 181), but the piece is published in a volume that presents itself as a contribution to emotion history. In the collection edited by Michael Champion and Andrew Lynch, Understanding Emotions in Early Europe, which aligns itself with the emotional turn, there are four contributions that appear under the heading “Intellectual Traditions”. They do indeed belong to intellectual history. Spencer E. Young, “Avarice, Emotions, and the Family in Thirteenth-Century Moral Discourse”, in Ordering Emotions in Europe, 69 – 84, studies, in the traditional manner of intellectual history, a (moral) discourse, but sees the study as a contribution to the “history of emotions in the Middle Ages” (70). Naama Cohen-Hanegbi and Piroska Nagy, “Pleasure in the Middle Ages. An Introduction”, in Pleasure in the Middle Ages, ed. Chohen-Hanegbi and Nagy (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), xi – xxiii (xvii), concede that many recent studies of emotion belong instead to “cultural and intellectual history”. This assessment applies to most of the contributions in their collection, which deal with attitudes, reflections, norms, discourses, viewpoints, understandings, and different approaches to pleasure (in medicine, theology, literature).  Reading the Early Modern Passions, ed. Paster, Rowe, and Floyd-Wilson.  Paster, Rowe, and Floyd-Wilson, “Introduction: Reading the Early Modern Passions”, 8.  This is also true of the collection Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture, ed. Brian Cummings and Freya Sierhuis (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), which contains many contributions to intellectual history written from the perspective of history and philosophy. Cummings and Sierhuis, “Introduction”, in ibid., 1– 9 (1– 3), also argue that “the field of intellectual history” is itself part of the affective turn simply because intellectual history also concerns itself with passions.

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The following discrepancy is especially striking. In her monograph Emotions in History (2011), Ute Frevert presents the supposed historical sequence of acedia, melancholia, and depression as an object of emotion history.⁴⁸ But Frevert’s actual work involves only the history of discourses. In his 2011 study, Werner Post dealt with the same topic from the same point of view as Frevert, but called his work what it actually was: a study explicitly located in intellectual history.⁴⁹ Because entirely traditional studies now appear packaged as contributions to the emotional turn,⁵⁰ it is extremely difficult to establish a new cognitive interest shared across historical emotion research. Given the very unclear situation, it would help if future studies published in this area adopted a clear position on three basic questions that could offer orientation in an otherwise confused domain. These questions are (a) what is the object of a study of emotion,⁵¹ (b) what is the cognitive interest of a study of emotion, and (c) with what methods and theories does a study of emotion seek to obtain the knowledge that it seeks?

a What is the Object of a Study of Emotion? Instead of constantly talking about emotions as the object of research and using the word emotion in the title of a book, the actual object should be named in an appropriate and precise way. This is, for example, what Susanna Morton Braund and Christopher Gill do in their collection entitled The Passions in Roman Thought and Literature (1997).⁵² They state that the book deals with the evaluation of emotions, and they do not seek to give the impression that it deals with emotional experiences. This is also true of the volume edited by Karl A. E. Enenkel and Anita Traninger, Discourses of Anger in the Early Modern Period (2015). This collection deals not with emotions but instead with “perceptions and expressions of anger in the early modern period by describing and analysing the specific notions of anger that were brought about by discourses such as law, theology, politics and diplomacy, medicine, the

 Frevert, Emotions in History, 31– 36.  Post, Acedia – Das Laster der Trägheit. Post’s study appeared as volume 12 in the Forschungen zur europäischen Geistesgeschichte (Studies in European Intellectual History) series. See also VIn34 below.  Marco Menin, “‘Who Will Write the History of Tears?’ History of Ideas and History of Emotions from Eighteenth-Century France to the Present”, History of European Ideas 40.4 (2014), 516 – 532, is, by contrast, of the view that the ‘history of emotions’ and the ‘history of ideas’ (in, for example, the moral-philosophical evaluation of tears) follow separate paths. He therefore argues for collaboration between these two research trends. In my view, these two trends have long been muddled together.  See Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, chap. 2.  Susanna Morton Braund and Christopher Gill, eds., The Passions in Roman Thought and Literature (Cambridge: CUP, 1997).

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arts, and literature”;⁵³ and “the contributions converge in the aim of mapping out the discursive networks in which anger featured and how they all generated their own version, assessment, and semantics of anger”.⁵⁴ In this volume, the emphasis is on the history of words and discourse.⁵⁵ In historical emotion research, the transformation of discourses about emotion is constantly mistaken for the transformation of emotions. Emotion historians say that their object is emotions, but they then proceed to study discourses about emotions.⁵⁶ This uniform use of the word emotions to designate a research object implies a common aim that does not exist, for many historical emotion studies deal not with emotions but with conceptions of emotion.⁵⁷ It would be helpful if the titles of studies made clear what their real object is.⁵⁸ Very many publications that believe they

 Enenkel and Traninger, “Introduction”, 1– 15 (1).  Enenkel and Traninger, “Introduction”, 6. This collection presents the history of discourses, not emotion history, and so belongs to the field of intellectual history.  The title of Stedman’s book is appropriate: Stemming the Torrent. Expression and Emotion in the Victorian Discourses on Emotions, 1830 – 1872. And the title of Peter King, “Emotions in Medieval Thought”, in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy, ed. Peter Goldie (Oxford: OUP, 2010), 107– 187, is also informative.  See, for example, Angelos Chaniotis and Pierre Ducrey, “Approaching Emotions in Greek and Roman History and Culture”, in Unveiling Emotions II. Emotions in Greece and Rome: Texts, Images, Material Culture, ed. Angelos Chaniotis (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2013), 9 – 14. But they concede that they have no direct access to emotional experiences in antiquity. So they study “the manifestation of emotions”, “representations and displays”, evaluations of emotions, the means “which were used for the arousal of emotions”, and also “emotional norms”, together with the concealment and suppression of emotions (11).  David Konstan and N. Keith Rutter, “Introduction”, in Envy, Spite and Jealousy. The Rivalrous Emotions in Ancient Greece, ed. Konstan and Rutter (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 1– 6, claim that they will study “emotions” (1– 2). But their contributors address “attitudes towards emotions” (1), “concepts” (3), “conceptions” (3), “notions” and “ideas of jealousy” (21). The title of the introductory volume Early modern emotions. An Introduction, ed. Broomhall (2017), promises to provide material on emotional experiences during the early modern period. But what we get in the volume is almost exclusively discourses about emotions, concepts of emotion, evaluations of emotions, together with sources, places, and ages relevant to emotions. It is much the same for the collection Emotions, Passions, and Power in Renaissance Italy (2015). Many of the contributions fail to address the emotions and passions named in the title, but deal in a quite traditional manner with political events, theories of emotion, political norms, medical tracts and discourse traditions. The collection Shame between Punishment and Penance. The Social Usages of Shame in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times, ed. Bénédicte Sère and Jörg Wettlaufer (Florence: SISMEL, 2013), provides no insight into the emotional experience of ‘shame’, and instead offers a study of historical semantics, theological discourses, and legal norms.. The contributors to Sympathy and Print Culture, ed. Kerr, Lemmings, and Phiddian (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), are less interested in emotional experiences than in discourses and representations of emotion.  Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, “Emotions in the Heart of the City. Crime and its Punishment in Renaissance Italy”, in Violence and Emotions, 21– 35, shows that the places in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian cities where the public punishment of delinquents took place varied in direct relation to the prescribed punishment. The essay is about the interdependence of “punishment” and “space”,

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have demonstrated a transformation of emotions have, in reality, demonstrated a transformation in discourse or communication, of expressions or representations.⁵⁹ The object of what is presented as a study of emotion is often misrepresented by an easily overlooked lack of precise formulation. This is exemplified by the collection Emotions in American History (2010), in which Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht states as editor that the contributions deal with the role of emotions in American history in various ways.⁶⁰ She summarises the essay by Jürgen Martschukat as follows: “The fourth section considers the role of emotions in social and political debates. Jürgen Martschukat’s essay traces the history of capital punishment in the New Republic as an history of emotions” (7; my emphasis). But Jürgen Martschukat describes his object as follows: “This essay is less interested in the actual experience of ‘real’ emotions within the observer of an execution in the early nineteenth century, but rather concentrates on the observation, description, and definition of the observers’ emotion in historic discourses to better understand the conceptualization of the emotional spectator”.⁶¹ In fact, Martschukat deals for the most part not with emotions but instead with discourses about emotions. Discussion of the affective states of mind of those observing public executions led to changes in those rituals. But this discourse itself created a new conception of the observer. Martschukat presents an account of discourses about emotions, not emotions themselves. The distinction that I am making here may seem to be nit-picking, but it concerns a decisive and sensitive point in current emotion research: it has to be precise about its object. It is only in this way that a differentiated picture of the ‘history of emotions’ approach as a discipline can be formed. Quite how difficult it is at present to define the objects and aims of historical emotion research can be seen in the recent introduction by Rosenwein and Cristiani, What is the History of Emotions?. ⁶² This book seeks to provide an outline of the research object of emotion historians. What do emotion historians talk about? We are dealing here the central question of historical emotion research. In the final chapter of their book, Rosenwein and Cristiani raise “the nagging question”: “are historians of emotion talking about real emotions when they plumb their sources? Can they say anything valid about emotional experience?” (121). To this they add the question: “What makes an emotion real or unreal?” not about “emotions”. The fact that emotion has a prominent part in the title deceives the reader, in my view.  This is pointed out in a review of Plamper by Jon Frederickson, “The History of Emotions: An Introduction by Jan Plamper”, Psychiatry 79.4 (2016), 351– 357 (352); DOI: 10.1080/ 00332747.2016.1237742.  Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht, “Introduction. Emotions in American History. The View from Europe”, in Emotions in American History. An International Assessment, ed. Gienow-Hecht (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 1– 11.  Jürgen Martschukat, “A Horrifying Experience? Public Executions and the Emotional Spectator in the New Republic”, in Emotions in American History, 181– 200 (183; my emphasis).  Barbara Rosenwein and Riccardo Cristiani, What is the History of Emotions? (London: Polity 2017).

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(121). They refer to attempts made by the Ekman school to establish whether “a person’s face revealed his or her true feelings” (122). Rosenwein and Cristiani maintain that no kind of external sign (facial expression, word, and so on) can prove whether a feeling is genuine and true. “We will never know whether an emotion is real. Asking that question takes us nowhere” (122). They suggest that this is true both for an emotionally relevant statement made by a contemporary (‘I am in love’) and for the statement of a medieval troubadour (‘I am really quite happy’), and that the only thing we can say with any certainty is that that there were men and women in the Middle Ages who could imagine that there was something like ‘real happiness’ and could imagine that people could feel such pleasure (122).⁶³ For Rosenwein and Cristiani, historians studying the sources have to be satisfied with the insight that, although no conclusion can be drawn from the emotionally relevant personal statements in historical texts as to whether they correspond to an emotional reality, they nevertheless demonstrate the idea of such an emotional experience. Rosenwein and Cristiani confuse two different things. The statement “we will never know whether an emotion is real” (122) is illogical. It implies that there is something called an emotion, but then also says that we can never know whether that something actually exists. Yet the existence of something – an emotion – cannot be presupposed, only then to claim that that something cannot be real.⁶⁴ I presume

 This recognition will surprise no one. Why should there not have also been people in the Middle Ages who had ideas like this? In AHR 2012, 1496, Rosenwein states that we can derive no more information from a contemporary’s statement to the effect that they are in love than we can from the poetic statement of a troubadour (Peire Vidal, twelfth century) that he loves his lady. In both cases, she argues, we can know only that there are or were men and women in the twenty-first and the twelfth centuries of the opinion that there is something called love. Rosenwein’s view that a written literary expression of emotion in the Middle Ages presents methodologically no greater, or no different, challenge than an everyday emotionally relevant verbal expression made now blurs the difference between oral and written expression (on this, see II.3.b below with regard to Reddy). During the Middle Ages, there was a very high degree of stylisation of written expression. Attention to the use of language was increased further still with the transition from handwriting to print culture. We have evidence that during the period from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, very many authors revised the language and rhetoric of their texts before passing them to a printer (Rüdiger Schnell, “Handschrift und Druck. Zur funktionalen Differenzierung im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert”, Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 32.1 [2007], 66 – 111 [esp. 90 – 107]). In medieval writing, we usually encounter expressions of emotion in a stylistically demanding form, quite different from the kind of everyday statement we might encounter today. Rosenwein’s dictum also obscures the fact that premodern men and women spoke a different language from the one we speak today, and the fact that many emotionally relevant statements in premodern texts were made in the context of a textual system of internal references that we need to decode before we can arrive at any kind of conclusion. Quite clearly, historians and literary scholars have different approaches to their objects of study. Historians ask directly about emotions, whereas literary scholars ask about the conditions for representations or expressions of emotions.  There is a similar problem with Rosenwein’s formulation in AHR Conversation 2012, 1496, that “usually our emotions are not ‘true’ or ‘false’”. What she means is that “our” emotions are “between sincere and insincere” (1502). But emotions themselves can be neither true nor false; only statements

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that what Rosenwein and Cristiani meant is more like this: “We will never know whether the statements about emotions and signs of emotions allow us to conclude that a real emotion exists.” The statement that I have quoted thus concerns the plausibility of linguistic utterances, or the status of signs as referents, not the authenticity or veracity of emotions.⁶⁵ Can the historicity of emotions be demonstrated if we have access only to signs of emotions? The conclusion has to be that we should speak of the historicity of signs (of emotions), and not of the history of emotions. The confusion of emotions and signs of emotions involves a fundamental and pervasive problem in historical emotion research. The lack of terminological clarity leads to substantive ambiguities. There is another problem concealed in the further comments Rosenwein and Cristiani make in their book. If we will never know whether emotions are ‘real’ or simulated, and if we can demonstrate only the existence of ideas of emotions, how can it then be shown that there are any corresponding emotional experiences? And how might their historicity be demonstrated? Rosenwein and Cristiani have the following answer to hand: the existence of emotions can be demonstrated through their effects (123). The power of emotions is said to be evident in our thought, speech, and action.⁶⁶ The historian can certainly proceed to study thoughts, speech utterances, actions, according to Rosenwein and Cristiani (123). But this is followed by a sentence that contradicts what comes before it: “Emotions disclose themselves through thoughts, bodily changes, words, practices, and acts. All of these have been the subject of historical studies, and all have shed light on the topic” (123). From this we might conclude that emotions are the primary object of Rosenwein and Cristiani’s research on emotions. Although we had previously been told that we can never know whether an emotional statement or facial expression allows us to conclude that a real emotion exists, it is now claimed that emotions will disclose themselves in words and physical changes to the body. It seems to me that a fundamental problem of historical emotion research lies behind this contradiction. On the one hand, emotion historians continually concede that we have no access at all to emotional experiences.⁶⁷ On the other, they want – of

made about them, about what we or others (supposedly) feel, can be. Rosenwein’s statement in “Problems and Methods”, 21 (we emotion historians should not agonise over “whether an emotion is authentic”) is similarly problematic. On the authenticity and sincerity of emotions, see Mikko Salmela, True Emotions (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2014), 75 – 103.  The emotion historian deals with signs of emotions, not with emotions (see III).  Some critical questions can be posed here. Do we trace the effects of actions back to real emotions when we have no idea whether those emotions are responsible for those effects, simply because otherwise we would have no kind of explanation at all? Are emotions real, if they have effects? Are they then perhaps not real, if they have no effects?  Representatively of many instances, see Achim Landwehr, “Ehen vor Gericht. Zur Kontrolle der Emotionen in der Frühen Neuzeit”, in: Emotionen in Mittelalter und Renaissance, ed. Christoph Kann (Düsseldorf: Düsseldorf University Press, 2014), 157– 189 (188); he concedes that “we cannot really arrive at serious statements concerning how the men and women living through early modern-

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all things – to write a history of these inaccessible emotions. Rosenwein and Cristiani fail to avoid this contradiction. They do go on the offensive, saying that the problem of the authenticity of emotions is unimportant for emotion historians, since we do not know anyway – whether in the past or in the present – whether an emotional statement is founded on a real emotion (122– 123). If, however, we cannot demonstrate the presence of ‘real’ emotions (i. e. an emotional experience), or say when and where we can assume the existence of ‘real’ emotions – if we openly admit this deficiency, what then are the objects with which emotion history is concerned? Rosenwein and Cristiani indicate two possible answers: (a) ideas about feelings (whether the corresponding feelings ever actually existed is not important) and (b) the effects of emotions (here the existence of ‘real’ feelings can be demonstrated). The consequence of this line of argumentation would have to mean admitting that historical emotion research works not with emotions but with ideas (discourses, words) about emotions on the one hand and the alleged effects of emotions on the other. Since ideas of emotions (a) can correspond to actual feelings, but do not have to, according to Rosenwein and Cristiani, emotion history is obliged to take up the tasks of (traditional) discourse history: studying the conceptions and designs that involve emotions. The effects of (imputed) emotions (b) likewise often resist attempts to trace them back to specific emotions, for we are faced with complex sets of emotions. Besides this, it can be seen from countless emotionally relevant historical interactions that it was not emotions that achieved an effect, but signs of emotion.⁶⁸ Nonetheless, if numerous actions and ways of behaviour are counted as effects of emotions, then the only thing that distinguishes emotion history from traditional event-based history is that it reduces all actions to emotions. In my opinion, the conclusion that must be drawn from all of this is that the historical study of emotion has no need for the kind of knowledge regarding emotion developed in the neurosciences.⁶⁹ They provide no explanation either of historical ideas of pleasure, happiness, jealousy, or shame, or of the socioculturally determined signs of emotion. Nor are they in a position to adequately describe or explain the historical effects of (signs of) alleged emotions.

ity really felt”. But all the same, he feels, it can at least be asked “why societies decide to understand emotions in this particular way, and to make a judgement about how they do so”. According to this, the object of historical emotion research is not emotional experiences but instead the social evaluation of emotions.  See III below on communication.  See Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart. Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). This is a classic study of the ‘emotional labour’ of airline stewardesses who not only always have to appear friendly but try to develop in themselves the related feeling of friendliness. The text is regarded as groundbreaking by the most recent historical studies, despite the fact that it predates all the supposedly significant new work on the theory of emotion in neuropsychology, evolutionary biology, emotional psychology, philosophy, and sociology. Is it therefore possible to ignore all these new theories and still pursue emotion sociology, and perhaps also the historical study of emotion? On Hochschild’s approach, see IIIn43 below.

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b What is the Cognitive Interest of a Study of Emotion? Historical studies of emotion should give a precise indication of what it is about the object ‘emotion’ that interests them and why they have this interest. Do they aim to find out something about emotionally conditioned action by people in the past or instead to demonstrate the historicity of emotional experiences? Do they seek to study the history of concepts of emotions, or the history of emotional practices, or the history of expressions of emotions? Are they interested in showing the historical effects of emotional behaviour, or do they want to write the history of emotion words? All such studies claim that their cognitive interest concerns emotions, but the sheer disparity of the objects of study chosen hinders any attempt to find a common cognitive interest. What connects, for example, an interest in the subjective emotional experiences of polyamorists – people who simultaneously maintain several sexual relationships – in 2010⁷⁰ with an interest in the scholastic distinctions concerning emotion made by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century?⁷¹ And where is the common interest between a study of the medico-neurophysiological discourse on a new form of empathy at the end of the nineteenth century on the one hand,⁷² and a study of the love letters written by an engaged couple in the sixteenth century on the other? Are there any sort of common insights that can be gained from such disparate material, insights that apply uniformly to the same object, emotions? Do the insights gained from one such study help in any way to form a better understanding of the results of the other? Is the author of one study at all interested in the findings of another? Even within Understanding Emotions in Early Europe (2015), a collection that is said to address ‘emotion’ as a common object of study, we find neither a common object of study nor a uniform cognitive aim.⁷³ There is, for instance, no kind of historical comparison between the theories of the Byzantine orator Michael Psellos (1018 – ca. 1080) concerning emotion⁷⁴ and the fear of crime in eighteenth-century London,⁷⁵ a comparison from which one might have been able to draw an account of emotional transformation. A literary analysis of the figure of Queen Guinevere in a medieval romance stands without explanation alongside an essay dealing with burial rituals among Australian aboriginals and in seventeenth- and eight-

 Jillian Deri, “Polyamory or Polyagony? Jealousy in Open Relationships”, in Emotions Matter, 223 – 239.  Brungs, Metaphysik der Sinnlichkeit; s. Vln47.  Boddice, The Science of Sympathy.  Champion and Lynch, eds., Understanding Emotions in Early Europe.  Michael Champion, “Representing Emotions”, in Understanding Emotions in Early Europe, 27– 49.  Robert Shoemaker, “Fear of crime”, in Understanding Emotions in Early Europe, 233 – 249.

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eenth-century England.⁷⁶ It is not possible to construct a ‘history of emotions’ from such disparate cognitive interests. It would be possible to contend, with some justification, that work in the history of emotion is only at a very early stage and that there is thus a need to bring together a mass of material, even if it resists being placed in some kind of common context. But if this were true, one would have to abandon, for the time being, any ambition to establish wide-ranging histories of emotions. Rob Boddice writes in his introductory book: “After all, the historian of emotions does not typically have emotion itself as the end in mind, but rather what emotions do in society.”⁷⁷ In this way, Boddice shows his interest in the ‘emotions in history’ approach: what effects do emotions have on society and in history?⁷⁸ In another study, Boddice sets out a different cognitive object: historical emotion research can and must help “reveal the historicity of human experience”.⁷⁹ This similarly shifts the focus to the ‘history of emotions’ approach. In fact, and in contrast to Boddice’s first position, numerous studies by emotion historians are directed at investigating the (historically and culturally determined) emotional experiences of individuals and groups. Their work belongs to the ‘history of emotions’ approach.⁸⁰ This indecisiveness regarding cognitive interest is also apparent in an American Historical Review “Conversation” from 2012.⁸¹ The journal’s editor confronted participants with the question (1495) of how one could, on the basis of expressions of emotion, ascertain people’s emotional experience. The responses were not uniform. The Africanist Julie Livingstone at first rejected the question outright, in true social constructivist style, with its implied distinction of the external and the internal. All the same, she did not wish to exclude the idea that there could be “pathways” along which one might approach inner emotional experiences (1500). But she then accuses the neurosciences, although certainly useful for historical emotion research, of starting with the assumption “that a feeling/emotion is an experience of inner life” (1507) that can be interpreted as such by a cultural self and communicated to others. An assumption of this kind is, according to Livingston, unacceptable, since it cannot be applied to subjects of all eras and, moreover, communication takes place through language that was itself culturally determined. Less hostile, but just as indecisive,

 Andrew Lynch, “Guinevere as ‘Social Person’: Emotion and Community in Chrétien de Troyes”, in Understanding Emotions in Early Europe, 151– 169; Sandra Bowdler and Jane Balme, “‘Memento mori’: Love/Fear of and for the Dead – Archaeological Approaches”, in ibid., 291– 312.  Boddice, The History of Emotions, 83 (emphasis in original).  This cognitive interest is also owed to the new so-called affective turn; see n33 on the Berlin SFB 1171.  Rob Boddice, “The History of Emotions: Past, Present, Future”, Revista de Estudios Sociales 62 (2017), 10 – 15 (12); (accessed 8 January 2018).  And to this a third category can be added: all of the emotion studies that actually pursue the methods of a traditional intellectual history.  AHR Conversation 2012: “AHR Conversation: The Historical Study of Emotions”, American Historical Review 117 (2012), 1487– 1531.

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was the position taken by the American studies specialist Nicole Eustace. She had no difficulty in admitting the existence of a gap between the interior (experience) and the exterior (expression, language; 1490); she also indicated that one cannot grasp the “emotional experience” of a person, and that she herself (as a consequence) disregarded the question of how one might gain access to this “emotional experience” and had directed her attention to the study of “emotional expression” and “emotional regulation” (1503). At the same time, she took the position that language determines expression and experience, such that individuals feel only that which they have defined through the use of language. This position would allow access to “emotional experience”, but Eustace obviously did not wish to go that far. Instead, she was ‘just’ interested in who expresses what emotion to whom (“how emotions are expressed”, “who expresses which emotions when and to whom”; 1490, 1506). From the ambiguous relationship that Eustace posits between inner (individual emotional experience) and outer (expression in speech), it is apparent that there is a curiosity about the inner life, the emotional experience of a person, but the difficulties that stand in the way of gaining access to this inner world result in recourse being taken to the analysis of forms of expression of inner life. Studying them, according to Eustace, provides insights into social order and political regulation. In this way, emotion history mutates into social and political history. The fact that differing cognitive interests come together in historical emotion research is not a matter for criticism – quite the opposite. But what seems problematic to me is the way that these differences in cognitive interest – and the causes of these differences – are not clearly identified but instead blurred. The confused state of current historical emotion research is a direct result of this. In the introduction to the monumental three-volume work Histoire des Émotions (2016 – 2017), the editors formulate the cognitive aim of historical emotion research as follows: it should investigate what men and women in earlier times have experienced; it should open up their inner world. Of relatively little interest, we read, is what men and women in former times did or what ideas they had.⁸² All the same, the first volume deals with precisely these ideas: semantics, concepts, norms, and discourses (in philosophy, rhetoric, theology, music, medicine, and literature). This discrepancy between aspiration (cognitive interest) and reality (research in practice) is a source of difficulty.

c What Methods and Theories do Emotion Studies Use? The choice of methods and theories employed depends on the definition of emotion and on the particular cognitive interest in each case. There are two distinct approaches in contemporary research on emotion in the cultural sciences.

 Histoire des Émotions, ed. Corbin, Courtine and Vigarello, t. 1 (Paris: Seuil, 2016), 11.

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(1) The first approach rejects entirely any dichotomy of inner (feeling) and outer (body, action), since this dualism is felt to derive from a historical, and hence superseded, conception of body and soul, action and feeling. Foremost among the representatives of this approach is practice theory, deconstructing the idea of a distinction between inner and outer that is relevant to emotion, and treating it instead as part of a tradition of thought that has to be abandoned. Because emotions are treated here as emotional practices physically embodied in people, it is thought sufficient merely to describe externally ascertainable practices and to trace their variation and change. Emotions are understood to be practices. According to practice theory, one does not have feelings; one does them. This approach is taken by all studies of emotion working with a performative model.⁸³ This includes all those (mainly sociological) studies that assume emotions arise through social interaction and treat emotions as such interactions.⁸⁴ Quite understandably, sociological studies of emotion focus on doing, not on a person’s inner state.⁸⁵ According to these theories, emotions are only formed at all in social praxis. They exist solely as action, as speech. The advantage of this approach is that it does away with the vexed question of what people ‘really’ felt. Changes in practices are treated as changes in emotions.⁸⁶ (2) The second approach ‘believes’ in things like feelings, subjective sensations, and an inner life (soul, psyche, consciousness of the self). Emotion studies of this type declare that they seek to study the (historicity of) emotional experiences.⁸⁷  See, for example, Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 8 (emotions are said to be not “interior states” but “practices”). Reddy’s conception of emotives is, however, a halfway house between this approach and the next one. On the one hand, Reddy imputes a distinction between emotional statements (external) and emotional experiences (internal); on the other hand, he equates an emotional state of mind with an emotional statement. His conception therefore combines descriptive and performative elements (see II.3.b below). But Reddy places great weight on the performative aspect, making recourse to speech act theory as well, which is why his approach is included here.  For recent sociological studies of emotion, see Jonathan H. Turner, “The Sociology of Emotions: Basic Theoretical Arguments”, Emotion Review 1.4 (2009), 340 – 354; Konstanze Senge and Rainer Schützeichel, eds., Hauptwerke der Emotionssoziologie (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2013); Lynn SmithLovin and Peggy A. Thoits, “Introduction to the Special Section on the Sociology of Emotions”, Emotion Review 6.3 (2014), 187– 188; Kathryn J. Lively and Emi A. Weed, “Emotion Management: Sociological Insight into What, How, Why, and to What End?”, Emotion Review 6.3 (2014), 202– 207; Jan E. Stets, “Comment on Methodological Innovations from the Sociology of Emotions – Theoretical Advances”, Emotion Review 7.1 (2015), 79 – 80.  Walby, Spencer, and Hunt, “Introduction”, in Emotions Matter, 5, make clear that the relational approach of sociologists “is more concerned with what emotions do than what they are”; the contributions to the collection seek to “investigate emotions in situ as they occur during sequences of interaction”.  See II.3.d below.  Nagy, “L’historien médiéviste”. Matt, “Current Emotion Research”, 119, also presents the aim of emotion research as gaining access to “the actual feelings of past generations”. Broomhall, “Emotions in the Household”, 11, mentions that some contributors to their collection “focus their analyses

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But at the same time, they concede that this cognitive aim can be attained only ‘indirectly’. Emotion historians in this ‘party’ need methods and theories that can help overcome the distance between texts and emotions, between emotional expressions and emotions. Indeed, this is the key question of historical emotion research: how do we get from the representations of emotions in the past to the emotions they are supposed to represent, to the emotional experiences of people in the past? That this is a fundamental problem is freely admitted,⁸⁸ while at the same time it is maintained that means (methods) have already been found to resolve it.⁸⁹ Among such methods employed in emotion research are ‒ the analysis of words for emotion;⁹⁰ ‒ the investigation of conceptions of emotion, or the evaluation of emotions; ‒ the study of standards of behaviour (emotionology);⁹¹ ‒ the investigation of bodily forms of expression (this approach makes use of the analysis of expressions of emotions, assuming that people’s feelings can be read from their bodies or from their facial expressions); and⁹² ‒ the identification of scripts.⁹³ The term script is used to describe different things by different disciplines: conventions of writing, discourses, recurring forms of behaviour, sets of rules of behaviour,⁹⁴ narrative structures,⁹⁵, or typified emo-

on the lived experiences of emotions” and that they are interested in “the felt emotion”. In Broomhall, “Introduction. Violence and Emotions”, 12, it is said that the contributions to the anthology aim to study the interdependencies between “emotional and violent experiences and phenomena in the early modern period”. Lisa Beaven, “Murder and misericordia”, 59, wants to study “feelings experienced”.  See, for example, Angelos Chaniotis, “Moving Stones”, 94: “Although the ancient historian cannot study what people really felt, he or she can study the external stimuli that generated emotions […].”  There is, however, an unmistakable degree of vacillation between the two positions: wishing to write about emotions but having to deal with representations of emotions, that is to say, with constructions of emotions that testify to their presence. See nn77– 82 above.  On the limits of this approach, see Matt, “Recovering the Invisible”, 42– 44; Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 63 – 65, 87– 89, 222– 227, 235 – 238, 364– 366, 421– 425, 773 – 788. See also V.1.c, Vnn84– 96 below.  Most recently, see Matt, “Recovering the Invisible”, 44– 47; see also II.3.a below.  On the question of whether with the change of expressions of emotion the emotion expressed changes, see Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, Index 1012– 1013, under “Ausdrucksformen von Emotionen”.  Originally discussed by Silvan Tomkins, “Script Theory: Differential Magnification of Affects”, in Nebraska Symposium on Motivation 1978, ed. Richard A. Dienstbier (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 201– 236.  These scripts are close to the semantics of emotionology. See Erika Kuijpers, “‘O Lord, save us from shame’: Narratives of Emotions in Convent Chronicles by Female Authors during the Dutch Revolt, 1566 – 1635”, in Gender and Emotions, 127– 146 (129): “Cultures, communities, and social groups all have a normative script for the narration and display of emotions; this was as true for sixteenthcentury nuns just as it is for us today. Whenever we express emotions in words, we use pre-existent narrative schemes [and gestures and facial expressions]. This is how we interpret, legitimise, and

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tional reactions to specific stimuli (i. e. conventional behavioural sequences). Thus, for instance, conventionalised expressions of emotion are understood as components of cultural scripts (or emotional styles) specific to a particular period or a particular social stratum, study of which reveals, so the promise goes, people’s emotional experiences. The method of understanding emotion itself as a narrative also belongs here. To find out the role played by emotion in an everyday context or in a historiographical report, according to this approach, we would have to ask “who acts how to whom and what happens”.⁹⁶ Emotions are identified with situations, since it is felt difficult to distinguish between emotions and the situations that induce them.⁹⁷ The task of the following section will be to examine the extent to which the theoretical constructs available to historical emotion research are able to deal with the problems that I have outlined above.

3 Theses and Theories a Emotionology and Communication The 1985 text “Emotionology”, by Carol Z. Stearns and Peter N. Stearns, was one of the first and most important contributions to the new historical study of emotions.⁹⁸ All later work has built on it. Hence, I think it appropriate to present here the most important aspects of this study, especially since over the last thirty years the Stearns’ approach has been reduced by critics to a handful of slogans, if not distorted to the point of unrecognisability. In addition to this, close examination of the Stearns’ interest helps reveal a blind spot in other theses regarding emotion (emotive, community, practice).

share emotions. In this process, valuable emotions have to be expressed and triggered, while less desirable ones have to be controlled or justified. To do this, we possess a repertoire of possible ways to verbalise emotions, which is extensive but not unlimited.” These cultural scripts make up what emotion historians call an emotional regime or emotional community. See McNamer, Affective Meditation, 12– 13 and 146 – 149.  Keith Oatley, The Passionate Muse. Exploring Emotion in Stories (Oxford: OUP, 2012), 69 – 81, describes a script of this kind for ‘falling in love’.  Jochen Kleres, “Emotions and Narrative Analysis: A Methodological Approach”, Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 41 (2011), 182– 202 (189).  Kleres, ibid., 189, talks of a “narrative emotion analysis”. Literary scholarship seeks to decode the emotional conceptions of an era through the analysis of ‘scripts’. See Robert A. Kaster, Emotion, Restraint, and Community in Ancient Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 8 – 9 and 151n17.  Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards”, The American Historical Review 90 (1985), 813 – 836.

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The Stearns were looking for criteria that might provide insights into the emotional experience of people in the past, when they came across the emotional standards propagated in the genre of advice literature (popular advice manuals, conduct literature, etiquette manuals, courtesy books, moral tracts, and the like); they concluded that it was possible that the norms articulated in this literature could have influenced the personal emotional experience of the people who read them. Of course, the Stearns were quite clear that the rules guiding the expression of emotions in a society provide only limited information about the actual emotional experiences of members of that society. The Stearns were seeking to achieve a convergence between the history of emotions and social history, thereby integrating “social and psychological theories” (815 – 816). The goal was that this be achieved by studying the “collective emotional standards of a society” (813). The focus was therefore “on the social factors that determine and delimit, either implicitly or explicitly, the manners in which emotions are expressed” (813; my emphasis). The Stearns coined the term ‘emotionology’ for the emotional standards of a society. Emotionology involves “the attitudes or standards that a society, or a definable group within a society, maintains toward basic emotions and their appropriate expression” (813; my emphasis). Despite the claims made by some critics, the Stearns did not suggest that the study of these emotional standards amounted to the revelation of the emotional experiences of members of a society. They were quite aware that social emotional norms permit only very conditional knowledge of actual emotional experiences, for they placed a great deal of weight on the distinction between emotionology (the “collective emotional standards of a society”) and emotions (the “emotional experiences of individuals and groups”; 813 – 814, 824– 834). This was a qualification and demarcation that, they said, earlier research had ignored (824).⁹⁹ Other critics made this distinction a cause for criticism, since this dichotomous conception of emotional experience and emotional standard clashes with the social constructivist presumption that emotions are created entirely through and together with social standards of emotion. The Stearns’ study, however, already had an answer to this objection. First, they argued, it should not be forgotten that the emotionality of people has a biological foundation. “Social scientists have ignored biological factors in their studies of emotions” (824). These factors, they felt, ensure “biopsychological continuities” (829). And so, despite their socio-historical approach, the Stearns did not ignore the biological basis of human emotionality. Second, they pointed out that the history of norms and the history of emotions do not always coincide:¹⁰⁰ emotional standards model the intensity of emotions without,

 Lewis and Stearns, “Introduction”, in An Emotional History of the United States, 4, described as a “crude statement” the belief of earlier emotion researchers “that changes in stated emotional values equated readily with actual emotional experience”.  See also Lewis and Stearns, “Introduction”, in An Emotional History of the United States, 2. In the past few years, they argue, historians have become more sensitive with regard to the discrepancy be-

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however, completely determining them. All the same, one should not draw too sharp a distinction between prescription and experience, the Stearns argued, since they are bound up with each other and there is even a degree of mutual influence. Change of emotion standards does not, they argued, always coincide with the transformation of emotions (824– 825, 829).¹⁰¹ What William Reddy claimed for the expression of emotions through speech was supposed by the Stearns for emotional standards: that they possess a common inherited emotional content. Another object of criticism was the statement made by the Stearns that “basic emotions” probably do not change at all (829). But critics failed to note the subsequent sentences, in which the Stearns did not exclude the possibility that an emotionological change could bring about a change in emotional experience (829).¹⁰² The fact that emotions are also said to contain “cognitive components” further supports the idea that emotional standards exert an influence on emotional experience (829). The Stearns even go so far as to suspect that “biological components of emotion” can change (829). Their study cannot, therefore, be reduced to a simple, one-sided position, for it postulates the existence both of emotional constants and emotions that respond to sociocultural change.¹⁰³ Even the objection that the Stearns assign only one emotional norm to a society can be easily rebutted, for they talk of different emotional styles and of “the importance of group variation within a time period” (829, 831n55), of “subgroup variations in emotion” (829), and point to “emotional variations” within the American middle class during the twentieth century (823).¹⁰⁴ With these statements, the Stearns anticipate the most important building block of Rosenwein’s conception of emotional communities. Whether one views the approach taken by the Stearns – an approach later developed further by Peter N. Stearns in work dealing with individual emotions – as a help or a hindrance, it does seem in one decisive point to be far ahead of the others presented here: only from the theory of emotionology do we learn that historical emotion research should be concerned not only with how and what someone felt, but also with how this was communicated. This link to communication can be detected in the way that the Stearns’ study repeatedly comes back to the point that the emotional standards of a society are directed at the “appropriate expression of emotion” (813, 814, 820, 824). Reddy’s theory of emotives deals solely with the “navigation of tween emotional standards and the lived experience of people, and a distinction has thus to be made between prescription and description.  Peter N. Stearns, Jealousy, 16 – 17, also conceded the existence of significant differences between discourses (standards) and experienced reality, or between the latter and change in the terms given to emotions.  For this reason, I do not understand why Rosenwein and Cristiani, in What is the History of Emotions?, 60, claim that the conception of emotionology presupposes that emotions are “stable” and that only emotional standards change.  Stearns and Stearns, “Emotionology”, 834, are of the view “that emotions are not simply biological reactions but also involve an interplay between body and mind”.  See also Peter N. Stearns, “History of Emotions: The Issue of Change”, 17.

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feeling” by a subject;¹⁰⁵ Rosenwein’s emotional communities presuppose an uncomplicated tacit agreement between the members of an emotional community such that communication is not an issue; as far as practice theory is concerned, external behaviour and emotional state of mind are the same thing (since practice is presumed to be an embodiment of emotion), meaning that communication is likewise not an issue here.¹⁰⁶ Only the theory of emotionology prompts the question of how the communication of emotions happens.¹⁰⁷ Since emotional standards are supposed to securely establish an uncomplicated social coexistence, whereas the emotionology model provides for a possible discrepancy between emotional standards and emotions,¹⁰⁸ some thought has to be given to how, in everyday praxis, the (possible) discrepancy between social emotional standards and the emotions of individuals can be prevented from becoming a disruptive element in social interaction. The solution lies in the Stearns’ formulation: “appropriate expressions of emotions”. It is enough, therefore, to practice in any given situation the required expression of emotion, even if one is not actually in a position to feel the emotion that is called for. The Stearns understand behavioural standards to be “standards of emotional expression”: it is a matter of the proper expression, not of the proper feeling. This raises the communicative aspect. Emotional standards involve only behavioural standards, not norms of feeling.¹⁰⁹ It is true that examination of books and manuals on advice, etiquette, and courtesy leads one to conclude that this literature of self-improvement deals above all with forms of behaviour and not very much with inner feelings.¹¹⁰ Social interaction depends on visible signs, not inner affective states of mind. This literature on social conduct, from the Middle Ages to well into the twentieth century, is directed primarily at one aim: teaching the members of a particular social stratum how they should fashion their social interaction with other (unfamiliar) persons – at table, in the workplace, during festivities – in such a way that no irritation, ill-humour, mortifica-

 Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 107, is interested in “the speaker’s emotional state”.  See Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?”, 214– 215. According to Scheer, distortion/interference in communication arises from the inability of a person to put on the ‘right’ facial expression or from the inability of an observer to read the expressed emotion ‘properly’. The reasons for unsatisfactory communication are thus located in the mediation of signal between sender and receiver, not within a sender who consciously transmits false signals. Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?”, is also focused primarily on the self and not on the other(s). Emotional practices are consequently forms of behaviour, everyday activities that assist a person in achieving a particular emotional condition (209). Hence, an individual can, by reciting or repeating compassion texts, evoke the feeling of compassion in him- or herself; cf. McNamer, Affective Meditation.  For more detailed discussion, see III below.  And not, as for instance Arlie Hochschild assumes, for display rules that entirely determine feeling rules – see IIIn43 below.  Stearns and Stearns, “Emotionology”, 835, write that “emotionology also involves standards for emotional behavior”.  See IV.3 below on medieval courtesy books.

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tion, or animosity arises.¹¹¹ “The pacifying function of manner” is the right description for this.¹¹² The emotional standards of a society also serve as a form of manners intended to avoid conflict in social interaction.¹¹³ The precondition for this is not emotions adequate to the situation, but instead the communication of emotions adequate to the situation. For this reason, the authors of etiquette books write less about emotions than about the expression of emotions in face-to-face situations;¹¹⁴ for one’s own advantage, or even for working together without any conflict, they advise, it can be necessary “to conceal one’s actual feelings”.¹¹⁵ The “appropriate expression of emotions” sometimes means the dissimulation of emotions.¹¹⁶ So-called emotional standards thus served more to foster social interaction without conflict than to maintain standards of feeling. Behavioural standards were about the avoidance of conflict, the sympathetic treatment of fellow human beings, not individual personal feelings. What was sought was interaction without disruption, not a subjective condition.

 Michael Curtin, “A Question of Manners. Status and Gender in Etiquette and Courtesy”, The Journal of Modern History 57 (1985), 395 – 423; Kathleen Ashley, “Medieval Courtesy Literature and Dramatic Mirrors of Female Conduct”, in The Ideology of Conduct. Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality, ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (New York: Methuen, 1987), 25 – 38; Gabriele Müller-Oberhäuser, “Norture newe founde or auncyent: Zur Tradierung von Höflichkeitsregeln im englischen Spätmittelalter am Beispiel von William Caxton’s ‘Book of Courtesy’”, in Schriftlichkeit und Lebenspraxis im Mittelalter (Münstersche Mittelalter-Schriften 76), ed. Hagen Keller, Christel Meier and Thomas Scharf (München: Fink, 1999), 279 – 297; Cas Wouters, “The Integration of Classes and Sexes in the Twentieth Century: Etiquette Books and Emotion Management”; Gabriele MüllerOberhäuser, “Gender, Emotionen und Modelle der Verhaltensregulierung in den mittelenglischen Courtesy Books”, Querelles 7 (2002), 27– 51; Rüdiger Schnell, “Tischzuchten” (2007).  Cas Wouters, “Etiquette Books and Emotion Management in the Twentieth Century. American Habitus in International Comparison”, in An Emotional History of the United States, 283 – 304 (299).  For this reason, Cas Wouters, in “Etiquette Books and Emotion Management in the Twentieth Century”, 285, is able to treat “emotionology” as “rules of etiquette”.  The art of letter-writing, as presented in epistolary manuals, demands not the appropriate feelings but instead “the appropriate expression and bridling of the passions”; Diana G. Barnes, “Epistolary Literature”, in Early Modern Emotions. An Introduction, 95 – 98 (98). Barnes detects “a close relationship to civility tracts” (95).  C. Dallett Hemphill, “Class, Gender, and the Regulation of Emotional Expression in Revolutionary-Era Conduct Literature”, in An Emotional History of the United States, 33 – 51 (37).  For a discussion of the centuries-long treatment of dissimulation in the literature on social conduct, see Rüdiger Schnell, “Curialitas und Dissimulatio im Mittelalter. Zur Interdependenz von Hofkritik und Hofideal”, Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 41 (2011), Heft 161, 77– 138; Schnell, “Alterität der Neuzeit”, 78 – 80; C. Dallett Hemphill, “Class, Gender, and the Regulation of Emotional Expression”, 36 – 39.

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b Emotives vs Literacy In his monograph The Navigation of Feeling (2001), William M. Reddy attempted to explain the political history of eighteenth-century France using emotion theory.¹¹⁷ Building on cognitive psychology, Reddy treated emotions as a highly complex interaction of cognitive processes. Following on from recent work in cognitive psychology, he maintained that no clear distinction could be made between conscious and unconscious, supra- and subliminal, and controlled and involuntary processes, and developed his “theory of emotives”. This treated emotions as a mixture of “activated thought material”, “goals”, and changing “attention”. Reddy’s aim was to develop an absolute standard for evaluating political power and political oppression in terms of emotion. He argued that social constructivist doctrine, which presumed the sociocultural determination of emotions (wishes, intentions, aims), was not capable of saying whether people in one culture or society were happier or unhappier than those in another. Reddy believed that he had found a workable criterion: the relation between socially or politically given emotional norms forming an “emotional regime” on the one hand, and emotional freedom of the individual on the other. Reddy thought this freedom is present where people are able to freely articulate the thoughts and feelings arising from their emotional expressions. The more freely that thoughts and feelings can be expressed, the greater the “emotional liberty” of the individual in an “emotional regime”. The processes thereby set in motion, he argues, often escape the will or the attention of the speaking person, and hence a navigation of feeling takes place: a conscious or unconscious manoeuvring between different and also contradictory goal-based orientations of an emotion. Emotional navigation can justifiably be regarded as the concept that most accurately reflects Reddy’s conception of emotion (118 – 122). In this navigation of feeling, in this dynamic interaction of emotional expression and emotional processes in a speaker, Reddy believed that he had identified the universal phenomenon that determines the inner emotional experience of men and women of all times and cultures (xii, 45, 54– 62). For Reddy, the emotional expression of an ‘I’, at the very moment in which it is expressed, influences the emotional condition of that person (intensifying, modifying, clarifying, dissolving); the utterance of an emotional condition brings about an alteration in the emotional condition in question. In Reddy’s view, emotional expression ‘does’ something to the emotion; it is not only descriptive but also performative. Reddy’s emotives must be understood as affective utterances. But Reddy assumes that emotions precede their emotional expression in language, and thus treats emotions as in part pre-linguistic. And Reddy also believes that a certain set of emotions is constant through time. According to Reddy, this insight into the “universal features of emotional life” enables a categorisation of political regimes according to emotion: which regimes

 Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling.

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permitted a free navigation of feelings (possibly released only by emotional expression in the first place), and which regimes demanded of their citizens a high level of “emotional suffering”? Those are the questions with the help of which Reddy seeks to explain the political history of eighteenth-century France. There are a number of critical remarks that can be directed at Reddy’s proposed research framework.¹¹⁸ (1) Given the number of studies of emotion that use Reddy’s central categories (‘emotives’, ‘emotional regime’, ‘emotional suffering’, ‘emotional refuge’), it should be noted here that Reddy’s own analyses of historical texts largely do without his central analytical category of ‘emotive’.¹¹⁹ There is a lack of evidence for the emotional impact of an emotive on the speaker – and on the action that follows on from it. There is a gap between the emotion theory that Reddy develops for individuals and his efforts to explain the course taken by political events in a nation. Very rarely does Reddy’s historical analysis examine specific emotive situations. Simply implying that emotives had, during the revolutionary years 1789 to 1794, a generally destabilising impact on the persons who uttered them is not enough to demonstrate the political relevance of emotives. (2) Reddy does not take account of non-linguistic emotives. However, in everyday life non-linguistic expressions of emotion, through gestures, facial expression, or posture, play just as important a role as linguistic expressions.¹²⁰ Everyday political life is very narrowly conceived in Reddy’s account. (3) Even the imaginary emotives (such as the thought “I am happy”) that can initiate the navigation of feeling in the same way as an emotional expression – and which could therefore be of great interest for political history¹²¹ – are disregarded in Reddy’s argumentation.¹²² Reddy appears to be excessively focused on performative speech act theory.¹²³ (4) Reddy’s approach falls between those of the ‘history of emotions’ and ‘emotions in history’ lines of enquiry.¹²⁴ His monograph takes a path that is unique in historical emotion research. Other studies of emotion examine historical changes in

 I also take into account here Reddy’s remarks in Jan Plamper, “The History of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns”, History and Theory 49 (2010), 237– 265. A detailed review of Reddy’s book (2001) can be found in Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 419 – 463.  Reddy’s monograph The Making of Romantic Love does not use the concept ‘emotive’ at all.  This failure to address non-linguistic aspects of emotional expression reveals that Reddy has neglected the communicative aspect of emotion.  Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 330, writes that “the concept of emotives makes it clear why human beings live in a perpetual state of uncertainty”. But it is not the spoken emotional expressions that contribute to uncertainty, but usually, and even more often, reflection on one’s own emotional state.  Reddy only mentions in passing (Navigation of Feeling, 331) the possibility of an “expression of thoughts”. But this expression would once again be dependent on language.  Plamper, The History of Emotions, 261, also criticises him for this.  See n83 above.

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feelings; Reddy, by contrast, examines historico-political changes in the conditions for feelings. He is interested not in demonstrating changes in individual emotions but instead in demonstrating changes in the factors that generally have an effect on emotional processes. This is because he conceives emotional processes as components of transcendent universal cognitive programs. There is, consequently, no point in trying to examine the processes’ historicity. Reddy is instead interested in the extent to which these universal programs are influenced by particular socio-political constraints – up to and including the maximisation or minimisation of possibilities for navigation in the brain. Reddy is interested not in the historicity of feelings but in the historicity of the causes responsible for the extent (or intensity) of emotional suffering. The quality of this emotional suffering seems not to vary. (5) I think that the greatest deficiency in the construction of Reddy’s theory lies in its lack of differentiation between oral and written affective utterances.¹²⁵ Historians appear so far to have overlooked the fact that Reddy’s theoretical construction deals only with oral expressions.¹²⁶ This oversight is understandable given that Reddy explicitly based his theory of emotives on speech act theory, that is, a theory of oral expression. Historians, by contrast, usually deal with texts. The possible emotional processes that emerge from the written formulation of affective utterances deviate from the navigation of feeling initiated by oral expressions of emotion, since emotions are articulated less directly in writing.¹²⁷ Written expression generally involves a more complicated cognitive process than oral expression. In a face-to-face situation, one speaks to someone. Written communication depends on speaking not only to someone – as in letters – but above all for someone – in autobiographies, memoires, memoranda, war reports, and so on.¹²⁸ In addition, in spoken discourse words follow one another more closely than in written reproduction, which in any case depends on ‘external tools’: paper, ink, pen. Because one is writing for someone, more care is taken in the choice of words. Fixing emotions in writing in both premodernity and modernity is much more subject to specific linguistic rules than reports of emotion in everyday speech. We know that in the fif-

 Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 331, makes no distinction between oral emotives and emotives in “literature, art, music, iconography, architecture, dress”.  See, for example, Tracy Adams, “Married Noblewomen as Diplomats: Affective Diplomacy”, in Gender and Emotions, 51– 65; Susan Broomhall, “Ordering Distant Affections: Fostering Love and Loyalty in the Correspondence of Catherine de Medici to the Spanish Court, 1568 – 1572”, in Gender and Emotions, 67– 86. Ian Germani, “Mediated Battlefields”, does not differentiate between the oral words of soldiers and their written notes about their own emotional experiences, and those of others, in war in the later 1790s. Tania M. Colwell, “Emotives and Emotional Regimes”, in Early Modern Emotions. An Introduction, 7– 10 (8 – 9), likewise draws no distinction between everyday emotives and emotional expression in letters, diaries, or dramas.  Even if the writing of diaries, autobiographies, or letters can be treated as an “emotional expression”. See Ulbrich, “Self Narratives as a Source”, 61: “the writing itself [of self-narratives] should be ascribed the status of an emotional expression”.  See also Matt, “Current Emotional research”, 119: texts are written for a public.

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teenth and sixteenth centuries texts written by hand were revised stylistically before they were printed.¹²⁹ And we know from twentieth-century authors what great pains they took in working on their texts. Someone composing a written text reflects much more strongly on the impression their words will make on potential readers or addressees. There is, therefore, a greater (temporal and mental) distance between what the composer of a written text might themself feel and what is written down on paper or parchment.¹³⁰ The construction of sentences is more complex; sentences are not left syntactically incomplete, unless of course this serves some rhetorical purpose. In oral expression, the navigation of feeling can develop much more freely and rapidly. By contrast, what has once been fixed in black and white after lengthy reflection hinders the free navigation of thoughts and emotions. This navigation of emotion that Reddy ascribes to oral expressions of emotion can, in being written down (in an autobiography or a letter), be halted more rapidly, since the writer, having perhaps spent a long time searching for an adequate formulation for a momentary oral expression, has not only found a linguistic solution but also come to a final conclusion about their emotional condition.¹³¹ Reddy himself makes no distinction between spoken and written statements of emotion.¹³² The well-documented view that it is easier to lie in writing than it is in person (“the body does not lie”) highlights the fact that greater authenticity, or a smaller gap between emotion and its expression (emotive), is ascribed to oral statements than to written communication. It is supposed to be easier to conceal a ‘genuine’ emotional state of mind when writing than it is in face-to-face communication. The idea that there is a greater distance between the composer of a piece of writing and what is written leads to the literary topos that one is able to put down in writing things (for example, wishes, declarations of love, intimacies) that one would be ashamed to say out loud. “A letter does not blush”, as Cicero wrote.¹³³  See Rüdiger Schnell, “Sprechen – Schreiben – Drucken (Speaking – Writing – Printing). Zur Autorschaft von Frauen im Kontext kommunikativer und medialer Bedingungen in der Frühen Neuzeit”, in A Place of Their Own. Women Writers and Their Social Environments (1450 – 1700), ed. Anne Bollmann (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2011), 3 – 41, esp. 29 – 32.  Turner and Stets, The Sociology of Emotions, 47– 49, summarise and comment on the position of Morris Rosenberg, “Reflexivity and Emotions”, Social Psychology Quarterly 53 (1990), 3 – 12. They suggest that it often happens that persons in a given situation have contradictory feelings but later, when writing it up with the benefit of some reflection, recount it as a homogenised and unambiguous experience. See Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 222– 223 and 964.  One can, however, exclude from this assessment passionate love letters whose linguistic style corresponds to speech and in which the navigation of the writer’s own feelings does not come to an end.  See Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 211– 232, on the diary of Main de Biran (1766 – 1824).  Cicero, Epistulae ad Familiares, ed. D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1988), V 12,1. See also Ambrosius, De virginibus. Latin-German, ed. Peter Dückers (Turnholt: Brepols, 2009), 1,1 (liber enim non erubescit). On this, see Rüdiger Schnell, “Medialität und Emotionalität”, 276 – 278. As it had been in antiquity and the Middle Ages, and would be in modernity, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries letters were often preferred to oral communication, because it was easier to ex-

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c Emotional Communities. Illusions? Barbara H. Rosenwein’s thesis that there are “emotional communities”, advanced by her in numerous studies since 2002, has become a much-cited guiding idea in historical emotion research.¹³⁴ The point of departure for Rosenwein’s engagement with the history of emotions was, first, the observation that well into the 1990s emotions were not being treated as a significant object of research by academic historians;¹³⁵ and, second, dissatisfaction with the apparent treatment in older cultural history (Huizinga), social history (Elias), and the history of mentalities (Lot, Febvre, Bloch, Delemeau) of the Middle Ages as a ‘primitive’ era¹³⁶ in which people lived out their emotions in an uncontrolled and uncivilised manner. These accounts assumed that during the Middle Ages people had been aggressive, brutal, uninhibited, and slaves to their emotions. Rosenwein sees the reason for this false image of the Middle Ages in the way that the history of mentalities conceived emotions – as something irrational, unchanging, and archaic, associated with the idea that the Middle Ages were a period of emotional immaturity which society has since grown out of.¹³⁷ In this way, Rosenwein created a bogeyman, a master narrative attached to the history of mentalities in which the path from the Middle Ages to modernity was characterised by increasing control of affect, and all of her writings are dedicated to rebutting this perspective.¹³⁸ Rosenwein counters the monolithic image of the Middle Ages and the ideas about restriction held by figures such as Norbert Elias with the argument that there was a plurality of communities of feeling in the Middle Ages. She therefore argues for the study of these “emotional communities” (for example, city, monastery, and court). Ascribing to both the history of mentalities and the Elias paradigm the idea that emotions erupted irrationally in medieval times,¹³⁹ Rosenwein proposes instead that emotions are social and cultural products, a perspective owed to recent press emotion in this way. See Carolyn James, “Letters”, in Early Modern Emotions. An Introduction, 121– 123 (123).  To name only a selection of her publications: Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions”; Rosenwein, “Eros und Clio”; Rosenwein, Emotional Communities; Rosenwein, “Problems and Methods”; Rosenwein, “Theories of Change”; Cristiani and Rosenwein, What is the History of Emotions?, 55 – 57.  Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions”, 821; Rosenwein, “Eros and Clio”, 427– 428.  This tripartite differentiation of cultural history, social history, and the history of mentalities is my own.  This assessment is unjustified in the case of Lucien Febvre.  See esp. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 5 – 15.  I show in Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 876 – 909 (“Emotionsgeschichte und Mentalitätsgeschichte”), that Rosenwein’s treatment of the history of mentalities is unjust. One of the contradictions of the present state of research is that Rosenwein, an emotion historian, writes against the history of mentalities, while another emotion historian sees emotion history as part of that history, although at the same time applying Rosenwein’s terminology to it. See Charlotte-Rose Millar, “Church and Parish Records”, in Early Modern Emotions. An Introduction, 115 – 117.

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theories of emotion. In this model, emotions are no longer seen as forces threatening individuals and societies but are treated on the contrary as factors furthering the construction of community.¹⁴⁰ Thus, Rosenwein identifies emotional communities with social communities. It is certainly true that in Rosenwein’s theoretical framework these communities of feeling are constituted less by emotions themselves than by evaluations of emotion.¹⁴¹ For Rosenwein defines emotional communities as follows: “groups in which people adhere to the same norms of emotional expression and value – or devalue – the same or related emotions”.¹⁴² In 2010 Rosenwein reaffirmed the detailed definition of emotional communities that she had given earlier, in 2002: Emotional communities are precisely the same as social communities – families, neighborhoods, parliaments, guilds, monasteries, parish church memberships – but the researcher looking at them seeks above all to uncover systems of feeling: what these communities (and the individuals within them) define and access as valuable or harmful to them; the evaluations that they make about others’ emotions; the nature of the affective bonds between people that they recognize; and the modes of expression that they expect, encourage, tolerate, and deplore.¹⁴³

Rosenwein’s emphasis on the plurality of emotional communities is directed against Reddy’s model of emotional history, which in her view posits that in every society or era only two emotional styles have competed with each other: a dominant emotional norm (the emotional regime) and an emotional norm (the emotional refuge) limited to a small number of social spaces such as salons and theatres. Rosenwein thinks this to be a highly simplified conception of the reality of emotional history, and so develops her model of a plurality of contemporary emotional communities. She also argues that the social and political conditions for one sole dominant emotional regime were absent during the Middle Ages. Nonetheless, current studies of emotion ignore Rosenwein’s efforts at demarcation, and treat Rosenwein’s emotional communities and Reddy’s emotional regime as interchangeable ideas.¹⁴⁴

 Rosenwein, “Eros and Clio”, 441. In opposition to the idea that there has been a steady improvement in the control of affect since the Middle Ages, Rosenwein has elsewhere made the following significant point: “Constraint is the great constant because culture is the great constant”; “Writing without Fear about Early Medieval Emotions”, Early Medieval Europe 10.2 (2001), 239 – 234 (234).  Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 29 and 191, concedes that it is difficult to establish what people of former centuries “really” felt, and that she had instead (and as a result) to make do with demonstrating the existence of “prevailing emotional norms” (my emphasis). This represents a convergence with the Stearns’ ‘emotionology’.  Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 2. Plamper, “The History of Emotions: An Interview”, 258, asks quite rightly whether Rosenwein’s term ‘emotional communities’ is not “a misnomer” and “ought better be termed ‘communities of emotional styles and/or norms’”.  Rosenwein in Plamper, “The History of Emotions: An Interview”, 252– 253.  See II.4 below.

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Rosenwein’s idea of emotional communities has been enthusiastically adopted: ‘emotional communities’ has become an indispensable buzzword.¹⁴⁵ However, for a long time no one subjected the textual analysis that Rosenwein presents in her monograph Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (2006) to a critical appraisal. I have done this elsewhere.¹⁴⁶ Here I can address only two representative examples: (1) an inscription on a gravestone dating from the fourth to seventh century (57– 78), and (2) a marriage poem from 566 (120). (1) Rosenwein wants to demarcate the Gallic diocesan cities of Trier, Clermont, and Vienne as three distinct “emotional communities” on the basis of grave inscriptions occurring in them. She considers in this connection the date from which emotion words are encountered in epitaphs (dulcissimus, carissimus, ‘most loved’; caritas, ‘love’; dulcedo, ‘sweet’; dolor, ‘pain’), what emotion words were used in the three Gallic cities, and the frequency with which they were used. Noting the differences that are revealed by this approach, she concludes that this demonstrates the existence of “three different emotional communities in Gaul before the eighth century” (77, 51). But Rosenwein’s textual material does not support this conclusion. Most of the grave inscriptions in the three cities make no use of emotion words. The fact that only a few inscriptions include emotion words, whose addition would involve considerably more expenditure, suggests that only a few families were able to afford this expensive public manifestation of emotions. These emotion words served to advertise the higher social status of a mourning family. The more wordy (and so the more expensive) an inscription, the higher the status of the client. These inscriptions are not signs of an urban emotional community; quite the contrary, they serve as an instrument socially demarcating a small elite. (2) Rosenwein believes that she can use a (Latin) poem by Venantius Fortunatus mythologising the marriage of the Merovingian King Sigibert to Brunichild (AD 566), a poem in which the king speaks of his powerful love for his bride, as evidence that the Merovingian court was an emotional community. This community is said to be characterised by an ideal shared by members of the court regarding the erotic love of two persons who are about to marry each other. The ideal of an emotional union between two newly-weds is elevated by Rosenwein as the conceptual core of an emotional community. Fortunatus’ wedding poem is said to be representative of Sigibert’s entire court as an emotional community that finds marital love attractive. The poem coincides, so Rosenwein argues, with the ideas of the members of the court. “His [Fortunatus’] epithalamium tells us about the image of married

 See, for example, Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions. An Introduction (Oxford: OUP, 2015), 67– 71; Andrew Lynch, “Emotional Community”, in Early Modern Emotions. An Introduction, 3 – 6; Boddice, The History of Emotions, 77– 83.  Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 463 – 536. Of all Rosenwein’s interpretations, Lisa Perfetti, “In Private. The Individual and the Domestic Community”, in A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Medieval Age, ed. Ruys and Monagle (2019), 119 – 132, takes up the two most questionable ones (127, 129).

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love prized at Sigibert’s court” (120). But when the itinerant poet Venantius Fortunatus was contracted in 566 to write a poem for the wedding of the Merovingian King Sigibert I to the Visigothic Princess Brunichild, everyone will have known what would be expressed in its verses. Wedding poems have been a literary genre since the time of ancient Greece. The content is fixed: depiction of the love between the newly-weds and the hope for renowned offspring. It can hardly be concluded from the fact that this wedding poem by Venantius Fortunatus also contains these traditional themes that Sigibert’s court is marked out as an emotional community by subscribing to the idea of marital love. What is crucial for any adequate assessment of this court society is not this praise of married love but rather the fact that the contract for the production of a (Latin) wedding poem was drawn up at all. The ‘performance’ of the wedding poem, not its content, was the crucial event. This literary and poetic event was intended to bestow splendour and prestige on the Merovingian court. Following this criticism of Rosenwein’s textual analyses, we turn to two central weaknesses of her theses: the lack of reflection on the concept of ‘community’ and the equation of emotional community with social community. Rosenwein equates emotional communities with social communities. She does state what constitutes the former: the evaluation of emotions, the nature of affective bonds, the modes of emotional expression. But she never tells us what a community is supposed to be! The meaning of this central category is left unexplained. And it is only because of this that she is able to treat emotional and social communities as identical. References to a few historical social examples will show how problematic this equivalence is; in the process, I refer to some of the social communities named by Rosenwein: families, neighbourhoods, parliaments, guilds, monasteries, parish church membership.¹⁴⁷ These ‘communities’ come into being partly through birth, marriage, spatial proximity, and common ownership (family) and partly through spatial proximity (neighbours), through political or occupational activities and interests (parliament, guilds), and through religious practices (monasteries, parish church memberships). This variety itself throws up the question of whether all these different forms of ‘communalisation’ are adequately contained within the one common term (social) community. It seems to me that the concept of ‘social community’ homogenises historical diversity.¹⁴⁸ But much more serious is my point that social communities are by no means always emotional communities. Take the family, for example. Families, or clans, form a social organisation – biologically, economically, through social rank, and structurally – but not in any respect an emotional community per se. We know from several cen See n143 above.  Helmuth Plessner, The Limits of Community. A Critique of Social Radicalism, trans. Andrew Wallace (Amherst, N.Y: Humanity Books, 1999; Grenzen der Gemeinschaft, 2nd ed. [Bonn: Bouvier, 1972]), opposes the idealisation and homogenisation of ‘community’, arguing that one should not paper over the gaps and contradictions in a community.

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turies’ worth of accounts about the difficult relationships between young and old in a peasant family when it was time to transfer a farm from one generation to the other, about the hard bargaining surrounding the rights to be retained by parents, and about dowries for female offspring. Irritation, dispute, emotional tension, and conflict were the order of the day. The history books are filled with instances in the history of the European aristocracy in which sons set themselves against fathers, rebelled, and even waged war on them. To talk of families as emotional communities whitewashes a very difficult social reality.¹⁴⁹ Rosenwein’s thesis is probably grounded in ideas of the respectable nuclear family from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There is an entire literature devoted to householding from antiquity up to the eighteenth century that proves how difficult it is to establish some kind of household equilibrium between the authority of the man (paterfamilias, the housefather) and repeated demands for equality on the part of the woman (materfamilias, the housemother).¹⁵⁰ Here too, conflict was inescapable. Marriage sermons from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century consistently deplore how married couples lived like cat and dog, constantly arguing. We do have some evidence of happy marriages in the Middle Ages, but the historical evidence regarding fractious married couples on the one hand and happily married couples on the other proves that social communities – and every family or marriage is a social community – are not necessarily emotional communities. Studies in social and legal history on married life in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries lead to serious doubt about whether families can be regarded as emotional communities. Even studies in emotion history that seek to demonstrate the existence of an emotional community for one particular family are forced to concede substantial differences between the expectations of the parents and the way their children behave.¹⁵¹ The counter-argument that honour binds a family into an emotional community ignores the fact that common interests do not always go hand in hand with common feelings. One further example: neighbourhoods. There are countless examples from past and present that people who live in close proximity with one another do not in any sense form an emotional community, but in contrast often live in a permanent state of conflict with one another. Friedrich Schiller summed this up when he wrote in his play Wilhelm Tell (1802– 1804): “The most pious person can not live in peace, if the bad neighbour does not like it” (4.3).¹⁵² Disputes between neighbours

 A more realistic image of tension in family relationships is given by Linda A. Pollock, “Rethinking Patriarchy and the Family in Seventeenth-Century England”, Journal of Family History 23.1 (1998), 3 – 27.  Rüdiger Schnell, “Concordia im Haus – Vielfalt der Diskurse (1300 – 1700)”. Domestic issues of this kind are still in evidence in early twentieth-century autobiographies. See the autobiography by Oscar Maria Graf, Das Leben meiner Mutter (München: Desch, 1947). I am grateful to Fritz Böhler for this reference.  Consider the study of the Amerbach family discussed in n212 below.  Friedrich Schiller, Wilhelm Tell, trans. Patrick Maxwell (London: Walter Scott, 1893).

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these days often lead to court proceedings, whether caused by leaves falling on next door’s land or noise. Since neighbours, both today and in the past, do not always have the same values, one cannot simply assume the existence of an emotional community without further consideration. Even in premodern towns and cities, there was more conflict than emotional agreement between neighbours.¹⁵³ Well into the twentieth century, it was envy rather than emotional agreement that characterised the relationship between neighbouring large farmers. When Rosenwein describes late medieval guilds as social and emotional communities, she again obscures the historical evidence. In this case, we even need to call into question the central term community. In German we speak of the guilds of the later Middle Ages as Genossenschaften (cooperatives), Berufsverbände (occupational groups), Körperschaften (corporations), Personenverbände (groups of persons), and Vereinigungen (associations), not Gemeinschaften (communities). The term Gemeinschaft suggests an implicit emotional and cultural harmony among members that is not part of the sense of Verband and Genossenschaft. Guilds need to be defined and described as cooperatives or occupational corporations, not as communities. The term community, or the German term Gemeinschaft, is out of place here. The members of a Verband (organisation) – Philologenverband (philological association), Ärzteverband (medical association), Unternehmerverband (business association), even guilds (!) – do not form an emotional community, but instead a corporate group organised around common interests and goals.¹⁵⁴ Hence, we cannot refer to guilds as either communities or emotional communities.¹⁵⁵ Finally, we come to monasteries, which Rosenwein also calls emotional communities.¹⁵⁶ It is true that medieval monasteries were social communities – we still talk of monastic communities today – but they were not in any sense emotional communities. There are masses of material documenting the formation within a monastic community of groups and parties, the existence of disputes over the hierarchical structure prevailing in a monastery, the quarrels over the forthcoming election of an abbot, or the letters of complaint about the isolation of those living in monasteries. Benedict of Nursia (died 547) composed a set of rules that dealt in part with quarrels and disputes, and the Regula Benedicti became the institutional foundation for numerous medieval monasteries. We can read there: “Harbor neither hatred nor jeal-

 Matter-Bacon, Städtische Ehepaare.  Verband is a central term of Max Weber’s sociology as developed in Economy and Society, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2019), chap. 1; it has a different theoretical function from Gemeinschaft, which is used to characterise particular forms of social relationship, not a (particular) form of social organisation.  It is conceivable, however, that emotional solidarity among such occupational groups could be created by an external threat.  See Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 30: the “clerical/monastic community”, whose worldview is supposedly represented in the work of Gregory the Great, is for Rosenwein an “emotional community”.

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ousy of anyone, and do nothing out of envy. Do not love quarreling; shun arrogance. […] If you have a dispute with someone, make peace with him before the sun goes down.”¹⁵⁷ There were often conflicts between monks, simply because of differences in character.¹⁵⁸ The factors leading to the formation of a social community do not automatically make that community an emotional community. Colleagues working for the same medium-sized company, residents of a care home, students living together in a house or flat, residents of an urban locality – all can form a social community without being an emotional community. The idea of social communities that are at once homogeneous, harmonious, and emotionally consensual communities is in my view an illusion, a self-deception. There is a certain paradox in the way that Rosenwein counters Reddy with an insistence on the plurality of emotional communities, yet at the same time homogenises those emotional communities. Studies of sixteenth- to eighteenth-century military life show that a closer and more exact examination of historical sources means some supposed emotional communities no longer present themselves as such. The military historian Dorothee Sturkenboom is sceptical of the homogenisation¹⁵⁹ carried out by studies that characterise military life in terms of emotional communities.¹⁶⁰ Sturkenboom questions the coherence of these military communities in camps and garrisons, and concludes that there was an “emotional gap” between officers and common soldiers. The death of an officer was mourned more than that of a common soldier. Commanding officers were distanced from the battlefield and so had a different appreciation of the course taken by the fighting, and thus also had memories of a battle that differed from those of the lower-ranking soldiers. Sturkenboom argues that class differences and the existence of the military hierarchy made any idea of the “coherence of emotional communities in early modern armies” questionable. It was more a matter of “sub-groups with different sub-cultures”. In my view, this example shows that more and more cracks begin to appear in the idea of an (emotional) community, the closer one looks at it.¹⁶¹ In many instances, the term ‘emotional community’ conceals more than it reveals when dealing with complex evidence.¹⁶² There is tension, competition, contradiction in every social community. For this reason, not every social community is an emotional community. Recognition of this might have raised the question of whether, and to what extent, affective or emotional factors create a kind of community that social factors do not. Unfortunately, the as-

 Regula Benedicti, IV 65 – 73; The Rule of St. Benedict. In Latin and English with Notes, ed. Timothy Fry (Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1981), 184– 185.  Regula Benedicti, II 26 – 32.  Sturkenboom, “Battlefield Emotions”, 278 – 280.  Kuijpers and Van der Haven, “Battlefield Emotions 1500 – 1800. Practices, Experience, Imagination”, 6, 8 and 9.  See also Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 536 n. 383.  See II.4 below.

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sumed equivalence of social and emotional communities precludes such a question being asked in the first place. Groups and institutions that social history has already defined (family, monastery, the military, the court, town and city, guilds, state, and so on) are subsequently treated as historical emotional ‘units’. This procedure involves a grave oversimplification. We are left with this: Rosenwein’s attempt to pluralise historical emotional evidence ends up, like those of her ‘followers’, by homogenising and levelling that same evidence.¹⁶³ To roll back this homogenisation, we need to find counter-questions. Are there emotional communities that are not at the same time social communities?¹⁶⁴ What real, historically documented social community – a particular family, a particular monastery, a particular household, and so on – is not an emotional community? The social constructivist foundation of Rosenwein’s approach promotes the equivalence of social and emotional community. But this equivalence is more a hindrance to work on the sources than a help. The term community needs to be reconsidered. It suggests homogeneity, concord, and harmony, where in reality conflicting interests and emotional differences (can) exist.

d Practices. Limited Insights The point of departure of practice theory, which is discussed above all in philosophical phenomenology, sociology, and anthropology, is the view that social constructivist research focuses problematically on language and social interaction, more or less entirely neglecting the body. According to representatives of practice theory, this lack of engagement with the physical leads to the mistaken assumption that the body is not influenced by sociocultural factors. Monique Scheer claims to have developed a theory of ‘emotional practices’, although this is itself developed from the work of the Stearns, Reddy, and Rosenwein.¹⁶⁵ There are four basic assumptions in her approach: (1) emotions are practices, or repeated forms of behaviour, and not inner psychic states; (2) therefore, no distinction is made between interior (feelings) and exterior (body);  Rosenwein’s differentiation (Emotional Communities, 24) of small and large circles has not been appreciated in the reception of her thesis. An exception is Charlotte-Rose Millar, “Church and Parish Records”, in Early Modern Emotions. An Introduction, 115 – 117 (116). In all recent studies of monasteries, families, the military, and urban populations, the sole reference is always to emotional communities.  From the thirteenth century onwards, some poems express the view that a relationship to a friend is more important than one to a relative. In both the Middle Ages and early modernity, there were friendly (emotional) relations between persons who did not form a social community.  Monique Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?”. This was preceded by a contribution written with Pascal Eitler: Pascal Eitler and Monique Scheer, “Emotionengeschichte als Körpergeschichte”, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 35 (2009), 282– 313.

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(3) the body is engaged in all emotional practices (equated with emotions) – emotions are, in effect, stored in the body; and (4) hence, historical changes to the body imply emotional changes, and vice versa. Practice theory involves a holistic conception of emotions; thinking, feeling, and acting constitute an inseparable unity that is materialised in the body. The Western anthropological dualism of body and soul, of exteriority and interiority, is felt be a historical construct that has no foundation in people’s psychophysiological nature. The distinction between an exterior (body) and an interior (feeling) is considered to involve outdated anthropological or philosophical conceptions. The praxeological turn presents itself as part of the performative turn. One does not have feelings; one does them. Emotions are treated as arising in the moment of action (writing letters, watching films, taking part in demonstrations; talking about emotions; communicating feelings; the development of feelings through a society’s emotional norms).¹⁶⁶ The criticism levelled by practice theory at the allegedly traditional mind/body dualism, together with dichotomies of interior and exterior, feeling and expression, shows that cooperation between premodern and modern historians would be worthwhile. For the dichotomy of body and mind that practice theory so decisively rejects is by no means the only perspective that we encounter in premodern times. It is widely assumed today that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers either worked with, or even initiated, a dualism of mind and body, or of reason and feeling/emotion/affect,¹⁶⁷ and research in emotion history frequently highlights the Cartesian distinction of mind and body as a dominant innovation.¹⁶⁸ But if one looks

 The conceptual proximity to Reddy’s performative model of emotions is unmistakable; see Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?”, 212– 213.  In fact, this dichotomy was the basis for the understanding of feelings around 1800; see, for example, Walter Pape, “‘Ja, wenn man Tränen schreiben könnte’: Erzählte Tränen, gespielte Tränen um 1800”, in Emotionen in der Romantik. Repräsentation, Ästhetik, Inszenierung, ed. Antje Arnold and Walter Pape (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2012), 171– 184 (171), citing Johann Gottfried Herder, “Von der Ode”, in Herder, Werke in zehn Bänden, ed. Günter Arnold, Martin Bollacher, and Helmut Bachmeier, Bd. 1: Frühe Schriften 1764 – 1772, ed. Ulrich Gaier (Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985), 57– 99, at 66: “Feeling and word are so opposed: genuine affect is dumb, locked into our rushing breast” (“Empfindung und Wort sind sich so gar entgegen: der wahrhafte Affekt ist stum, durchbraust unsere ganze Brust inwendig eingeschlossen”). According to Herder, “feelings are never directly accessible”; our own feelings “can be communicated to others only through arbitrary words or bodily signs”; Walter Pape, ibid., 172.  Critical of this discussion, and of the one-sided association of Descartes with the dualism model: Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 854– 860; Penelope Gouk, “Clockwork or Musical Instrument? Some English Theories of Mind-Body Interaction before and after Descartes”, in Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Cultural Expression, ed. Susan McClary (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 35 – 59; Charis Charalampous, Rethinking the Mind-Body Relationship in Early Modern Literature, Philosophy and Medicine. The Renaissance of the Body (New York: Routledge, 2016).

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back further than the seventeenth century into the Middle Ages, it emerges that two contrary relationships of mind and body, or interior and exterior, were discussed during this period. On the one hand, we encounter the view that physical behaviour influences the inner state of people, or that the body is merely the executive organ of inner disposition;¹⁶⁹ on the other, the view that facial expressions, gestures, and the activity of a person – minstrel, ascetic, courtier – do not permit any deductions to be made about their (inner) feelings and intentions.¹⁷⁰ According to one position, mind and body are two quite distinct things and are constantly opposed – the body does not do what the mind tells it to do – whereas for other medieval theologians and philosophers, mind and body form a psychosomatic unity.¹⁷¹ Mind and body depend on each other and are bound up with each other. And in accordance with this idea of the integral connection of inner and outer, or the mind as the seat of affect and the body, the body reveals what is happening in a person’s interior.¹⁷² Once this multilayered medieval situation is made clear, it is no longer quite so easy to talk in terms of a contrast between a medieval discourse of body and mind on the one hand and an alleged philosophical turn in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on the other.¹⁷³ Even the ‘declaration of war’ of practice theory against the traditional mind/body dichotomy now presents itself as a unilateral historical construction.¹⁷⁴ Descartes’s attempt to conceive mind and body as separate substances on the one hand, but at the same time to conceive them as a unity on the other, is astonishingly close to medieval thinking and reduces the conceptual distance from  See, for example, Leon Battista Alberti (1404– 1472), On Painting and On Sculpture, ed. and trans. C. Grayson (London: Phaidon, 1972), 80 – 83 (the movements of the soul can be read from the movements of the body).  See Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 82– 83 and 839 – 860; Schnell, “Wer sieht das Unsichtbare?”; Schnell, “Curialitas und Dissimulatio”.  Lee Jones, “Friend and Adversary: Some Reflections on the Body and the Soul in Medieval English Thought”, in Venus and Mars. Engendering Love and War in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Andrew Lynch and Philippa Maddern (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1995), 71– 87. See also IIInn16 – 31 below.  On the attachment of these two contrary views to different discourses and communicative situations, see Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 842– 847.  Like modern practice theory, scholars of early modernity have also situated emotions in both body and mind; Karen Harvey, “The Body”, in Early Modern Emotions. An Introduction, 165 – 168. See also Dawson, Lovesickness and Gender, 15 ff. (in the early modern period, interior and exterior were seen as interdependent). On the unity of the physical and the psychological in the medical thinking of the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, see IIInn16 – 31, IVn81, Vnn97– 119 below.  Hilge Landweer and Catherine Newmark, “Seelenruhe oder Langeweile, Tiefe der Gefühle oder bedrohliche Exzesse? Zur Rhetorik von Emotionsdebatten”, in Pathos, Affekt, Emotion. Transformationen der Antike, ed. Martin Harbsmeier and Sebastian Möckel (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2009), 79 – 106, quite rightly think that “the historico-philosophical claim of a supposed opposition of reason and feeling created a straw man that suited everyone” (95). This was because “most historical theories of emotion had taken account of the cognitive elements in emotions, even if this was not yet done in terms of a conception of intentionality”. The idea of the intentionality of emotions implies that they are connected to objective conditions and so can be rationally explained.

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the premodern theories that practice theory claims for itself.¹⁷⁵ Having qualified the historical claims that practice theory has made, I now turn to a few critical remarks on the possibilities and limits of this line of research.¹⁷⁶ (1) Practice theory and emotion history. What can practice theory contribute to the ‘history of emotions’ approach? We start with the basic idea of practice theory: that emotions exist only in actions, or forms of behaviour; that these actions are, together with the related emotions, stored in the body; and that changes in, or different, actions allow us to conclude that emotions have changed. From the perspective of practice theory, therefore, the history of emotions will consist of documenting ordinary and habitual behaviours that can be shown to exist in historical sources (penances; church attendance; tournaments; forms of prayer, confessions; visits to museums, concerts, and cinemas; reading novels; writing letters, walking and hiking; religious processions; being a pub regular; hustings; funeral rituals; sexual activities, political demonstrations; and so on). Such documentation does give us information about what people did in the past. But what kind of emotional reaction these activities might have produced in participants or in individuals is something that practice theory can neither tell us nor has any interest in telling us.¹⁷⁷ If practice theory treats visible actions and activities as the source for a history of emotions, yet these emotional practices produce different reactions both in one and the same person and in several people, emotion history as pursued by practice theory will provide us with reliable statements only about changes in emotional practices, not about the transformation of emotions. Practice theory can tell us nothing about what someone who visits a museum, looks at a childhood photo, or takes a drug feels; nor does it seek to do so.¹⁷⁸ It is concerned with “how and why historical actors mobilized their bodies in certain ways”.¹⁷⁹ Hence, it can only register different observable physical activities of a social group, and compare them with the potentially emotionally relevant signs of other

 The idea of the psychosomatic unity of the human being – at least in the domain of feelings and emotions – and of the visibility of emotional states in the body places Descartes in the tradition of medical conceptions from antiquity to the Middle Ages. Here too, visible changes in the body were interpreted as changes in a person’s soul and emotions.  A more detailed analysis of Scheer’s essay from 2012 can be found in Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 166 – 190. On Scheer’s 2012 essay, see also Plamper, The History of Emotions, 265 – 270; Boddice, The History of Emotions, 120 – 124.  If it did nonetheless seek to do so, it would have to rely on the statements of people about their emotional reactions – like all the other approaches. Emotional reactions to the terrifying material objects in nineteenth-century London museums were different for each visitor. See Melman, “Horror and Pleasure”, 32, 43 and 46. Medieval sources report very different emotional reactions on the part of pilgrims to the grave of the French King Louis IX (died 1270): Megan Cassidy-Welch, “Emotion, Place, and Memory at the Royal Abbey of St. Denis”, in Performing Emotions in Early Europe, 185 – 199.  Eitler and Scheer, “Emotionengeschichte als Körpergeschichte”, 296.  Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?”, 215 (my emphasis).

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groups and in other eras.¹⁸⁰ What emotions accompany these physical practices is of no interest. Speculation on these matters is left to psychologists and neurophysiologists. According to practice theory, the same practice should always produce the same emotional state of mind in a person, since for practice theory that emotional state of mind is anchored in the body together with the practice. Given its focus on the body, practice theory has to exclude emotional variables, despite the fact that in everyday life emotional experiences and also the expression of emotion are very much related to context and situation, not only to the body. Practising the violin, going to a football match, praying in church, going for a walk in the woods, going for an aimless drive, even sexual union – these are all matters that are by no means always associated with the same emotional circumstances. Practice theory ignores situation-specific factors. In my opinion, it is precisely the innovative aspect of practice theory, namely its focus on the body, that hinders any recognition of emotional plurality and diversity. (2) Detrimental consequences. Very many emotion historians who adhere to social constructivist doctrine are convinced that we can learn something about the emotional experience of our predecessors by using historical conceptions of emotion. In contrast, practice theory is of the view that all premodern conceptions of emotion are founded on a false dichotomy – the anthropological dualism of mind and body, of interior and exterior – that has to be deconstructed. Practice theory hence removes the textual foundation of these emotion historians. If premodern conceptions of emotion are founded on false assumptions, they can no longer be used as points of departure for a history of emotion.¹⁸¹ (3) Limited scope. Numerous emotional circumstances are not produced, or ‘embodied’, by emotional practices, but arise without and apart from emotional practices: anxiety,¹⁸² envy, ambition, shame, boredom, amazement, anger, depression, and the like. Practice theory therefore explains only a small part of the emotional circumstances that make up people’s lives.¹⁸³ (4) Constancy vs change. Many practices that are also bound up with emotional experiences remain unchanged over very many centuries: suckling babies, ploughing the fields with horses or oxen, eating together as a family, the sexual union of man and wife, mourning for dead children, church services in rural areas, and so on. Repetitive practices such as milking cows, mowing grass, lifting potatoes, praying to-

 Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?”, 217 and 218.  It will be shown below (V.1– 2) that historical conceptions of emotion can be used as a foundation for a history of emotions (as emotional experiences) only to a very limited extent anyway.  See VI.3 below regarding the Platter autobiography.  Whether in literature or in social reality, one can see again and again that, despite habituation to many emotional practices, the subsequent behaviour of very many people contradicts the aim of those practices. Reddy already noted this in the AHR Conversation 2012 (‘The Historical Study of Emotions’), 1497.

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gether in a monastery, and celebrating village festivals have remained the same over many centuries. Can we conclude from this that the related emotions have remained unchanged from the tenth to the twentieth century? As a historian, Scheer talks only of change.¹⁸⁴ But history has to take account of those things that defy change as well.

e Neurohistory and Bioculture. Exaggerated Expectations? The holistic approach of practice theory is followed even more consistently by Rob Boddice, since he seeks to introduce the findings of neuroscience into the study of the emotional experiences of people in the past.¹⁸⁵ Boddice talks not only of the plasticity of the body but of the plasticity of the brain. The human brain, involved in all emotional experiences, shows a “remarkable plasticity” (2017, 13b; 2018, 154– 158). The activity of the brain is, Boddice believes, of course regulated by nature but is not fixed over time; it alters with changes in culture. Nature and culture are not opposites but instead a biocultural whole (2017, 12b). The way in which people react emotionally to their surroundings depends, in his view, on the way in which they perceive those surroundings: they appraise, assess, and evaluate the significance of the events occurring all around them. If we knew how historical actors perceived reality, we could, according to Boddice, also grasp the reality of emotional experience, for the signals that we receive through our five senses are interpreted by our brains (2018, 133). For this reason, he argues, historians have to take the “biocultural status of human beings” seriously (2017, 10a – b). “The feelings and the senses have a history that is at once a history of culture and a history of the body” (2018, 133). According to Boddice, sense perception and its interpretation by the brain give our emotions a meaning that then in turn affects our feelings. Visual, tactile, and auditory experiences cannot, therefore, be separated from “an affective evaluative cognitive process” (2018, 133). The challenge is to recognise the connection between perception and affective experience. “The social neurosciences are empirically demonstrating the mutability of experience and the contextual subjectivity of perceptions of reality” (2017, 13a; my emphasis). As with historical emotion research in general, Boddice wishes to reveal the “historicity of human experience” (2017, 12b). Like other emotion historians, he assumes that in antiquity people had “entirely different affective experiences” from those which we have today (2017, 11b). The cognitive aim

 Monique Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?”, 220, writes that “emotions change over time not only because norms, expectations, words and concepts that shape experience are modified, but also because practices in which they are embodied, and bodies themselves, undergo transformation”.  The following remarks concern two works by Boddice: “The History of Emotions: Past, Present, Future” (2017) and The History of Emotions (2018). I subsequently cite them by year and page number.

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is, therefore, not a new one.¹⁸⁶ However, Boddice is of the view that the neurosciences can give historians new tools in their efforts “to unlock the history of experience” (2017, 11a – b), that is, to explain why emotions change from one epoch to another.¹⁸⁷ The emotional experience of people is said to be “embodied in physical matter, thinking stuff, and visceral movement”. Human culture is to be regarded as part of the natural evolution of the human species (2017, 12b). Someone who wants to investigate people’s emotional experience should not neglect the biological and neurophysiological processes that run in the background. Boddice calls this a “neuro-historical approach to history” (2017, 12b). Neurohistory, Boddice suggests, shows that external factors such as drugs, new media, air pollution, working conditions, or new illnesses influence affective processes. These kinds of external factors, according to Boddice, have hitherto been neglected by emotion historians. He considers that we are dealing with an “entanglement of culture and biology”, arguing that traditional social constructivism only took culture into account and should be replaced by “evolutionary biology”, which takes proper account of “reality” (2017, 13b). Only in this way can one study the “historicism of reality”, that is, “an authentically experienced and embodied diachronic process” (2017, 13b). Boddice does acknowledge that we cannot subject historical actors in the past to neuroscientific analysis. And he does not require that historians “become competent neuroscientists” (2017, 10a – b). All the same, he believes, the knowledge produced by the “social neurosciences” offers historians an opportunity that they should take up (2017, 13b): “Knowledge of neuroplasticity, of the effect of culture on biological processes, and of the cultural framing of neurological activity, suggest that we can look to reconstruct the conditions of historical experience” (2017, 13b; my emphasis). Of course, for Boddice, we cannot establish how the human brain functioned in the past; but with the aid of the neurosciences, we can better understand the conditions of human experience, and in this way gain access to the feelings of historical actors (2017, 14a). Historians, he argues, are capable of doing this since they are used to piecing together the cultural context of past worlds with regard to material, intellectual, and social conditions. Above all, however, he sees historians as especially suited to this kind of work because of their “attention to the testimony of historical actors” (2017, 14a). Unlike social constructivism, Boddice argues, this “neuroscientific impetus” takes seriously the existence of a reality beyond culture. The task of historians is said by Boddice to be the identification of the parameters of affective experi-

 Boddice is interested in “how they [emotions] were experienced, what aroused them, in what form, and with what effects” (2017, 11b).  Rob Boddice, “Review of Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions. An Introduction, Oxford 2015” (Reviews in History; DOI: 10.14296/RiH/2014/1752 [accessed 21 December 2017]), 1, asks: “Do historians need to know – at all – what emotions actually are?” Boddice, The History of Emotions, 167, answers in the affirmative: “In sum, neuroscience and genetics are arming historians with tools they can apply to the historical record and to the history of experience at the most fundamental level.”

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ence in a given context: “the meaning and expression of historical ‘emotions’ and emotion words, the social dynamics of their expression, and the causes and effects, including at the environmental level, of changes in these things” (2017, 14a). It is not necessary “to know the historical brain, on a neurological basis, but we can come to know the history of experience” (2017, 14b). I must admit that reading these arguments that Boddice made in 2017 and 2018 leaves me somewhat baffled. First of all, Boddice gives the impression that taking the neurosciences into account opens up an entirely new perspective on the emotional experience of our predecessors. All affective experience, he suggests, comes from the activity of the brain. But Boddice ultimately undercuts the force of his message by denying that historians need specifically neuroscientific competence. He instead refers to traditional methods: “Affective statements have to be read in context, against other affective statements, against the languages of the body, or gesture, of interaction and intercourse, and against the sensual worlds, in which historical actors moved and existed” (2018, 163). The only new element I can see here is that Boddice sees external factors, such as poverty, war, famine, air pollution, and new illnesses, as causing changes in human genetic material and hence also changes in emotional experiences (2017, 13a; 2018, 164). Let us suppose for the moment that, as Boddice suggests, historians could benefit from the insights of neuroscientists. What opportunities would be opened up to historians by taking account of the fact that emotional experiences are linked to neural processes? (1) All that neuroscientists can tell us is that particular emotions or feelings are linked to particular neurophysiological processes in particular regions of the brain. Variations in the intensity of brain activity allow us to determine whether someone reacts empathetically to a situation. But what an experimental subject actually feels is not shown by diagrams or images.¹⁸⁸ To find this out we need a self-description by the subject.¹⁸⁹ However, for such a self-description the subject needs to use socially available linguistic resources. The subject can articulate their affective state of mind only by using the linguistic conventions of society. But this does not in any way give us access to an ‘authentic’ affective experience. And if this line of argument is accepted – that a subject can feel only what is available linguistically to that subject – we

 On the difficulties involved in seeking to grasp the neural activities of the brain with our consciousness, see Georg Northoff, “Are Our Emotional Feelings Relational?”, in Emotions, Community, and Citizenship. Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives, ed. Rebecca Kingston, Kiran Banerjee, James McKee, Yi-Chun Chien, and Constantine Christos Vassiliou (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 126 – 153.  Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 115 – 124. It is also true that attempts to determine the emotional experiences of witches with the aid of neuroscientific categories have to face up to the fact that the sources give us not experiences but interpretations of experiences.

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can spare ourselves the effort of employing neuroscience in search of ‘authentic’ feeling. Linguistic analysis of the self-description would be enough.¹⁹⁰ (2) If famine, failed harvests, wars, epidemics, and environmental catastrophes influence perception and thus emotional experience in people, the repetition of such events in different epochs lends support to the idea that there is a uniformity of particular emotional dispositions over time.¹⁹¹ (3) Boddice repeatedly states that “perceptions of reality” are of decisive importance for emotional experience (2017, 13a; 2018, 134 ff.). But in what manner are these perceptions, and hence the related emotional experiences of our predecessors, actually accessible? In the form of oral and written statements of the persons concerned. In the case of events that occurred many centuries ago, emotional experiences have come down to us in texts. The act of writing these emotional (and the related cognitive) experiences down has to be seen as the product of a further transformation. Emotional experiences arising from neural processes are initially translated through the medium of language. This medium, ‘language’, together with its history, is subject to processes other than simply neural processes in the brain. Emotions that have in this way been expressed through language are then transferred into the medium of ‘writing’. Ultimately, original neural processes are accessible to us only in a form that has been mediated twice: converted into language (a), then written down (b).¹⁹² (4) The perceptions, and with them the emotional experiences, of our predecessors are, according to Boddice, jointly determined by the ideas and norms of a given culture or epoch. He assumes in this way that cultures and epochs are radically differentiated (2018, 163). But what happens if these societies and cultures are riven by internal differences, such as rival conceptions of emotion, different signifiers of emotion, or competing sets of values?¹⁹³ Many knights failed to respond to the passionate calls of many bishops to participate in the Crusades of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. They had better things to do (concerning private, political, and territorial interests) than conquer or defend the Holy Land. Even the Christian knights fighting Muslims in Palestine did not all share the same perception of ‘reality’. Some risked their own lives, others cleared off once any danger loomed. How can we explain these differing perceptions of reality? How could such different perceptions arise in the same culture, within the same community of belief, differences which then, according to Boddice, would lead to differing affective experiences? We could also pose such questions with respect to political events in Germany between 1933 and

 Boddice places great weight on the perception of a concrete social context. But most neurophysiological tests do without any such context.  This prospect of emotional uniformity does not, however, apply if the brain has undergone neurophysiological changes in response to cultural changes (through education, technology, and so forth).  On orality and writing, see nn125 – 133 above.  See V.1 below.

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1945, during the Third Reich. Why did one person join the resistance to Hitler, why was another enthused by Hitler’s promises? Often the dividing line ran through one and the same family. These examples highlight the limits of an approach that, on the one hand, works with transpersonal categories of body, brain, and culture but, on the other, introduces a strong personal or individual element by using the analytical category ‘perception of reality’. The gap between (supposedly culturally influenced) neural processes (“plasticity of the brain”) and the multitude of individual perceptions, and hence affective experiences, cannot be bridged. Thinking in terms of categories like ‘cultures’, ‘epochs’, ‘societies’, and ‘communities’ cannot explain the countless different forms of behaviour, attitudes, models, and affective experiences within an epoch, culture, and society, or even within a single family. Quite possibly, the key to such an understanding lies not in neural processes that transcend individuals but instead in very personal convictions and character traits.¹⁹⁴ The young Thomas Platter (sixteenth century) was distinguished from all other members of his family by his extraordinary sensitivity to things that disgusted him, even though the whole family lived together sharing the same social conditions.¹⁹⁵ On the other hand, his reaction to seeing an object that disgusted him resembled that of people in the twenty-first century: looking away, running away, being afraid. During a passage from Italy to Palestine, aboard a pilgrim ship during the sixteenth century, some of the pilgrims were ashamed at having to relieve themselves naked in front of their fellow travellers, others not.¹⁹⁶ Fear for one’s own life does not seem to have been affected by sociocultural influences either. The fact that the young goatherd Thomas Platter was frightened to death when one night he had to hang onto clumps of grass to prevent himself falling down a steep drop would be something one could regard as a timeless emotional experience.¹⁹⁷ That Felix Platter was the only person in his family who felt drawn to music, especially musical instruments,¹⁹⁸ is a contraindication for facile generalisations about the relation of context, perception, and neural processes. All the same, the example of acedia, melancholia,¹⁹⁹ and depression can lend support to Boddice’s thesis that it is not reality (however construed) that is responsible for affective experiences, but rather the perception of reality: acedia and melancholia, although almost identical affective states, were in fact diagnosed in distinct

 From antiquity right up to the twenty-first century, we encounter in historical reports both irascible and good-natured people, rulers who are fearful as well as ones who are decisive, and politically influential women as well as women without political influence. The existence of varying emotional dispositions can safely be assumed.  See VI.2 below.  See IVn283, VIn109 below.  See VI.3 below.  See VI.2 below.  See VI.1 below.

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ways by different kinds of people – theologians saw them as sins, physicians treated them as the result of faulty combinations of bodily fluids. These distinct diagnoses certainly had an influence on the affective state of the people in question. However, in this case it was not the perceptions of the subject that influenced an emotional experience, but instead the perception of a third party. Furthermore, the ongoing controversies within the neurosciences, and the constant revision of neuroscientific theses and positions, do not seem to me to provide a reliable basis for work on historical texts.

4 The Relation and Reception of Theories In this concluding section, I will address some features of the relationship between the four theories presented above, and also consider their reception in emotion research. (1) Lack of consistency between the basic idea and actual research practice. The detailed presentation of the four approaches in introductory texts, and in introductions to collections of essays, clashes spectacularly with the actual influence of these theses on historical studies of emotion.²⁰⁰ Hardly any study of emotions in premodernity uses their methods in dealing with its source material.²⁰¹ The study of modern emotion history likewise proceeds without a systematic use of the four approaches.²⁰² Reddy’s theory of ‘emotives’, developed in relation to his work on the French Revolution, is for the most part found in studies of that historical event,

 For example, Rosenwein is mentioned in only two, and Reddy in six, of the sixty-six contributions to the three volumes of Histoire des Émotions, ed. Corbin, Courtine and Vigarello (2016 – 2017).  This can be shown with some examples. In the collection Passions et pulsions à la cour (2015), only one of sixteen contributions makes reference to the theses of Reddy and Rosenwein (315 and 321– 322). Only two of eleven contributions in the collection Violence and Emotions in Early Modern Europe (2016) mention any of the theoretical approaches (those of Monique Scheer and Barbara Rosenwein) outlined above. All of the contributions plunge straight into the historical sources. The same is true of the thirteen contributions in the collection Ordering Emotions in Europe (2015): one contribution, by Louise D’Arcens, mentions Rosenwein and Reddy; two contributions mention Rosenwein. The same is true of the fourteen contributions in Pain and Emotion in Modern History (ed. Rob Boddice [Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014]): two contributions mention the keywords of Reddy and Rosenwein: emotive and emotional community. In the collection Gender and Emotions (2015), only four out of twelve contributions cite Reddy, Rosenwein, or Scheer. In the collection Emotions in the Household (2008), only one of fifteen contributions (not including the introduction) mentions any of the approaches (the Stearns’ emotionology). In the collection Understanding Emotions in Early Europe (2015), only four of fourteen contributions (not including the introduction) refer to Reddy (once) or Rosenwein (three times). Among the thirteen contributions to Passions, Sympathy and Print Culture (2016), only one is oriented following any of the four approaches covered here (Rosenwein).  Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht, ed., Emotions in American History. An International Assessment (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010). Only the Stearns’ approach is mentioned, and that in just five of twelve pieces.

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and rarely in studies of emotion in premodernity.²⁰³ Quite plainly, the enterprise of emotion history can manage without the theses of the Stearns, Reddy, Rosenwein, or Scheer.²⁰⁴ If premodern emotion studies mention their names at all, it is usually to name-drop their key terms, not to use them. The terms emotionology, emotional regimes, emotional communities, and emotional practices become empty shells, applicable to each and every historical condition, without being made historically specific. The homogenisation and harmonisation implicit in Rosenwein’s formulation of ‘emotional community’ becomes reinforced when taken up by others; one could almost speak of an inflationary usage of ‘emotional community’. Very many historical studies of emotion refer to Rosenwein’s ‘emotional communities’ as if they were an established historical fact. The attraction of the conception is so great that it is even employed in studies that involuntarily undermine the idea.²⁰⁵ Hence, the following all become ‘emotional communities’: tenth-, eleventh-, and twelfth-century scholars;²⁰⁶ the eighteenth-century French military;²⁰⁷ a seventeenth-century nunnery;²⁰⁸ late medieval urban society in general;²⁰⁹ all premodern households;²¹⁰ the Greek  Sophia Rosenfeld, “Thinking about Feeling, 1789 – 1799”, French Historical Studies 32 (2009), 697– 706; Marie-Cécile Thoral, From Valmy to Waterloo. France at War, 1792 – 1813, trans. Godfrey Rogers (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Germani, “Mediated Battlefields”.  By contrast, Cairns and Nelis, “Introduction”, 1, consider that William Reddy and Barbara Rosenwein have been a great inspiration to the “historical study of emotions”.  And so, for instance, Walter Andrews, “Ottoman Love: Preface to a Theory of Emotional Ecology”, in A History of Emotions, ed. Liliequist, 21– 47, seeks to prove that “the emotional language” (primarily the language of love) in the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire was broadly accepted “at all social levels and in many places” (24). Throughout the Empire, the same emotional standards determined the interactions of individuals with their social and natural surroundings. For this reason, Andrews considers his study to be a confirmation of Rosenwein’s thesis, and he talks of the “emotional community” of (the entirety of!) Ottoman culture and of “Ottomanian society” (24). Rosenwein’s idea of temporally coexisting small-scale ‘emotional communities’ (itself a counter to Reddy’s conception of ‘emotional regimes’) is consequently undermined.  Mia Münster-Swendsen, “The Use of Emotions in the North-European School Milieus, c. 1000 – 1200”, in Networks of Learning. Perspectives on Scholars in Byzantine East and Latin West, c. 1000 – 1200, ed. Sita Steckel and Niels Gaul (Münster: LIT, 2014), 161– 181.  Kuiijpers and Van der Haven, “Battlefield Emotions 1500 – 1800. Practices, Experience, Imagination”, in Battlefield Emotions 1500 – 1800, 3 – 21. Here the army, elsewhere treated as an ‘emotional regime’, is now treated as an “emotional community” (6, 8, and 9).  Claire Walker, “An Ordered Cloister?”. Walker characterises seventeenth-century English nunneries as emotional communities, although her study recounts continual conflicts and sectarianism within these nunneries. See also Claire Walker, “Monastic Communities”, in Early Modern Emotions. An Introduction, 277– 280. That a study of nuns running the Paris hospital Hôtel-Dieu in the early sixteenth century can describe them as an “emotional community”, even though besides their disputes with the city authorities they were constantly arguing among themselves, shows how Rosenwein’s term can be reduced to a meaningless label: Lisa Keane Elliott, “‘Big mouth, big belly, fat pig!’ Tumults and Troublemakers in the Sixteenth-Century Paris Hôtel-Dieu”, in Violence and Emotions, 79 – 95.  Jelle Haemers, “A Moody Community? Emotion and Ritual in Late Medieval Urban Revolts”, in Emotions in the Heart of the City (14th–16th century), ed. Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin and Anne-Laure

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city of the second century AD;²¹¹ a sixteenth-century Basle family;²¹² the entirety of Ottoman culture;²¹³ all those who were moved to sympathy when looking at images of the Passion in the fourteenth century;²¹⁴ seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English prostitutes;²¹⁵ and finally the Christians of Gaul in the fifth and sixth centuries.²¹⁶ Rosenwein does deal in terms of smaller and larger emotional communities,²¹⁷ but there comes a point where sheer numbers prevent one using the term ‘emotional’; otherwise, the formulation ‘emotional community’ becomes analytically useless.²¹⁸ It is no different with the term ‘emotional regime’. Since Rosenwein has herself approximated the type ‘emotional community’ with Reddy’s ‘emotional regime’,²¹⁹ it comes as no surprise that these terms have become interchangeable in the litera-

Van Bruaene (Turnholt: Brepols, 2005), 63 – 81 (80); see Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 536 n. 383. Lisa Liddy, “Affective Bequests: Creating Emotion in York Wills, 1400 – 1600”, in Understanding Emotions in Early Europe, 273 – 289 (274), treats as one unitary emotional community all those who, living in York from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, made a will and were beneficiaries of a will.  Susan Broomhall, “Emotions in the Household”, 13 – 14, treats premodern households (from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century) as “emotional communities”, even though premodern household literature (or household manuals) constantly emphasises the need for an emotional distance between the man and woman of the house and their servants. See Schnell, “Concordia im Haus”. Stephanie Tarbin, “Raising Girls and Boys: Fear, Awe, and Dread in the Early Modern Household”, in Authority, Gender and Emotions in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, ed. Susan Broomhall (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 106 – 130, shows that premodern households in no way always formed emotional communities.  Onno M. van Nijf, “Affective Politics. The Emotional Regime in the Imperial Greek City”, in Unveiling Emotions II (see n56 above), 351– 368 (for Van Nijf, ‘emotional communities’ are the same thing as ‘emotional regimes’).  Valentina Sebastiani, “Childhood and Emotion in a Printing House (1497– 1508)”, in Childhood and Emotion, 143 – 156. Sebastiani identifies so many conflicts within the Basle Amerbach family that one wonders whether Rosenwein’s label emotional community applies at all to the material with which Sebastiani is dealing. In addition, the characterisation of the emotional connection between the members of the Amerbach family in the sixteenth century could be transferred to virtually all solid bourgeois families of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: concern for the welfare of children, paternal criticism of extravagant student lifestyles, the anguish of parents when a daughter wishes to marry a man they dislike, the happiness of sisters when their brothers come home. What is time-specific in any of that?  Andrews, “Ottoman Love”; see n205 above.  Lachlan Turnbull, “Discursive Affect and Emotional Prescriptiveness: On the ‘Man of Sorrowness’ in Fourteenth-Century Italian Painting”, in Performing Emotions in Early Europe, 221– 241.  Emily Cock, “‘Affecting Glory from Vices’: Negotiating Shame in Prostitution Texts, 1660 – 1750”, in Performing Emotions in Early Europe, 27– 49.  Rosenwein, Emotional communities, 61– 62.  See n163 above.  See the further examples of the way in which the formulation ‘emotional community’ is emptied of meaning in II.3.c above.  Rosenwein, “Problems and Methods”, 22– 23.

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ture.²²⁰ The rules of conduct to be observed by those in a nunnery are declared to form an emotional regime, but at the same time it is said that the nuns form an emotional community.²²¹ If medieval Christianity in total becomes an emotional regime,²²² the diversity in how medieval monks, lay people, and clerics lived vanishes. Even the voluntary self-castigation of late medieval religious women and the rules of behaviour for eighteenth-century soldiers have both been called emotional regimes. ²²³ At the same time, as already noted, the military has been said to form an emotional community.²²⁴ But can an emotional community in any strict sense be at the same time an emotional regime in the sense used by William Reddy? In Rosenwein’s monograph of 2006, emotional communities are characterised by the manner in which they take shape on a voluntary basis, through a preparedness to adopt the values constituting the community, through a preparedness to engage at any time in emotional exchanges with other communities.²²⁵ By contrast, Reddy’s conception of a regime is characterised by comprehensive state-political coercion that leads to the creation of places of emotional refuge. He also maintains that free movement between emotional regime and emotional refuge is not possible. Consequently, he tends to call medieval religious communities “emotional refuges” rather than “emotional regimes”.²²⁶ The practice among medieval Christians of sympathetically commemorating the death of Christ on Good Friday is also understood in emotion studies

 Boddice, The History of Emotions, 80: “In sum, anything that looks like an emotional community in Rosenwein’s terms is probably also an emotional regime in Reddy’s.”  Claire Walker, “An Ordered Cloister?”.  McNamer, Affective Meditation, 9.  Kuiijpers and Van der Haven, “Battlefield Emotions 1500 – 1800. Practices, Experience, Imagination”, 4 and 7, on emotional regimes. Germani, “Mediated Battlefields”, also calls the military an emotional regime. McNamer, Affective Meditation, 16, calls affective devotion, the way in which late medieval women performatively expressed their compassion for Christ, an affective regime or emotional regime. But this affective devotion lacks any sense of compulsion or imposition of a norm.  Kuijpers, Van der Haven, “Battlefield Emotions 1500 – 1800. Practices, Experience, Imagination”, 6, 8 and 9: the military, or the army, which elsewhere has been called an ‘emotional regime’, is now reclassified as an “emotional community”.  Boddice, The Science of Sympathy, 12– 13, criticises Rosenwein’s claim that Reddy’s concept of ‘regime’ is bound up with the nation state and thus not transferable to the Middle Ages. Boddice says that power also plays a role in Rosenwein’s emotional communities but that she has excluded this aspect; on this, see Boddice, The History of Emotions, 209 – 211. Boddice, The History of Emotions, 77– 80, emphasises the fact that Rosenwein denies any kind of state compulsion for her emotional communities so that she can distinguish them from Reddy’s emotional regimes.  Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 154. In respect of the monastery that she is describing, Jennifer Carpenter, “Positive Emotion in the Thirteenth Century: The Emotional World of Goswin of Bossut”, in Understanding emotions in Early Europe, 171– 190 (185), quite properly talks of “emotional community” and “emotional refuge”, not of “emotional regime”. McNamer, Affective meditation, 12, on the other hand, makes no distinction between “emotional regimes” and “emotional communities”. Both figurations are said to have emerged on the basis of “cultural scripts”.

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as an emotional regime.²²⁷ If the bye-laws of an eighteenth-century English town can be dubbed an emotional regime, and the household of a mother to which a pregnant woman withdraws can be called an emotional refuge, Reddy’s terminology begins to lose any claim it might have to analytical usefulness.²²⁸ The term emotional practice also seems to have recently degenerated into a vacuous phrase. That suicide can be called an emotional practice seems to me to render the term unusable.²²⁹ The limited influence of the four approaches discussed above is also apparent in the fact that several of the most recently published studies of emotion could have been written forty or fifty years ago. Reading these texts, one wonders to what extent they belong to an emotional turn. They make no use of new theoretical frameworks but deal in a traditional manner with historical events, conflicts, reports, modes of behaviour, and affective impacts of texts, discussing problems and discourses (of theology, philosophy, music, and medicine) that have been the object of research in the humanities for decades. The only difference from similar kinds of texts published in the 1960s and 1970s is the more frequent occurrence of the terms emotion and feelings. ²³⁰ Earlier studies of Crusade accounts, the literature of consolation, political intrigues and diplomatic activity, adultery and love affairs at court, infanticide and urban unrest, conflict in monasteries and families, and public speeches and private correspondence – all of them also mention emotional aspects.²³¹ I would recom-

 Barbara Newman, “Review of Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010)”, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 110.4 (2011), 523 – 526 (523).  Joanne McEwan, “‘At my mother’s house’. Community and Household Spaces in Early Eighteenth-Century Scottish Infanticide Narratives”, in Spaces for Feeling. Emotions and Sociabilities in Britain, 1650 – 1850, ed. Susan Broomhall (London and New York: Routledge 2015), 12– 34.  Trigg, “Introduction: Emotional Histories”, 12.  This is true of very many contributions to the collection Passions et pulsions à la cour (2015); of contributions to Gender and Emotions (2015), for instance, Megan Cassidy-Welch, “Order, Emotion, and Gender in the Crusade Letters of Jacques de Vitry”, 35 – 49, and Tracy Adams, “Married Noblewomen as Diplomats: Affective intimacy”, 51– 65; of most of the contributions in Authority, Gender and Emotions in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, ed. Susan Broomhall (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), with studies among other things of moral treatises, tapestries, court records, and political letters; and of Ordering emotions in Europe (2015), dealing with the hierarchy of angels, catalogues of vices, beliefs in demons, Christology, music treatises, memorialising techniques, a text advertising a charitable body, the discourse of friendship in Jesuit school lessons, theological discourses about maternal love, a tract called De consolatione, affect theory, and so on. At base, the content of these pieces is little different from that of earlier studies of (moral) theology, music theory, or discourse history from the 1960s to the 1980s. Apart, that is, from an excessive use of the term emotion. A similar criticism applies to Thomas Anthony Greene, “Softening the Heart, Eliciting Desire. Experiencing Music in a Carolingian Monastery”, in Emotions, Communities, and Difference in Medieval Europe. Essays in Honor of Barbara H. Rosenwein, ed. Maureen C. Miller and Edward Wheatley (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 46 – 58.  What Ruth Chavasse writes about the letters of the fifteenth-century humanist Marcantonio Sabellico in her essay “Humanist Educational and Emotional Expectations of Teenagers in Late Fifteenth-Century Italy”, in Emotions in the Household, 1200 – 1900, 69 – 84, is no different from compa-

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mend younger emotion historians to pay at least some attention to historical literature from the 1950s to the 1980s,²³² so that they might orient their own work more appropriately.²³³ So as not to be misunderstood: I have read all of the studies criticised above with great interest and profit. But I fail to find anything new here in methodological or theoretical terms.²³⁴ Straitjacketing historical material in terms of buzzwords like emotional community, emotional practice, or emotional regime tends to reduce what we might learn from the historical sources, not increase it. These terms become empty slogans, distorting our appreciation of the historical material. (2) Overestimation of differences. It is not only the influence of the four approaches outlined above on actual historical practice that is overvalued. The differences between the approaches are overestimated too.²³⁵ Representatives of each of the four approaches are in fact closer to one another than their efforts at demarcation suggest, as I have sought to indicate.²³⁶

rable studies from the 1960s to the 1980s. The contribution by Tracy Adams, “Fostering in early modern France”, in ibid., 103 – 118, could almost have been published in the 1970s as a study of ideals of education and family ties in the sixteenth century.  Stephanie Trigg, “Introduction: Emotional Histories”, notes that “the study of emotions and passions in historical context is not new” (4), that “interest in the emotions or feelings of the past is hardly new” (8), and that the emotional turn has merely resulted in the institutionalisation of emotion history. Cairns and Nelis, “Introduction”, 8 – 9, note that “Classics research” had given attention to emotions long before the emotional turn, adding of course that this has been joined by “the cognitive-evaluative approach to emotion” since the 1970s and 1980s. But this cognitivist approach can already be seen at work in ancient writers (Aristotle, Rhetoric, II 1; Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, IV 7,14).  In the domain of literary studies, a glance at the history of the field is sufficient to understand that the supposed emotional turn is no more than a return – see von Koppenfels and Cornelia Zumbusch, “Einleitung”, in Handbuch Literatur & Emotionen, 17.  My assessment is especially true of Boquet and Nagy, Medieval Sensibilities (2018). Of course, every reader will be impressed by the range of material presented. All the same, this cannot conceal the fact that this is really just a review of long-familiar results in different areas of study: the history of piety (monks, mysticism, beguignage, and so forth), moral theology, music theory, courtly love, homoeroticism, scholastic anthropology and psychology, sermons, history of medicine, discourses of rulership. The authors claim that their ‘history of emotions’ “is founded on a history of experience” (7). They seek to “avoid any distinction between felt emotion and expressed emotion” (7). But neither felt emotions nor expressed emotions are prominent, but instead norms, theories, ideals, imaginations, conceptions, and discourses about emotions – which have all been covered perfectly well by the fields in question anyway. The books seems to me a product of intellectual history, not of emotion history, and I can see no turn related to historical research; consider, for instance, Herbert Grundmann, Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter (Berlin: Ebering, 1935; 4th ed. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1970), now in English translation: Grundmann, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages, trans. Steven Rowan (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995).  See the discussion of practice theory in II.3.d above.  Rosenwein and Cristiani, What is the History of Emotions?, 26 – 61, elaborate the differences between the four approaches.

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All four theories talk of emotional styles that are learned either through being directly taught, through socialisation, or through communal group experiences.²³⁷ Hence, it is possible for some emotion historians to refer to Monique Scheer, others to Reddy, and others still to Rosenwein when they use the term emotional style. ²³⁸ Reddy and Scheer, like Rosenwein, take account of deviant emotional styles within a society (“countercultural groups”).²³⁹ Even as early as the Stearns, there was an emphasis on the need to distinguish different emotional communities, a position later claimed by Barbara Rosenwein for herself.²⁴⁰ The Stearns,²⁴¹ Rosenwein, Reddy, and Scheer all maintain that emotional style is an important object of research in helping to distinguish different communities of feeling from one another.²⁴² Rosenwein herself says that there is little difference between her own approach and that of the Stearns. The Stearns in her view demonstrated “the enormous transformations in emotional standards, norms, and styles” in modernity, and her aim was to do the same for the Middle Ages.²⁴³ Her 2006 book on emotional communities “speaks of norms, codes, and modes of expression rather than feelings”.²⁴⁴ The Stearns’ conception of emotionology shares important basic elements with Rosenwein’s approach: emotional values are part of emotionology,²⁴⁵ and they are an important element of Rosenwein’s emotional communities.²⁴⁶ Rosenwein expressly notes this affinity.²⁴⁷ Like Peter N. Stearns, William Reddy has laid emphasis on the importance of emotional norms for the socially conformist development of feelings.²⁴⁸ For this reason, Reddy’s “emotional regime” is often used as a synonym for the Stearns’ “emotional standards” or for Hochschild’s “feeling rules”.²⁴⁹ Almost at

 Stearns and Stearns, “Emotionology”, 835; Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 124– 6; Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 23; Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?”, 211 and 216.  Erika Kuijpers, “O, Lord, Save Us from Shame” (s. n94 above), invokes Scheer for her use of emotional style (130); Jacqueline Van Gent, “Gendered Power and Emotions: The Religious Revival Movement in Herrnhut in 1727”, in Gender and Emotions, 233 – 247, on the other hand invokes Reddy (234).  Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 128 – 129; Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?”, 217.  Stearns and Stearns, “Emotionology”, 829.  Stearns, Jealousy, XI and 3, for example, refers to “emotional styles”.  On the term emotional style, see Benno Gammerl, “Emotional Styles – Concepts and Challenges”, Rethinking History 16 (2012), 161– 175, who argues that emotional styles can also be defined spatially and that emotional patterns and practices vary in different social contexts.  Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 203.  Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 193.  Stearns and Stearns, “Emotionology”, 824 and 830.  Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 24: “An emotional community is a group in which people have a common stake, interests, values, and goals” (my emphasis).  Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 97.  Reddy in the AHR Conversation 2012, 1497. This is also done by Eugenia Lean, 1498. Reddy does note that the attempt to meet socially prescribed norms can fail (ibid.); see also Reddy, “Historical Research on the Self and Emotions”, Emotion Review 1.4 (2009), 302– 315 (302).  This is pointed out by Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions. An introduction, trans. Keith Tribe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 265.

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the same time as each other, William Reddy and Monique Scheer both pointed to the role played by (emotional) practices in the constitution of emotion.²⁵⁰ That emotion historians sometimes play down the distinction between these approaches can be seen from the way in which some new studies blend practice theory and emotives, and in the process even render those theoretical building blocks unrecognisable. The key terms emotives and emotional practices become unusable. I will provide an example to back up this assertion. Sarah McNamer (2010) makes use of Reddy’s conception of the emotive, but reduces Reddy’s theory to a performative approach.²⁵¹ She omits the descriptive element of emotional expression and the navigation of emotion. In McNamer’s analytical model, emotions are created at the point of oral articulation; she argues that female readers of late medieval texts on the Passion produced the feeling of sympathy by orally repeating guidance on appropriate sympathy. But her performative approach comes into conflict with her feminist framework. She argues that these Passion texts (by Anselm of Canterbury, John of Fécamp, and Aelred of Rievaulx, among others) were originally composed for the specific emotional needs of female religious. According to McNamer, therefore, only for women qua sex is it possible, physically and legally, either as bride or as wife (40 – 57), to imagine Christ and in performatively articulating a text on the Passion to develop a special emotional closeness to and feeling for the sufferings of Christ. But if the production of this special feeling of sympathy is something imputed only to women qua sex, the performative approach – “to perform compassion is to feel like a woman” (119) – is overlaid with ontological and biological assumptions. In McNamer’s account, it is not male clerical writers who ‘persuaded’ women of their special affinity to compassio; instead, women themselves sensed the need to express their love of Christ in their com-passion, and the male authors obliged them by writing suitable texts.²⁵² But this would mean that compassion was not created in the performance of texts on the Passion and would instead be innate to women qua sex.²⁵³ (3) Differences. For all the correspondences, there are clear clashpoints between the four approaches. This can be seen in the way in which the contributions of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ are seen to shape the nature of human emotions. While Rosenwein and Scheer are convinced that our emotions are solely and entirely a sociocultural

 Reddy in AHR Conversation 2012, 1497. Reddy calls “feelings” even “the result of training”. Eugenia Lean, ibid., 1498, talks of “bodily practice” and that “emotional expressions […] become viscerally felt, somatically embodied”. Scheer’s essay “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?” appeared in the same year (2012).  McNamer, Affective Meditation, 12.  On the methodological problems of demonstrating the congruence of biological gender and literary style, see Rüdiger Schnell, “Gender und Rhetorik in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit. Zur Kommunikation der Geschlechter”, Rhetorik Jahrbuch 29 (2010), 1– 18.  Which leads to the question: why did women only discover this desire for compassion in the eleventh and twelfth centuries?

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product, the Stearns and Reddy think that they are, to a greater or lesser extent, inherited, for both assume that people work to control emotions (‘emotional effort’). The debate over nature and culture introduces another controversial issue: what is the relationship between emotion (interior) and emotional expression (exterior)?²⁵⁴ Do emotional expressions always provide information about the emotional state of a person? Are emotional expressions perhaps culturally determined to a greater degree than emotional experiences?²⁵⁵ If ‘affect’ is a prediscursive state located in the body, and this is distinguished from ‘emotion’ as a more cognitively determined condition,²⁵⁶ the question arises: does the history of affect take a different course from that of the history of emotions?

 See nn81– 89 above.  In AHR Conversation 2012, the historian Nicole Eustace (1490 and 1506) talks of the universal (psychophysiologically determined) basis of emotions on the one hand and of the historical manifestation of “expressions of emotions” on the other. Lyndal Roper, in Frank Biess, “Discussion Forum ‘History of emotions’”, German History 28.1 (2010) 67– 80 (79), discusses the possibility that the historicity of forms of expression is incompatible with the history of feelings. It has already been pointed out that practice theory (Scheer) simply refuses to work with the dichotomy of inner and outer, that the Stearns and Rosenwein work with this model, and that Reddy adopts a position between the two – see n83 above.  On this debate, see Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect. A Critique”, Critical Inquiry 37.3 (2011), 434– 472; now in detail Ruth Leys, The Ascent of Affect. Genealogy and Critique (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2017); Trigg, “Introduction: Emotional Histories”, 6 – 8. See Vn71 below.

III Communication through Signs of Emotions The question of how emotions are communicated has already been raised in the previous chapter (II.3.a) in connection with the approach taken by the Stearns. This question will now be considered more closely. “Emotions are largely communicative tools”, writes Barbara Rosenwein.¹ Elsewhere she speaks of “uses of emotions” and argues that “emotions are social signals”.² In my view, emotions are not themselves communicative tools; it is the signs of emotion – gestures, facial expressions, words – that constitute those tools.³ Not emotions, but signs of emotions, are used for communication. It is probably unlikely that we use emotions in the sense of having free control over our own emotions. It is more plausible that we use signs of emotions. It is not emotions that are social signals, but expressions of emotions.⁴ If social interaction is determined

 Rosenwein in AHR Conversation 2012, 1496.  Rosenwein, “Problems and Methods”, 19, states “that emotions could be used in public forums” since they form a virtual language of gesture. Rosenwein, ibid., 20, talks of “instrumental uses of emotions” and about the fact that “emotions are, among other things, social signals”. Cf. also Rosenwein, “Thinking Historically about Medieval Emotions”, 831 and 836 (“uses of emotions”), 830 (“Emotions as Social Signals”), 836 (“emotions as communicative social tools”). The view that “all emotions serve as social signals to others” can also be found in sociology; Shlomo Hareli and Brian Parkinson, “What’s Social about Social Emotions?”, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 38.2 (2008), 131– 156 (135). Jelle Haemers, “In Public. Collectivities and Polities”, in A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Late-Medieval, Reformation and Renaissance Age, ed. Andrew Lynch and Susan Broomhall (2019), 141– 155, also speaks of how rulers “used emotions” to achieve political objectives. Similarly, Alston and Harvey, “In Private. The Individual and the Domestic Community”, in A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Baroque and Enlightenment Age, ed. Walker, Barclay, and Lemmings (2019), 137– 153 (148: “the use of emotions in daily life”). See IIn206. Boddice, A History of Feelings (2019), discusses with reference to Machiavelli (1461– 1527) the art of recognising – or the inability to recognise – the feelings of others. In this context, he speaks of “a history of misreading the emotions of others” (84). Yet it is not emotions that can be read wrongly, but signs of emotions.  Rosenwein, “Problems and Methods”, 20, correctly states that “expressions of emotions should thus be read as social interactions” (my emphasis).  The distinction between symptom (direct physical expression of emotion) and symbol (socially accepted meaning of a sign) is extremely important. The theory of signs distinguishes between signa naturalia (symptoms; expressions of emotions as direct, immediate signs of a natural condition) and signa data (symbols; signs whose meaning is determined socially). The forms assumed by emotions not considered to be immediate, ‘natural’ expressions (for example, a cry of pain, tears, blushing), but which are socially determined (gestures, facial expressions, linguistic formulations), hence signa data, can also be called ‘representations of emotions’. In literary or historical texts, or in paintings, the representation of these everyday ‘representations of emotions’ becomes the ‘representation of representations of emotions’. See Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 286 – 287, 649 – 652 and 771. See also I.3 above. On the distinction between non-arbitrary, ‘natural’ and artificial, functionally deployed expressive gestures, see Sebastian Korb and Klaus R. Scherer, “Ausdruck von Emotionen: Produktion, Kontrolle und Manipulation”, in Gefühle zeigen. Manifestationsformen emotionaler Prozesse, ed. Johannes Fehr and Gerd Folkers (Zürich: Chronos, 2009), 49 – 95. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110692464-005

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not by emotions but instead by signs of emotions, emotion history has, at least in part, to be written and read as a history of signs, and the theory of emotion has to incorporate and employ a theory of signs. Emotion theorists, of course, are firmly dismissive of the thesis that we communicate by means of signs of emotions. They point to a line of research, beginning with Charles Darwin (1872) and William James (1884), that is supposed to have demonstrated the close connection between neurophysiological processes, expressions of emotions, and emotions. They can conceive of emotion and expression of emotion only in an interdependent relationship. Separating emotions and expressions of emotions is clearly not an option for historians of emotion. But we need to take communication theory as well as emotion theory into account in this dispute. Historians of emotion overlook the fact that the rules for the communication of emotions are different from those for the sensation of emotions. This will be discussed briefly here (see more fully Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 621– 668). In all communication, there is a sender and a recipient who interact with each other. Each of these two participants is subject to a different set of conditions, for the production of signs takes place following different laws from the reception (or perception) of those signs. The idea that the members of a community communicate with the help of emotions – by speaking, gesticulating, choosing to speak at a higher or lower pitch, putting on one facial expression instead of another – ignores this distinction. Such a view would have us believe that both sender and recipient are affected by the same premises of emotion theory in the same way. It thereby levels the difference between the production- and reception-oriented perspectives on the communication process. In most situations, the sender (or the acting subject in emotional terms) knows whether their action really does match their inner state. And they also know perfectly well whether they desire such a convergence or are merely pretending. The recipient, on the other hand, the other partner in the communication process, has access only to what the sender imparts to them: gestures, facial expressions, words. They can decode these visible and audible ‘forms of expression’ in different ways. Either they trust that the actions and gestures of the other party match the inner attitude that the latter is presumed (following the emotional standards that apply) to have – or they distrust the illusory sociocultural consensus that sign (expression of emotion) and signified (emotion) correspond to each other. Whichever view the recipient takes, what they have to decode is always a sign. Judging whether or not the articulation and inner state of the sender are congruent is the preserve of the recipient; the sender has only a limited influence on this. Communication of emotional relevance, accordingly, takes place not by means of emotions but by means of particular (verbal or nonverbal) signs (or signals) that by social convention indicate particular emotions. Emotions that someone is not feeling in a particular situation can still be feigned, or simulated, by that someone. This pretence or simulation, however, takes place by means of signs, not emotions (which are not even present). The communicative code consists not of emotions but of signs (or signals). It is not just the recipient of signs who is dealing only with signs. Someone

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who feigns or simulates or posits love ‘sends’ not emotions but signs (a bunch of flowers, a letter, a loving word). No historian of emotion would deny that lovers are communicating not through emotions but through signs of emotions when they correspond in writing. But it is not just written communication relating to emotions that uses signs of emotions; communication in a face-to-face situation also feeds on the exchange of ‘signs of emotions’. From this there results a clear opposition between two perspectives. For the acting, gesturing, speaking subject it may be a valid assumption that expression, action, and emotion are congruent. For that subject, gestures of emotional relevance (crying, laughing, handshakes, embraces, and so forth) are in the ideal case neither symptoms nor symbols but an integral component of the emotion. For partners in the communication situation – ‘third parties’, as it were – however, the gestures or physical changes they perceive present in the first instance merely signals that point to something and thereby become signs. Whether they classify the signals received as symptoms (authentic signs of an emotion that is physiologically inseparable from those signs) or as symbols (the meaning of signs in social consensus) depends among other things on the emotion-theoretical position to which they subscribe (see below). Sender and recipient cannot but be subject to different constraints in the context of emotion theory and communication theory. Even if the action is one and same thing as the emotion for the person who does it, the recipient perceives only appearances: gestures, words, facial expressions, pitch of voice. They will, it is true, compare their perception with the relevant sociocultural ‘emotion code’ and impute emotions to the other person on that basis, but this is where they reach their limits: pragmatics (misalignment) sets the theory and the illusory consensus (convergence) out of kilter. Precisely in perception and interaction, it is not feelings but the perceptible signs of feelings that play a decisive role. These signs often help to defuse an escalating confrontation between two people – when, that is to say, signs of reconciliation, rapprochement, or sorrow are sent even though there is still internal irritation. People, then, communicate not by means of their emotions – which often enough are not present in the first place, or which the communication partner cannot know with any accuracy – but by means of signs (gestures, facial expressions, voice pitch, vocabulary, and so forth). (This is a long-established principle in communication studies.) This is most clearly apparent in misunderstandings or misinterpretations in communication: it is not emotions that are misinterpreted or wrongly understood (emotions cannot be true or false!), but signs (or signals) that, as expressions of emotions, we (mis)understand. The (erroneous) equation of emotionally relevant signs on the one hand and emotions on the other is the cause of many misunderstandings or misinterpretations, which thereby happen to demonstrate the problems of the assumption in the first place. The partners in an interaction react not to emotions but to signs of emotions. Even in those cases where one of the partners is aware of the discrepancy between the outer behaviour and inner attitude of the other, they are – at a public event, for instance – compelled to play along with the display of

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emotion and ignore the (alleged) emotion of the other. Social interaction thrives above all on signs, not emotions. Drawing on the insights of communication studies, what follows will show how far removed from reality is the conviction of emotion historians that emotions and expressions of emotions are (always) inseparably linked. In her introduction to the collective volume Emotions in the Household (2008), Susan Broomhall states that the contributions seek, among other things, to study what “strategies of resistance within households were demonstrated through emotions”.⁵ But the strategies of possible resistance on the part of servants are deployed not through emotions but through signs of emotions: refusing to work, harsh words, sullen faces, working slowly, and the like. Again and again, we read in studies of emotion that people communicate or interact with one another through emotions.⁶ Emotions are argued to be vital to how people get along together. It has also been said that “the most useful approach for those studying the history of emotion” is “to recognize that emotions are ‘communicative social tools with transformative potential’”.⁷ Who, then, is right? Those who maintain that ‘we communicate via emotions’, or those who maintain that ‘we communicate via the expression of emotions’?⁸ An answer to this question depends on three factors:⁹ on the understanding of emotion, on the different perspectives of participants (sender–addressee), and the given communicative situation (first meeting/ritual behaviour, communicating with strangers/ communicating with familiar faces, oral/written communication). I distinguish three views where the understanding of emotion is concerned.¹⁰

 Susan Broomhall, “Emotions in the Household”, 1.  As in Didier Lett, “Famille et relations émotionnelles”, in Histoire des Émotions, t. 1 (2016), 179 – 211 (181).  Maddern, McEwan, and Scott, “Introduction: Performing Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Worlds”, xxviii (the embedded quotation is from Rosenwein).  I am referring here to the conscious and intentional communication of emotions. In this I do not include the ‘contagion’ or ‘transfer’ of emotions in large crowds; see Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004); W. Gerrod Parrott, “Psychological Perspectives on Emotion in Groups”, 33 – 36. On this, see also Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 762– 764.  Neurophysiological knowledge could be helpful in seeking to answer the question of whether we communicate by emotions or by signs of emotions. Nonetheless, in my view it is above all insights related to the theory of interaction and communication that we need. There are very many recent publications in this area, for example the APA Handbook of Nonverbal Communication, ed. David Matsumoto, Hyisung C. Hwang, and Mark G. Frank (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2016) (also online); Nonverbal Communication, ed. Judith A. Hall and Mark L. Knapp (Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2013) (online); Body – Language – Communication. An International Handbook on Multimodality in Human Interaction (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2013) (online). And still worth reading: Niklas Luhmann, “Was ist Kommunikation?”, Information Philosophie 1 (1987), 4– 16.  In II.2.c only two variants are presented, since in that context the perspective of evolutionary biology is not involved.

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First, representatives of evolutionary approaches are convinced that it is not feelings but expressions of feelings that have a communicative function.¹¹ (And evolutionary biologists go on to argue that this expression of feelings is subject to cultural influences.) But ethnologists, who as we know favour a constructivist approach, have likewise “emphasized the social and communicative functions of facial emotional expression”.¹² Evolutionary biologists and constructivists do not differ over the social function of mimetic expression, but rather over the issue of whether mimetic expression has a fixed relationship to one emotion.¹³ Nor should it be any surprise that even for the sociologist Erving Goffman, who was very much interested in patterns of behaviour and rituals of interaction, social communication was effected through the expression of emotions, not through emotions.¹⁴ The second variant is practice theory and the performative approach. Here the question is not whether one communicates through emotions or through signs of emotions. Here emotions are something one does (doing emotion), something that can easily be observed from external activities. Practice theory makes no distinction between an inner and an outer. If there are communicative misunderstandings, this is because one of the parties has failed to communicate properly (either failed to send a clear signal or misinterpreted the signal).¹⁵ According to practice theory, we do communicate via emotions, because external action and emotion are the same thing.

 Cf. Harald A. Euler, “Evolutionstheoretische Ansätze”, in Emotionspsychologie. Ein Handbuch, ed. Jürgen H. Otto (Weinheim: Beltz, 2000), 45 – 63 (47); Peter A. Andersen and Laura K. Guerrero, “Principles of Communication and Emotion in Social Interaction”, in Handbook of Communication and Emotion, ed. Andersen and Guerrero (San Diego: Academic Press, 1998), 49 – 96; Dieter Ulich and Philipp Mayring, Psychologie der Emotionen, 2nd, revised and augment. ed. (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2003), 63 – 65 (Darwin is stated to have taken “communicative signalling functions composed of facial expression and gesture” as his starting point; 63); Brian Parkinson, “Do Facial Movements Express Emotions or Communicate Motives?”, Personality and Social Psychology Review 9 (2005), 278 – 311.  Plamper, The History of Emotions. An Introduction, 155. For the way in which twentieth-century research connected facial expression and emotion, see also Winfried Nöth, Handbuch der Semiotik, 2nd., revised ed. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000), 308 – 310; Winfried Nöth, Handbook of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 402– 404; Arvid Kappas, “Kommunikations- und Regulationsmedium”, in Psychologie der Emotion, ed. Gerhard Stemmler (Göttingen: Hogrefe, 2009), 387– 443. Of course, a few representatives of the cultural-relativist approach uncouple facial expressions and emotions. In contrast with evolutionary biologists, they are of the view that facial emotional expressions “did not convey in a direct and unfiltered manner true emotions of the kind that Ekman saw, but served instead to communicate with other people”; Plamper, The History of Emotions. An Introduction, 155. Ingrid Vendrell Ferran, on the other hand, has sought to demonstrate the “lack of purposiveness” in emotional forms of expression: Die Emotionen. Gefühle in der realistischen Phänomenologie (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2008), 181– 187.  James A. Russell, “Is There Universal Recognition of Emotion from Facial Expression? A Review of the Cross-Cultural Studies”, Psychological Bulletin 115 (1994), 102– 141.  Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual. Essays in Face-to-Face Behavior (New Brunswick: Aldine Transaction, 2008); on this, see Turner and Stets, The Sociology of Emotions, 27– 30.  Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?”, 214– 215. See IIn106 above.

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Reddy’s emotives can be attributed to this second variant insofar as they are performative utterances. Of course, Reddy also attributes a descriptive function to them. But the fact that the described situation supposedly changes as a result of the expression of emotion means that a difference arises between outer and inner. This circumstance brings emotives closer to the third variant. The third variant proceeds from emotions as a subjectively experienced condition and calculates the possibility of a difference between the inner condition and external gestures (or words) of a person. According to this position, in any one social interaction one has to allow for both convergence and difference in emotional state of mind and forms of expression. Western literature, rhetoric, and moral philosophy have long dealt with both possibilities. On the one hand, from antiquity up to the present there has been a widespread conviction that the inner emotional state and intentions of a person can be read out of their external behaviour (gestures and facial expressions).¹⁶ The body, it is believed, indicates the psychic state of a person. On the other hand, recognition of the difference of outer and inner also has a long history from antiquity right up to modernity, as testified by orators, poets, courtiers, and diplomats.¹⁷ The possibility of facial dissemblance was something that, for example, Adolph Freiherr von Knigge (1752– 1796) made clear: Have your face in your power so that none find anything written there; neither astonishment, nor pleasure, nor repugnance, nor annoyance. The people at court read faces better than they do printed things.¹⁸

Striking historical evidence of the potential difference between outward signs (or behaviour) and inner sensibility can be found in Steven Mullaney’s study of emotions  See, for example, Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), II 447: O quam difficile est crimen non prodesse vultu! (“How hard it is not to betray one’s misdeeds in one’s countenance!”); Matthew of Vendôme, Ars versificatoria, in Les arts poétiques du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle, ed. Edmond Faral (Paris: Champion, 1924; Reprint Genf and Paris: Slatkine, 1982), 109 – 193, here 140 (I 87): Exemplum de affectione: Affectio est repentina et transitoria animi vel corporis permutatio. […] Est color interpres mentis vultusque propheta (“An example of emotion: emotion is the sudden and transitory change of mind and body. […] The colour of the face and the face itself betray what someone thinks and feels”). During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was thought that the physical and the psychological formed a unity (the doctrine of humours), as already discussed above (II.3.d); see also IVn81, Vnn97– 119 below. On the same view in the Middle Ages, see Boquet and Nagy, Medieval Sensibilities, 136 – 137.  Hence, the timelessly controversial discourse about the connectedness of inner and outer should be no surprise. David Freedberg argues that from the sixteenth to the twentieth century there was constant interest in the question of the extent to which one could judge the affective state of a person from facial expression: “Feelings on Faces. From Physiognomics to Neuroscience”, in Rethinking Emotion, 289 – 323. But this is an issue that goes back to antiquity. See also Arvid Kappas, “Kommunikations- und Regulationsmedium”, in Psychologie der Emotion, 387– 443 (430): facial expression is said to be no reliable indicator of emotional conditions.  Adolph Freiherr von Knigge, Über den Umgang mit Menschen, ed. Karl-Heinz Göttert (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1991), 336 (III 12).

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during the time of Shakespeare.¹⁹ Given the way that sixteenth-century monarchs had ordered a change first from Catholic to Protestant beliefs, then back to Catholic, and then back to Protestant, by the later sixteenth century no one could be sure whether the outward ritual actions of neighbours and fellow parishioners corresponded to their inner religious convictions. In these cases, emotional practices were not written in the body.²⁰ Ancient rhetoric also dealt with the relation between emotion and the communication of emotion. It was said that if a speaker wished to have an emotional impact on his listeners then that speaker had to feel those emotions himself.²¹ Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC) thought, however, that it was sufficient if this feeling an emotion was only simulated.²² In the early modern reception of these recommendations, it was thought possible that tears would be enough to move the public, and that the speaker or actor did not have to feel the corresponding sorrow.²³ Reference is constantly made in medieval and early modern literature giving advice on proper conduct at court to the idea that to be successful one has to dissimulate, while on the other hand one should be wary of the dissimulations of others. But advice on this art of dissimulation, recommended on grounds of politeness or ambition, was not confined to sixteenth-century treatises for courtiers.²⁴ During the seventeenth century, techniques for suggesting the authenticity of feelings in

 Mullaney, The Reformation of Emotions, 7– 17.  John Jeffries Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 29 – 35: to keep their heretical thoughts and beliefs to themselves, many suspected citizens concealed their true convictions not only from Church courts but also in their everyday lives so that they would not be denounced. This finding also contradicts practice theory, which holds that particular emotional practices are written in the body.  For instance, Horace, Ars poetica, v. 102: Si vis me flere, dolendum est / primum ipsi tibi; Horace, Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, ed. and trans. Henry Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1926; Reprint 2005).  Cicero, Tusculan disputations, IV 19,43 and 25,55: even if a speaker is not actually in a rage, that is all the same “to be simulated in words and movement” (quae [iracundia] etiamsi non adsit, tamen verbis atque motu simulandam arbitrantur). See Anne Vial-Logeay, “L’univers romain”, in Histoire des Émotions, t. 1, 64– 85 (67– 71). Cf. also Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, ed. Radermacher, VI 2, 35 – 36. Cicero, De oratore, II 194– 199, does, however, assume compassion in the orator if the latter seeks to arouse compassion in listeners.  See Mullaney, The Reformation of Emotions, 51– 53, on this discussion, arising from Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall (London: Simmes, 1604).  John Jeffries Martin suggests this in “Inventing Sincerity, Refashioning Prudence. The Discover of the Individual in Renaissance Europe”, The American Historical Review 102 (1997), 1309 – 1342. See, by contrast, Schnell, “Curialitas und Dissimulatio”. And see, for example, Wolfram von Eschenbach (ca. 1200), Parzival, trans. Edwards, 752,23 – 25 (Feirefiz laughs but is actually weeping inside). See also Sharon C. Mitchell, “Moral Posturing. Virtue in Christine de Pisan’s Livre des Trois Vertus”, in The Inner Life of Women in Medieval Romance Literature, ed. Jeff Rider and Jamie Freedman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 85 – 106, on the feigning of emotions towards enemies – for example by displaying loyalty – in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

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written communication were directly taught.²⁵ The distinction between inner and outer was also raised in the early modern period when the ‘sincerity of the body’ was questioned.²⁶ Mistrust related to the possibility that the body might not indicate the inner disposition of a person was something that was widespread during the Middle Ages, both at court and in the business of the Church.²⁷ Uncertainties about the congruence of external facial expression or gestures and inner affective condition was, for instance, discussed in connection with Church confessions. The shedding of tears (effusio lacrimarum) was taken as a genuine sign of something that was happening within the person, as a sign of inner remorse and penitence. All the same, one could never be sure about the ‘authenticity’ of tears.²⁸ For this reason, priests set great store in the fact that tears shed during a sermon came from the heart. Generally speaking, tears were taken as proof of ‘genuine’ emotional participation in the religious process. The body served as guarantor of truth, or authenticity, because it was believed that the body could not lie. The possibility that visible weeping might not be

 Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, “Exclusive conversations”. The Art of Interaction in Seventeenth-century France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 143 – 174, on the fictional collection of letters by Edme Boursault (1638 – 1701). Goldsmith argues that Boursault’s Lettres de Babel and Treize lettres taught his readers a new rhetoric of intimate communication – “how to communicate feelings, how to test the authenticity of another’s speech, how to appear sincere” (165; my emphasis). She does point to the conflict between rhetorical ambition (of the letters) and the desire for authenticity implicit in personal declarations (165 – 167). On this conflict between rhetoric and sincerity, see also Benthien and Martus, “Einleitung”, in Die Kunst der Aufrichtigkeit im 17. Jahrhundert, 1– 16; Carmen Furger, Briefsteller. Das Medium ‘Brief’ im 17. und frühen 18. Jahrhundert (Köln: Böhlau, 2010), 178 – 208. See also Jon R. Snyder, Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).  On the related discussion in the seventeenth century, see Marie-Thérèse Mourey, “Gibt es eine Aufrichtigkeit des Körpers? Zu den deutschen Tanzlehrbüchern des späten 17. Jahrhunderts”, in Die Kunst der Aufrichtigkeit im 17. Jahrhundert, 329 – 341. Rüdiger Campe, Affekt und Ausdruck. Zur Umwandlung der literarischen Rede im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1990), 452– 454, suggests that dissimulation first became an everyday phenomenon only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This view is also held by Corbin, Courtine and Vigarello, “Introduction générale”, in Histoire des Émotions, t. 1, 9. It may be the case that the question of authenticity, or of the sincerity of feelings, was discussed more intensively in the seventeenth century than hitherto. Cowan, “In Public. Collectivities and Polities” (2019), 172, suggests that the “culture of politeness” in the eighteenth century “placed greater emphasis on sincerity and transparence”. Yet this focus on sincerity was merely the flip side of the widespread techniques that made it possible to feign it.  Schnell, “Curialitas und Dissimulatio” (2011); Schnell, “Historische Emotionsforschung”, 271– 275. See, for example, Vincent of Beauvais (thirteenth century), Speculum [morale] doctrinale, Duaci 1624 (Reprint Graz: Druck- und Verlags-Anstalt, 1965), 402 (IV 177: to what degree can one judge a person’s inner self from their outer self?).  Schnell, “Historische Emotionsforschung”, 272– 274; Axel Michaels, “Performative Tears. Emotions in Rituals and Ritualized Emotions”, in Emotions in Rituals and Performances, ed. Axel Michaels and Christoph Wulf (London: Routledge, 2012), 29 – 40; Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 407– 419.

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connected to inner penitence was, however, always taken into account.²⁹ Given the semiotic ambiguity of tears, it is only too understandable that in the Middle Ages, as in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,³⁰ there was widespread discussion of the relationship between the inner (the heart) and the outer (the body).³¹ The concept of emotionology can be assigned to this third way of understanding emotion.³² It is assumed that people’s external behaviour is oriented on given emotional standards, and that members of a particular social stratum seek to live up to these standards through an appropriate expression of emotions. Whether or not an inner state matches the required external expression is a secondary consideration. A convergence between external behaviour and inner condition is not necessary, even if it might be desirable. Rules of politeness demand a specific emotional expression in countenance, gestures, and choice of words. But all those involved know that external behaviour is no guide to inner state.³³ This is something that can be found in the conduct and deportment literature of both antiquity and the twentieth century. The second factor that determines answers to the question posed earlier – do we communicate through emotions or through signs of emotions? – is the kind of social interaction between the person sending a message and the addressee. The persons sending the message may be convinced that they have shown their feelings spontaneously and directly, and thus without mediation. The addressee, who perceives only words, gestures, and facial expression, cannot, however, be sure without further evidence that those words and gestures correspond to the emotional state of the person uttering them. Lovers across the ages have communicated primarily through signs. This is especially true of all relationships endangered by mistrust, jealousy, or disappointment. Erotic love lends itself particularly well to the thesis that what often counts in personal relationships is not feelings but signs of feelings. For this reason, Niklas Luhmann calls love “a model of behavior”, “a code of communication, ac-

 Lyn Blanchfield, “The Sincere Body. The Performance of Weeping and Emotion in Late Medieval Italian Sermons”, Quidditas 20 (1999), 117– 135; and her Tears that Tell. The Ritualistic Uses of Weeping by Participants of Late Medieval Florentine Sermons, Diss. State University of New York at Binghamton (DA 61– 11 A [2004], 4163); (accessed 22 July 2018). The idea that tears were an instrument of princely rule was discussed in premodernity; Laurent Smagghe, “Les émotions politiques dans les cours princières aux XIVe-XVe siècles”, in Histoire des Émotions, t. 1, 202– 212, esp. 205 – 211.  Von Koppenfels and Zumbusch, “Einleitung”, 15; they argue that Schiller and Kleist introduced to the theatre the idea that tears, going pale, and blushing could mislead.  See Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 407– 419; Bele Freudenberg, Irarum nutrix. Emotionen und Ehrverletzungen bei William of Newburgh, Richard of Devizes und Walter Map (Bochum: Dr. Dieter Winkler, 2014), 91– 98 (“Verbergen von Emotionen” [“concealment of emotions”]).  See II.3.a.  Paula M. Niedenthal, Silvia Krauth-Gruber, and François Ric, Psychology of Emotion. Interpersonal, Experiential, and Cognitive Approaches (New York: Psychology Press, 2006), 164– 184 (the suppression of an emotion is said to have no impact on the emotional state of the person in question).

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cording to the rules of which one can express, form and simulate feelings, deny them, impute them to others”.³⁴ For those observing a social interaction as a third party, emotions can likewise only be read out of external signs. During seventeenth- and eighteenth-century court proceedings related to conflicts in a marriage, the emotional disappointments of the couple were also discussed. Whether a wife, contrary to any statement by the husband, really loved her husband or not was determined on the basis of concrete actions, or failures to act, as well as general conduct. They were treated as signs of feelings.³⁵ A third factor is the communicative situation. Whether a private conversation or ritual behaviour (burials, rock concerts, cheering a winning goal during a game of football, religious services, rituals of rulership) is involved, actors and possible observers will tend to assume either discrepancy or congruence. In ritual behaviour, emotions and signs of emotion often coincide in the manner assumed by performative practice theory. The socially and culturally accepted practice of attributing an emotionally relevant meaning to particular forms of conduct, practices, or signs (words, gestures, and so forth) can, however, in many situations be used simply to communicate those signs. Signs are deployed functionally. The medieval ira regis (‘the king’s anger’) consisted mainly of a gesture, or the ritualised comportment of the ruler.³⁶ It was immaterial whether or not the king really was angry.³⁷ What was important for any moral judgement was whether the expression of anger was due to a king’s personal vindictiveness or to justifiable anger. In the twenty-first century, a father can say to his child, with a severe face and raised voice, that he is angry because the child has not tidied his toys away; but he does not have to be angry himself. He can send signals of an emotion to someone without feeling those emotions himself. The person spoken to in this way reads the (alleged) emotions from gestures, facial expressions, and words. Or alternatively: one congratulates someone at work for a promotion despite being envious and despite the fact that one would have liked that position oneself. An act of sympathy (embracing a friend after the burial of his brother) can be the execution of an emotional standard, without necessarily involving any feeling of sympathy. This action (the embrace) shows the feeling of

 Luhmann, Love as Passion, 20. For Luhmann, love is “a model of behaviour that could be acted out”.  Alexandra Lutz, Ehepaare vor Gericht. Konflikte und Lebenswelten in der Frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 2006), 191– 203. On marriage law in ancient Rome, see James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 35.  Most recently, see Freudenberg, Irarum nutrix, 107– 116; s. n31 above.  See Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 621– 636. See also Jehangir Yezdi Malegam, “In Public. Collectivities and Polities”, in A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Medieval Age, ed. Ruys and Monagle (2019), 133 – 149, on the relationship between sign, communication, and emotion: it was acceptable for a medieval ruler to display anger, but not uncontrolledly – i. e. only when such anger seemed justified.

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sympathy.³⁸ Showing sympathy is (was) part of social morality. A gesture is sufficient to live up to this morality. Communication works through the sign of an emotion. Whether there is divergence or convergence also depends on whether the two people communicating know each other or not. Given that a special effort is usually made to achieve an appropriate expression of emotions when communicating with strangers, there is more room here to suppose that there may be a difference between inner and outer. It is no accident that rules of politeness in conduct literature and courtesy books presume insight into the distinction of inner from outer.³⁹ It might be objected that the following of rules regarding the expression of feelings can also affect feelings themselves, as studies of airline stewardesses have shown. From this perspective, conformity to display rules (standardised social modes of expression) results in feeling rules (how one should feel in particular situations) being followed as well. According to sociologists, the emotional culture of a society is made up of a series of expectations regarding how one should feel in a particular situation (feeling rules, experience) and how one should express those feelings (display rules, expression).⁴⁰ Of course, feeling rules are communicated through display rules, and can be evaluated only through the latter. What an individual actually feels in any given situation is not something sociological analysis can resolve.⁴¹ Whether socially prescribed display rules and their corresponding feeling rules are adhered to in a given situation is something that each party in the interaction has to decide for themself. A third party can only speculate on it.⁴² Communication theorists do, however,  Boddice, The Science of Sympathy, 4: if someone embraces his friend following the burial of his brother, this action ‘shows’ the feeling of sympathy – “the act demonstrates the feeling of sympathy”.  Interaction free of conflict in society relied on the communication of the expected signs of emotion, and not so much on the showing of ‘actual’ emotion.  Reinhard Fiehler, Kommunikation und Emotion. Theoretische und empirische Untersuchungen zur Rolle von Emotionen in der verbalen Interaktion (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1990), 70 – 79; Jan Stets, “Future Directions in the Sociology of Emotions”, Emotion Review 2.3 (2010), 265 – 268, 265; Hannelore Weber, “Sozial-konstruktivistische Ansätze”, in Emotionspsychologie. Ein Handbuch, ed. Otto, 139 – 150, 144– 145. According to Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain. The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 117– 118, here discussing Paul Ekman, “display rules” indicate “who can show what emotion to whom and when and how much” (my emphasis). See also Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen, “The Repertoire of Nonverbal Behavior: Categories, Origins, Usage, and Coding”, Semiotica 1 (1967), 49 – 98.  This objection can however be set aside if one is of the view the emotions are identical with forms of expression (“I am sad because I am crying”) – see the James–Lange theory. Paul Ekman has written about whether one can manipulate facial expression so as to conceal emotions. He believes this to be possible, but also that a practised observer can see through it: Paul Ekman, “Darwin, Deception, and Facial Expression”, in Emotions Inside Out. 130 Years after Darwin’s ‘The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals’, ed. Paul Ekman, Joseph J. Campos, Richard J. Davidson, and Frans B.M. de Waal (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 1000) (New York, N.Y: The New York Academy of Sciences, 2003), 205 – 221.  It is for this reason that historians are often unable to decide whether a ruler acted in a fit of anger, or simulated a fit of anger in order to act. See, for example, Penelope Nash, “Reality and Ritual in the Medieval King’s Emotions of Ira and Clementia”, in Understanding Emotions in Early Europe,

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take into account that in any one social interaction the (justifiably) expected display rules may be observed while the related feeling rules are not followed.⁴³ Often we do not communicate through emotions but instead through conventionalised emotional expression.⁴⁴ There is another factor that decides whether we can expect there to be divergence or convergence between inner and outer in a communication situation. Whether, and to what extent, we communicate through emotions or through signs of emotions, is a question that has different answers for oral and written communication. In a face-to-face situation, partners in an exchange will be more inclined to attribute the emotions in question to their counterpart if the latter’s words are accompanied by matching gestures and facial expressions. In written communication, words are the only means through which an addressee can be convinced of the nature of one’s own feelings. No one will dispute that in the case of love letters it is not emotions but signs of emotions – the words written down, the words read – that define the communication. In written communication, language is the most important means of communication. It is language that transmits emotions credibly, that can simulate them or evoke them. Striking proof of this thesis can be found in a study by Susan Broomhall (2015).⁴⁵ She investigates the letters that Catherine de Medici (1519 – 1589), wife of the French King Henri II, wrote to various people at the Spanish court after the early death of her daughter Elisabeth de Valois, seeking to reinforce the emotional bond of her two granddaughters to the family and relations of their young deceased mother, and in this way to bring about a political rapprochement between the Habsburg and Valois houses. Broomhall writes: This chapter thus explores how emotions operated as a form of power in early modern elite diplomatic relations. To do so, I analyse the emotions of Catherine de Medici’s correspondence. Catherine employed a rich emotional vocabulary and practice across her letters, and I consider

251– 271 (265). Regarding the punishment meted out by Otto III to two adversaries, she asks: “did Otto III show a true kingly anger or did he show an unjust anger?” She leaves open the question of whether Otto acted on a sudden rush of affect or was engaging in ritualised conduct.  Fiehler, Kommunikation und Emotion, 1, 44, 57, 70 – 71, 79, 84. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The managed heart. Commercialization of human feelings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), by contrast thinks that through emotional work a complete coincidence of feeling and expression of feeling can be achieved; on this, see Mikko Salmela, True Emotions (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2014), 81– 82. and 125 – 132; Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 210 – 211 and 334– 337. On Hochschild’s various studies, see Turner and Stets, The sociology of emotions, 36 – 46. See also IIn69 above.  Seventy years ago, a study of Thomas Aquinas noted “that we never have emotional experience without exhibiting emotional behavior, though we may exhibit emotional behavior without having emotional experience”; Robert Edward Brennan, Thomistic Philosophy. A Philosophical Analysis of the Nature of Man (New York: The Macmillan Company, 161956), 155.  Susan Broomhall, “Ordering Distant Affections: Fostering Love and Loyalty in the Correspondence of Catherine de Medici to the Spanish Court, 1568 – 1572”, in Gender and Emotions, 67– 86.

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how the use, significance, and impact of expressions of feelings, from specific word usage, grammatical constructions, and phrasing choices, to letter length and the use of handwritten passages, did ‘emotion work’ to create neutral, positive, or negative tone and achieve certain goals. In addition, I study affective performance; that is, how emotions were employed and suggested by ritual, gesture, and space.⁴⁶

It appears to me that two objects of study are mixed up here in a typical way. On the one hand, it is implied that emotions exercise power, and Broomhall states that she intends to study emotions in Catherine’s correspondence. But on the other hand, the object of analysis identified is not emotions but instead vocabulary relevant to emotions, grammatical constructions, “phrasing choices”, the use of expressions by the writer to achieve a particular objective: influencing the addressee emotionally. The correspondence as a whole does lend expression to emotions, but it is above all the letters that are supposed to serve the achievement of particular political aims. To achieve these aims, the writer of the letters uses, as well as gifts, rhetorical and linguistic tricks that will influence the addressee emotionally, creating or maintaining emotional ties. Consequently, in this written communication it is not emotions that exercise power, but language, discourse; and this means of communication is set to work by people, who thereby acquire power over others. The expressions of feelings that are functionally deployed in letters should not be mistaken for feelings. It is texts that make history. Texts imagine, insinuate, initiate, provoke, preserve, and destroy emotions. How they, or their writers, manage to do this should be a central object of historical emotion research.⁴⁷ Of course, it could be objected that Catherine’s correspondence was defined and determined by emotions: by her affection for her two granddaughters growing up at the Spanish court without their recently deceased young mother. In this understanding, Catherine’s letters would be the consequence of prior emotions (a state of affairs that would, of course, be disputed by performance theorists).⁴⁸ But then the letters would have to be studied to determine how far they were marked by this already existing love for her granddaughters. Broomhall’s textual analysis, however, aims to show how much Catherine de Medici sought, with the help of her letters, to build up an emotional relationship with third parties in order to secure future political influence at the Spanish court. For that she required not so much love for her granddaughters as linguistic competence. It is the latter, therefore, that effects the creation

 Broomhall, “Ordering Distant Affections”, 68 (my emphasis).  The piece by Broomhall referred to here does without any kind of substantive or formal reference to the ideas of Reddy, Rosenwein, or Scheer.  In this case, an emotion would precede the emotional practice of writing a letter, something that could not happen according to performance theorists.

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of an emotional bond;⁴⁹ that grandmothers loved their grandchildren seems to have gone without saying. Emotion historians make free use of the formulation that “emotions make history”, but communication theory suggests that this needs questioning. It should really be “signs and signals of emotion” that are said to make history. If it is true that emotional communities are founded above all on a common emotional style shared by their members, and if early modern researchers pursue the question of “how particular forms of emotional expression offer or reveal group identity and belonging within, or exclusion from, communities”,⁵⁰ one might conclude that it is not emotions, but instead the expression of emotions, that are the decisive factor for communication. Even if one does not entirely agree with my thesis that emotional communication takes place via signs of emotion, it will at least have become plain that the difference between “we communicate through emotions” and “we communicate through signs of emotion” cannot simply be ignored. In the former case, it is emotions that are at the centre of attention (psyche, inner state, feelings); in the second case, signs (gestures, facial expressions, linguistic utterances, and so forth). Each is the concern of a different field of scholarly activity from the other. This chapter was not intended to reject the insights that emotion theorists (since William James in 1884), the neurosciences, and cognitive psychology have given into the relationship between emotions and expressions of emotions. My aim was simply to demonstrate that the ‘law’ of interdependency between emotion and expression does not apply in many areas of life and everyday situations, and thus cannot be employed a priori as evidence for a history of emotion.⁵¹

 Broomhall, ibid., 76, herself mentions that the Spanish king, just like his mother-in-law Catherine de Medici, was “skilled in the diplomatic rhetoric of family and affection”. The study by Susan Broomhall and J. Van Gent, “Corresponding Affections: Emotional Exchange Among Siblings in the Nassau Family”, Journal of Family History 34.2 (2009), 143 – 165, analyses “how emotions themselves might also create or define power structures within families” (146; my emphasis). Emotions are conceived as an “agentive force” (143). But at the same time the thesis is advanced “that using the language of emotions […] could indeed constitute forms of power within the Nassau family” (158; my emphasis). First emotions are said to be the motivating force, then language. But I think it makes a great difference whether emotions, or the linguistic articulation of emotions, determine the power structure within a family. Broomhall and Van Gent themselves concede that emotional expression often depended on existing hierarchical structures within the Nassau family, not on the emotional states of family members (155, 158).  Broomhall, “Introduction. Violence and Emotions in Early Modern Europe”, 11 (my emphasis).  See Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 133 – 139.

IV History – Histories 1 The History of Emotion – Which Historical Model? What kind of periodisation do emotion historians want for the ‘history of emotion’? Do we need some new concept for the kind of history of emotions and feelings envisaged?¹ None of the various constructions reviewed in the second chapter gives any indication of the view of history that it presupposes. Reading historical studies of emotion, what is very striking is the sheer lack of discussion of the historical framework into which ‘the’ history of emotion is to be fitted. Mostly, it is assumed that the history of emotion and social history are in lockstep with each other. For its part, the periodisation of social history seems uncontroversial. Nonetheless, the student of emotions finds themself faced with a certain contradiction when they admit that they still do not possess a “satisfying narrative of the history of emotions”,² but all the same presume that the ‘history of emotions’ has the same trajectory as social history. The idea that an epoch, or history in general, had some kind of unity has been in retreat ever since poststructuralism and deconstruction subjected conceptions of unity and completeness to serious criticism in, amongst other areas, philosophy, architecture, literary studies, and gender studies; interest in everything fragmentary, particular, discontinuous, undefined, and arbitrary, meanwhile, has been on the advance. That history cannot be grasped with categories such as rationality, causality, and totality has been convincingly shown by some cultural critics.³ To which model does the history of feelings really belong?⁴  See, for example, E. H. Carr, What is History? (London: Macmillan 1961; Reprint Basingstoke: Palgrave 2001).  Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Theories of Change in the History of Emotions”, in A History of Emotions, ed. Jonas Liliequist (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), 7– 20 (quotation: 18). Boddice, A History of Feelings (2019), seeks a new narrative; see VII below.  In German literary studies, dislike of the great master narratives has led to a remarkable hybrid: David Wellbery, Eine neue Geschichte der deutschen Literatur (Berlin: Berlin University Press, 2008). This offers not, as the title promises, a history (of German literature) but a conscious melange of dozens of pieces on all possible poets, poems, political events, concepts, historical figures, institutions, philosophical tendencies, and so on. Every reader can put together their own history out of these bits and pieces. Transferred or applied to emotion history, this would mean that within any ‘culture of feeling’ there would be no ‘later’ to which an ‘earlier’ could relate, and that moreover two historically successive cultures of feeling could barely be distinguished from each other.  For A. Pinch, “Emotion and History. A Review Article”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 37.1 (1995), 100 – 109, 109, it is certain that “the history of feelings requires a framework that is nonnormative, non-teleological”. Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution. Intimate Life in England, 1918 – 1963 (Cambridge: CUP, 2010), 386, reject a “teleological narrative of sex and marriage” in the twentieth century, arguing that it is not possible to separate ‘modern’ from ‘traditional’ marriages. In his book Theorien der Intentionalität im Mittelalter (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 2002; 2nd revised ed., 2004), Dominik Perler, a historian of philosophy, “deliberately” https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110692464-006

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It is obvious to an outsider that contemporary historical studies of emotion constantly talk of ruptures, new beginnings, contrary tendencies, and contradictions in emotion history, but in so doing are talking only of nineteenth- and twentieth-century emotion history. Studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century emotions talk less of unilinear development and more of contradictory processes, of ruptures and new approaches.⁵ But premodernity is not permitted these ruptures, new beginnings, contradictions, conflicts, and competing forces, apart from in the writing of specialists on the premodern period.⁶ The idea of a homogeneous and static Middle Ages still prevails.⁷ It is not difficult to grasp the magnitude of the implications for historical emotion research if the Middle Ages, too, are treated as a period during which very many developments originated, but then faltered and faded; as a period in which different views were competing for dominance and the victory of one position was by no means a necessity but due to coincidence; as a period during which the representatives of an institution (the Church) advanced different views in different communica-

does not seek to “construct a history of development”, giving three reasons. (1) In medieval texts, he argues, earlier models are not replaced by more recent ones; instead, a plurality of competing theories appears. (2) Medieval philosophy, he argues, does not display any “immanent” or “linear” development. (3) He finds it generally dangerous to speak of histories of development in philosophy, if by that we mean the history of a rise to ever-improving theories and solutions (foreword to the second edition, x ff.). But if there is no clearly recognisable development to be found even in the area of philosophical theories on a single aspect of the problem, how is historical emotion research supposed to write the history of such a multifaceted (psychological, sociological, neurological, linguistic, philosophical) phenomenon as that of emotions? Might we perhaps have to be content with snapshots of individual historical moments?  See, for instance, Ute Frevert et al., Emotional Lexicons. Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling 1700 – 2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Susan Matt, “Current Emotion Research”, 120. Even Peter N. Stearns, “History of Emotions: The Issue of Change”, in Handbook of Emotions, ed. Michael Lewis and Jeannette M. Haviland (New York: The Guilford Press, 1993), 17– 28, 22, wrote that emotion history from the eighteenth to the twentieth century was characterised more by “sporadic bursts” than by “steady development of significant emotional change”.  Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe and Mary Floyd-Wilson, “Introduction: Reading the Early Modern Passions”, in Reading the Early Modern Passions, 1– 20 (2). Mullaney, The Reformation of Emotions, 15, talks with reference to the English sixteenth century of “flaws and fractures”, of “ideological contradictions”, and of “conflict in the early modern habitus and social imaginary”, and writes that “cultural faultlines are sites of tension and potential upheaval”. Mullaney’s presentation creates the impression that such cultural and affective tensions were unknown in the Middle Ages. The classical historian Angelos Chaniotis, “Moving Stones. The Study of Emotions in Greek Inscriptions”, in Unveiling Emotions. Sources and Methods for the Study of Emotions in the Greek World (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2012), 91– 129 (124), demands that historians of emotion “take into account the diversity, contrasts, and contradictions of the Classical world”.  An excellent contrast is presented by Joan Cadden, “‘Nothing Natural Is Shameful’: Vestiges of a Debate about Sex and Science in a Group of Late-Medieval Manuscripts”, Speculum 76.1 (2001), 66 – 89, where she discusses the diversity of views on human sexuality.

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tive situations;⁸ as a period that attached just as much importance to cultivated table manners as was the case in modernity;⁹ as a period during which physicians and theologians had differing ideas about the affective condition of humans; in general, as a period full of contradiction, controversy, parallel societies, economic dynamics, and social competition.¹⁰ The history of premodernity was teeming with (social, political, religious, and literary) options that were, eventually, realised only in part. Nothing was inevitable. Current historical emotion research fluctuates between a macrohistorical ambition and a microhistorical approach – betraying an indecisiveness that is in itself all too understandable given the hesitant origins of what has become an ambitious historical research programme. Its dilemma lies in having written off the older master narratives of Max Weber, Norbert Elias, and Michel Foucault, whatever the individual differences between them, but then searching for a “larger compass”¹¹ that would make it possible to integrate fragmentary episodes into a broader framework,¹² and that would prevent work from becoming trapped in small-scale studies like those of emotional communities. The half-heartedness of such efforts can primarily be explained by the way that contemporary emotion research takes place in two largely discrete research domains. There is hardly any interchange between research on antiquity, the Middle Ages, and early modernity on the one hand and the study of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries on the other. As a consequence of this ‘radio silence’ between medievalists and modern historians, two distinct ‘histories of emotion’ have developed. The recent publication of the three-volume Histoire des Émotions marks the first time that the ambitious project of providing an overview of the emotional history of the West from antiquity to the present has been attempted.¹³ But even here, the chro-

 For an exemplary case, see Philippa Maddern, “How Children Were Supposed To Feel; How Children Felt. England, 1350 – 1530”, in Childhood and Emotion. Across Cultures 1450 – 1800, 121– 140 (esp. 128 – 136); she shows that in the later Middle Ages there were two contrary positions on whether children could have genuine, lasting feelings.  See IV.3.  On the simultaneous existence of contrary conceptions of gender, see Schnell, Sexualität und Emotionalität, 318 – 366.  Peter N. Stearns, “Modern Patterns in Emotions History”, in Doing Emotions History, ed. Susan J. Matt and Peter N. Stearns (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 17– 40 (quotation: 24).  The great difficulty of this enterprise can be discerned in Reddy’s essay “Historical Research on the Self and Emotions”. On the one hand, Reddy details the results of many studies of changes in emotional history from the sixteenth to the twentieth century; on the other, he suppresses or homogenises the often contradictory findings of these studies in his efforts to construct a clear historical sequence (see, for example, 306).  Histoire des Émotions, t. 1: De l’Antiquité aux Lumières, ed. Georges Vigarello (Paris: Seuil, 2016); t. 2: Des Lumières à la fin du XIXe siècle, ed. Alain Corbin (Paris: Seuil, 2016); t. 3: De la fin du XIXe siècle à nos jours, ed. Jean-Jacques Courtine (Paris: Seuil, 2017). See VII below on a similar work in six volumes in English from 2019.

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nological organisation confirms the duality in emotion history just noted: the first volume is devoted to the period from antiquity to the eighteenth century, while the second and third deal with the period from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Nonetheless, even the first volume lacks a ‘larger compass’. Its contributions range over distinctly varied aspects, textual genres, and emotions, such that there is no thematic continuity.¹⁴ The individual contributions to the three volumes are not related to one another. This is due on the one hand to the fact that authors deal only with their own area or period,¹⁵ and on the other to the fact that thematic elements (politics, religiosity, gender relations, medicine, law, childhood, war, hunting, travel, theatre, discourses of rulership, the impact of the weather, music, migration, melancholy, anxiety, laughter, interaction with animals and with nature, and so on) are not systematically covered for each period but instead dealt with selectively, limited to particular centuries.¹⁶ On top of that, some contributions are content to show that emotions have played a significant role in people’s lives (the ‘emotions in history’ approach), while other contributions make an effort to demonstrate historical changes in emotions (the ‘history of emotions’ approach). The title of the collection should really be revised to “fragments of emotion history”.¹⁷ Insofar as contributions on early modernity claim to identify a transformation in emotional history, the evidence often fails to withstand scrutiny. This is mostly because the medieval knowledge of early modern historians is strictly limited.¹⁸ This

 Thus, for instance, the section on antiquity says nothing about marital relations, whereas the section devoted to the medieval period deals with this in detail (179 ff., 191 ff.). The corresponding part relating to the seventeenth and eighteenth century is then very brief (347– 349). In the first volume, we find something about the relation of music and emotion only in the section dealing with the “Âge Moderne” (the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; 409 – 429).  Thus, for instance, in a contribution relating to the nineteenth century (Histoire des Émotions, t. 2, 203 – 226) an emotion-historical finding is described – the gender-specific evaluation of emotion – that exactly matches a finding in a contribution on Greek antiquity (Histoire des Émotions, t. 1, 25 and 28 – 29). But no editorial reference is made to this historical parallel.  Claire Langhamer, “Amours, séductions et désir”, in Histoire des Émotions, t. 3, 382– 400, understands her own – methodologically convincing – study as a contribution to the ‘history of love in everyday life’. But she neglects the historical dimension. She cites, for instance, a woman who contributed to the readers’ letters section of journals and was very much opposed to the way that journals frequently advised their female readers to overlook the love affairs of their husbands. This woman was clearly not prepared to excuse the adultery of her husband (387– 388). Langhamer‘s presentation gives the impression that, before the twentieth century, wives had borne the adulterous activities of their husbands without complaint. Such an assumption denies the existence of a querelle des femmes going back to the fifteenth century. On the crossover of marital discourse and the querelle des femmes, see Schnell, Frauendiskurs, 294– 309.  In my view, this three-volume work is a missed opportunity. If the contributors had spent a week together at a workshop, discussing all the contributions, there might well have been a different Histoire des Émotions that laid more emphasis on substantive convergences and divergences. Much the same is true of the six-volume A Cultural History of the Emotions (2019); see VII below.  Maurice Daumas, “Coeurs vaillants et coeurs tendres. L’amitié et l’amour à l’époque moderne”, in Histoire des Émotions, t. 1, 333 – 350 (347– 349), is of the view that even at the close of the medieval

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leads to a misrecognition of the traditional nature of emotional ideas, and reinforces a mistaken contrast between the Middle Ages and (early) modernity.¹⁹ No matter how admirable the wealth of historical material presented in Histoire des Émotions might be, there is a problem in the way that it reinforces long-established misconceptions regarding the relation of the Middle Ages to early modernity (fifteenth to eighteenth centuries). This problematic relationship of medievalists and early modern historians is not, however, unique, but has parallels in all historians specialising in different periods. If historians were to fully recognise that antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the early modern period were much more complex, contradictory, cross-cutting, and labile than commonly admitted, emotion history as a discipline could contribute to a revision of the traditional historical picture rather than simply confirming it. I am puzzled by the fact that historians of emotions create the impression on the one hand that their project of a ‘history of emotions’ is very new, but on the other already seem ready to start writing a history of emotions.²⁰ The project of emotion history is one that is just beginning and, apart from the three volumes of the Histoire des

period the institution of marriage was despised. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he goes on, marriage underwent a re-evaluation: it was now founded on mutual love and faithfulness on the part of both spouses. See, by contrast, for the Middle Ages Schnell, Sexualität und Emotionalität, chaps. IV – V, VII. Furthermore, Daumas (347) notes that in the sixteenth century husbands were advised not to treat their wives with the same passion in bed as they would a lover. But this is a tradition that goes right back to antiquity. Cf. Schnell, Sexualität und Emotionalität, 290 – 292. To illustrate the specific conception of marriage common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Daumas cites a decision by the Council of Trent (1545 – 1563) according to which nothing is more disgraceful than if a husband loves his wife with the same passion that he would display in an adulterous relationship. But this decision likewise has a centuries-old history; Rüdiger Schnell, Andreas Capellanus. Zur Rezeption des römischen und kanonischen Rechts in ‘De amore’ (München: Fink, 1982), 22– 23 and 148 – 154. Laurent Smagghe, “Les émotions politiques”, 208, cites evidence that in the fifteenth century wives of the high nobility were assigned the role of calming the (political) rage of their spouses. But there are already reports of this affective function of wives in twelfth-century chronicles; Sharon A. Farmer, “Persuasive voices. Clerical images of medieval wives”, Speculum 61 (1986), 517– 543; Rüdiger Schnell, “Macht im Dunkeln. Welchen Einfluß hatten Ehefrauen auf ihre Männer? Geschlechterkonstrukte in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit”, in Zivilisationsprozesse, ed. Schnell, 309 – 329.  Georges Vigarello, in his introduction to the chapter on the “Âge moderne” in Histoire des Émotions, t. 1, 215 – 218 (215), is of the view that Baldassare Castiglione formulated a new manly ideal in Il Cortegiano (“The Courtier”; 1528) and in so doing overturned medieval values. Vigarello talks of a “changement du régime émotif” (“change of emotional regime”; 215). But Alain Montandon, “L’invention d’une autosurveillance intime”, in ibid., 253 – 271, esp. 254– 261, seeks in his contribution to establish the medieval tradition of this supposedly new ideal, a tradition that is adequately documented in numerous recent studies: Schnell, “Curialitas und Dissimulatio”; Schnell, “Die höfische Kultur des Mittelalters zwischen Ekel und Ästhetik”, Frühmittelalterliche Studien 39 (2005), 1– 100.  This often works only insofar as a representative character is attributed to one single statement. The plurality, even contradictoriness, of modes of behaviour, viewpoints, and kinds of text within any one era is simply ignored.

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Émotions (2016 – 2017), there is no overview of it; and so the experimental character inherent to this project presents an opportunity to take a more ‘open’ historical perspective as a starting point, projecting into this ‘open history’ a new kind of history of emotion freed from any definite linkage to established forms of periodisation. This is an opportunity that emotion history should grasp. How might emotion history be helped in creating its own history? Two thoughts strike me. The first concerns the descriptive categories that historians use. Since the study of historical emotions connects social history with emotion history, it tends to work with the concepts supplied by social history. However, over the last forty years it has been shown perfectly well that many of the analytical categories with which social history works – such as ‘family’, ‘nobility’, ‘middle class’, ‘the household’, ‘generation’, ‘social community’, ‘bourgeoisie’ – are only conceptual tools with whose aid we seek to organise a very complex social and political reality in order that we might better understand it. With more detailed historical analysis, the social referents of these preliminary tools become detached from them, shifting into a confusing spectrum of competing and non-homogeneous groupings. It would be most unfortunate if historical emotion research were to treat these conceptual tools as adequate descriptions of social reality and so, for example, were to assume the existence of social communities whose existence in fact remains to be demonstrated in the first place. Some emotion historians use the label emotional community for the most varied social, political, economic, and religious groupings in the belief that in so doing they have identified and comprehended an emotional fact.²¹ On the contrary, the very first task of emotion history should be to call into question the analytical category ‘community’.²² The second thought involves a circumstance readily admitted by emotion historians, but which they then usually exclude from their sketches of historical change: that emotions are in part biologically and physically determined.²³ Might it not be  See II.4.  See II.3.c.  See, for example, Nicole Eustace in AHR Conversation 2012, 1506 – 1507. She concedes “that there are biological commonalities that underlie affect”. Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation, follows a softer variant of social constructivism and so does not exclude the existence of a biological basis for emotions: “The ‘weaker’ thesis allows for the possibility that some aspects of emotional response or experience have a basis in biological predisposition, while still granting significant generative and shaping power to cultural influences” (208n7). In the course of her argument, McNamer then blends her performative approach with a biological-ontological understanding of “femininity” (see the section “Overestimation of differences” in II.4 above). Michael Champion and Andrew Lynch, “Understanding Emotions: ‘The Things They Left Behind’”, xx, adopt McNamer’s position. Stephanie Tarbin, “‘Good Friendship’ in the Household: Illicit Sexuality, Emotions and Women’s Relationships in Late Sixteenth-Century England”, 136, writes that she takes “a ‘weak’ social constructionist view of emotions, regarding them as human attributes whose forms of expression are shaped by cultural values and practices”. Tarbin thus sees the expression of emotions as culturally determined, not emotions per se. For Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body. Emotions and the Shakespeare Stage (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), 245, “many important emotions are both transhistorical and transcultural”.

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possible that in and through emotion history a stubbornly resistant potential could be discovered that does not fit into the conventional historical framework?²⁴ If emotions are understood as a potentially timeless human predisposition,²⁵ it could be suggested that this predisposition provokes resistance to socio-historical contexts.²⁶

2 The Master Narratives of Modernity and Text Analysis This section aims to do more than just demonstrate that a situation regarding emotions that is claimed to be typical of modernity can also be found in the premodern period. The emotion research of the past ten years has already made ample progress in that respect. The section has two further aims. It is intended to create an understanding of the fact that only by giving proper consideration to the specific functions of a text can it be determined whether particular emotionally relevant forms of behaviour have changed from premodernity to modernity. It also aims to heighten awareness of the fact that the idealised images of an integration of love and sexuality But Paster is here thinking of the ‘species’ of individual emotions – ‘anxiety’, ‘fear’, ‘pleasure’, and so on – and not forms specific to one particular time. Dorothee Sturkenboom, “Battlefield Emotions in Early Modern Europe: Trends, Key Issues and Blind Spots”, in Battlefield Emotions 1500 – 1800. Practices, Experience, Imagination, ed. Erika Kuijpers and Cornelis Van der Haven (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 277: “the final word is still out on whether emotions are hard-wired in the human brain or not”. Practice theory does, however, seek to convert this natural inheritance into a cultural inheritance; see II.3.d above.  According to one sociological position, the capacity to generate emotions is something that inheres in human nature (in the subcortex), and is not a constructed ability. Cultural influences, in this view, impinge only on the activation, forms of expression, and use of this capacity. Cf. Jonathan H. Turner, Human Emotions. A Sociological Theory (London: Routledge, 2007), 42; Jonathan H. Turner and Jan E. Stets, The Sociology of Emotions (Cambridge: CUP, 2005), 285; on this Simon J. Williams, “A ‘Neurosociology’ of Emotion? Progress, Problems and Prospects”, in Theorizing Emotions, ed. Debra Hopkins, Jochen Kleres, Helena Flam, and Helmut Kuzmics (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2009), 245 – 267 (248 – 249). The philosopher Robert C. Solomon, who had hitherto taken a strictly constructivist position, has in his latest book (True to Our Feelings: What our Emotions are Really Telling Us [Oxford: OUP, 2007]) argued from an intermediate position. Even he now speaks of an “inherited capacity to have an emotion” (249). Culturally distinct is said to be what an emotion like anxiety or irritation evokes, and how that emotion is expressed (251). If there were a universal or “basic” emotion, that would be on account of its equal impact on all men and women (birth, procreation, childhood, living with others, death), not because of biological, evolutionary selection, genetics, or neurology (251). Nonetheless, “culture and biology are the yin and yang of our emotional inheritance” (251). In this way, Solomon adopts a moderate constructivist position. Contemporary social psychology rejects the distinction between social and basic emotions; Shlomo Hareli and Brian Parkinson, “What’s Social about Social Emotions?”, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 38.2 (2008), 131– 156.  This is the line of argument taken by the linguist Anna Wierzbicka, Emotions across Languages and Cultures (Cambridge: CUP, 1999). She seeks to demonstrate the existence of “emotional universals” using a basic translinguistic vocabulary. I for one am critical of attempts to develop a history of emotions from the analysis of language; see below V. 1– 2.  See II.3.e (on the bioculture thesis).

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that are drawn in premodern literary texts may be conditioned by processes in intellectual and educational history, not by changes in the history of emotion. It is not enough to show that love and marriage were already converging at the level of discourse in the Middle Ages: to assess the relevance for the history of emotion of pertinent statements in a text, we must ask who is presenting the ideal of a love marriage to whom in what genre and in what way. Philological knowledge is needed here, not that of the neurosciences. Before I turn to examining individual master narratives that have survived the criticism of Elias’s civilisation theory, I want to point out the two most important reasons for why such master narratives exist at all; in this way, I aim to identify a central deficiency of an emotion history that seeks to sketch the ‘big picture’. The first obstacle facing an emotion history if it is to deal appropriately with more than one historical period is the way in which the study of history and culture is divided up into particular eras. As a practical division of labour this has its merits, but it also has substantive drawbacks. Anyone seeking an overview of the complete history of an emotion has to rely on what can be found in reference works, and these foster an unreliable homogenisation in what they convey.²⁷ This brings us to the second central obstacle: the fact is ignored that within any era – from antiquity all the way into modernity – different discourses, literary domains, and positions compete one with another. The rigid periodisation of history does enable us to contrast one era with another, but it falsifies the historical sources. When contemporary historical emotion research speculates about the historical transformation of emotions, it should not only follow a diachronic approach but also take into account the synchronous plurality of discourses, textual genres, and communicative situations within every era.²⁸ An example will show what happens if medievalists and early modern historians work alongside each other rather than together. Glenn D. Burger attempts in his book Conduct Becoming (2018) to describe a historical emotional transformation in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: from a conception of marriage built around purely economic considerations to one in which both spouses were bound to each other by marital affection.²⁹ Burger’s argument suggests that the emotionalisation of marriage that very many emotion historians have located only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was in fact initiated very much earlier. Con-

 My study seeks to avoid this danger by using concrete, individual examples.  See V, passim.  Glenn D. Burger, Conduct Becoming. Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). Burger also claims that the initially extremely negative image of women changed positively since the thirteenth century. It should also be said that Burger outlines the history of discourse about women and marriage. He places in strict contrast what he sees as an early (clerical) Middle Ages that was hostile to women and, moreover, saw marriage as a purely economic arrangement and a later Middle Ages that was favourable to women, a sentiment propagated by the emotional connection between spouses. See n34 below.

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versely, the image conveyed by Katie Barclay (2011) regarding marriages among the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scottish elite makes one doubt the theory that there was an emotional turning point in the eighteenth century. The eighteenth century appears to be ‘more backward’ than the later Middle Ages. Unlike Burger, who presents marriage in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as an ‘emotional unit’, Barclay sees marriage in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as still dominated by a “patriarchal social order”.³⁰ Burger does recognise that late medieval spouses had difficulty in finding a balance between hierarchy and love,³¹ but he nonetheless focuses only on the emotional relationship. Barclay, on the other hand, places in the foreground the structural conflict between the patriarchal rule of the husband and marital love, and concludes that intimate marital relationships in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were not all that different from those of earlier centuries.³² Marriage in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was defined by the structural conflict between power (of the man) and mutual love – just as in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, we might add.³³ How is it that Burger and Barclay come to such different conclusions? The answer can be found in the second obstacle facing work in the history of emotion that I have mentioned: the different sources that are used. Burger’s book is based on literary texts that idealise the marital relationship and that favour its emotional aspect; Barclay, by contrast, works exclusively with letters and legal decisions that provide a ‘more realistic’ image of power relationships in early modern marriage. One could say that both authors are right, insofar as they convey what their sources tell them. This reflects the fact that the statements about the history of emotion that we make today are defined by whether we consider the function(s) of our historical sources. If we are comparing two textual genres with opposing functions, we cannot automatically draw conclusions about changes in emotion history simply on the basis of different representations of emotions. Burger’s and Barclay’s work could perhaps be reconciled if the specific functions of the texts on which they draw were taken into account. This approach, though, would require a history of emotion capable of conducting source criticism across traditional historical eras. This would mean

 Barclay, Love, 198. See also ibid., 32 (“It [chap. 5] concludes that hierarchy, and thus patriarchal power, was not dissolved due to the intimate relationships of spouses”). The husband gives orders, the wife obeys.  Burger, Conduct Becoming, 134– 135 and 196.  Barclay, Love, 198.  See Nicole Matter-Bacon, Städtische Ehepaare im Spätmittelalter. Verhaltensmuster und Handlungsspielräume im Zürich des 15. Jahrhunderts (Marburg: Tectum Verlag, 2016). The entire Western literature of house and householding since the (pseudo‐)Aristotelian Oiconomia can be said to be characterised by the effort to defuse the structural conflict between the rule of the husband and the friendship or love of the wife; see Schnell, Sexualität und Emotionalität, 178 – 180; Schnell, “Concordia im Haus”. Placed in the context of enduring and widespread discussion of this conflict, many of Barclay’s statements (especially in chapter 7) on the temporally specific nature of the conflict are unconvincing.

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the abandonment of the standard disciplinary divisions.³⁴ Besides that, views that have long been abandoned in some subdisciplines are still accepted and propagated in others.³⁵ Before dealing more closely with the four master narratives that today circumscribe the views of emotion historians, a few words might be permitted on Norbert Elias’s conception of history. For decades his civilisation theory provided an uncontested framework for the treatment of Western emotional history from the twelfth to the twentieth century.³⁶ Elias constructed a close connection between psychogenesis and sociogenesis. He argued that from the Middle Ages to early modernity ‘man’ was required to control affect ever more closely, which was tied to a steady decline in violent action. The psychic constitution of early modern man was said to be marked by an enhanced sense of disgust and of shame. By coupling psychogenesis and sociogenesis, Elias anticipated much of an emotion history that would likewise closely connect emotion history to social history.³⁷ There is no question that Elias’s theory of the civilising process has had unheard-of influence in the cultural sciences; but we should not overlook the fact that this theory has distorted our perspective on the Middle Ages. It is, therefore, no wonder that Elias’s master narrative has met

 This would mean medievalists would not have to shake their heads at the statements of early modern historians so often. Barclay, Love, 54– 55, thinks that a new image of women emerged in the eighteenth century. The premodern characterisation of women as wayward and sexual beings (“as disorderly and sexually insatiable”), he argues, gives way to a positive conception of the woman “as innately chaste and virtuous” (Barclay, ibid., 54). Barclay, ibid., 191, thinks that “in the early modern period, women were thought to be sexually aggressive, desiring sex for health and happiness”. But the theologian Henry of Ghent (ca. 1217– 1293) reflected a widespread view of his time that married women were not that interested in sexual intercourse; see Schnell, Sexualität und Emotionalität, 301– 304. There were several quite different views of women in the Middle Ages (among others, the woman as a positive counterpart to the man!), so Barclay’s contrast falsifies the historical circumstances; see also Schnell, Sexualität und Emotionalität, 358 – 366 (and passim); Schnell, “Geschlechtscharaktere in Mittelalter und Moderne. Interdisziplinäre Überlegungen zur Natur/Kultur-Debatte”, Frühmittelalterliche Studien 51 (2017), 325 – 388. We are dealing here not with images of women linked to particular eras but instead with images of women linked to particular texts and discourses.  Danijela Kambaskovic, “Love”, in Early Modern Emotions. An Introduction, 53 – 56 (55), is of the view that Protestant doctrine created the idea of a “companionate marriage”. But this ideal of marriage as companionship already existed in the Middle Ages; Rüdiger Schnell, “Text und Geschlecht. Eine Einleitung”, in Text und Geschlecht. Mann und Frau in Eheschriften der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Rüdiger Schnell (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 9 – 46 (esp. 30 – 36); Schnell, Sexualität und Emotionalität, 94– 96, 156n5 (with many references to the literature), 161 and 226.  Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process.  See, most recently, Robert van Krieken, “Norbert Elias and Emotions in History”, in: Emotions and Social Change, ed. Lemmings and Brooks, 19 – 42. Cowan, “In Public. Collectivities and Polities” (2019), 166, highlights Elias’s achievement in bringing to light the “relationships between emotional experiences, the development of codes of civility and behaviour management, and the making of modern (or at least incipiently modern) states”. Even today many early modern historians could benefit from this.

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with criticism from historians, especially those working on the Middle Ages.³⁸ Historians working on the modern period would add to this criticism the argument that no society can function if it does not require its members to control affect, adding that, at most, forms of self-discipline changed between the Middle Ages and early modernity.³⁹ Given the outbreaks of violence with the two world wars of the twentieth century, it has been said that there can no longer be any talk of a civilising process.⁴⁰ Medievalists have pointed to large amounts of evidence that even in the Middle Ages the control of affect was required and practised in very many situations.⁴¹ My principal objection to Elias’s historical model is to his idea of a single, unilinear process of disciplining and controlling affect. This call for the social, cultural, religious, and emotional diversity of premodern times to be recognised leads me to talk of civilising processes in the plural – processes that took very different courses. In these processes of controlling and prescribing affect, there are moments both of continuity and of rupture, mingled together and running in parallel. And these processes can still be observed today. It would be a mistake to think that with this criticism of Elias’s master narrative – leading from a lack of control of affect in the Middle Ages to the increasing selfdiscipline of early modernity – emotion history has successfully detached itself from all master narratives.⁴² Quite obviously, no emotion history can do without

 See, among others, Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History” (my emphasis), American Historical Review 107 (2002), 821– 845 (esp. 826 ff. and 834 ff.); Rosenwein, “Eros and Clio. Emotional Paradigms in Medieval Historiography”, in Mediävistik im 21. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans-Werner Goetz (München: Fink, 2003), 427– 441 (433); Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 7– 13; Rosenwein, “Theories of Change in the History of Emotions”, 7 ff.; Peter N. Stearns, “Modern Patterns”, 20 – 21.  See, for instance, Susan Broomhall, “Introduction. Violence and Emotions in Early Modern Europe”, in Violence and Emotions in Early Modern Europe, ed. Broomhall and Sarah Finn (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 1– 18, 2– 5 (during modernity violence had not been reduced, but had changed its form; there were new and different forms of violence).  See Stephen Mennell, “The Other Side of the Coin: Decivilizing Processes”, in: Norbert Elias and Human Interdependencies, ed. Thomas Salumets (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), 32– 49.  Rüdiger Schnell, ed., Zivilisationsprozesse. Zu Erziehungsschriften in der Vormoderne (Köln: Böhlau, 2004); Rüdiger Schnell, “Die höfische Kultur des Mittelalters zwischen Ekel und Ästhetik”, Frühmittelalterliche Studien 39 (2005), 1– 100.  Elias’s construct still influences the work of some emotion historians today. See, for instance, Thomas J. Scheff, “Unpacking the Civilizing Process: Interdependence and Shame”, in Norbert Elias and Human Interdependencies, 99 – 115, esp. 105 – 106 (Scheff adheres to Elias’s assessment of medieval table manners, nakedness, hygiene, and lack of intimacy); Cas Wouters, “The Civilizing of Emotions. Formalization and Informalization”, in Theorizing Emotions, 169 – 193. Wouters explicitly follows Elias’s developmental model, whereby emotional self-control, rather than a control enforced by a third party, first emerged in early modernity. Alain Montandon maintains in his “L’invention d’une autosurveillance intime”, in Histoire des Émotions, t. 1, 253 – 261 (253), that Elias’s civilising process first fully developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, even though he presents medieval ‘predecessors’ in detail. See also Eva Illouz, Saving the Modern Soul. Therapy, Emotions, and The Culture of Self-Help (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 63 – 64 (“Following Norbert

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the construction of epochal changes. And in fact, emotion history as practised by historians working on the modern period does have very many other kinds of narratives with which to replace that of Elias, and which enable them to integrate the diversity of possible historical emotional changes within a broader framework.⁴³ These narratives ensure that modern historians deal historically with the emotion history of the period from the eighth to the eighteenth centuries in a manner distinct from that of medievalists. Whereas the former treat modernity as distinct from the Middle Ages or the premodern, the latter emphasise continuity between the Middle Ages and early modernity. Otherness is confronted with constancy.⁴⁴ Within the study of history, there are indeed two ‘camps’ of emotion historians who have different ideas about the ‘history of emotion’. There are at least four master narratives underlying these contrasting constructions.

Elias’ thesis in his monumental Civilizing Process, we may view emotional control as the result of the modern (i. e., since the seventeenth century) differentiation of functions and of networks of interdependency that thus orient the self toward a greater number of social interactions”). Barclay, Love, sees the Western development as a “development from the savage to the modern” (55), shifting during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from control by others to “self-control” (135, 136). Alan Hunt, “The Civilizing Process and Emotional Life: The Intensification and Hollowing Out of Contemporary Emotions”, in Emotions Matter, 137– 160, does not question Elias’s historical design at all. The contributions in Assaulting the Past. Violence and Civilization in Historical Context, ed. Katherine D. Watson (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), discuss in the context of Elias’s theory the places, forms, and agencies of violence from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. The contributions in Emotions and Social Change. Historical and Sociological Perspectives, ed. Lemmings and Brooks (New York and London: Routledge, 2014), seek to develop Elias’s theory. The reception of Elias is documented further in Rosenwein, “The Place of Renaissance Italy in the History of Emotions”, in Emotions, Passions, and Power in Renaissance Italy, ed. Fabrizio Ricciardelli and Andrea Zorzi (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), 15 – 29 (esp. 18 – 20).  In the cultural-historical discussions of the last one hundred years, a total of seven processes have been made responsible for the development of early modernity: secularisation, rationalisation, civilisation, social disciplining, individualisation, differentiation (Niklas Luhmann), and modernisation. See Rüdiger Schnell, “Alterität der Neuzeit: Versuch eines Perspektivenwechsels”, in Wie anders war das Mittelalter? Fragen an das Konzept der Alterität, ed. Manuel Braun (Göttingen: V & R unipress, 2013), 41– 94 (49 – 51).  See the careful position taken by Peter N. Stearns, “Modern Patterns”, 22– 24. In a new contribution, however, Stearns does highlight what is new in the eighteenth century: “In Private. The Individual and the Domestic Community”, in A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Age of Romanticism, Revolution, and Empire, ed. Susan J. Matt (London, New York, Oxford, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 137– 156. See also Otto Gerhard Oexle, Die Gegenwart des Mittelalters (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2013); Rüdiger Schnell, “Alterität der Neuzeit: Versuch eines Perspektivenwechsels”; Louise D’Arcens, Old Songs in the Timeless Land. Medievalism in Australian Literature 1840 – 1910 (Turnholt: Brepols, 2011).

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a Subjectivity/Identity/The Self The first narrative recounts how there was no idea of subjectivity in the Middle Ages. Consciousness of a self or of an ego is said to have first developed in the eighteenth century. The Middle Ages, so the story goes, had no conception of an ego and a self (or no preoccupation with the ‘other’).⁴⁵ Psychohistorians have dated the genesis of conscience, of the individual, of the subject, the autonomous ego, and personal identity from the period following the Middle Ages.⁴⁶ Just how far the conception of the Middle Ages and the emotion history of modernity are related can be seen in the work of Ute Frevert. Her research report of 2009 contains the thesis that at the end of the eighteenth century the “apotheosis of fellow-feeling and sympathy” coincided with “the development of modern individuality and the diffusion of capitalist economic forms”.⁴⁷ She elaborates this (allegedly) historical fact with the help of a theory taken from developmental psychology.⁴⁸ This states that children first develop a feeling for others “when they perceive themselves to be their own person, an ‘ego’ and a self and able to objectify themselves as such” (193). “It can therefore be argued that, in terms of cultural history, it was only with the concentrated engagement with the ego that originated in early modernity, and that found its dramatic highpoint in the egoism of a Smithian economic subject, that the ‘other’ could become a recognisable problem” (193). This idea of the Middle Ages as the childhood of Western cultural history goes back to the beginning of the twentieth century.⁴⁹ Ute Frevert is not alone in taking this position.⁵⁰

 Representative of many is Robert Muchembled, Passions de femmes au temps de la reine Margot 1553 – 1615 (Paris: Seuil, 2003), esp. 10 – 16 (discovery of the ego around 1600). Robert Muchembled, “Pour une histoire des émotions au XVIe siècle”, in Les fruits de la récolte. Études offertes à Jean-Michel Boehler, ed. Jean François Chauvard and Isabelle Laboulais (Strasbourg: Presses Université de Strasbourg, 2007), 365 – 380, 375, goes so far as to assert that the claim to speak for oneself counted in the Middle Ages as an unforgivable sin of pride, as if there was not a plethora of ego-statements during the Middle Ages, both in the religious and the temporal spheres.  As Hedwig Röckelein has shown: “Psychohistorie und Mediävistik”, in Moderne Mediävistik. Stand und Perspektiven der Mittelalterforschung, ed. Hans-Werner Goetz (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1999), 288 – 299, esp. 289 – 293. William Reddy, “Historical Research on the Self and Emotions”, Emotion Review 1.4 (2009), 302– 315, reviews the relevant studies and concludes that the modern self first emerged in the eighteenth century (306).  Frevert, “Was haben Gefühle in der Geschichte zu suchen?”, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 35 (2009), 183 – 208, 193.  Frevert seems to be using Piaget’s model; see Jean Piaget, The Moral Judgement of the Child (New York, N.Y.: Collier Books, 1962).  See, among others, Johan Huizinga, Herfstij der middeleeuwen (Haarlem: Willink, 1919 [1921]); Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1955). Both Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 5 – 10, and Stearns, “Modern Patterns”, 22– 24, oppose this view.  Dieter Birnbacher, “Emotionen im Wandel des Zeitgeists”, in Emotionen in Mittelalter und Renaissance, ed. Christoph Kann (Düsseldorf: Düsseldorf University Press, 2014), 21– 53, 43 – 47, under the influence of Norbert Elias (45 – 46), repeats the usual ideas about an “unmistakable primitivism in

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Here I can only point in a footnote to the long list of medieval studies that establish a knowledge of the self, subjectivity, and the existence of an ‘ego’ and an ‘other’ in the Middle Ages.⁵¹ But anyone who knows that Peter Abelard wrote a treatise in the twelfth century with the title Scito te ipsum (“Know Yourself”); that from the twelfth century, at the latest, Christian moral theology judged human action no longer by its external consequences but according to the intentions of the acting person; and that at the Lateran Council of 1215 the Church required each Christian to take confession once a year, and in so doing search their own conscience⁵² – any such person will be unable to deny subjectivity to the Middle Ages, just like anyone

the emotions” (43) of medieval people, about a “greater degree of disinhibition in the expression of emotion” (46; emphasis in original), and that “the emotionality of the great majority of medieval people swung from one extreme to another, something that reminded some cultural historians of the way children felt and behaved” (43).  See, for example, Schnell, “Alterität der Neuzeit”, 53 – 61; Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual 1050 – 1200 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); Caroline Walker Bynum, “Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?”, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 31 (1980), 1– 17; Michel Zink, La subjectivité littéraire. Autour du siècle de Saint Louis (Paris: Presses Université de France, 1985); Sarah Kay, Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry (Cambridge: CUP, 1990); Sarah Spence, Texts and the Self in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge: CUP, 1996); Reto Luzius Fetz, Roland Hagenbüchle, and Peter Schulz, eds., Geschichte und Vorgeschichte der modernen Subjektivität, vol. 1 (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1998); Susan R. Kramer and Caroline Walker Bynum, “Revisiting the Twelfth-Century Individual”, in Das Eigene und das Ganze. Zum Individuellen im mittelalterlichen Religiosentum, ed. Gert Melville and Markus Schürer (Münster: LIT, 2002), 57– 85; Peter Haidu, The Subject Medieval/Modern. Text and Governance in the Middle Ages (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004); A. C. Spearing, Textual Subjectivity. The Encoding of Subjectivity in Medieval Narratives and Lyrics (Oxford: OUP, 2005); Simon Gaunt, Love and Death in Medieval French and Occitan Courtly Literature. Martyrs to Love (Oxford: OUP, 2006), 13 – 14 (modern subjectivity, modern sexuality, modern thinking about ethics are all held to begin with the troubadour ballads of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries); Fidel Fajardo-Acosta, Courtly Seductions, Modern Subjections. Troubadour Literature and the Medieval Construction of the Modern World (Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2010) (the modern subject is said to have first been constructed in the twelfth century. It is argued that a continuum links the twelfth and twentieth centuries, and the modern subject is even said to be medieval [49]. That love is thought to be the ultimate human experience, as it is in medieval troubadour lyrics, is presented as the key element in the constitution of the modern subject); Karl A. E. Enenkel, Meditatio – Refashioning the Self. Theory and Practice in Late Medieval and Early Modern Intellectual Culture (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011); Harald Derschka, Individuum und Persönlichkeit im Hochmittelalter (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2014); Christian Rode, Zugänge zum Selbst. Innere Erfahrung in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Münster: Aschendorff, 2015); Holly A. Crocker, “Medieval Affects Now”, Exemplaria 29.1 (2017), 82– 98.  Susan R. Kramer, Sin, Interiority, and Selfhood in the Twelfth-Century West (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2015). Kramer sees the introduction of obligatory confession around 1200 as an important turning point in the history of subjectivity and the self. She argues that we can even speak of a “modern sense of the self”. On the impact of obligatory confession since the twelfth century on the history of emotions, see John H. Arnold, “Inside and Outside the Medieval Laity: Some Reflections on the History of Emotions”, in European Religious Cultures. Essays offered to Christopher Brooke on the Occasion of his Eighteenth Birthday, ed. Miri Rubin (London: Institute of Historical Research, 2008), 107– 129.

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who is familiar with the literary products of troubadour verse and mysticism, or anyone who has read monastic letters of friendship. Of course, it has to be clarified⁵³ whether this is a different kind of subjectivity from that of modernity.⁵⁴ Quite possibly, it is not the phenomenon ‘subjectivity’ that has changed but the way in which one speaks of oneself.⁵⁵ Investigating this would, however, be something more for historians of literature and language than for emotion historians. The argument over subjectivity in the Middle Ages suffers, in my view, from the fact that only a restricted range of textual material of limited informative value is taken into consideration.⁵⁶ The tableau of medieval emotionality can be seen as a whole only if the communicative behaviour of the men and women who lived in this epoch is also taken into account. People’s affective states of mind are bound up with the way they deal with others, in the Middle Ages as in any other period. A sociocultural background needs to be illuminated. Of course, this is what emotion research does when it studies subjectivity, individuality, and the self in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If medieval affective states of mind were to be studied not only in terms of emotional words or emotional concepts, but also with regard to emotionally relevant communication situations – as is done for modernity – we would end up with a different picture of medieval emotionality. Taking stock of social and affective interactions in the Middle Ages would, I am sure, involve some surprises for historians of the modern period. Taking account of the sensitivities of third parties, or others – what Frevert calls ‘a feeling for others’ – plays a central role in the requirements of medieval behaviour, whether at the worldly court or in monasteries. This can be shown from behavioural rules found in an official ‘rule book’ (Consuetudines; ca. 1120 – 1130) from the monastery of St Victor in Paris. In the section about the tasks of the hospitarius (the mem-

 Katharina Philipowski, Die Gestalt des Unsichtbaren. Narrative Konzeptionen des Inneren in der höfischen Literatur (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2013), 237– 261, distinguishes a modern from a medieval connotation of inwardness. The latter is said to have an objectively anthropological and theological structure of being. Moreover, she argues, the inner spaces described in medieval literature evoke not the inner space of an individual figure but instead an exemplary inner space, a transindividual inner space.  Above all, consideration must be given to the gender-specific aspect. If one believes feminist theses, women first gained the status of a subject in the twentieth century; see Schnell, “Alterität der Neuzeit”, 57– 61.  See Andreas Bähr, Furcht und Furchtlosigkeit. Göttliche Gewalt und Selbstkonstitution im 17. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: V & R unipress, 2013), 18.  The wide differences of opinion over the point from which modern subjectivity can be said to have developed are apparent, for example, in the work of the Romanist Paul Geyer. In a study published in 1997, he placed the discovery of the modern subject in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Geyer, Die Entdeckung des modernen Subjekts. Anthropologie von Descartes bis Rousseau [Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997; 2nd unrevised edition, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007]). In 2009, clearly after his textual knowledge had expanded, Geyer took the view that the modern subject was already being constructed in Petrarch (1304– 1374); Paul Geyer, ed., Petrarca und die Herausbildung des modernen Subjekts (Göttingen: V & R unipress, 2009).

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ber who looked after monastery guests), there are behavioural rules stipulating what is to be done if guests fall ill, or even die. In the case of a convalescent guest, the instructions run as follows: When however someone who has been ill begins to recover from his weakness, special care has to be taken that he is not released [from the sickroom] until he has fully recovered his health. And whatever food, drink, or other refreshment is necessary in the meantime should be given to him in abundance and without delay. The abbot should often visit him and encourage him to ask for what he needs, without embarrassment [ut non erubescat] or reservation. He should not think that he makes trouble of any kind [neque ullo modo onerosum se esse credat]. All servants of the house should, moreover, be instructed to show a cheerful and kindly face to all guests, not only to those who are ill, but to all who arrive.⁵⁷

In the situation depicted, two forms of desired politeness and courtesy come together: the abbot is deeply concerned about the welfare, or the complete recovery, of his sick guest, and wishes to meet his every wish. For his part, it is implied, the guest would wish to seem as considerate as possible and so impose as little as possible on his hosts. He finds it difficult, or he is ashamed, to express any kind of special requests as regards food, drink, and care. The abbot, aware of this behavioural model of courtesy and modesty, has to ask the guest directly to set shame aside and make his demands known quite freely. How any such competition over the greatest possible degree of politeness might turn out in any one case can easily be imagined: both persons seek to exceed the courtesy of the other, meaning that a modus vivendi can only gradually be established. The sick guest will have to find out just what he can expect of the abbot by way of additional trouble, without taxing him too much. For his part, the abbot has the task of testing the shame-threshold of the guest, while respecting it and without violating his obligations as a host. Each of them has to observe the other. The ‘other’ becomes central for the thinking of the ‘ego’. Without exaggeration, it can be said that medieval texts not only testify to a lively discourse of competition between the ego and the other, but also reveal a great sensitivity in everyday interaction at court or in the monastery. Here, at least, people are – ideally – not only fixated on themselves; they also reflect the subjective perspective of the other.⁵⁸ It is quite astonishing that the dispute between poststructuralists and deconstructivists, excluding the subject on the one hand, supporting feminist efforts to establish a female historical subject on the other, has barely found any echo in historical emotion research: to what extent can we assume any existence for a ‘self’, or subjectivity? This problem touches on a more basic question: with what kind of historical model do emotion historians want to work? (see IV.1).

 Liber Ordinis Sancti Victoris Parisiensis, ed. Lucas Jocqué and Ludovicus Milis (Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis, 61) (Turnholt: Brepols, 1984), 67 (chap. 17). The oldest manuscripts date from the second half of the twelfth century.  I cannot present any more evidence here.

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b Interiorisation and Privatisation/Rendering Intimate The first narrative leads to the second: the internalisation of emotion.⁵⁹ Emotion research favours the story that in Western culture emotions or affects have become increasingly internalised in the course of historical time.⁶⁰ This process of internalisation is supposed to have been especially intense during the eighteenth century.⁶¹ However, tendencies towards interiorisation have been documented for earlier periods such as, for instance, the fourth century BC, the twelfth century, and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.⁶² With respect to the confessional, the introduction of confessional practice in 1215 and the associated involvement of shame points to a tendency towards interiorisation.⁶³ It is thought that a shift took place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from a culture of shame to a culture of guilt, and that this change involved the internalisation of shame.⁶⁴ A comparison of Homeric heroes (eighth/ninth centuries BC) with twenty-first century everyday self-descriptions shows that the process of interiorisation has in no respect run a straight course, and cannot be ascribed to any one particular era either. Homer’s heroes believed that they received their affects from outside themselves, from the gods.⁶⁵ The responsibility for misbehaviour is also ascribed mostly to third parties, the gods. But then, during antiquity, there was a major shift in the understanding of emotion. The Homeric view, that feelings overcame humans from outside themselves, was from the fifth century BC faced with another conception  I do not deal here with Norbert Elias’s thesis concerning the increasing internalisation of social norms, that is, the alleged transition from external control to self-control in the early modern period. See Rüdiger Schnell, “Replik zur Rezension von Hans-Ulrich Musolff zum Band Rüdiger Schnell (Hg.), Zivilisationsprozesse, Köln 2004”, Erziehungswissenschaftliche Review 6.3 (2007); (accessed 26 May 2018).  This “process of interiorization” is outlined by Catherine Newmark, “From Moving the Soul to Moving into the Soul”, in Rethinking Emotion. Interiority and Exteriority in Premodern, Modern, and Contemporary Thought, ed. Rüdiger Campe and Julia Weber (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2014), 21– 35, with respect to the history of the philosophical conception of emotion. Descartes is said to have made “an important step toward the interiorization of the emotions” (27). With Kant “the most completely interiorized conception” is supposedly achieved (30).  See the preceding note. See also Rüdiger Campe and Julia Weber, “Rethinking Emotion: Moving beyond Interiority”, in Rethinking Emotion, 1– 18.  For Greek antiquity: Rüdiger Schnell, Causa amoris. Liebeskonzeption und Liebesdarstellung in der mittelalterlichen Literatur (Bern and München: Francke, 1985), 360 – 372. On the twelfth and sixteenth centuries: Rüdiger Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 109 – 111. For general discussion of the Middle Ages as a whole: Schnell, Causa amoris, 391– 451.  Katharina Behrens, Scham. Zur sozialen Bedeutung eines Gefühls im spätmittelalterlichen England (Historische Semantik 20) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 274– 290, 309, 318, 329 (in the later Middle Ages there was, alongside the ‘private’ confession, also the ‘public’ penance; 277). See also n52 above on confession as a condition for the development of the self.  Peter N. Stearns, “Shame, and a Challenge for Emotions History”, Emotion Review 8.3 (2016), 197– 206 (198 and 202). On the relation of cultures of guilt and of shame, see V. 3 below.  Catherine Newmark, “From Moving the Soul to Moving into the Soul”, 21.

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of emotion. This held that emotions came from inside people.⁶⁶ From the time of Euripides’ tragedies (fifth century BC) at the latest, the insight was formulated that humans were responsible for their actions and for their affects. In the time of the great tragedians and the first philosophers (from the sixth and fifth centuries BC onwards), a transformation took place.⁶⁷ The interiorisation of feelings had begun. All the same, the original and now supposedly archaic view of feelings by no means now vanished from Western discourse as a result of a Greek enlightenment during the fifth century BC. Even today people talk about being overwhelmed by feelings as if they were controlled by external forces.⁶⁸ The conviction is still widespread today that emotions will seize us like external forces and lead us to commit actions against our own will or throw us into severe emotional distress.⁶⁹ As late as the sixteenth century, people believed that, as far as their affect or emotions were concerned, they were under the influence of external forces, of the Devil for instance.⁷⁰ Even if such ideas are ‘false’ from a constructivist viewpoint, these exculpatory views of human behaviour are nonetheless a sociocultural ‘reality’ in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modernity. The fact that scholarly discourse from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries has focused on the interiorisation of emotion cannot and does not trump the continued existence of popular conceptions. Two particular aspects that are repeatedly presented as proof of the ‘process’ of interiorisation in cultural studies will be addressed here.

(a) Action vs ‘Feeling’ For a long time, emotion historians have repeatedly pointed to the fact that the emergence of the German word Gefühl and the (supposedly) new eighteenth-century

 See Eric R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951). Dodds distinguishes a Homeric shame culture from a classical Greek guilt culture.  Schnell, Causa amoris, 359 – 379.  On this set of problems, see Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 135n79.  In the opinion of Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 210, the idea of “having emotions” (as if emotions belonged to us) belies the way that emotions ‘come to us’, or catch us out. Solomon, True to Our Feelings, 190 – 200 (“Myth Eight. Emotions Happen to Us”), discusses the arguments for and against the thesis that, in the twentieth century, emotions seize us externally, but ultimately argues against this idea on moral and ethical grounds. On this aspect, and the alleged difference between the ideas of antiquity and modernity, see Boddice, A History of Feelings (2019); VIInn74– 81 below; II.3.d above.  John Jeffries Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism (Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). On sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France: Georges Vigarello, “L’émergence du mot ‘emotion’”, in Histoire des Émotions, t. 1, 219 – 224. Hans-Jürgen Diller, Words for Feelings. Essays Towards a History of English Emotion Lexicon (Heidelberg: Winter, 2014), 379 – 380 and 390 – 391, is of the view that the displacement in lexical history of passion by emotion since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is indicative of a mental transformation: that people no longer think of emotions as something determined from outside of themselves. But Diller, ibid., 365 – 366, argues with respect to the present: “we tend to think of our emotions as spontaneous and not subject to our will”.

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meaning of the English word feeling represented not only a new conception of emotion but also a new way of feeling.⁷¹ It is argued that Gefühl/feeling is not an objective indicator of a situation or an object, but instead a subjective reaction to a situation, subjective experience and reflection on a feeling, inner enjoyment of an emotion, and for the most part not an action motivated by self-interest. Feeling implies a sense of self. This subjectification of affect, and thus also feeling for oneself, is supposedly foreign to the Middle Ages. Before the eighteenth century, emotions were supposedly determined by external factors and associated with actions. Consequently, premodern texts represent emotions as actions. Emotion and action are said to be the same thing. There was no inner space in which a character in a narrative could reflect on their emotions, consciously experience them, or even seek to fight against them. It is claimed that this can been seen in the transformation of the emotional conception of ‘Zorn/anger’. In premodern times, ‘Zorn/anger’ was thought to be a social emotion that existed only in social interaction. In the eighteenth century, however, “anger came to be primarily located in the individual’s interiority”. The eighteenth-century emergence of the conception of Gefühl, it is argued, “fundamentally transformed” that of ‘Zorn/anger’.⁷² According to this view, eighteenth-century emotional discourse created the feeling ‘anger’ from the affect ‘anger’, so that anger was conceived no longer as a desire for revenge but instead as an inner, self-reflective movement shuttling between the object that triggered it and the affective state of the soul.⁷³ But this kind of transition of anger from affect to feeling has also been identified for the Middle Ages. One medieval study argues that in the (earlier) epic poetry of the twelfth century, anger as affect was conceived only as an external, physical event, without any psychic dimension; and that then, in the later (courtly) romance of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, anger and violence were conceived as some-

 Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions. The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: CUP, 2003); Thomas Dixon, The Invention of Altruism. Making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain (Oxford: OUP, 2008); Thomas Dixon, “‘Emotion’: The History of a Keyword in Crisis”, Emotion Review 4.4 (2012), 338 – 344; Jutta Stalfort, Die Erfindung der Gefühle. Eine Studie über den historischen Wandel menschlicher Emotionalität (1750 – 1850) (Bielefeld: transcript, 2013); Stella Lange, Gefühle ‘schwarz auf weiß’. Implizieren, Beschreiben und Benennen von Emotionen im empfindsamen Briefroman um 1800 (Heidelberg: Winter, 2016), 25 – 68 and 399 – 400.  Karl A.E. Enenkel and Anita Traninger, “Introduction: Discourses of Anger in the Early Modern Period”, in Discourses of Anger in the Early Modern Period, ed. Enenkel and Traninger (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015), 1– 15 (7). On the historicity of Zorn/anger, see the introduction to VI below.  Johannes F. Lehmann, “Feeling Rage: The Transformation of the Concept of Anger in Eighteenth Century Germany”, in Discourses of Anger, 16 – 45 (24– 25 and 29 – 32). What Enenkel and Traninger, and also Lehmann, assume for the eighteenth century – the interiorisation of anger – is claimed for the sixteenth century by Edward Muir, Mad Blood Stirring. Vendetta and Factions in Friuli during the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1993), xxvi (“a transformation from externalizing anger […] to internalizing it”).

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thing that occurred within somebody.⁷⁴ The situation in literary history is, of course, different again if the Middle Latin period from the ninth to eleventh centuries is taken into account. For example, in the heroic epic Waltharius (from as early as the ninth or tenth centuries), Attila’s outbreak of rage,⁷⁵ caused by the flight of Walther and Hildegund, is treated both as an external-physical event (Attila tears his clothes to pieces, tosses sleeplessly in bed, stops eating; Attila can no longer speak because of excessive anger) and as an inner event: “The king is surging inwardly with warring cares” (sic intestinis rex fluctuat undique curis; v. 385); “Outward, the man betrays his suffering within” (prodidit exterius, quicquid toleraverat intus; v. 387). It cannot be denied that the representation of anger in Waltharius has a tendency to interiorisation, although there is no reflection by the character on his inner condition.⁷⁶ Nor does the Latin romance Ruodlieb (last third of the eleventh century) restrict its depiction of ‘anger’ to external, violent action; it also offers insights into the psychic inner space related to ‘anger’.⁷⁷ Already, this secular romance is familiar with the warning against sudden rage (ira; V 498 – 501) and advises “rein your temper”. Consistently with this, the text speaks against blind revenge (III 13 ff., IV 141, V 41 ff.) and presumes the existence of an inner space into which the affect ‘anger’ must not be permitted to enter.⁷⁸ That anger is not only a brief, spontaneous affect – and not only an action – but can be a feeling long nurtured, is proved by this Latin text in the statement that red-haired people, when in a fit of anger, no longer think of loyalty. For “his wrath is vicious, dreadful and long-lasting” (nam vehemens dira sibi stat

 Klaus Ridder, “Kampfzorn. Affektivität und Gewalt in mittelalterlicher Epik”, in Eine Epoche im Umbruch. Volkssprachliche Literalität 1200 – 1300. Cambridger Symposium 2001, ed. Crista Bertelsmeier-Kierst and Christopher Young (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2003), 221– 248 (240 – 241). On the meaning of the Middle High German word zorn, see Klaus Grubmüller, “Historische Semantik und Diskursgeschichte: zorn, nît und haz”, in Codierungen von Emotionen im Mittelalter. Emotions and Sensibilities in the Middle Ages, ed. C. Stephen Jaeger and Ingrid Kasten (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2003), 47– 69.  Waltharius and Ruodlieb, ed. and trans. Dennis M. Kratz (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1984), Waltharius, 20 – 21 (V. 380 – 399).  Another ‘counter-proof’ can be found in a scene from Otfried von Weißenburg’s Evangelienharmonie (around 870 AD, written in a vernacular idiom). Concerning the betrayal of Christ by his disciple Peter, we can read: “As soon as he [the cock] had crowed the first time, Peter became reflective [!]; the words of the Lord brought him in his inner being to himself once more. At the same moment he became oppressed by the realisation that everything had happened to him in the way that the Lord [Christ] had said it would. He began to wail and call upon the Lord. His pain-filled tears touched the Lord’s heart.” Otfried von Weißenburg, Evangelienbuch. Auswahl, althochdeutsch/neuhochdeutsch, ed. and trans. Gisela Vollmann-Profe (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1987), 137 (IV 18,35 – 40). Here we have an important element of something that is supposed to be an early modern feeling: consciousness of oneself, the feeling of guilt, and reflection on one’s own affective state.  Waltharius and Ruodlieb, ed. and trans. Kratz.  Tears were also linked to the existence of this inner space (ambo nimis intime flebant; Waltharius and Ruodlieb, ed. and trans. Kratz; Ruodlieb, V 582; “both were sobbing deeply”).

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durabilis ira; V 453).⁷⁹ The idea that one can examine oneself inwardly and feel shame is familiar to the Ruodlieb (“that he felt deep shame”; XIV 34). Two passages where exterior body language is contrasted with a psychic interior deserve special attention. Although Ruodlieb’s mother experiences great pain at his departure, to his face she feigns hope that he will soon return, concealing her pain “deep in her heart” – Quae simulando spem premit altum corde dolorem (“Who, while feigning hope, suppressed the pain deep in her heart”; I 58) – and consoling those who were sad.⁸⁰ In agreeing a secret rendezvous, a wife conceals her feelings, feigning sadness in the presence of her husband, in reality rejoicing inside (Interius gaudens tamen inquit ei quasi maerens […]; VII 82). This idea of a psychic inner space, therefore, extends to that of an independent sphere, detached from external physical demeanour. The discovery of the interior, and the discovery of the difference between inner and outer, did not, therefore, have to wait until the courtly romance of the twelfth century. Nonetheless, what is sketched out here does not mean that the idea of inner feeling must have existed continuously and in all textual genres from the early to late Middle Ages. This idea of inner feeling can be displaced by other conceptions from time to time, both in medieval and early modern times. For instance, some studies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries suggest that contemporary ideas of human affective circumstances did not contrast inner and outer, as has been done since the eighteenth century, but instead saw the physical and the psychological as a unity, or as interdependent.⁸¹ There has been no continuous and unbroken development towards interiorisation in Western emotion history; instead, there have always been new beginnings, rupture, modification, and competition between conceptions.

 Waltharius and Ruodlieb, ed. and trans. Kratz, 122 – 123. David of Augsburg, De exterioris et interioris hominis compositione (Quaracchi: Collegio San Bonaventura, 1899), 129 (II 39), sees here a third variation of anger: Tertia qualitas irae est diuturna commotio, quae aliquando rancorem fovet (“The third kind of anger is a long-lasting inner movement that keeps rancour alive for a while”). In the court records of the city of Zurich for the year 1431, it is written that a citizen of Zurich suffered greatly in his heart for many months after the adultery of his wife. The same is reported of a female citizen for the year 1466: she suffered “heavily in her heart” (my emphasis) because of the adultery of her husband. See Matter-Bacon, Städtische Ehepaare, 298 and 314. Rage, jealousy, dishonour, and the like can take root for a long time within someone, even in the fifteenth century.  Waltharius and Ruodlieb, ed. and trans. Kratz, 76 – 77.  See, for instance, Paster, Rowe, Floyd-Wilson, “Introduction: Reading the Early Modern Passions”, 13. This view is shared by all recent studies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed. Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993); Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England. Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: CUP, 1999), 1– 39; Paster, Humoring the Body, 76 – 77 and 244– 245; Lesel Dawson, Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern English Literature (Oxford: OUP, 2008), 15 – 16; Allison P. Hobgood, Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England (Cambridge: CUP, 2014), 13 – 14; Jan Purnis, “Renaissance Discourses of Emotions”, in Emotions, Community, and Citizenship, 52– 74 (69). See also II.3.d above.

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The above discussion of a possible transformation from emotional action to early modern conscious feeling undermines practice theory, which sets out to deconstruct the dichotomy of inner feeling and external action as a traditional figure of intellectual history, arguing that this is a polarity that has to be abandoned. What from the standpoint of recent work on emotion history is something created in the eighteenth century – the new meaning of feeling or the new terminology of Gefühl, a new kind of emotional state, the idea of self and of subjectivity, subjective reaction to a situation or to an object – all this is for practice theory a form of self-deception propagated by the Enlightenment. As far as practice theory is concerned, emoting and acting are the same thing. The ego is the action. There is no (longer any) inner self. This is said to render emotion-historical narratives of interiorisation obsolete.⁸² In my view, this judgement is not supported by the historical evidence. As we have seen, we already find the idea of an inner self before the eighteenth century, together with a tendency to interiorisation. Quite possibly, we are faced not with a one-off disruption in emotion history but instead with the constant competition of different conceptions of emotion. We turn next to the second aspect of the thesis of interiorisation.

(b) Rendering Intimate/Privatisation It is widely accepted that from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries relationships between spouses and family members have become more intimate, more emotional in form.⁸³ This interiorisation of family ties is linked with various socio-historical factors, among others with the separation of the husband’s workplace and the family home, with the separation of public and private (and consequently also with a privatisation of family life), and with a new attitude towards the child. What evidence is there for this narrative of a growing intimacy and emotionalisation of marital and family relationships? Does the crucial shift to interiorisation really happen only in the eighteenth century?

 Whether this theory is worth pursuing is discussed in II.3.d.  Jamake Highwater, Mythos and Sexuality (New York: New American Library, 1990); Elena Pulcini, Amour-passion et amour conjugal. Rousseau et l’origine d’un conflit moderne (Paris: Champion, 1998); Harry Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature. Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2000), 233 – 234; Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 144– 149, 153– 154, 158 and 275; Christine Roulston, Narrating Marriage in Eighteenth-Century England and France (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010) (in the eighteenth century, a decisive transformation occurred, from a hierarchically organised model of marriage to one based on love and reciprocity); Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History. From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Viking, 2005); Hannelore Schlaffer, “Ehestiftung, Ehebruch und sexuelle Revolution. Der Roman des 19. Jahrhunderts”, Poetica 37 (2005), 413 – 427 (the ideal of loving marital partners first emerged in the nineteenth century); Christof Breitsameter, Liebe. Formen und Normen. Eine Kulturgeschichte und ihre Folgen (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 2017), 106 – 121; Alston and Harvey, “In Private. The Individual and the Domestic Community” (2019), 137– 153 (144). Critical of this discussion: Schnell, Sexualität und Emotionalität, 20 – 41; Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 816 – 831.

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Since various disciplines work together and for one another in this narrative – social history, moral philosophy, lexical history, emotion history – corrections in the one discipline will have consequences for the entire narrative.⁸⁴ Hence, there are consequences for emotion history in the way that social history (together with the history of literature and gender history) has over the last twenty years made major changes to the traditional image of bourgeois-familial intimacy. Not all wives were focused on their own family.⁸⁵ The idea that a separation of public and private spheres first developed in the eighteenth century has had to be abandoned.⁸⁶ In the same way, the thesis that gendered character was first constructed in the eighteenth century has been subjected to heavy and critical qualification.⁸⁷ The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries no longer fulfil the functions that have been ascribed to them for decades. But even if it has been proved that the social reality of bourgeois marriage was different from what social and gender historians have insisted for decades, the selfdescriptions of this stratum could well have sought to realise this (unrealistic) image of marital intimacy and privacy. I will briefly show here how these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century idealisations coincided to an astonishing extent with those of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. I begin with the findings of a monograph on marital intimacy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; move on to a theoretical discussion of what intimacy is; and then, having opened up these historical and theoretical issues, introduce some textual evidence from the later Middle Ages. To avoid any misunderstanding, I should make clear that the term intimacy is not confined in the following to the sense of ‘sexual relationship’, but is used in its widest sense to convey familiarity, personal closeness, and an inner connection.⁸⁸ Intimacy is treated as the mark of a private sphere that is contrasted to public, social space.⁸⁹ Katie Barclay has sought, using the private letters of Scottish married couples from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, to establish how far these couples

 See Schnell, Sexualität und Emotionalität, 89 – 96.  See Walter Erhart, “Das zweite Geschlecht: ‘Männlichkeit’, interdisziplinär. Ein Forschungsbericht”, Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 30.2 (2005), 156 – 232.  Cf. nn235 – 247. More recent research has been concerned to revise traditional positions and has drawn attention to the interrelationship of the private-domestic and public spheres; Alston and Harvey, “In Private. The Individual and the Domestic Community” (2019), 137– 153. But see also nn89 – 95 below.  Schnell, “Geschlechtscharaktere”.  See, by contrast, Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy. Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).  Kornelia Hahn and Günter Burkart, “Vorwort”, in Grenzen und Grenzüberschreitungen der Liebe, ed. Kornelia Hahn and Günter Burkart (Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 2000), 7– 10. We can disregard here that fact that during the Middle Ages actions that we regard as intimate and so ascribe to the private sphere were performed in public (a kiss between two rulers). For what it is worth, in the twentieth century the rulers of the so-called Eastern bloc states kissed each other quite publicly.

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saw their marital relationship as an intimate one.⁹⁰ According to Barclay, the basic problem of any attempt to treat a marital relationship as intimate derives from the socially sanctioned hierarchical structure of marriage: the power of the husband and the obedience of the wife.⁹¹ Intimacy was associated with friendship, but friendship was mostly thought of as a relationship between two equals. How, then, might (marital) subordination (in marriage) be reconciled with equality (between friends)?⁹² From Barclay we can gather that marital intimacy in the eighteenth century was created above all by equating intimacy with domesticity, and domesticity with privacy. In this way, a private self was marked off from a public self.⁹³ One’s own home was imagined as a space marked off from the outside world, as a place of refuge in which the marital couple – and especially the man – could set aside the pretences demanded by the public realm and become quite true to themselves.⁹⁴ Friendship is said to have offered a model for marriage in this way. Communicative openness between the married couple is said to have made a material contribution to intimacy. Hence, it is possible to identify, for the Scottish eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury elite, a convergence involving privacy, intimacy, domesticity, and friendship.⁹⁵ What might now be surprising is that we will also encounter this idea of marital intimacy in late medieval texts. But first, let us deal with the modern discussion on the nature of intimacy. Georg Simmel tried to define what might be meant by intimacy:⁹⁶ a couple creates intimacy as soon as “the inner element of the relationship […] is felt to be its most important, as soon as its structure of feeling becomes something that each wishes only to share with or show to this one other, and no one else”.⁹⁷ For Niklas Luhmann, a substantial part of the “intimate relationship” system-type is that within

 Barclay, Love, 125 – 147.  On this aspect of Barclay’s study, see nn30 – 32 above.  This issue is already raised in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (book VIII), as well as in his Oikonomia; it was repeatedly raised in medieval wedding sermons and early modern household books; Schnell, “Concordia im Haus”.  Barclay, Love, 135 – 139. In n85 above, it has already been noted that the ‘house’ of the eighteenthand nineteenth-century bourgeoisie was certainly not so clearly separated from the outside world. But social imagination does not always have to correspond to social reality.  Even in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, private life is assigned a higher value than a public existence, since in the private realm greater authenticity is held to prevail. Here, he believed, the individual was completely himself; Margaret Ogrodnick, Instinct and Intimacy. Political Philosophy and Autobiography in Rousseau (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1999), 10.  During the twentieth century, discussion of the preconditions for an ideal marriage included the question of whether friendship could be reconciled with marriage. Ruth Abbey and Douglas J. Den Uyl, “The Chief Inducement? The Idea of Marriage as Friendship”, Journal of Applied Philosophy 18.1 (2001), 37– 52. Abbey and Den Uyl refer to anticipations of this discussion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  Georg Simmel, “Die Gesellschaft zu zweien” (1908), printed in: Simmel, Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1901 – 1908, vol. 2 (Gesamtausgabe, vol. 8) (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1993), 348 – 354 (351).  This definition is also cited by Arni, Entzweiungen, 7.

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such a relationship it is “not permitted that the personal aspect of communication be evaded”.⁹⁸ The historian Caroline Arni describes intimacy as follows: For the period around 1900 it can be said that a love match, as a mutually shared meaning, conceived marriage in terms of the promise of intimacy, and so in terms of intimacy. For in its modern coding love means a feeling that involves the individuality of the partner and the exclusivity of the relationship: what one shares with the loved one is shared with no other, one shares it with this person and this person alone, because they are who they are.⁹⁹ That is what modern love is all about – whatever kind it might be.¹⁰⁰

The historian Ann-Charlott Trepp described the high degree of intimacy, emotionalisation, and inwardness that marked the relationships of young single men and women around 1800 as well as the ideal married couple. She argues that “marriage for love as a new design for living” emerged towards the end of the eighteenth century but only became established in the first third of the twentieth century.¹⁰¹ It might be assumed that not only Barclay but also Trepp, Simmel, Luhmann, and Arni regard the (marital) intimacy that they describe as an early modern phenomenon, or even one first arising in modernity.¹⁰² But their picture of a couple’s exclusive intimacy goes right back to antiquity. It was rooted in the ideal of friendship that Barclay also saw as the basis of marital intimacy in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Scotland. The relationship with a friend as an alter ego, with whom one can speak as to oneself and who can be trusted with one’s secrets, is a relationship that is distinct from all others into which one might enter. This ancient ideal of friendship was adopted in the Middle Ages and early modernity. From antiquity (Aristotle, Cicero, and others), through the Middle Ages (Aelred of Rievaulx, Thomas Aquinas, treatises on love, Poggio Bracciolini, and others), and right up to early modern times (Ulrich von Hutten, Michel de Montaigne, and others), the central aspect of friendship was the friend as alter ego. With one’s friend one could exchange one’s innermost thoughts, trust him or her with all one’s secrets. He or she could be talked to ‘as to oneself’. With a friend ‘one could be oneself’.¹⁰³ As outlined above, Barclay saw

 Niklas Luhmann, Love as Passion. The Codification of Intimacy, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 14 (the English translation given there is imprecise: “which ensures that the personal level has to be included in the communication”).  This idea is shared by Luhmann, Love as passion, 153 – 154.  Arni, Entzweiungen, 7– 8.  Anne-Charlott Trepp, Sanfte Männlichkeit und selbständige Weiblichkeit. Frauen und Männer im Hamburger Bürgertum zwischen 1770 – 1840 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), 401.  Szreter and Fisher, Sex before the Sexual Revolution, 2– 3 and 359 – 360, maintain that the intimacy of twentieth-century English married couples was based largely on privacy and the concealment of their intimate sphere from third parties; the couples that they interviewed mostly declined to talk about their sexual practices.  The literature on ideas of friendship in antiquity and the Middle Ages is enormous. See, among others, Reginald Hyatte, The Arts of Friendship. The Idealization of Friendship in Medieval and Early Renaissance Literature (Leiden: Brill, 1994); Julian Haseldine, ed., Friendship in Medieval Europe

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in this possibility of being one’s true self an important part of marital intimacy during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The idea of a mutual relationship closed to outsiders in which there was a special openness in conversation was transferred to romantic relationships by the twelfth century at the latest,¹⁰⁴ and from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to marriage, such that from the twelfth century onwards the discourses of friendship, marriage, and love became increasingly entangled.¹⁰⁵ In the discourse of the later Middle Ages, this linkage of friendship, marriage, and love was enriched with the idea of one’s own space closed to the outside, separating both spouses from the outside world. Typical was the topos of the husband who, after toiling ‘out there in the world’, returned home to the domestic circle of his loved ones, above all to his wife. In marriage texts of the later Middle Ages, the wife is repeatedly lauded as an alter ego to whom the husband could be quite open in a way that he could not be with others, in whose company he constantly had to dissemble and conform.¹⁰⁶ In the late medieval conception of marriage, the two spouses closed themselves off from other persons, forming a communicative unit from which nothing escaped to the outside. Everything discussed within this partnership remained hidden from outsiders.

(Phoenix Mill: Sutton, 1999); James McEvoy, “The Other as Oneself. Friendship and Love in the Thought of St Thomas Aquinas”, in Thomas Aquinas. Approaches to Truth, ed. McEvoy and Michael Dunne (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002), 16 – 37; Laura Gowing, Michael Hunter and Miri Rubin, eds., Love, Friendship and Faith in Europe, 1300 – 1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); David Konstan, Friendship in the Classical World (Cambridge: CUP, 2005); Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandidge, eds., Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2010); Caroline Krüger, Freundschaft in der höfischen Epik um 1200. Diskurse von Nahbeziehungen (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2011), 61 ff. on heathen antiquity and the Christian legacy of late antiquity.  See Mary F. Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages. The ‘Viaticum’ and its Commentaries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 65 – 66 and 279n58.  Extensive examples from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries can be found in Schnell, Sexualität und Emotionalität, 161– 172 and 202– 203. Luhmann, Love as Passion, 100, by contrast, talks of “the old alternatives of love and friendship” (the German original refers to “competition”, not “alternatives”). Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe, 16 – 17, also fails to recognise the medieval integration of the discourse of friendship into that of marriage. She cites a passage about friendship from Aelred of Rievaulx, Speculum caritatis (III 109), and suggests that the intense emotional relationship between friends described by the medieval writer is something that “we today” might have with a sexual or marital partner. This would not, she believes, have been true of medieval men and women; they would not have equated deep and sincere love with sexual love. It is inexplicable that the medievalist Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual, 98, takes the view that during antiquity and the Middle Ages values were associated with friendship that “we today” associate with marriage. Friendship and marriage were linked in the medieval discourse on marriage – see Schnell, “Concordia im Haus”.  Thomas Borgstedt, “Paul Flemings stoizistische Liebesdichtung und die Latenz des Subjekts in der Frühen Neuzeit”, in Die Kunst der Aufrichtigkeit im 17. Jahrhundert, ed. Claudia Benthien and Steffen Martus (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2006), 279 – 295 (284), notes that already in ancient poetry “often such a border was drawn between a hostile public space and a closed space of erotic intimacy”.

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Let me select some examples from numerous texts from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, since they are clearly unfamiliar to those who study the history of emotions. Poggio Bracciolini (1380 – 1459) discusses in his treatise An seni sit uxor ducenda dialogus (“Whether an Old Man Should Marry”; 1437) the question of whether a wise man should marry. In favour of marriage Bracciolini makes the argument that it is a “genuine and full friendship” (vera ac perfecta amicitia); it is “the best and most pleasant community” (societas optima ac jucundissima).¹⁰⁷ In a later passage, this is supported in detail with reference to the special communicative intimacy of marriage: I add here that it is of great assistance in our lives to have a person to whom you can entrust your life, with whom you can share your thoughts, discuss your plans, share your pleasures, soothe unpleasantness, someone you can call an alter ego, something that is [only] possible in perfect friendship.¹⁰⁸

According to this statement, the wife was capable of friendship, contrasting with other misogynistic statements of antiquity and the Middle Ages.¹⁰⁹ In a marriage she is even a husband’s closest friend. For the husband, the prospect of being able to communicate his innermost thoughts, fears, and wishes to his wife is a great psychological relief or comfort. At the same time, this special communicative intimacy presupposes a special emotional relationship, or at least creates one. The fact that Bracciolini credits to marriage communicative closeness of a kind that exists in an ideal friendship does not necessarily mean that any particular fifteenth-century marriage did actually correspond to this ideal. What is, however, remarkable is that such a possibility was raised, and articulated in literary form.¹¹⁰ Without exaggeration, it can be claimed that from early beginnings in antiquity, and more strongly

 Poggio Bracciolini, An seni sit uxor ducenda dialogus, in: Bracciolini, Opera omnia, ed. Riccardo Fubini, t. 2 (Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1966), 683 – 705 (701).  Bracciolini, An seni sit uxor ducenda dialogus, ed. Fubini, 701: Adde quod magnum est vitae nostrae adjumentum habere cui vitam tuam credere, cum qua cogitationes communicare, consilia conferre, gaudium impartiri, aegritudines lenire possis, quem te alterum, quod in perfecta est amicitia, vere queas dicere.  This is also claimed by Josef Georg Ziegler, Die Ehelehre der Pönitentialsummen von 1200 – 1350. Eine Untersuchung zur Geschichte der Moral- und Pastoraltheologie (Regensburg: Pustet, 1956), 44n28, regarding a statement by Bonaventura.  Nonetheless, that marriage did – also in reality – open up the possibility of communicating the most inner and confidential thoughts and feelings to another person can be seen in some letters between married couples. See Steven E. Ozment, Magdalena and Balthasar. An Intimate Portrait of Life in Sixteenth-Century Europe Revealed in the Letters of a Nuremberg Husband and Wife (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 38 – 39 (the pregnant wife wrote in a letter of July 1584 about the stirring of her child in the womb; at the same time, she requested her spouse to let no one have sight of this letter save him, for she would otherwise be ashamed).

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from the thirteenth century, the ancient/medieval ideal of friendship was transferred to the marriage relationship.¹¹¹ Francesco Barbaro (1390 – 1454) describes this ideal of marital friendship in the introduction to his treatise on marriage (1415): the wife is characterised as a companion, spouse, and friend (socia, conjunx et amica) to whom one’s most intimate thoughts (cogitationes intimas) are entrusted, with whom one can shed all care and pains in sweet conversation (sermone ac suavitate).¹¹² Concerning marital love, Barbaro states that it almost represents the image of perfect friendship: caritas conjugalis […] perfectae amicitiae imaginem exprimit. ¹¹³ In so doing, he even outlines the psycho-communicative advantages of marriage from the viewpoint of the wife: Everything that weighs [on the wife], all cares, so far as it is worthy of the ear of a clever man, she should tell him, making nothing up, keeping nothing secret, hiding nothing. Often anxiety [angor] and inner distress [animi molestia] can be lifted through counsel and conversation [consilio et sermone], which for her must be sweetest with her husband. She will at the same time take up, or lighten, all the thorns and stones of the troubles that she shares and bears in common with him. If they be extremely burdensome and deep-seated, they will eventually be calmed so long as she confides in her husband [familiariter suspirare]. May she then live with her husband and mingle her heart with his [animum misceant] so that, possibly, as Pythagoras seeks in friendship, one will be made from two.¹¹⁴

Confidential, intimate conversation with the husband brings psychological relief to the wife as well. Because man and wife can ‘speak out’, they grow together into a spiritual and emotional community.¹¹⁵ The thread binding communicative confidence to emotional tie is spun explicitly by Leon Battista Alberti (1404– 1472) in Della famiglia (“Of the Family”; 1434– 1441);

 See Rüdiger Schnell, “Die ‘Offenbarmachung’ der Geheimnisse Gottes und die ‘Verheimlichung’ der Geheimnisse der Menschen. Zum prozessualen Charakter des Öffentlichen und Privaten”, in Das Öffentliche und das Private in der Vormoderne, ed. Gert Melville and Peter von Moos (Köln: Böhlau, 1998), 359 – 410, esp. 382– 408.  Francesco Barbaro, De re uxoria, ed. Attilo Gnesotto, Atti e memorie della Royale Academia di scienze lettere ed arti in Padova 375 (1915/1916), 6 – 105, here 29, 27– 30,5 (Quid jucundius quam […] pudicam mulierem habere, quae secundis et adversis rebus socia, conjunx et amica sit? cui cogitationes intimas, quae ad rem suam pertineant, […] in cujus sermone ac suavitate curas omnis doloresque deponas?; I 1).  Barbaro, De re uxoria, ed. Gnesotto, 66,15 – 17 (II 2).  Barbaro, De re uxoria, ed. Gnesotto, 67,16 – 26 (II 2).  The close communicative and emotional union of the married couple is also emphasised by Albrecht von Eyb in his marriage treatise (1472). Albrecht von Eyb, Ob einem manne sey zunemen ein eelichs weyb oder nicht (“Whether a Man Should Marry”), ed. Helmut Weinacht (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1982), 81. As Albrecht sees it, a married couple cut themselves off from others through forming a communicative unity from which nothing escapes to the outside.

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here love, goodwill, passion, pleasure, and friendship blend with the transparency of communication.¹¹⁶ We may consider the love [l’amore] of husband and wife greatest of all. If pleasure generates benevolence [benivolenza], marriage gives an abundance of all sorts of pleasure and delight [piacere e diletto]: if intimacy increases good will, no one has so close and continued a familiarity [familiarità] with anyone as with his wife; if close bonds and a united will arise through the revelation and communication [per conversazione] of your feelings and desires [affezioni e volontà], there is no one to whom you have more opportunity to communicate fully and reveal your mind than to your own wife, your constant companion; if, finally, an honourable alliance leads to friendship [amicizia], no relationship more entirely commands your reverence than the sacred tie of marriage. Add to all this that every moment brings further ties of pleasure and utility, confirming the benevolence filling our hearts. Children are born, and it would take a long time to expound the mutual and mighty bond which these provide.¹¹⁷

The connection of communicative and emotional togetherness cannot be missed here. Within marital friendship, confidential, unconstrained conversation assumes an important place.¹¹⁸ Indeed, it makes up a good part of marital happiness.¹¹⁹ This translation to a marital relationship of an ancient and medieval ideal of friendship that is male in conception, and intended only for men, has so far been demonstrated only using the writings of Italian humanists. But in a late fourteenth-century French treatise we can find an attempt by early modern marital discourse – or at least some of its representatives – not only to see the marital relationship as an economic and social community but (also) to understand it as an expression of erotic attraction. In the French domestic text Le Ménagier de Paris (ca. 1393), written by an older noble for his young wife, instructing her in household management (keeping stock of provisions, caring for horses, dealing with servants, and so on), we can find remarkable statements regarding the emotional attraction between two spouses:¹²⁰  Leon Battista Alberti, I Libri della famiglia, trans. Renée Neu Watkins, The Family in Renaissance Florence (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1969), 98. Leon Battista Alberti, I libri della famiglia, ed. Ruggiero Romano and Alberto Tenenti (Torino: Einaudi, 1969), 107.  See also Johannes Nevizzanus, Sylvia nuptialis (Lyon: Moylin, 1526), fol. 92r–93r. In the third book, twelve reasons are given for getting married. The eighth is amicitia, and we can read there: quod etiam aliqua secreta sunt eis communicanda propter amicitiam, et inter maritum et uxorem est maximus amor (“the married couple must also share any secrets with each other, because they are bound by friendship, and between husband and wife there is the greatest love”).  See also Erasmus of Rotterdam, Christiani matrimonii institutio, in Opera omnia, vol. 5 (Leiden 1704), Sp. 675C: “Nothing can more assuredly restore, secure, and reinforce goodwill between men and women than mutual conversation [mutuus sermo]”).  See Erasmus of Rotterdam, Encomium matrimonii, in Opera omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami, ASD I-2 (Leiden: Brill, 1971), 420 – 421; ASD I-5 (Leiden: Brill, 1975), 406.  Nicole Crossley-Holland, Living and Dining in Medieval Paris. The Household of a Fourteenth-Century Knight (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1996), 3 – 8 u. 185 – 211, has sought to identify the anonymous author, arguing that a certain Guy de Montigny wrote this domestic encyclopedia when he was about sixty.

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In God’s name, I believe that when two good, virtuous people are married, all other loves outside of each other are remote and forgotten. It seems to me that when they are in each other’s presence, they look at each other more than at others, playfully tweak one another, press close, and do not willingly recognize or speak to anyone besides each other. And when they are separated, they think of each other, saying in their hearts, ‘When I see him, I will do this for him, say this to him, ask him about this.’ All their private pleasures, their dearest desires, and their perfect joys are satisfied in pleasing and obeying the other. But if they don’t love each other, then they don’t value obedience and reverence any more than does the average couple which is, in most cases, not much.¹²¹

The attachment and desire of young married people is directed above all at the pleasure that mutual, intimate conversation gives them, excluding all other people. It seems to be an important part of marital emotionality. At another point, Le Ménagier de Paris instructs husbands and wives to hide their respective secrets from others but to confide everything to their marital companions.¹²² The marital community is thus made into a place in which two people can and should confide their innermost thoughts and feelings without reservation. In this way, the distance necessarily grows between openness within the marital sphere and a necessary closure with regard to others in the public sphere. That three discourses – of friendship, love, and marriage – overlap in the ideal of reciprocally open discourse finally becomes clear if one examines medieval treatises on love. Here a sign of true love is identified as the wish to reveal to the loved one all the secrets of one’s own heart: Li premiers signes de vraie amour si est loiaus cuers, qui ne puet riens celer vers son ami (“The first sign of true love that comes from a sincere heart is when one cannot keep anything secret from the loved one”).¹²³ Another lesson teaches: Li tiers est regehir et descouvrir souvent son cuer on ami (“The third sign is often to open one’s heart to the beloved, and unburden oneself”).¹²⁴ In a fifteenth-century Minnerede in which two women dispute the pros and cons of a love affair, the advantages with which we are already familiar from friendship discourse are transferred to love: “when my friend complains of his troubles to me, and I tell him of my sorrows, and we do that in true fidelity, our pleasure becomes so great that it knows no bounds”.¹²⁵ The parallel between marriage and a love affair is, moreover, strengthened by the fact that one is counselled in both contexts to open one’s heart

 The Good Wife’s Guide. Le Ménagier de Paris. A Medieval Household Book, trans. Gina L. Greco and Christine M. Rose (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009), 124 (I 6,26).  The Good Wife’s Guide, trans. Greco and Rose, 144 (I 8,9): “Therefore, my dear, know how to conceal your secrets from everyone, except for your husband.”  Un art d’aimer du XIIIe siècle [L’amistiés de vraie amour], ed. Jacques Thomas, Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 36 (1958), 798 – 806, 806.  Printed in Alfred Karnein, De Amore in volkssprachlicher Literatur. Untersuchungen zur Andreas Capellanus-Rezeption in Mittelalter und Renaissance (Heidelberg: Winter, 1985), 289.  Mittelhochdeutsche Minnereden, ed. Gerhard Tiele, vol. 2, 2., unveränderte Aufl. (Dublin and Zürich: Weidmann, 1967), Nr. 6 (V. 110 – 114).

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to no one other than one’s lover or marital companion.¹²⁶ This instruction can also be found in relation to proper conduct among friends.¹²⁷ As with friends and lovers, the married couple separate themselves from the rest of the community in securing for themselves their own sphere of confidential thoughts and feelings. Like monads, lovers and married couples separate themselves from others. In the process, marriage is given the same emotional space as is granted to lovers. The exclusion of marital intimacy from the communicative space of a social community demonstrates a kind of conscious and intentional isolation of marriage, and so seems at first glance to clash with the political function of marriage since the later Middle Ages.¹²⁸ But we should probably assume different ‘existential spaces’ for marriage: one exclusive domain reserved for the married couple themselves, and one accessible to social authorities.¹²⁹ So long as public order is not threatened by marital dispute, marriage breakdown, and the like, what happens in a marriage is of no interest to the authorities.¹³⁰ Nonetheless, the parallel existence of completely different perspectives – marriage as the exclusive concern of two friends or lovers vs marriage as a part of public order – shows the kinds of divergences, or distinct spheres of discourse, with which we are confronted if we wish to speculate about the relationship between love and marriage in premodernity.

 See Hugo von Montfort (ca. 1400), Die Texte und Melodien der Heidelberger Handschrift cpg 329, vol. 2, ed. Viktor Spechtler (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1978), Nr. 3, Str. 16 u. 17 (for lovers); João de Barros, Espelho de casados (“Mirror for Married Couples”; 1540), ed. Tito de Noronha and Antonio Cabral (Porto: Impr. Portugueza, 1874), II 8, fol. 22r – 23r: “there is nothing that secures friendship so much as that between husband and wife. […] Now to attain this sweet friendship [tam suave amizade] men have to marry, because in this way the husband then has someone with whom he can safely share his secrets [seguramente comunique seus segredos]. […] And the law requires that each knows the secrets of the other and is obliged to keep them and not reveal them to others [guardar e nam descobrir].”  The point of departure here is the Old Testament: causam tuam tracta cum amico tuo et secretum extraneo non reveles (“Debate thy cause with thy friend himself; and discover not a secret to another”; Proverbs 25:9).  See Schnell, Sexualität und Emotionalität, 105 – 115.  Conflict between the two requirements is addressed in Gottschalk Hollen (1411– 1481), Praeceptorium divinae legis (Nürnberg: Anton Koberger, 1497), 4. Gebot (fol. 97r); Francesc Eiximenis, Lo libre de les dones (written ca. 1395, published 1495), 2 vols., ed. Frank Naccarato (Barcelona: Curial Ed. Catalanes, 1981), II 3; João de Barros, Espelho de casados (1540), ed. De Noronha and Cabral, II 8. There the question is raised of the extent to which a wife might be allowed to conceal civil infringements on the part of her husband.  Deborah Cohen shows how the unity of familial secrecy and privacy was broken in the twentieth century – Cohen, Family Secrets. Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain (Oxford: OUP, 2013). Certainly, married couples did still seek in the twentieth century to protect their intimate sphere from the attention of third parties; Szreter and Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution, 2– 3 and 359 – 360. See n102 above.

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The passages cited here¹³¹ reveal an interesting feature of the ‘inner sphere’ of marriage: with the conception of the ‘marriage companion as alter ego’, discourses of love, friendship, and marriage come together in a complex manner. In the ideal of marriage as a conversation community shared between friends who reveal to each other their deepest secrets, married couples are likened to lovers who sense the desire to open their own heart to the loved one.¹³² Of course, it must be emphasised that alongside this idealisation of communicative openness in marriage there existed a quite different conception of marriage and of women: husbands were warned not to confide everything to their wives because this could have dangerous consequences. Critical voices constantly raised the alleged inability of women to keep the secrets entrusted to them – this monotonous claim is extensively documented – and this makes clear the differences and tensions in premodern discourse on marriage. There is not just one concept of marriage; we are confronted instead with several drafts and outlines. Comprehensive self-revelation in marriage was neither universally nor always accepted. However, it is of great importance for the present argument that the late medieval ideal of marital intimacy described in the examples above is in close agreement with what Simmel, Luhmann, Trepp, Arni, and Barclay claim to be the mark of an early modern intimate relationship: exclusivity of communication, emotional closeness, marriage as friendship, the separated space of an inner relationship, the separation of a ‘private self’ from a ‘public self’. The idea of a confidential and intimate togetherness between married people is not something foreign to the later Middle Ages. There are striking similarities with modern conceptions of marital intimacy. Brief consideration of a study of modern marriage may help to make this clear. Caroline Arni describes the nature of an ideal marriage of the kind that prevailed in Switzerland around 1900:¹³³ Sealed off from the cool world of economy and politics, a family founded on love leads a trusting [traute], emotional, and intimate existence in the home [Heim]¹³⁴ that the wife creates and that for the husband is the refuge and the place of regeneration and recreation.¹³⁵

 See also Ludovicus Vives, De officio mariti (Basel 1540); German by Christophorus Bruno, Von Gebirlichem Thun vnd Lassen aines Ehemanns Ain buch (Augsburg: Stainer, 1544), chap. 4 (fol. 38v – 39r); Francesc Eiximenis, Lo libre de les dones, ed. Naccarato, II 3 (chap. 72).  When Luhmann, Love as Passion, 15, assigns to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the creation of a system-type for intimate relationships in which it is not permitted to evade the personal aspect of communication, he ignores the history of love as discourse. See n98 above.  Arni, Entzweiungen, 89 (my emphasis).  This term corresponds to the English terminology of home and domesticity, which Barclay, Love, employs to characterise the marital intimacy of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scottish marriages (see above).  See also Arni, Entzweiungen, 89 ff (emphasis in original).

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Marriage texts from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries also contrast the hostile and stressful ‘world outside’ with trusted togetherness with one’s companion in marriage.¹³⁶ Marriage is conceived as an area of emotional retreat for the husband, who after his stressful activities in the world beyond the house can, once home, confide in his marital companion, telling her of the cares and woes that cannot be told to anyone outside the marriage. Compared with the constraints of the ‘outside world’, which demand a great deal of self-discipline, reticence, and dissimulation, the communality of the marriage is lauded as an emotional haven¹³⁷ in which the husband can be entirely himself, able to surrender his innermost to his marriage companion.¹³⁸ The passages introduced here correspond to what Niklas Luhmann wrote about love in the modern marriage: the ego threatened by economy, politics, and pressure to perform “saves itself in love, regenerates itself in the family”.¹³⁹ How do these examples fit into emotional history? As far as the ideal of marital intimacy and privacy goes, nothing much seems to have changed from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries.¹⁴⁰ There is, however, one decisive difference that I think can be identified at the level of discourse. What was formulated in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by a small educated elite – assisted by a blending of the discourses of friendship, love, and marriage – had a broader reception in the eighteenth century. What Luhmann has described as a structural change in the eighteenth century should be seen more as a discursive change. The ideal of a former elite ‘trickled down’.

 See also Johannes Mathesius, Syrach: Das ist, Christliche, Lehrhaffte, Trostreiche vnd lustige Erklerung vnd Auslegung des schönen Haussbuchs, so der weyse Mann Syrach zusammen gebracht vnd geschrieben (Leipzig: Beyer, 1589), Sermo 7, on Ecclesiasticus 25 (p. 171): when the husband returns home from his work, the wife should meet him with a friendly greeting. The wife must teach the children that they should give him a kiss and put their little hands in those of their father. See Susan Karant-Nunn, “Kinder, Küche, Kirche: Social Ideology in the Sermons of Johannes Mathesius”, in Germania Illustrata. Essays on Early Modern Germany, Presented to Gerald Strauss, ed. Andrew C. Fix and Susan Karant-Nunn (Kirksville: Sixteenth Century Journal Publ., 1992), 121– 140, ibid., 131. See also Steven Ozment, Ancestors. The Loving Family in Old Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), on the sixteenth century.  Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 144, 146, 149, 153 – 154, 158 and 275, is of the view that an “affectionate marriage” became a place of “emotional refuge” for the first time in the eighteenth century.  This fact belongs to a history of the (imagined) sincerity (of emotions). The marital home becomes a place of normality, unmasked. On such ‘unmasked places’ in the seventeenth century, see Claudia Benthien and Steffen Martus, “Einleitung. Aufrichtigkeit – zum historischen Stellenwert einer Verhaltenskategorie”, in Die Kunst der Aufrichtigkeit im 17. Jahrhundert, 1– 16, esp. 3 – 4.  Niklas Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1997), 988.  The marriage idyll already outlined in the fifteenth century was also instrumentalised for socioeconomic ends in the nineteenth century. In the later 1840s, it seems that leading economists recognised that industrialisation needed the family as an emotional ‘haven’. See Peter N. Stearns, American Cool. Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 63. What was in the later Middle Ages discussed as a matter for two people (being quite ‘oneself’ in intimate conversation with one’s spouse) was now swept into economic discourse.

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I would like to dwell on the following point: even if at the level of discourse we encounter a similar ideal of marital intimacy in the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries, this does not necessarily mean that married couples of the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries followed that ideal in the same way. In the fifteenth century, the proposition of marital intimacy primarily served the self-presentation of a humanistic elite. Given that in the fifteenth century the ideal of marital intimacy was set out only in texts by those with literary erudition, it seems better to assume a change in educational and literary history than a (class-specific) change in emotion history. The basic question is that of the relationship between literary and emotional changes. And it is not neurophysiologists but philologists who can answer it. In the fifteenth century, members of a literary elite used an ideal that assigns considerable import to the linguistic trust between spouses to set themselves apart from ‘masses’ that were treated as incapable of such communication. Anyone who opposes the thesis of a correspondence between late medieval and modern ideals of marital intimacy by arguing that only in the eighteenth century did the idea of a private space marked off from a public sphere appear, needs to think again. In contrast to the belief, still widespread and in part reinforced by Norbert Elias, that the distinction between ‘private’ and ‘public’ was alien to the Middle Ages,¹⁴¹ medieval authors – not only in relation to marriage – do distinguish between private space and an ‘outside world’, and not only with respect to marriage.¹⁴² Bearing this in mind, what the philosophers Hilge Landweer and Catherine Newmark define as the essence of the private in the eighteenth century can also be asserted for the late medieval ideal of marital togetherness: “Even in the classical literature of the eighteenth century, the private was established as the realm in which one could be who one ‘really’ was.”¹⁴³ We can recall once more Barclay’s formulation of marital

 Belinda Roberts Peters, Marriage in Seventeenth-Century English Political Thought (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), is of the opinion that marriage in the seventeenth century was barely conceived as a private institution, but that in the course of the seventeenth century the analogy between state and family/marriage shifted into a separation of state and family. Boquet and Nagy, Medieval Sensibilities, 248, also dismiss the dichotomy of private and public for the Middle Ages. On this, see IV.2.c – d below.  See Diane Shaw, “The Construction of the Private in Medieval London”, The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 26.3 (1996), 447– 466; Annette Kern-Stahler, “Die Suche nach dem privaten Raum im englischen Spätmittelalter. Literatur und Lebenswirklichkeit”, in Virtuelle Räume. Raumwahrnehmung und Raumvorstellung im Mittelalter, ed. Elisabeth Vavra (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2005), 87– 107; Rüdiger Schnell, “Kommunikation unter Freunden vs. Kommunikation mit Fremden. Eine Studie zum Privaten und Öffentlichen im Mittelalter”, in Verwandtschaft, Freundschaft, Bruderschaft. Soziale Lebens- und Kommunikationsformen im Mittelalter, ed. Gerhard Krieger (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2009), 127– 150.  Landweer and Newmark, “Seelenruhe oder Langeweile”, 103. What Agnes Walch, “De l’âme sensible à l’avènement scientifique des émotions: la densification des émotions dans la sphère privée”, in Histoire des Émotions, t. 2, 203 – 226 (205 and 207), writes about the private sphere of a marital community in the nineteenth century is very similar to what is outlined here with respect to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Christian Kiening, Schwierige Modernität. Der ‘Ackermann’ des Jo-

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intimacy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: that there one could be one’s true self. From the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, in conversation with his wife as his alter ego, the husband could be quite himself,¹⁴⁴ free of any of the disguises he was forced to adopt in the ‘outside world’. Privatisation, intimisation, and exclusivity are characteristic not only of modern love, as Niklas Luhmann argues, but also of premodern marital relationships, at least at the level of discourse. To conclude this section, we can indicate the urgency of the need to reformulate emotion history by comparing two statements relating to different eras. An advice book published in 1784 rejected the idea of a marriage between two people that was not based on deep attachment: “without an exchange of hearts, what in the eyes of God or man can sanctify their choice?”¹⁴⁵ In 1750, Hugh, earl of Marchmont, wrote to his wife Elizabeth that their union was a “perfect union of minds and unanimous love”, and an “entire union of souls”.¹⁴⁶ The reader may be surprised to find that there is a very similar statement in a papal missive from the later eleventh century, a statement that was adopted by Canon Law in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.¹⁴⁷ In this letter, Pope Urban II (1088 – 1099) requested the king of Aragon not to allow his niece to marry a man she did not love – she had refused to agree to a marriage arranged by her uncle, and the pope supported the position taken by the young woman: in no event must the young woman marry against her will, for along with the unity of the body there should be an affective unity of kindred spirits. The decisive passage ran as follows: Quorum enim unum corpus est, unus debet esse et animus (“Those whose bodies are united [in marriage] must also be united in their hearts”).¹⁴⁸ It is possible, of course, that the eleventh-century pope had some other kind of unity of hearts in mind than that envisaged by the author of the eighteenth-century book advising on marriage or the writer of the letter;

hannes von Tepl und die Ambiguität historischen Wandels (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1998), 450 ff., speaks of a “privatisation of affect” in fifteenth-century literature.  Thomas Luckmann, “Persönliche Identität. Soziale Rolle und Rollendistanz”, in Identität, ed. Odo Marquard and Karl-Heinz Stierle (München: Fink, 1979), 293 – 313 (312– 313), writes mostly about the “exclusion of a private sphere”: “While role-play in ‘public’ institutions was ‘acted out’ with a subjective distance, the private sphere, separate from society, offered the (illusory) possibility of being ‘truly oneself’.”  John Moir, Female Tuition; or an Address to Mothers, on the Education of Daughters (London: J. Murray, 1784), 260; I quote here from Barclay, Love, 61.  Quoted from Barclay, Love, 116.  We find the text again in Gratian’s Decretum (ca. 1140; C. 31 q.2 c. 3; see next note), and in Petrus Lombardus’ collection of sentences (1140/1160; IV dist. 29; PL 192, 916). Walter of Mortagne (ca. 1100 – 1174) also included Pope Urban II’s statement in his marriage treatise De sacramento conjugii (PL 176, 153– 174, col. 159B).  Corpus iuris canonici, vol. 1: Decretum Magistri Gratiani, ed. Emil Ludwig Richter and Emil Friedberg, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1879; Nachdruck Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1955), 1113 (C. 31 q. 2 c. 3). Reference was made at the same time to the possible consequences of an absent heartfelt union: there would be the danger of fornication (fornicatio). The evil of this sin was to found in whoever had made the women marry against her will.

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but, at the very least, one has to admit that the history of marital intimacy has been more complicated than is generally accepted at present.¹⁴⁹ Despite undeniable social changes from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries, there was a stubborn continuity in a particular vision of marital intimacy.¹⁵⁰ The important changes have been at the level of discourse. That which in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was the marriage ideal of a small cultured elite (Poggio Bracciolini, Leon Battista Alberti, Francesco Barbaro, Le Ménagier de Paris, among others) finds a broad echo in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century journals, newspapers, and books of etiquette. But the discourse connecting friendship, love, and marriage remained the basis of the discussion in modernity. What I want to stress here is that a change in discourse history does not always point to a change in the history of emotion.

c The Integration of Love and Sexuality The third master narrative of contemporary work on emotion is related to the second. It assumes that it was only in the eighteenth century that love and sexuality¹⁵¹ first came together, both within marriage and outside of it.¹⁵² The previous semantics of love related to courtly love are believed to have laid the emphasis on the passion of pure feelings rather than on the mere satisfaction of male sexual enjoyment.¹⁵³ This

 Daumas, “Coeurs vaillants”, 342, is of the view that it was only from the seventeenth century that the Church treated a “union of hearts and minds” as an important element of marriage.  This period could be extended back into antiquity if we included Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (book VIII) or Ovid’s Metamorphoses (book VIII 611– 724: Philemon und Baucis).  It is well established that ‘sexuality’ both as a term and as a concept first emerged in the nineteenth century. In practice, however, this modern concept is used by scholars in relation to premodern material. See In3.  Luhmann, Love as Passion, 43 – 45. Luhmann treats the inclusion of sexuality in the meaning of love as a major change during the eighteenth century. It has to be said of Luhmann’s book that everything he writes about love (and women) in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is based on obsolete research. It needs revising. Nonetheless, modern studies remain wedded to his arguments. To claim, for example, that “the woman was discovered [in the eighteenth century] to be a human being” (Luhmann, Love as Passion, 100) is pure nonsense. All the same, I would not go so far as Stefan Seeber and argue that Luhmann has treated a phenomenon belonging to one particular time as an anthropological constant: Stefan Seeber, “Liebesdurcheinander: Das Buch der Liebe und Niklas Luhmann”, Oxford German Studies 43.4 (2014), 345 – 361 (p. 360). The evidence that I advanced above for the ideal of a happy marriage involving privacy and intimacy was all drawn from a small cultured elite. On Luhmann, see also Rüdiger Schnell, “Liebesdiskurse im Mittelalter”, in Amor docet musicam. Musik und Liebe in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Dietrich Helms and Sabine Meine (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2012), 41– 69 (43 ff.); Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 758 – 760 and 822– 823.  I have shown that love and sexual satisfaction were assumed to belong together in troubadour lyrics: Rüdiger Schnell, Tod der Liebe durch Erfüllung der Liebe? Das ‘paradoxe amoureux’ und die höfische Liebe (Göttingen: V & R unipress, 2018).

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(alleged) dualism of pure love and sexuality is supposed to have been dissolved in the eighteenth century by romantic love.¹⁵⁴ Now, for the first time, sexuality is supposed to have been linked to love in an indissoluble bond.¹⁵⁵ This master narrative became consolidated because, while there are studies of sexuality in the Middle Ages, just as there are studies of love,¹⁵⁶ there is hardly any work that brings the two together.¹⁵⁷ Indeed, the discourses of the medieval Church did largely distinguish between love and sexual desire. Marital love had a positive connotation as affectus maritalis, whereas sexual desire was treated with distrust. Nevertheless, despite the numerous statements by moral theologians on the dangers raised by sexual desire, in several discourses and texts they held to the ‘realistic’ view that the enjoyment experienced in sexual union strengthened the bond between a married couple, that is, their love (amor, diligere) for each other.¹⁵⁸ On top of that, it was plain to many members of the

 William M. Reddy, The Making of Romantic Love. Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia and Japan, 900 – 1200 CE (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), maintains that, unlike Indian and Japanese culture, the dualism of love and sexual desire was inscribed into all of Western culture. For criticism of this, see Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 536– 588. In 2018 Reddy repeated his claim: William M. Reddy, “Courts and Pleasures: The Neuroscience of Pleasure and the Pursuit of Favour in Twelfth-Century Courts”, in Pleasure in the Middle Ages, ed. Naama Cohen-Hanegbi and Piroska Nagy (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), 131– 164.  See, for example, Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy; Breitsameter, Liebe, 106 – 121 (the integration of love and sexuality is said to have first occurred in modernity), 186 (troubadours are supposed to have brought about a marginalisation of sensuality). On changes in sexual behaviour and the evaluation of the sexual during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Peter N. Stearns, Sexuality in World History (London and New York: Routledge, 2009; Repr. 2010), 79 – 102.  On sexuality: James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987); Joyce E. Salisbury, ed., Sex in the Middle Ages. A Book of Essays (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1991); John W. Baldwin, The Language of Sex. Five Voices from Northern France around 1200 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994); Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe; Arnold Angenendt, Ehe, Liebe und Sexualität im Christentum (Münster: Aschendorff, 2015) (this book deals primarily with sexuality). On love: Jean Leclercq, Monks and Love in Twelfth-Century France. Psycho-Historical Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Schnell, Causa amoris; Peter Dinzelbacher, “Liebe im Frühmittelalter. Zur Kritik der Kontinuitätstheorie”, Zeitschrift für Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft 19 (1989), Heft 74, 12– 38. Burger, Conduct Becoming, mostly deals with marital affection, only mentioning marital sexuality in passing. Up to the thirteenth century, he writes, sexual activity was supposedly condemned, whereas from the fourteenth century a self-restrained and self-controlled sexuality in marriage was approved of. In his view, the Middle Ages did not know heterosexuality in the modern sense, and consciousness of heterosexuality first emerged from the sixteenth century onwards (16 – 17, 24– 25, 107, 197 and 202n44). For criticism of these ideas, widespread in queer studies, see Rüdiger Schnell, “Courtly love und queer theory. Eine Fallstudie zur Foucault- und Laqueur-Rezeption”, Romanisch-Germanische Monatsschrift 62.3 (2012), 267– 288.  For this reason, Schnell, Sexualität und Emotionalität, made this connection the subject of a large monograph. The new study by Franz X. Eder, Eros, Wollust, Sünde. Sexualität in Europa von der Antike bis in die Frühe Neuzeit (Frankfurt and New York: Campus 2018), deals only with sexuality.  Schnell, Sexualität und Emotionalität, 227– 248.

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medieval Church that many married couples slept together not because they wished to avoid adultery, or beget children, but simply because they loved each other.¹⁵⁹ The widespread view today that sexual desire was condemned in medieval times, and that the connection of love and sexuality was a creation of modernity, is based in the first place on a bias created by the medieval source material used,¹⁶⁰ and second on the juxtaposition of texts serving quite different functions. For example, statements drawn from a medieval commentary on the Sentences written for theologians have been compared with early modern books of advice on marriage written for a lay public, and conclusions have been drawn about epochal changes from the differences between the two kinds of text. It is important to observe the methodological problem of interdependence between the sources and any generalisations made. It will now be shown, using some examples, that, besides the familiar positions almost exclusively cited by historical emotion research, there are other discursive domains that also document how medieval theologians viewed the discrepancy between ‘official’ norms and lived practice. It turns out that there are surprising parallels between the Middle Ages and modernity as regards the relationship between love, sexual desire, and marriage. We first have to accept that differing, at times contrary, discourses on marital sexuality were sustained within the medieval Church. Robert of Courson (died 1219) discussed in his Summa theologiae moralis the practical question of how one might judge marital intercourse among ‘common people’, and so especially the lay public, who knew nothing about the fine distinctions made by theologians and whose marital coupling was not oriented to the four objectives of marriage (concerning descendants, the avoidance of adultery, and so on). Contrary to rigid theological doctrine, Robert argued that lay persons should not be condemned for loving their wives too tenderly (nimis tenere diligunt) and frequently approaching them sexually. In so doing, he argued, common people were only following a normal urge to unite with their spouse, without having any other definite end in view.¹⁶¹ We read here of

 Schnell, Sexualität und Emotionalität, 227– 265, esp. 232– 254.  There is a bias towards moral-theological tracts and general theological literature. Medical tracts, vernacular love poetry, pastoral texts, and so on have broadly been ignored.  Robert of Courson, Summa theologiae moralis (Brügge, City Library, MS lat. 247), fol. 133v: Nam vulgus nullum illorum quatuor modorum attendit. Immo de quadam consuetudine vulgari accedunt laici ad suas uxores, non attendentes nisi hoc, quod coniuncti sunt in matrimonio vel quod unus appetit copulari alteri, non attendentes determinate aliquem finem […] Non enim iudicandum est, laicos ideo esse damnandos, quia nimis tenere diligunt uxores suas vel quia frequenter accedunt ad eas (“For the people pay no regard to these four modes. Lay people approach their wives out of a kind of habit, because they sense the marital bond, or because the wife wants to have sexual relations with her husband. In so doing, they purse no definite aim. […]. It is not a matter of determining whether lay people should be condemned for this, that they love their wives too affectionately, or that they often sleep with them”); quoted in Michael Müller, Die Lehre des hl. Augustinus von der Paradiesesehe und ihre Auswirkung in der Sexualethik des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts bis Thomas von Aquin (Regensburg: Pustet, 1954), 159n96.

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erotic, male sexual desire within marriage as an expression of love. The most extreme tender love (nimis tenere diligere) thus manifested itself in a frequent desire for sexual intercourse. I would not describe Robert of Coulson’s position as being in any way unusual,¹⁶² but instead would distinguish it from a theoretical and dogmatic one as ‘realistic and pragmatic’. The archbishop of Florence, Antoninus Florentinus (1389 – 1459), conceded in his confessional pamphlet (1480) that the distinctions made by Church doctrine between different modes of marital intercourse (for the avoidance of adultery, the satisfaction of sexual desire, and so forth) could not always be clearly distinguished from one another in practice.¹⁶³ The theological authority Petrus Lombardus (died 1160) also adhered to a realistic approach to marital sexual life. He admitted in his commentary on the Sentences that “there are hardly any married couples who do not from time to time come together in fleshly union without any thought of procreation”.¹⁶⁴ The theologian Walter of Montagne, bishop of Laon, was just as matter of fact when writing about ‘normal sexual relations’ in a marriage in his treatise on marriage (ca. 1150): for him, there were no married couples who did not occasionally, overcome by sexual desire, engage in the marital act.¹⁶⁵ On the other hand, the English mystic Richard Rolle (died 1349) rebuked husbands who, inflamed by excessive passion for their beautiful wives, harmed their health by far too much sexual intercourse.¹⁶⁶ The connection of passionate love and marriage associated with marriage practice comes in for sharp criticism here. Other Church authorities knew that this is an everyday practice and accepted it as such. There was room for different opinions within medieval theological discourse. That the reciprocal enjoyment of coitus reinforced the emotional bond of a married couple was openly admitted and welcomed by both clerics and physicians in numerous writings.¹⁶⁷ A few examples will have to suffice. (a) Johannes Hartlieb (ca. 1400 – 1468). One of the most widely circulated medical tracts was Secreta mulierum (“The Secrets of Women”), attributed to Albertus Magnus, written shortly before 1300 and the subject of several fourteenth-century

 See John W. Baldwin, “Five Discourses on Desire. Sexuality and Gender in Northern France around 1200”, Speculum 66 (1991), 797– 819 (803 – 804).  Antoninus Florentinus, Summula confessionis (Venedig: Johann von Köln und Johann Manthen, 1480), fol. 49rb (III 3,1).  Petrus Lombardus, Sententiarum libri quatuor, IV 31,9 (PL 192, 922: Et vix aliqui reperiri possunt adhuc amplexus carnales experientes, qui non interdum conveniant praeter intentionem procreandae prolis). Further passages in Schnell, Andreas Capellanus, 152– 154.  Walter of Mortagne, De sacramento conjugii, 3 (PL 176,157 A).  Richard Rolle, Incendium amoris, ed. Margaret Deanesly (Manchester: University Press, 1915), 211 (chap. 24): Porro perversi viri sunt qui eciam in proprias uxores propter eorum pulchritudinem immoderate inardescunt, et tanto cicius ipsorum corpus a viribus frangitur, quanto magis in explendis desideriis carnis relaxatur (“In this respect, those men are morally corrupted who are immoderately inflamed in their passion for their beautiful wives and whose bodies are weakened all the more quickly, the more often they engage in the satisfaction of fleshly lust”).  See Schnell, Sexualität und Emotionalität, 241– 255.

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commentaries. A misogynist text, written by a man for men, it dealt mainly with menstruation, with the influence of the stars on the development of human life in the womb, with the conditions for falling pregnant, with miscarriages, and with tests for pregnancy and virginity.¹⁶⁸ In spite of some ‘original’ remarks, the treatise can be seen as a compilation of ancient and medieval knowledge, both moral-philosophical and medical, relating to gynaecology. A fifteenth-century German version reinforced the connection of sexual satisfaction and psychological well-being in the discourse of the original Latin treatise and confined it to the relationship between married couples. This was Johann Hartlieb’s Secreta mulierum deutsch (ca. 1467), in which he included not only the text of and commentary on the Latin original but also material from other relevant works (for example, Pseudo-Trotula, Macrobius, Muscio, Gilbertus Anglicus). What the text is about is announced in the list of the content:¹⁶⁹ the text informs the reader what the “natural masters” (natural philosophers and physicians) have written about the “nature” of women and everything relating to women, and about “how a man should live and behave with women so that love and friendship between married couples might not be ruined”.¹⁷⁰ Hartlieb’s medical optimism went so far as the belief that, where the husband satisfied his wife sexually, this provided a guarantee of emotional harmony between the married couple.¹⁷¹ Marital sexuality and the emotional bond between the married couple thus depended on each other. The gynaecological information and sexual-psychological advice in Hartlieb’s text ultimately serve only to support an emotionally satisfactory relationship between husband and wife. Marital disharmony, which often arises from a lack of enjoyment in the marital act, can be resolved by medical intervention and advice about sexual intentions – so claim the physicians. And Hartlieb agrees with them – Macrobius tells of a book “that teaches how you can create great love and friendship between men and their wives with the help of various means”.¹⁷² Hartlieb is talking here of the narrowing of a vagina that is too wide, which could reduce sexual enjoyment. Chapter 17 of the text is devoted to the question of why women have an especially strong desire for coitus during pregnancy. This is explained with reference to the increased fluids that no longer flow away with monthly periods. Women will feel an itching in their vagina which makes them lust for sexual

 See Helen Rodnite Lemay, Women’s Secrets. A Translation of Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’s ‘De Secretis Mulierum’ with Commentaries (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1992); Karma Lochrie, Covert Operations. The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 98 – 118.  Hartlieb, Secreta mulierum deutsch (München, Bavarian State Library, MS cgm 261, fol. 46r).  Hartlieb, Secreta mulierum (deutsch) mit Glosse, ed. Kristian Bosselmann-Cyran (Pattensen/ Hannover: Wellm, 1985), 91,7– 10: auch wye ain man mit frawben leben vnd thun soll, das recht lieb vnd frewntschafft tzwischen eelewtten nit czerstört werden mag. This tract also described the marital relationship in terms of friendship; see section (b) in IV.2.b above.  Similar statements in other areas of discourse are discussed in Schnell, Sexualität und Emotionalität, 239 – 241.  Hartlieb, Secreta mulierum (deutsch), ed. Bosselmann-Cyran, 106, 77– 80.

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intercourse and so by extension the secretion of superfluous bodily fluids. This ‘fact’ prompts Hartlieb to encourage men to engage in sexual activity during this period: O dear, good man. If you wish to gain the love and fidelity of women, so do it during this period. You will then win the favour, attention, and love of women.¹⁷³

The precondition of marital harmony and the emotional bond between married couples is therefore a satisfactory sex life. Whereas in chapter 17 attention is paid to the sexual satisfaction of women, at the end of chapter 62 the sexual enjoyment of men is highlighted. Nonetheless, the main medical aim is to foster sexual activity that satisfied both partners. Hence, the aforementioned surgical narrowing of the vagina is defended against the accusation that this is a sin. The conclusion of chapter 62 deals with the need for physicians to intervene in the case of women who, as a result of malformed genitals, are to their own sorrow and that of their husbands unable to have sexual intercourse with their husbands at all, or not able to fully enjoy it. If one were not to help such wives and husbands to enjoy coitus, then a marriage would often be destroyed, and there would be great ill-feeling between the married couple. For Gilbertinus says¹⁷⁴ that nothing on earth holds husband and wife so firmly together in righteous love than sweet and lovely union.¹⁷⁵

Physicians were convinced that the sexual and emotional relationships of married couples could not be separated from each other. The significance of sexual enjoyment was too important for marital harmony to survive its absence. Satisfactory coitus served not only physical but also psychological well-being.¹⁷⁶ Anyone who thinks that such a positive integration of love and sexuality was something of which only physicians were capable in the Middle Ages¹⁷⁷ will be astonished by some of the statements in theological texts.  Hartlieb, Secreta mulierum (deutsch), ed. Bosselmann-Cyran, 140, 44– 47.  Hartlieb owned a manuscript copy of the Compendium medicinae by Gilbertus Anglicus (thirteenth century); see Hartlieb, Secreta mulierum (deutsch), ed. Bosselmann-Cyran, 35. I should say that I have not been able to find such a statement related to Hartlieb’s reference in any copy of Gilbertus Anglicus available to me.  Hartlieb, Secreta mulierum (deutsch), ed. Bosselmann-Cyran, 234, 55 – 59.  For this reason, chapter 6 of Hartlieb’s version of Trotula picks up the interdependence of emotional and sexual delight. Hartlieb even goes so far as to claim: “Believe me, dear man, nothing harms body and soul more than engaging unwillingly in coitus.” Quoted in Middle High German in Margaret Schleissner, “A Fifteenth-Century Physician’s Attitude toward Sexuality. Dr. Johann Hartlieb’s Secreta mulierum Translation”, in Sex in the Middle Ages. A Book of Essays, ed. Joyce E. Salisbury (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1991), 110 – 125 (p. 117; quoted after a copy in Munich, Bavarian State University, cgm 261, fol. 61r: Glaub du mir gutter man dz kain ding dem leyb vnd gemut schedlicher ist dan der mynn mit vnlust zu pflegen). Schleissner, ibid., 118, rightly refers to Hartlieb’s reworking of the original into an ars erotica (for marriage).  Recognition or even promotion of sexual pleasure by medieval physicians is extensively documented; see, for example, Theodor W. Köhler, Homo animal nobilissimum. Konturen des spezifisch

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(b) Thomas Aquinas (died 1274). The importance of sexual pleasure to the emotional bond between man and wife was something not unknown to Thomas Aquinas. Responding in his Summa theologica to the question (Quaestio) of whether a husband should love his wife more than his father or mother, he stated:¹⁷⁸ “For a man loves his wife chiefly as united with him in the flesh.”¹⁷⁹ Without any kind of resentment, he expresses the view that it is ultimately marital coitus that is responsible for the love of a husband for his wife. Love and sexuality are seen together and are not separated.¹⁸⁰ In Thomas Aquinas’ view, the pleasure experienced in sexual union becomes the most important factor in the development of an emotional relationship between man and woman in a marriage.¹⁸¹ In the context of contemporary natural philosophy, which saw coitus as the source of the greatest pleasure, Thomas Aquinas’ position becomes quite understandable.¹⁸² The pleasure arising from sexual intercourse furthers the emotional bond between a married couple. (c) Guilielmus Peraldus (died 1271). An almost exact contemporary of Thomas Aquinas was the French Dominican Guilielmus Peraldus, who in his Summa de virtutibus (before 1249) related the sexual and the psychological, emotional aspects of marriage. He considered that the deepest and most intimate love arose because the spouses had become a physical unity, and that from the sexual union a union of minds arose (mentalis unio), creating an inseparable community. It was, he considered, exactly because of the physical union that marital love seemed to represent the greatest love (amor maximus). For this reason, he argued, marital love exceeded

Menschlichen in der naturphilosophischen Aristoteleskommentierung des dreizehnten Jahrhunderts, Teilband 1 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 142– 146.  St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae. Latin Text and English Translation. Introduction, Notes, Appendices and Glossaries, ed. Thomas Gilby, 60 Bde. (Cambridge: Blackfriars, 1964– 1975).  St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 34, 150 – 151 (II 2, q. 26 a. 11: Diligit enim homo uxorem suam principaliter ratione carnalis coniunctionis). See Vn18 below.  Boquet and Nagy, Medieval Sensibilities, 114, by contrast, argue that medieval theologians distinguished sexual enjoyment from love. The association of love and sex in court poetry of the twelfth century is said to have shocked theologians. But this statement of Thomas Aquinas, that the husband loved his wife on account of sexual pleasure, coincides with a statement by Tristan in the Tristan of Thomas de Bretagne (twelfth century), ed. and transl. Gesa Bonath (München: Fink, 1985), 102– 103: “Love arises from the sexual act” (Sneyd-Fragment, Vers 570 – 575).  On the relevant passages in Aquinas, see Josef Fuchs, Die Sexualethik des heiligen Thomas von Aquin (Köln: Bachem, 1949), 132– 136 (physical conjunctio necessarily founded mutual love; indeed, “with some degree of exaggeration, Thomas viewed carnalis copula as the prime basis of love between man and woman”; ibid. 134).  See also Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages. Medicine, Science and Culture (Cambridge: CUP, 1993), 114, on Albertus Magnus, Quaestiones super ‘De animalibus’ (lib. V q. 3: people feel the greatest pleasure during coitus). See also Albertus Magnus (In 4 Sent., dist. 31 art. 1; Opera omnia, ed. Auguste Borgnet, vol. 30 [Paris: Vivès, 1894], 229b, citing another author): In libro ‘De coitu’ dicit Auctor, quod natura in coitu posuit summam delectationem (“In the book On Coitus the author writes that nature has placed the greatest pleasure in sexual union”).

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love for parents.¹⁸³ He endows sexual union with the power of leading a married couple to the most intimate love, in so doing integrating the mental union (unio mentalis) that was inherent to marital love (amor maritalis). Sexual community in this way corresponded to a unity of mind and emotion. Guilielmus Peraldus saw sexuality and a bonding of mind and emotion as one and the same thing. I cannot introduce further examples here.¹⁸⁴ The list could be extended with reference to the numerous vernacular courtly narratives from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. They describe, often in an astonishingly outspoken manner, the degree to which the partnership of the courtly couple is imbued with sexual desire.¹⁸⁵ It will have become perfectly clear just how wrong it would be to ascribe a general hostility to sexuality to the Middle Ages.¹⁸⁶ Love and sexuality did not come together for the first time in the eighteenth century. Hence, a statement such as the following from Alan Peterson must be regarded as invalid: The idea that sexual fulfilment underpins a loving relationship and that the resolution of sexual problems can solve matters of the heart came into being with sexual science that began to evolve in the late nineteenth century (see Bland and Doan, 1998a,b; Bullough, 1994; Russett, 1989). In the twentieth century, there developed a thriving sexology industry […]. Experts began to promote the view that sex formed the basis of marital relationships.¹⁸⁷

In my view, a consistent mistake in surveys of medieval sexuality is ignoring the broad spectrum of discourses and positions in the Middle Ages, and continuing instead to cite over and over again the same passages from a few texts. Anyone who also takes into account texts of pastoral theology, medical writing, vernacular poetry – let alone texts that have not yet been edited! – will gain a different perspective. Not all the material covered above allows conclusions to be drawn about social practice. What matters here is more the simple fact that the idea of sexual and emotional union in marriage could be formulated in Western writing from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries.¹⁸⁸ Some medieval theologians realised that the scholarly distinctions made by moral theologians failed to connect with reality as experienced by the lay public. They understood that conjugal coitus combined sexual desire with love for the spouse, and they considered that the shared experience of coitus intensified the emotional bond between a couple. Many theologians and physicians re Guilielmus Peraldus, Summa de virtutibus (Basel: Michael Wenssler, sine anno), fol. 215v–216r (III 2, 17).  See Schnell, Sexualität und Emotionalität, 239 – 261.  Included here would be, among others, Chrétien de Troyes, Erec (ca. 1170); Hartmann von Aue, Erec (ca. 1180); (anonymous), Reinfried von Braunschweig (ca. 1300); Wirnt von Gravenberc, Wigalois (ca. 1220); Gautier d’Arras, Eracle (ca. 1180); Heinrich von Neustadt, Apollonius von Tyrland (ca. 1300).  It would just as misguided to deny the sexual implications of so-called courtly love; Schnell, Tod der Liebe durch Erfüllung der Liebe?.  Alan Petersen, Engendering Emotions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 89 – 124 (chap. 4: “Love, Intimacy, and Sex”; here at 116).  Peter N. Stearns, Sexuality in World History, 47– 55, places the emphasis differently.

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cognised this as a positive effect of sexuality. On the one hand, the theological and medical texts that I have cited deal with an everyday integration of love and sexuality. On the other, some theologians also called for just such a mental and physical unity. This is, therefore, by no means a marginal or subversive idea, but was instead a widespread view shared by theological and medical authorities. Is there, then, no difference at all between the late medieval period and modernity with regard to the history of emotions? Compared to the preceding section on intimacy, there is less need to assume a difference between discourse and everyday reality where the integration of love and sexuality is concerned. This is because it was not just a small educated elite that wrote about the integration of love and sexuality: theologians and physicians also addressed it. Theologians, almost reluctantly, even acknowledged this practice in marriage. Even so, the difference at the level of discourse between modernity and premodernity when it comes to the integration of love and sexuality cannot be overlooked: whereas such an integration found widespread acceptance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such standpoints faced stiff competition in the medieval discourse. Alongside approval of marital sexuality during the late medieval period, on the grounds that it strengthened the emotional bond between man and wife, there also existed a discourse of hostility to sexuality. But there was never any open discourse of confrontation between the two positions, since they were articulated in different communication situations and in different discourse locations. Here again we must conclude that attempts to compare modernity with premodernity in emotional history need to recognise the plurality of premodern discourse. That ideas about everyday married life in the thirteenth century and at the end of the nineteenth do more or less coincide can finally be shown using a detail in the rendering of marital sexuality as discourse: a husband sees his wife naked. In the thirteenth century, as in the nineteenth, we encounter reports of how husbands, on seeing their wives naked before them, were more or less automatically engulfed by sexual desire and pressed themselves upon their wives. Caroline Arni has studied the transcripts of divorce proceedings conducted at Berne High Court (Switzerland) around 1900; she mentions the statement of a wife who hardly dared change her clothes because, once her husband saw her naked, he “immediately went for her”.¹⁸⁹ The thirteenth-century Franciscan priest Berthold von Regensburg describes a similar scene in his sermons.¹⁹⁰ While town-dwellers observed the days of continence prescribed by the Church, those living in the countryside did not allow them to constrain their marital sex life. So it would happen, wrote Berthold, that if, after being well rested from a good sleep on a feast day, a peasant caught sight of his scantily dressed wife, he could hardly wait until after breakfast to sleep  Arni, Entzweiungen, 235.  Berthold von Regensburg, Predigten, ed. Franz Pfeiffer, vol. 1 (Wien: Braumüller, 1862; reprint with a foreword by Kurt Ruh [Berlin: De Gruyter, 1965]), 309 – 338 (Nr. XXI, 324). Whether the text we have is really by Berthold, or is a version of it made somewhat later, is not important here.

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with her. “Like a cock he runs to her and pays no attention to day or hour.” Here, as in the Berne court case, sight of the naked wife is automatically followed by the sexual arousal of the husband. There are quite obviously (at the level of discourse!) patterns of behaviour that remain the same over centuries. Of course, these two statements are not about a social or sexual reality, but instead represent the discourse constructing male sexuality.¹⁹¹ Nonetheless, contemporary historians of emotion oriented to social constructivism maintain that these sociocultural schemas determine the thoughts and feelings of people. If that is so, the centuries-old conception of the husband who at the sight of his naked wife presses himself upon her must have been something that happened in ‘reality’; the discourses constructing patterns of behaviour on the one hand and everyday practice on the other must have approximated each other. Did ‘social action’ – which social constructivists equate with emotion – thus not change at all between the thirteenth and the twentieth centuries? I do not want to speculate about that here. At the level of discourse, at any event, little seems to have changed. There are striking parallels with respect to the discourse concerning sexual behaviour in marriage.

d Parental Love The fourth master narrative is based on the idea that premodern parents did not love their children. Hence, modern historians develop a history of emotions that is temporally distinct in its structure from that of medievalists. I will not deal with this discussion in any detail here, not least given that the theory of the absence of parental love from premodernity has declined in popularity. Demonstrating parental love in the Middle Ages is therefore not the central concern of the following remarks. Instead, they are concerned with the reasons that allowed this untenable theory about the history of emotions to emerge in the first place. Only when medievalists and early modern historians have come to agreement about this methodological point can a rapprochement on the ‘substance’ begin. Here again it will prove helpful to consider philological aspects: what texts with what functions do we cover? I take as my starting point Susan J. Matt’s summary of the argument:¹⁹² the two positions – continuity and change – with which she deals cannot, she thinks, be reconciled.¹⁹³ The argument between medievalists, who tend to favour continuity, and historians of the modern period, who presume the existence of a dramatic shift, is not one that she feels can be resolved. Does this mean that we have to deal with two ‘histories of emotions’? In my view, the conflict cannot be resolved so long as both ‘parties’ start out from different sources and adhere to differing conceptions of history (continuity vs  See the further examples in Schnell, Frauendiskurs, 199 – 200.  See Matt, “Current Emotion Research”, 119 – 120. Stearns, “History of Emotions. Issues of Change and Impact”, also provides a survey of research.  Matt, “Current Emotion Research”, 120b.

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discontinuity): the analysis of sources and conceptions of history are mutually related. Differing specialist knowledge leads to differing historical approaches; differing historical approaches lead to differing interpretations of historical sources. And this is how differing ‘histories of emotion’ arise. What would have to happen to bring these two ‘histories’ together into a single history? Peter N. Stearns has identified a key point:¹⁹⁴ detailed research must go hand in hand with a readiness and ability to think in terms of longer periods of time. Isolated convergences in some aspects of the emotional history of the twelfth and of the nineteenth centuries should not lead us to ignore the great social changes that occurred in the course of the intervening centuries. Stearns, of course, maintains that no such overview exists. Early modern historians and medievalists, in his view, continue ploughing their own furrows with ever-more detailed studies of phenomena related to emotions, but dialogue between them about possible analytical models capable of overcoming the contrast between premodern and modern has ceased. Just how difficult it is to resolve this problem can be shown briefly with reference to the debate over the alleged lack of parental love in the Middle Ages. I am not concerned to determine who is right;¹⁹⁵ my intention is instead to establish why the arguments advanced in each case were or are not capable of convincing the other side and thus of furthering some kind of understanding between medievalists and ‘modernists’.¹⁹⁶ I draw my arguments from Stearns’s survey, which reviews in detail the controversy over parental love and contrasts the opposing arguments.¹⁹⁷

 Stearns, “Modern Patterns”, 24.  Matt, “Current Emotion Research”, 120, summarises both positions (Ariès and Stone vs medievalists) and comes to no conclusion. According to Peter N. Stearns, Childhood in World History, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), chaps. 5 – 6, there was a decisive shift in the relationship between parents and their children in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but he leaves open the question of whether these changes had any advantages for the children. According to Stearns, ibid., 71– 72 (chap. 6), there are four major changes that make up the shift, and which separate modern childhood from childhood in older agrarian societies: (1) in earlier times children were given productive family work, but in the eighteenth century the view became established that children should go to school; (2) the number of children per family declined (from five to seven, now fewer); (3) the rate of child mortality was reduced (it was previously 30 – 50 %); and (4) the state now took an interest in children’s welfare, and school reduced parental control over children. But the question remains as to whether these ‘superficial’ changes led to a stronger emotional attachment between parents and children.  A few new studies of childhood in premodern times can be mentioned here: Pauline Stafford, “Review Article. Parents and Children in the Early Middle Ages”, Early Medieval Europe 10 (2001), 257– 271; Barbara A. Hanawalt, “Medievalists and the Study of Childhood”, Speculum 77 (2002), 440 – 460; Jean Jost, “Loving Parents in Middle English Literature”, in Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2005), 307– 328; Margaret L. King, “Concept of Childhood: What We Know and Where We Might Go”, Renaissance Quarterly 60 (2007), 341– 401; Phyllis Gaffney, Constructions of Childhood and Youth in Old French Narrative (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011); Jarzebowski and Safley, eds., Childhood and Emotion; Sandra Cavallo and Silvia Evangelisti, eds., A Cultural History of Childhood and Family, Vol. 3: A Cultural His-

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The following points have been made to support the thesis that parental love first emerged in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: that the high rate of infant mortality in premodern times hindered the development of an emotional bond between parents and children; that the widespread use of wet nurses before the eighteenth century is not indicative of parental love; that in premodern times it often happened that one’s own children were sent to work in another household for many years; that the leaving of babies at church doors and the corporal punishment of children is not suggestive of parental love; and that in premodern times children were compared with animals. It is striking that early modern historians argue in terms of external factors (infant mortality, school), or modes of behaviour (abandoning babies, wet nurses, corporal punishment). These factors are supposed to testify to the lack of parental love in the Middle Ages. Moreover, it is apparent that conclusions regarding the general disposition of the medieval population are drawn from the behaviour of members of a single social stratum. Finally, it is evident that certain practices (beating children, making children work for other families, abandoning babies) that were, in fact, quite common during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are ‘offloaded’ onto premodernity. Conversely, the references made by medievalists to parental love as expressed in premodern treatises on education and improvement, sermons, letters, or autobiographies are regarded as isolated instances not to be taken seriously. Hence, in the debate over premodern and modern parental love there is a contrast in emphasis between external changes, the existence of which cannot be denied, and a supposed continuity in inner emotions. This makes it clear why the parties concerned are talking past each other. Medievalists and historians of the modern period have differing conceptions of emotion and of social context: the former assume a historical emotional continuity in spite of sociocultural changes, while the latter maintain the existence of emotional changes because of those shifts. This is a controversy that threatens to overturn the most basic conviction of emotion historians: that social change always determines emotional change. For this reason, the debate between medievalists and early modern historians about whether parents in the Middle Ages loved their children is mostly a proxy for a debate over the validity of a fundamental doctrine of modern emotion research. So long as the pressing relevance of this lack of consensus between medievalists and early modern historians is not identified and dealt with, the protagonists will continue to talk past each other. Even if medievalists could refute most of the arguments of their oppo-

tory of Childhood and Family in the Early Modern Age (London: Bloomsbury, 2014); Janay Nugent and Elizabeth Ewan, eds., Children and Youth in Premodern Scotland (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2015); Didier Lett, “Famille et relations emotionnelles”, in Histoire des émotions, t. 1, 179 – 201 (181 and 193 – 198); Martina Winkler, Kindheitsgeschichte. Eine Einführung (Göttingen: V & R academic, 2017); Lisa Perfetti, “In Private. The Individual and the Domestic Communities”, in A History of the Emotions in the Medieval Age, ed. Ruys and Monagle (2019), esp. 129 – 132.  Stearns, Childhood in World History, 56 – 83.

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nents, this would be of little use while the principle that social change determines emotional change remains unchallenged. If a thirteenth-century priest warns rich parents against mollycoddling their children;¹⁹⁸ if in the fourteenth century fathers play ball with their children;¹⁹⁹ if during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Italian towns and cities sought to limit public graveside lamentations, including at the graves of children;²⁰⁰ if, not in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but already from the twelfth to the sixteenth, romances and treatises on marriage made the point that parents should not marry their children to persons they did not love; if in a thirteenth-century romance a perfectly clear distinction was made between the behaviour of children and adults;²⁰¹ if, in short, more or less all the characterisations of modern parental love can be proved to have already existed in the Middle Ages, one would think that early modern historians might reconsider their contrasting views. But the principle of social constructivist research cited above does not allow this to happen. What might a solution to this disarray look like? How can the discrepancy between the medieval and the early modern positions, and thus between two quite contrary theoretical suppositions, be resolved? Since no agreement on the basic point at issue – whether there are emotional constants over the span of many centuries – can be anticipated, convergence will have to come from discussion of individual issues. At the end of such a discussion, we might be left with a new insight: that both exist, emotional constants and emotional change. This recognition might follow if both sides engaged in a rather more differentiated approach. It might run as follows. (1) Since the 1980s, socio-historical researchers have moved away from some of the more traditional ideas of the premodern large family on the one hand and the conception of emotional intimacy in the small (bourgeois) family of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on the other; instead, they have emphasised the latter’s

 Klaus Arnold, Kind und Gesellschaft in Mittelalter und Renaissance (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1980), 121. A treatise dealing with bringing up children bemoaned the cossetting of children by their parents; Irmgard Elter and Michael Dallapiazza, “Das Kapitel über Kindererziehung in der ostschwäbischen Bearbeitung des “Baumgarten geistlicher Herzen” aus cgm 400. Edition und kulturgeschichtliche Überlegungen”, Rostocker Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft 7 (1999), 125 – 150.  David Herlihy, “Family Solidarity in Medieval Italian History”, in Economy, Society and Government in Medieval Italy. In memoriam R.L. Reynolds, ed. David Herlihy, Robert S. Lopez and Vsevolod Slessarev (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1969), 173 – 184 (p. 181).  Diane Owen Hughes, “Mourning Rites, Memory, and Civilization in Premodern Italy”, in Riti e rituali nelle società medievali, ed. Jacques Chiffoleau, Lauro Martines, and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’ Alto Medioevo, 1994), 23 – 38; Carol Lansing, Passion and Order. Restraint of Grief in the Medieval Italian Communes (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2007); observations on the latter in Martin G. Eisner, “Review of Lansing, Carol, Passion and Order: H-Italy”, H-Net-Reviews, September 2010.  Konrad von Würzburg, Partonopier und Meliur, ed. Karl Bartsch (Wien: Braumüller, 1871; Reprint Berlin: De Gruyter, 1970), vv. 12078 – 12090.

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emotional involvement with other groupings (relations, neighbours, friends).²⁰² The contrast drawn between premodern and modern parental love might be toned down by the dynamics of socio-historical research on families. (2) Cross-checks are needed for well-founded research in social and emotion history: we need to examine conflicts between parents and children in modern times, together with their causes. Speaking of parental love gives rise to the idea of a harmonious family life, something that was not always present in everyday life in premodern or modern times. (3) The either/or mentality has to be abandoned. It is unlikely that parents did not love their children in the Middle Ages.²⁰³ ‘Either/or’ has to be replaced with ‘this way/that way’. Perhaps medieval parents loved their children in a different way, in a manner that we are unable to perceive, trapped as we are by our ideas of what counts as proper parental love. Thus, the most recent studies no longer argue about whether parents loved their children in premodern times but rather ask in what way parental love was expressed in premodernity.²⁰⁴ A fascinating field of research opens up here for practice theory. It may be that some practices of parental love have altered over time, but not the emotional bond of parents to their children. This would, of course, undermine a basic thesis of practice theory, namely that practice and emotion coincide. A review of regional, national, and social differences even within modernity reinforces scepticism with respect to this basic principle. For example, right up to the 1950s and 1960s in the Netherlands it was usual for children in well-off families to address their parents formally. Parents were persons to be respected, not friends as in many other Western countries. Did those Dutch parents not love their children? Of course, we need to distinguish the quality of a bond from its intensity. The latter would probably be greater for the twentieth century than for the thirteenth.²⁰⁵ (4) Of decisive importance – here is the focus of my own study – is that the analysis of the relevant historical texts (letters, autobiographies, chronicles, tracts on education and improvement, protocols) always pay due attention to their function. How parental love is spoken about depends on the communication situation of the speech or text – this is true both for modernity and the Middle

 Schnell, Sexualität und Emotionalität, 89 – 96; Margareth Lanzinger and Edith Saurer, “Politiken der Verwandtschaft. Einleitung”, in Politiken der Verwandtschaft. Beziehungsnetze, Geschlecht und Recht, ed. Margareth Lanzinger and Edith Saurer (Göttingen: V & R unipress, 2007), 7– 22 (esp. 7).  It is striking that no one has so far doubted the existence of parental love in antiquity.  Katie Barclay and Kimberley Reynolds, “Introduction: Small Graves: Histories of Childhood, Death and Emotion”, in Death, Emotion and Childhood in Premodern Europe, ed. Katie Barclay, Kimberley Reynolds, and Ciara Rawnsley (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 1– 24 (4– 5); Claudia Jarzebowski, “Childhood”, in: Early Modern Emotions. An Introduction, 214– 217; Jarzebowski, Kindheit und Emotion (2018).  Premodern sources do talk of the ‘love’ of parents. Of course, the relevant descriptive vocabulary in both the Middle Ages and modernity has to be examined so as to check whether the same words mean the same things. See, for instance, Hugo de Prado Florido (ca. 1272– 1322), Sermones dominicales, s.a. s.l. (Hain 8997), Sermo 96: the mother loves her son more than his father (mulier plus diligit filium quam pater). But what is meant by ‘love’ (diligere)?

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Ages. (5) The extent to which individual cases can be treated as representative is a serious problem. To what extent can a generalisation be made from one historical event? Just like today, we should assume that in premodernity not all parents loved their children with the same intensity. In the Middle Ages, as in the nineteenth century, the range of parental affection would have been great. We have to do away with the idea that ‘the’ nineteenth century involved more love for children than ‘the’ fourteenth century. (6) Social differentiation is vital. The insistence on the part of emotion research that parental love first arose in the eighteenth century is always associated with a process of embourgeoisement. But what about modern parental love in rural families, the families of day labourers and factory workers? During the nineteenth century, many poor Tyrolean peasant families sent their poorly dressed children – known in cultural history as the ‘Swabian children’ – on a dangerous and arduous march through the snowy Alps to Upper Swabia (Ravensburg, Augsburg) so that they could live there with rich peasants, naturally in return for hard work. There were very many personal tragedies in the course of this time away from home. Conversely, one might assume the existence for many families in fifteenth-century Italian city states the same kind of familial intimacy that existed among the inhabitants of towns and cities in the nineteenth century. In both cases, the death of their children caused parents great suffering. (7) The methodological problem of comparability is, of course, related to the fact that well into the sixteenth century we lack relevant material for most parts of the population because they could not write. The increasing amount of written documentation for parental love in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries does not necessarily imply any increase in parental love. It becomes clear what emotion research has to do to bring two separate histories of emotion (medieval work on the one hand, the study of modernity on the other) together in a jointly constructed history of emotions:²⁰⁶ clarifying the semantics of terms for ‘parental love’, comparing behaviours and rituals in which parental love is expressed, comparing similar situations and discovering new ones, including behavioural norms and behavioural sanctions, paying attention to social stratification, taking into account different conditions in education and media history for the linguistic articulation of parental love. There is an enormous range of questions and tasks.

 For the methodological difficulties in demonstrating a historical change in the emotional sense of maternal love, see Claudia Opitz, “Pflicht-Gefühl. Zur Codierung von Mutterliebe zwischen Renaissance und Aufklärung”, in Kulturen der Gefühle in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, ed. Ingrid Kasten, Gesa Stedman, and Margarete Zimmermann (Querelles 7) (Stuttgart and Weimar: J.B. Metzler, 2002), 154– 170.

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e Conclusions Behind the four narratives, there ultimately lies an idea of a Middle Ages that is culturally, intellectually, morally, and affectively ‘backward’ compared with modern times. ‘The’ Middle Ages are said to have had no sense of ‘ego’, of ‘self’, of ‘subjectivity’. Any sense of inner feeling, of inwardness, was foreign to ‘them’. ‘The’ Middle Ages are said not to have been capable of linking love and sexual desire either in discourse or in reality. It is obvious to anyone that this kind of Middle Ages can have little in common with the world of feeling and sensibility of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What if, however, these master narratives do not stand up to criticism? Would we not then also have to rewrite the emotional history of modernity? But the emotional turn has, up until now, clung to the traditional image that historians have drawn for Western history and not changed it at all: the eighteenth century still marks the decisive shift from ‘yesterday’ to ‘today’. Alongside a history of emotion fixated on diachronic developments, there is a need for studies of emotion that take due account of synchronic diversity, hence identifying and accounting for differences within an epoch. Some of the elements that would need to be taken into account are the numerous coexisting discourses in the Middle Ages (for instance, medicine against theology), institutions and spaces (court, monastery, towns and cities),²⁰⁷ social strata (nobility and scholars as contrasted to simple peasants), conceptions of value and educational level (clerics vs lay persons), kinds of text (speculative and theoretical as opposed to pastoral theological writings), communication situations (behaviour towards strangers as opposed to those one knew and trusted, communication between clerics as opposed to lay people), the lived world (everyday life as opposed to the culture of festivals), differences in mentality and gender. Out of all this, it would become apparent that during the Middle Ages, in all spheres, there was competition, conflict, and controversy that contributed to the development of a specific dynamic that, until now, has been assumed to be non-existent; and also that there was a yawning gap between Church teaching and human practice. If there were civilising processes, they were considerably more complex, discontinuous, and fragmentary than Norbert Elias described in his epoch-making work.

 Of course, people of different strata performing quite different functions came into contact with one another at court. Hence, the people living at court cannot be said to have formed a community. That the court can be understood as anything but an emotional community is evident in the contributions to Passions et pulsions à la cour (Moyen âge – Temps modernes).

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3 Modern Perspectives – Medieval Findings. Text Analyses Elias’s general thesis of a constant increase in the control of affect complemented by a constant decline in the potential for violence has, of course, been qualified by early modern historians and sociologists. All the same, the image that modern historians still have of the Middle Ages is largely shaped by Elias’s account of table manners, allegedly uninhibited nudity, and the practice of defecating in public.²⁰⁸ This is above all because the way in which Elias made use of his most important genre of sources, the medieval conduct books, has never been critically examined. The skills of sociology or social history, of course, are not what we need to do this. Instead, to show that Elias’s characterisation of medieval table manners is false, we must turn to literary analysis: the content of medieval conduct books dealing with table manners is fully apparent only if one appreciates the function of these texts.²⁰⁹ Elias’s description of social interaction in the Middle Ages is doubly misleading. He (a) has misunderstood the function of his most important source – conduct books dealing with table manners from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries – and (b) has permitted the Middle Ages only one mode of behaviour at table, failing to note that then, as now, when dealing with strangers, other, more ‘civilised’ rules of behaviour were required than when dealing with friends and close family. Elias homogenised history.

a Medieval Table Manners Elias was convinced that medieval texts about table manners taught adults table manners that they had not previously known.²¹⁰ He went on to maintain that later, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, children were also taught proper table manners.²¹¹ But Elias failed to take into account Latin texts regarding table manners from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.²¹² The purpose of these texts was not to teach adults how to behave at table; instead, they were intended to make lessons more entertaining for children learning Latin. To this end, table manners were formulated in a rather crude and humorous way, showing how one ought not to behave. But this particular kind of literary offering – presenting coarse behaviour like spitting

 The idea that a sense of disgust first developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is one that is also owed to Elias: Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant. Odor and the French Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986); J. F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility. Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill & Wang 1990).  I refer to this principle repeatedly here.  Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, 47– 142.  For instance from Erasmus of Rotterdam, De civilitate morum puerilium; see Elias, The Civilizing Process, 47– 69.  Elias, The Civilizing Process, 53 – 54.

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and gobbing – tells us nothing about medieval table manners, but instead something about the introduction of fun into Latin lessons. From the opposite one learned proper behaviour – and Latin. Pupils were entertained by the earthy content of the books on table manners; the crudity with which (bad) manners were presented contrasted at the same time with the rhetorical brilliance of these writings, often composed in melodious hexameters.²¹³ To give a taste of all this, here are some examples. Urbanus magnus (late twelfth century or around 1200) combines hexameter and alliteration right from the start:²¹⁴ Dílige dóctrinám, doctóres dílige dóctos; / Dédoctús doctí doctóris dógmata dámpnat (“Love the teaching, love the learned teacher; only the fool laughs at the teaching of the learned teacher”).²¹⁵ Or: Sépe íuvat scíre sapiénti scíre silére (“It often helps the wise to know when one should be silent”; v. 1922). That the master of the house is permitted to urinate at home is also conveyed in alliterative hexameters: Úrináre licét dominó domuí dominánti (V. 1086). That one should not impatiently demand more to drink than the cupbearer serves becomes in the Latin classroom: Pócula nón poscás nisi qué pincérna propínet (V. 1009). This etiquette text – really a very artificial piece of writing – ends with eighteen verses that all end with -osa (V. 2816 – 2833): a display of rhetorical fireworks. To be fully enjoyed, these melodious texts must really be read out loud: they taught not only good manners but also a Latin that read well. Anyone who fails to connect these two aspects of the texts cannot understand their function. If Latin pupils were taught proper table manners in the twelfth century, it can be assumed that their elders already knew them, and certainly not just since the previous century. Elias’s developmental thesis can therefore be rejected. In contrast to Elias, who looked for the origins of civilisation solely in the culture of the nobility, it is clerical culture, monastery schools, and the training of novitiates that are to a great extent responsible for the processes of disciplining.²¹⁶

 See Rüdiger Schnell, “Mittelalterliche Tischzuchten als Zeugnisse für Elias’ Zivilisationstheorie?”, in Zivilisationsprozesse. Zu Erziehungsschriften in der Vormoderne, ed. Rüdiger Schnell (Köln: Böhlau, 2004), 85 – 152 (esp. 107– 109).  Urbanus magnus Danielis Becclesiensis, ed. J. Gilbart Smyly (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis, 1939), 36. Most recently on this text: Thomas Zotz, “Urbanitas. Zur Bedeutung und Funktion einer antiken Wertvorstellung innerhalb der höfischen Kultur des hohen Mittelalters”, in Curialitas, ed. Josef Fleckenstein (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990), 392– 451 (414– 417); Robert Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin Kings, 1075 – 1225 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 578 – 588; Frédérique Lachaud, “L’enseignement des bonnes manières en milieu de cour en Angleterre d’après l’Urbanus magnus attribué à Daniel de Beccles”, in Erziehung und Bildung bei Hofe, ed. Werner Paravicini and Jörg Wettlaufer (Stuttgart: Thorbecke, 2002), 43 – 53, which places the work in the second half of the twelfth century and considers it possible that it originated at the court of the English King Henry II.  Urbanus magnus, ed. Smyly, vv. 74– 75.  Rüdiger Schnell, “Wer sieht das Unsichtbare? Homo exterior und homo interior in monastischen und laikalen Erziehungsschriften”, in ‘anima’ und ‘sêle’. Darstellungen und Systematisierungen von Seele im Mittelalter, ed. Katharina Philipowski and Anne Prior (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2006), 83 – 112.

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Elias also missed the function of vernacular verses on table manners (thirteenth and fourteenth centuries) that were also often full of humour and wit. They were not intended to teach adults table manners, but rather served to entertain a court elite that had long been familiar with them. These texts, which are generally referred to as courtesy books, are in part phonetic showpieces. It must have been a real pleasure to hear these verses being read out. Norbert Elias thought that he had found in the medieval texts evidence of actual uncivilised behaviour at table; but, on the contrary, they are evidence that at twelfth- and thirteenth-century courts, and among clerics and monks, there was a highly developed sense of how to behave at table, something that children still have to be taught today: “don’t dip your fingers in the salt cellar”, “don’t put your elbows on the table”, “don’t talk with your mouth full”.²¹⁷ A special set of table manners is part of how a leading cultural stratum conveys its own selfconfidence. Great value was also laid on good conversation at table – between adults, of course. One was to converse wittily and pleasantly with one’s neighbour during the meal, and talk especially about things that interested them. Any joking at table was not to offend anyone present.²¹⁸ The ideal of a refined dining culture has to be seen as part of an imagined aestheticisation of lifestyle that we find in numerous texts written for the court milieu: no uncontrolled physical movements; formal speech; giving an aesthetic impression when walking and talking.²¹⁹ The degree of cultivation during the Middle Ages, at court as in the monastery – which also touches on medieval affective culture – is apparent on three different levels. On the first level, it is a matter of proper behaviour while eating. The second concerns speaking while dining, how one conducts a conversation with others. The third level is reached in the texts that report elaborately on what is eaten and what is said at table, and that either – in the case of Latin texts – make Latin lessons more entertaining or – in the case of vernacular texts – are pleasant entertainment for the court elite. By the time one arrives at this third level, the need to be taught the proper way of eating has been left far behind. The fact that the vernacular texts on table manners were formulated in such a way that one had to laugh at them proves that their function was not to teach an uncivilised public. The court public was distinguished not

 Schnell, “Mittelalterliche Tischzuchten als Zeugnisse”, esp. 93 – 106. See also Schnell, “Tischzuchten”, in: Höfe und Residenzen im spätmittelalterlichen Reich, ed. Jan Hirschbiegel and Jörg Wettlaufer (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2007), 615 – 635.  Schnell, “Gastmahl und Gespräch. Entwürfe idealer Konversation, von Plutarch zu Castiglione”, in Norm und Krise von Kommunikation. Inszenierungen literarischer und sozialer Interaktion im Mittelalter, ed. Alois Hahn, Gert Melville, and Werner Röcke (Münster: LIT 2006), 73 – 90; Schnell, “Die höfische Kultur”.  The same behaviour was required in monastic and clerical contexts, but in that case understood as the precondition for a life oriented to God rather than being admired as an expression of secularaesthetic conduct; see Schnell, “Wer sieht das Unsichtbare?”.

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only by its fine aesthetic conduct at table but also by the aesthetic discourse about that conduct.²²⁰

b Shame, Disgust, and Honour. Developments and Counter-Developments ‘The’ Middle Ages distinguished between two kinds of social interaction: between strangers on the one hand and between intimates on the other. Two distinct shame thresholds were associated with these two modes of interaction. It was only in dealing with strangers that one could suffer shame or gain honour. Social interaction with strangers required distance. Excessively intimate behaviour with a stranger could be taken as a sign of contempt for them. Like today, there was the view that respect existed only where a certain distance was maintained (a physical distance too).²²¹ With friends and family members, by contrast, more intimate, perhaps also more emotional interaction could be cultivated.²²² Norbert Elias and many others after him have failed to note that during the Middle Ages there were different shame thresholds in different communication situations. The behavioural norms for social interaction with strangers differed from those used in dealing those with whom one was familiar. For example, during a meal taken together, and to take account of any feelings of disgust on the part of guests, it was recommended that lips be wiped before drinking from a wine glass that was also being used by a neighbour at the table. For the same reason, it was recommended that an overnight guest be given a room as far as possible from the toilet (so that the guest might not be troubled, or even nauseated, by the bad smell). Even blowing out a candle with a breath in the direction of the guest was prohibited, since this might offend the guest’s sensitivity with regard to smell.²²³ Distance from a stranger’s (guest’s) body and respect for their sense of shame even

 On the aesthetics of court culture, see Schnell, “Die höfische Kultur”. It has been shown for the fifth century AD that table manners contributed to the making of social distinctions: Emmanuelle Raga, “Romans and Barbarians at the Table. Banquets and Food as Tools of Distinction according to Sidonius Apollinaris (Fifth-Century Gaul)”, in Inclusion and Exclusion in Mediterranean Christianity, 400 – 800, ed. Yaniv Fox and Erica Buchberger (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019), 239 – 258.  In the edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung for 18 September 2018, there was an article about the Belgian choreographer Jan Fabre (9): “Physical closeness that arises in the artistic work of choreographers and dancers must not lead to loss of respect.”  Francesco Petrarca, Lettera ai posteri (Posteritati), ed. Gianni Villani (Rom: Salerno Ed., 1990), 12, says that one can do without elegantia in style in everyday conversation with friends (Neque vero in communi sermone cum amicis aut familiaribus eloquentiae unquam cura me attigit). See also Petrarca, De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia. Latin/German, trans. Klaus Kubusch, ed. August Buck (Hamburg: Meiner, 1993), IV 2: Michi autem sermo vagus inter amicos inelaborateque sententie (“In the company of friends, I employ a looser way of talking and everyday idioms”).  Urbanus magnus (late twelfth century), ed. Smyly, vv. 1290 – 1291 and vv. 2413 – 2414.

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went so far as ensuring that a guest’s bed was not made up in their presence.²²⁴ Honour was due to guests, and it was only in the presence of strangers that one could feel ashamed – for example, by a sudden misstep.²²⁵ Emotional and physical distance characterised this form of social contact.²²⁶ In many medieval tracts on table manners, it is explicitly stated that the rules presented are intended for interaction with strangers. ²²⁷ They repeatedly emphasise that behaviour permissible at table when at home is not suited for dining with strangers.²²⁸ In a German translation of Disticha Catonis, we can read²²⁹ that communicative behaviour when dining with strangers should be different from that practised at home.²³⁰ Urbanus magnus (late twelfth century) teaches (V. 1015) that when dining at a stranger’s table one should not criticise any dish. The ban on slurping one’s egg is said not to apply when one is dining at home.²³¹ It is also permissible when dining at home to sit casually, or even lie down; this was strictly forbidden at a stranger’s table.²³² Reinerus Alemannicus, in his tract Phagifacetus (first half of the thirteenth century), described how one ate with friends, noting how this diverged from public and official dining: when dining with friends, a greater sense of freedom (libertas; 291) in behaviour prevailed; the atmosphere was not lofty and dignified (no

 Urbanus magnus, ed. Smyly, v. 2392.  The fact that shaming can work within a family is clear in modernity; see Peter N. Stearns, “Shame, and a Challenge for Emotions History”, Emotion Review 8.3 (2016), 197– 208.  Montandon, “L’invention d’une autosurveillance intime”, in Histoire des Émotions, t. 1, 257, misconstrues this difference in behaviour towards strangers on the one hand and familiars on the other. Montandon thinks that from the thirteenth century onwards people in general became more distanced with regard to both their own bodies and those of strangers. Montandon finds evidence for this in, for example, the rule of behaviour according to which two genteel persons should not share the same spoon. But there was already a rule like this in the tenth century; Schnell, “Mittelalterliche Tischzuchten als Zeugnisse”, 133 – 134. Familiarity between two people is demonstrated there by drinking out of one beaker and using one spoon when eating. See n258 below.  In the following, I can only refer to a few selected sources. For more detail, see Schnell, “Kommunikation unter Freunden vs. Kommunikation mit Fremden”. Evidence dating from 1582 that the behavioural rules found in medieval and early modern writings on manners were intended for interaction with strangers is given by Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility. Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 86. She draws the conclusion that shame and disgust were experienced differently depending on time and place.  See the Bamberg version of Cato. Extracts are printed in Dieter Harmening, “Neue Beiträge zum deutschen Cato”, Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 89 (1970), 346 – 368 (352– 358).  Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, MS Ed. VII 55 (now MS Lit. 176; fifteenth century), fol. 201v – 211v (vv. 128 – 131).  Further examples: Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, MS Ed. VIII 18 (now MS Lit. 177; fifteenth and sixteenth century), fol. 110v – 120v (V. 85 – 89; the text is identical with Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, MS Ed. VII 55); similar statements in Innsbrucker Tischzucht, Fassung f, ed. Emil Weller, Dichtungen des sechzehnten Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Litterarischer Verein, 1874), 50 (vv. 5 – 6).  Urbanus magnus, ed. Smyly, vv. 2613 – 2614.  Urbanus magnus, vv. 990 – 991 (tua mensa vs aliena mensa; see also the handwritten addition C in v. 1020).

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maiestas; 292); attestations of honour were not finely weighed (not every gesture was immediately questioned in terms of honour); and hence, conversation developed more easily than at an official, public banquet, where one person dominated conversation.²³³ Important for us here is that Reinerus connected the fact of a looser, informal atmosphere with a reduced emphasis on honour. In his Galateo (1558), Giovanni della Casa mentions that different rules of conduct were appropriate between two persons known to each other than those appropriate for strangers.²³⁴ One should never give to someone else a glass of wine from which one had just drunk, unless one was familiar with that person. No comprehensive reconfiguration of the range of affect can be read out of premodern tracts on table manners. The addressees of these tracts are asked only to show self-discipline merely at times, not in the totality of everyday life. Knowledge that people behaved differently at home, among their family and familiars, from the way they behaved in public led to the advice that one should seek out a person in their own home if one wished to know if they were truthful, fair, and honest.²³⁵ It was presumed that people only behaved the way they really were in private. A recent study²³⁶ claims that the idea that someone could enter the privacy of someone else’s house uninvited is a modern idea, that it did not apply to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But it can be shown that in fifteenth-century London citizens complained that their neighbours did not respect their intimate space.²³⁷ Around 1400 a citizen of London complained that the unbearable smell from the

 Reinerus Alemannicus, Phagifacetus, ed. Heinrich Carl Abraham Eichstaedt (Jena: Bran, 1839), vv. 288 – 308; the German version by Sebastian Brant has been edited by Silke Umbach, Sebastian Brants Tischzucht (Thesmophagia 1490) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1995), vv. 474– 495.  Giovanni della Casa, Galateo, ed. Giorgio Manganelli and Claudio Milanini, 2nd. ed. (Milano: Rizzoli, 1977), 63; Giovanni della Casa, Galateus. Das Büchlein von erbarn / höflichen und holdseligen Sitten, verdeutscht von Nathan Chytraeus (1597), ed. Klaus Ley (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1984; Reprint of Frankfurt 1607 edition), 11.  Facetus cum nihil utilius, ed. Leopold Zatočil, Cato a Facetus (Brünn: Vydava Masarykova Universita, 1952), 287– 293, here str. 118. Angelo Poliziano (1454– 1494), Praefatio in Suetonium, therefore regards historiographical reports about the domestic and intimate life of individuals as being much more useful than stories about what was done in council meetings, in wars, in public, and in front of everyone: the latter things are only a pretence, whereas the former are of enduring value, and no one can keep up a pretence for long, wearing a mask; a German translation of the passage is in Albert Wesselski, trans., Angelo Polizianos Tagebuch (1477 – 1479) mit vierhundert Schwänken und Schnurren aus den Tagen Lorenzos des Großmächtigen und seiner Vorfahren (Jena: Diederichs, 1929 [digitised]), xxxii.  Lucas Burkart, “Der vermeintliche Blick durchs Schlüsselloch. Zur Kommunikation zwischen unterschiedlichen Sozialsphären in der städtischen Kultur um 1500”, in Offen und Verborgen. Vorstellungen und Praktiken des Öffentlichen und Privaten in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, ed. Caroline Emmelius (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004), 167– 178.  Shannon McSheffrey, “Place, Space, and Situation. Public and Private in the Making of Marriage in Late-Medieval London”, Speculum 79.4 (2004), 960 – 990 (esp. 986 ff.).

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neighbour’s toilet disturbed his private life; he took the case to court.²³⁸ The Latin tract on manners Urbanus magnus (late twelfth century) advised²³⁹ respecting the private sphere of others and not entering a strange house without calling out loudly for the master of the house. A thirteenth-century French text on manners for women maintains that it was impolite to look into the house of a stranger. If one wished to enter, one had to knock or cough. One was not to be an intruder in a stranger’s house.²⁴⁰ The private sphere of the other, of a stranger, had to be respected. Even if the houses were open, this by no means meant that public and private space became mingled. Instead, the distinction between the two was to be ensured through control of one’s own gaze. If we lack knowledge of these modes of behaviour and conceptions of space, we are bound to end up misunderstanding ‘medieval emotionality’. The taboo on looking also applied to people who defecated or urinated in public.²⁴¹ In his autobiography of 1114, Guibert de Nogent described a case that is said to have occurred in a monastery.²⁴² I will summarise only the details that are of interest in the present context. An abbot is about to leave his monastery on a journey; before he leaves, he wishes to visit a seriously ill brother monk in his cell who, he fears, is close to death. But at the moment he enters the cell, he finds the monk sitting on a pot that had been brought to his cell while he was ill so that he might relieve himself. The abbot saw the monk sitting in this terribly strained position. Each looks at the other (alterutrum quidem se sunt intuiti), resulting in the embarrassment of the abbot (abbatem puduit) at having put the other person in such an awkward position; he immediately leaves the cell.²⁴³ Guibert de Nogent reports the outcome as being

 Diane Shaw, “The Construction of the Private in Medieval London”, The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 26.3 (1996), 447– 466.  Urbanus magnus, ed. Smyly, Vers 1360 – 1365.  Robert de Blois (thirteenth century), Chastoiement des dames, ed. John Howard Fox, Robert de Blois, son oeuvre didactique et narrative (Paris: Nizet, 1950), vv. 477– 496; Urbanus magnus, ed. Smyly, vv. 1354 ff.  Compare, among others, Urbanus magnus, ed. Smyly, vv. 1088 – 1089.; Erasmus of Rotterdam, Colloquia familiaria, in Erasmus von Rotterdam. Ausgewählte Schriften, ed. and trans. Werner Welzig, vol. 6, 3rd ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006), 2 (“In primo congressu”); further examples in Rüdiger Schnell, “Kritische Überlegungen zur Zivilisationstheorie von Norbert Elias”, in Zivilisationsprozesse, ed. Schnell, 21– 83 (p. 52). Even when dining at table, one was meant to convey the feeling to the others that they were not being observed; cf. Schnell, “Kritische Überlegungen”, 48 – 50. See also IV.4 below.  Guibert de Nogent, De vita sua, ed. and trans. Edmon-René Labande (Paris: Société d’Édition ‘Les belles lettres’, 1981), I 22; trans. John F. Benton, Self and Society in Medieval France: The Memoirs of Abbot Guibert of Nogent (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 104– 105.  It is hard to say whether the abbot is embarrassed at having discovered the monk in such a shameful position, or whether he is embarrassed at having created such a situation. On the controversy over the distinction of shame from embarrassment, see Paster, The Body Embarrassed; Christoph Demmerling and Hilge Landweer, Philosophie der Gefühle. Von Achtung bis Zorn (Stuttgart and Weimar: J.B. Metzler, 2007), 232– 236 (on shame, distress, and honour); W. Ray Crozier, “Differ-

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that the monk was robbed of the chance of making a confession before his death. The behaviour of the abbot presumes a rule of behaviour according to which another person should not be looked at when defecating. If, despite this, such a situation arises, not only the observing person feels shame but also the person being observed, since they are subject to the gaze of another just as they are defecating. Hence, they are to blame for having created this embarrassing situation for both parties (“each saw the other” is what it explicitly says in Guibert’s report). The taboo on looking and seeing prevails here too. Respect for private space was necessary because even in the Middle Ages people behaved differently in their private space and among family and familiars than they did in the presence of strangers. The shame threshold was different.²⁴⁴ So, for instance, we find in a thirteenth-century Occitan didactic poem²⁴⁵ that many women play, laugh, and converse with their family members, but as soon as strange knights came in they did not so much as glance at them. The male author, from a male perspective, deplores this difference. Relevant here is a remark by Robert de Blois (thirteenth century) in a French didactic poem,²⁴⁶ according to which a woman should allow only those with whom she is familiar to see her white skin. A woman who revealed her white skin to someone with whom she was not familiar is said to have disgraced herself.²⁴⁷ It should have become clear enough that the drive for self-discipline had, as early as the Middle Ages, resulted in the alternative of a private space in which behaviour could be undisturbed and unobserved. It is also clear that a stranger or a guest was ascribed a different status from that of a familiar person, and as a consequence was given more respect.²⁴⁸ Showing respect consisted of taking account of the feelings of others, of strangers. Respect was shown to someone by paying due attention to their sense of dignity, their sense of disgust, their concern for cleanliness, their desire for undisturbed conentiating Shame from Embarrassment”, Emotion Review 6.3 (2014), 269 – 276; Stearns, Shame. A Brief History, chap. 1.  The relaxation of speech taboos among family and friends is discussed further in Schnell, Sexualität und Emotionalität, 265 – 280.  Sordello, Ensenhamen (before 1257), in: Sordello, Le poesie, ed. Marco Boni (Bologna: Palmaverde, 1954), vv. 1200 – 1208 (translated by Katharina Städtler, “Schule der Frauen. Altprovenzalische Liebeslehren, Lehrgedichte und Konversationsregeln für Mädchen und Frauen”, Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 19 [1989, Heft 74], 75 – 92 [p. 79]).  Robert de Blois, Chastoiement de dames, ed. Fox, vv. 184– 212.  Clement of Alexandria, Christ, the Educator, trans. Simon P. Wood (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1954), 225 – 226 (chap. 31,1– 33,3), could, if need be, accept a woman undressing in front of her husband; but to do so in front of strangers in a bathhouse was something he strongly condemned.  In Francesco da Barberino (1264– 1348), all rules of behaviour involve the requirement that those with whom one is together at table should be shown respect. He talks of honorem facere (“showing respect”); Francesco da Barberino, I documenti d’amore, ed. Francesco Egidi, vol. 1 (Rom: Arché, 1905), 112 (I 7).

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viviality. This could be manifested by, for instance, not turning one’s back on them, or keeping quiet while they talked, or cleaning the rim of a cup before passing it to a neighbour at table.²⁴⁹ The connection between politeness, consideration, self-discipline, and being honoured (in the sense of being treated specially) is explicitly formulated in very many medieval texts on manners.²⁵⁰ Special or particular treatment is required only between people between whom there is a social or emotional distance. This relationship between treating someone in a special way and that person not being familiar is not a new invention: it can be shown to have existed in the Middle Ages. At any event, during the Middle Ages the idea was repeatedly formulated that when dealing with those who were familiar, special or particular treatment seemed superfluous – and with this any cause for embarrassment was minimised. This view can be seen at work in a late medieval ‘mirror for princes’ composed by Philippe de Mézières (1327– 1405) for the young King Charles VI. Philippe stipulated that at table the young ruler should not become too easily involved in conversation with others, since familiarity can breed contempt: ta digne personne ne doit pas estre si commune en conversation a ta table, ne ailleurs, que l’amour et reverence de ta grant et singuliere dignite soit defaillant ou aucunement perdue (II 246).²⁵¹ A king, therefore, was not meant to become too matey with others at table, since he could lose the respect of his subjects.²⁵² Familiarity broke down social distance and made respect a non-issue. Respect prevailed only where there was distance. In the later thirteenth century, Aegidius Romanus warned rulers in his mirror for princes (1277– 1279) against being too familiaris, too familiar, with their servants, for they thereby ran the risk of being held in contempt.²⁵³ In his treatise on householding (Della Famiglia; ca. 1430/1440), Leon Battista Alberti expresses the view that the lady of the house should not chat with the maidservants, and definitely not with the menservants, for too great a familiarity stifles the showing of respect.²⁵⁴ And contempt means loss of honour. Angelo Poliziano

 Facetus cum nihil utilius, ed. Zatočil, Stanza 48,1; 92; 137,2; 142; Urbanus magnus, ed. Smyly, Vers 996; Konrad von Haslau, Der Jüngling, ed. W. Tauber (Altdeutsche Textbibliothek 97) (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1984), Verse 114– 115.  See, for example, Thomasin von Zirclaria, Wälscher Gast, ed. Heinrich Rückert (Quedlinburg and Leipzig: Basse 1852; reprint Berlin: De Gruyter, 1965), vv. 363 – 390; Karlsruher Hofzucht, ed. Ursula Schmid, Codex Karlsruhe 408 (Bern and Munich: Francke, 1974), 453 – 459 (V. 17– 18).  Philippe de Mézières, Le songe du vieil pelerin, ed. George William Coopland, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: CUP, 1969), 246.  On Philippe’s text, see most recently Rosalind Brown-Grant, “Mirroring the Court. Clerkly Advice to Noble Men and Women in the Works of Philippe de Mézières and Christine de Pizan”, in Courtly Literature and Clerical Culture. Höfische Literatur und Klerikerkultur, ed. Christoph Huber and Henrike Lähnemann (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002), 39 – 53 (esp. 51).  Aegidius Romanus, De regimine principum (Rom: Zannettus, 1607), 397 (III 2,19).  Alberti, I libri della famiglia, trans. Watkins, 218 (book III). By contrast, Christine de Pizan, in her La Cité des Dames (1405), allows women of high nobility a degree of familiarity with their ladies-in-

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(1454– 1494) sums it up: Familiaritas contemptum parit (“Familiarity breeds contempt”).²⁵⁵ David of Augsburg warns monks in his tract for novitiates against developing such familiarity (familiaris esse) in dealing with someone that they lost all sense of shame.²⁵⁶ Here we can see an awareness that with greater familiarity, physical distance – and so sense of shame²⁵⁷ – is reduced. Distance and respect belong together.²⁵⁸ By contrast, familiarity permits a more relaxed exchange that allows for things that might otherwise cause outrage.²⁵⁹ The discussion of the rules to be observed during conversation in seventeenth-century France also covered the nature of entretien familier (familiar conversation). In this context, it was repeatedly remarked that particular rules can be neglected when dealing with especially familiar conversation partners. One did not need to be as careful as one usually was in dealing with other people. Nonetheless, attention was drawn at the same time to the fact that if one showed too much familiarité, one risked losing respect and dignity.²⁶⁰ Emotional closeness renders paying respect superfluous, and familiar exchange reduces the possible risk of embarrassment. Respect presupposes distance; only under these circumstances does embarrassment arise.²⁶¹ Lack of distance, by con-

waiting: Franziska Martinelli-Huber, “Robert von Blois – Konversation der höfischen Dame in einem Erziehungstext des 13. Jahrhunderts”, in Konversationskultur in der Vormoderne. Geschlechter im Gespräch, ed. Rüdiger Schnell (Köln: Böhlau, 2008), 219 – 252 (248 – 250).  Angelo Poliziano, Tagebuch, trans. Wesselski, 87 (No. 179).  David of Augsburg, De exterioris et interioris hominis compositione, 20 (I 1,15): Nemo sit ita familiaris tibi, coram quo penitus obliviscaris verecundiae (“Let no one be so familiar to you that you forget all sense of shame with respect to them”). David of Augsburg (thirteenth century) thus treats feelings of shame as perfectly normal.  See VI.5 below: at first lovers feel embarrassment with each other, but this vanishes with their sexual union.  In particular cases, the creation of personal closeness – by using the same cutlery, for instance – can serve to render the guest very special, since in this way a particular bond is meant to be expressed. See Schnell, “Mittelalterliche Tischzuchten als Zeugnisse”, 133 – 134; and also n226 above.  [Antoine de Courtin, Nouveau traité de la civilité], The Rules of Civility, or, Certain Ways of Deportment observed in France amongst all Persons of Quality, upon several Occasions, translated out of French (London: Printed for J. Martin […], 1671), 17– 21.  See Christoph Strosetzki, Konversation. Ein Kapitel gesellschaftlicher und literarischer Pragmatik im Frankreich des 17. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt a. M.: Lang, 1978), 18 – 19. Stefano Guazzo, La civil conversazione, ed. Amedo Quondam, 2 vols. (Modena: Panini, 1993), deals in book 2 with modes of behaviour in public, in book 3 with domestic and private conduct among familiars. In the Zimmerische Chronik (ca. 1550/1560), according to the second edition of Karl Barack re-edited by Paul Herrmann, vol. 3 (Meersburg and Leipzig: Hendel, 1932), 192,20 – 23, there is an account of a group of people entertaining themselves with farcical stories, in which the jumbled and disordered way that some talked did not bother the others, since they all knew each other.  Stephanie Trigg, “‘Shamed be …’: Historizing Shame in Medieval and Early Modern Courtly Ritual”, Exemplaria 19.1 (2007), 67– 89, points out this interdependence between shame and respect. See also Bénédicte Sère and Jörg Wettlaufer, eds., Shame between Punishment and Penance. The Social Usages of Shame in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times (Florence: SISMEL, 2013).

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trast, furthers familiarity and eradicates embarrassment. Exchanges between people familiar with one another are less formal, more relaxed, or even ‘more undisciplined’ than exchanges between strangers. Different standards of behaviour prevailed in the Middle Ages between different groups of people and in different situations. These standards permit the conclusion that there was a range of thresholds for embarrassment in premodern times. Different forms of emotionally related exchanges were practised, at least at court and in monasteries.²⁶² If after reading medieval courtesy books, one glances at twentieth-century books on etiquette, one makes an astonishing discovery. These writings on behaviour coincide in one central point: warning against being too familiar with strangers, above all with those of a lower social standing, because this could endanger the superiority, or the honourable status, of the superior party. In his study of the twentieth century, Cas Wouters writes that etiquette books warn of the “dangers of familiarity” and recommend distance.²⁶³ With the progressive informalisation of social exchange, behavioural standards of this kind have progressively disappeared. Nonetheless, from the fourteenth to the twentieth century the idea prevailed that excessive emotional closeness in exchanges with social inferiors harmed the reputation of a social superior.

4 Blame and Exoneration I believe that the medieval and early modern world permitted communicative spaces that were mostly detached from ideas of honour and dignity, and in which the need for self-representation was absent. As we have seen, there were different rules for dealing with familiars and with strangers, and these rules reveal the existence of quite distinct thresholds for shame and disgust within the Middle Ages. It is also plain that general ideas of honour and respect imputed to the Middle Ages could from time to time take a ‘time out’. Instead of the advance of the civilising process on a broad front, we now have some insight into the situational and temporal limitations of the validity of norms of behaviour and communication. My thesis is as follows: specific disciplinary behavioural norms function to ease disciplinary compulsion so that the life of individual persons and life together in social communities can be made bearable. Increasing psychic and emotional burdens

 The points made above heavily qualify Reddy’s theory of emotional regimes and emotional refuges. If within every society two distinct standards of behaviour are (can be) practised – informal in a familiar setting, respectful of strangers in a (political) public one – the idea of emotional regime loses relevance.  Cas Wouters, “The Integration of Classes and Sexes in the Twentieth Century: Etiquette Books and Emotion Management”, in Norbert Elias and Human Interdependencies, 50 – 83 (esp. 55 and 58 – 60).

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are compensated by mechanisms for their relief.²⁶⁴ Many developments are weakened by counter-developments. Sometimes relief and burdens even balance each other out. In this regard, the interchange between emotional regime and emotional refuge that Reddy proposed for the eighteenth century²⁶⁵ has only limited relevance for the ‘dialectic’ here: his theoretical model involves the confrontation of an allpowerful emotional regime with emotional refuges confined to small niches. In contrast, I have in mind an interchange and complementarity of affective burden and emotional relief that one and the same society constructs for itself. This is a balance of forces that act against each other, on the one hand maintaining the functioning of a society while on the other making life together tolerable for the members of that society. Hence, the informalisation attributed to the twentieth century does make living together in society easier, but it also demands from each and every member a high degree of control over affect.²⁶⁶ I think that every society experiences the antagonism between the constraints of discipline on the one hand and spaces of freedom from those constraints on the other. Pressure, or compulsion, creates a counter-pressure. I call this the dialectic of the civilising process. Elias underestimated this dialectic of history.²⁶⁷ Elias saw only an increasing control of affect, supposedly from the Middle Ages to modernity. But premodern literature on behaviour has a dual perspective. On the one hand, it requires the individual person to behave according to social norms – not to do this or that while eating, for example – and so puts this person under a certain pressure. Any offence against these norms would harm his or her standing, hence affect honour. At the same time, however, this same literature requires of every individual that they do not observe others while they are eating.²⁶⁸ Medieval and early modern pedagogical writings document efforts to ease the pressure placed by gener-

 Peter N. Stearns, Battleground of Desire. The Struggle for Self-Control in Modern America (New York, N.Y.: New York University Press, 1999), makes a similar claim for the twentieth century, arguing that although we can detect increasing self-control among Americans through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at the same time new leisure pursuits became established in which their feelings were allowed to run free. See also Cas Wouters, “Developments in the Behavioural Codes between the Sexes: The Formalization of Informalization in the Netherlands, 1930 – 85”, Theory, Culture and Society 4 (1987), 405 – 427: the greater the social trend to more informal (familiar and intimate) exchange between the sexes, the greater the social enforcement of self-restraint and the formalisation of the informal.  Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling.  Hans Peter Dreitzel, “Peinliche Situationen”, in Soziologie. Entdeckungen im Alltäglichen. Festschrift Hans Paul Bahrdt, ed. Martin Baethge and Wolfgang Essbach (Frankfurt a. M. and New York: Campus, 1983), 148 – 173 (170 – 171).  This deficiency is also criticised by Utz Jeggle, “Zur Dialektik von Anständig und Unanständig im Zivilisationsprozeß”, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 95 (1992), 293 – 304; Walter Haug, “Literaturgeschichte und Triebkontrolle. Bemerkungen eines Mediävisten zum sog. Prozeß der Zivilisation”, Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Jahrbuch für 1993 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1994), 51– 58 (p. 53).  Schnell, “Kritische Überlegungen”, 49 – 51.

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alised demands for self-discipline on those participating in an official banquet. Hence, in texts that teach table manners one can find the rule that one should not constantly observe others while eating, otherwise the latter will get the impression that one is noting exactly how they eat and what they eat. On the one hand, these prescriptions regarding table manners work with fear of shame: “The others at table are watching you and will see that you are uncultivated, that you have no control over yourself.” On the other hand, these texts contain instructions to limit such observation by others. An Arabic text on table manners from the eleventh or twelfth century states that one should not watch those with one at table, and pay no heed to what they eat, so that they will not be embarrassed.²⁶⁹ The late twelfth-century Latin text on manners Urbanus magnus states that while one should for the sake of politeness look at those with whom one is dining,²⁷⁰ the servants should on no account constantly watch those who are eating.²⁷¹ In the thirteenth- or fourteenth-century Latin text on table manners Doctrina mense,²⁷² there is the same direction: no one should keep watch on the mouth of another, nor should one count the number of mouthfuls taken by another. Johannes Sulpicus Verulanus (1444 – 1503) cautions in his own text, De facetia mensae: “You should not look darkly at your table companions, or pay attention to what each has eaten. Look often to your own movements.”²⁷³ In Thomasin von Zirclaria’s Wälscher Gast (ca. 1215), we learn (V. 474– 478) that, while the master of the house must constantly reassure himself that all guests have sufficient to eat, the guest should be skilful (gevuoc) enough to feign that he has not noticed. The guest, therefore, should not constantly watch other people. German court manners are spelled out more clearly in the Karlsruhe Codex 408:²⁷⁴ one should not constantly stare one’s neighbour in the face.²⁷⁵ Erasmus of Rotterdam also teaches²⁷⁶ that it

 Al-Ghazālī, Über die guten Sitten beim Essen und Trinken. Das ist das 11. Buch […].. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte unserer Tischsitten, trans. and revised Hans Kindermann (Leiden: Brill, 1964), 15 – 16.  Urbanus magnus, ed. Smyly, v. 995.  Urbanus magnus, v. 1115.  A.J. Simon, ed., Table manners for boys (Doctrina mense, trans. O.J. A. Russell) (London: Wine and Food Society, 1958), Verse 44– 46. The Latin text has also been published by H.-W. Klein in Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 14 (1978), 194– 199.  Giovanni Sulpizio Verolano, De facetia mensae (also printed under the title De moribus puerorum carmen iuvenile), s.l. s.a. (incunable), vv. 98 – 99. The text is printed in Nikolaus Henkel, “Tischzucht und Kinderlehre um 1500”, in Zivilisationsprozesse, ed. Schnell, 153 – 168, here 164– 166. The ‘dark looks’ here symbolise possible envy of what one is eating. In Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum (Frankfurt: Nicolai Steinii, 1601), 265 (eating is not worthwhile where the face of the master of the house gives you dark looks), emphasis is more on the imperative of conviviality.  Codex Karlsruhe 408, ed. Ursula Schmid, 453 – 459 (V. 102 ff.).  The oft-formulated requirement that one should leave others who are eating or drinking to themselves (look into your own beaker while drinking, and do not turn to your neighbour when he is drinking) also belongs in this context.  Erasmus Roterodamus, De civilitate morum puerilium, in Opera omnia, Vol. 1 (Leiden 1703; reprint Hildesheim: Olms, 1961), Sp. 1040C/D: Inurbanum est oculis circumactis observare quid quisque

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shows bad manners to let one’s eyes wander and observe what everyone is eating, and that one should not stare another guest full in the face.²⁷⁷ All instruction and advice have the same aim: to reduce the burden and pressure that bear down on everyone taking part in a banquet. Whereas other passages in these books on manners require absolute self-control, here we have a kind of compensatory relief: one should refrain from constantly observing one’s companions at table, and in so doing give them the reassuring feeling that they are not constantly under the control of another.²⁷⁸ This is a complex discourse on the interplay between the intensification of fear of shame – shame as an instrument of disciplining – and relief from it so as to reduce inhibition. There is a correlation between the creation and the reduction of a fear of shame. This dialectical principle of burdening and relief applies not only to meals taken together but also to perception in public space. The taboo on looking in public provides relief from the compulsion of discipline. Here belongs the general requirement that one not stare at other people,²⁷⁹ and also the requirement that one not greet people who are in the process of urinating or defecating.²⁸⁰ There are taboos on looking in so-called primitive cultures with respect to naked men or women.²⁸¹ We need to heavily qualify the widespread idea that uninhibited defecation in public was the norm during the Middle Ages. There are very many sources testifying that such human necessities were performed in ‘privy’ places.²⁸² Not greeting a per-

comedat, nec decet in quemquam convivarum diutius intentos habere oculos (“It is impolite to let one’s eyes wander and see what each is eating; nor is it fitting to rest one’s eyes for any length of time on one particular table companion”).  See also Erasmus, ibid., Sp. 1039 A: Inter bibendum intortis oculis alios intueri illiberale est (“It is impolite to look at someone from the side while they are drinking”).  John Anthony Burrow, Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), overlooks this aspect.  Giovanni della Casa, Galateo, German translation by Nathan Chytraeus (1597), ed. Ley, 132.  Urbanus magnus, ed. Smyly, vv. 1088 – 1089; Erasmus of Rotterdam, De civilitate morum puerilium (glosses on a Cologne edition of 1530 in Elias, The Civilizing Process, 110 – 111); Johann Christian Barth, Die Galanthe Ethica (Dresden and Leipzig: Lesch, 41731), 288 (if one passes a person relieving himself, one acts as if one does not notice, and so it is impolite to greet them), cited in Elias, The Civilizing Process, 113. Elias, The Civilizing Process, 111, sees in this instruction from 1731 proof for a shift forward in the boundary of shame (a “shift of the frontier of embarrassment”), although the same injunction can be found in Urbanus magnus (late twelfth century), of which he was clearly unaware. See n241 above.  Dazu Hans Peter Duerr, Nacktheit und Scham (Der Mythos vom Zivilisationsprozeß 1) (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1988, 1994), 135 – 148.  (Ps.‐) Albertus Magnus, Secreta mulierum cum commento (deutsch), Critical Text and Commentary, ed. by Margaret Rose Schleissner (Diss. Princeton 1987), 317. See also Humbertus de Romanis, Instructiones de officiis ordinis [1259], in Humbertus de Romanis, Opera de vita regulari, t. 2, ed. Joachim Joseph Berthier (Turin: Marietti, 1956), 220 (V 8). In a German version of a text for nuns, Johannes Meyer, Buch der Ämter (1454), refers to a toilet as an intimate and private place: So si zuo dem geheim gond (“If they go to a privy place”; Freiburg i.Br., Stadtarchiv, MS B1– 147, fol. 85v); digitised manu-

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son in the act of urination indicates that the person involved has been given the feeling of not being noticed. Given this prevailing taboo on looking, all conceptions of the supposed uninhibitedness of the Middle Ages regarding sexuality and nudity need to be revised. Not greeting someone means, in effect, not seeing them.²⁸³ This all involves balancing the compulsion of self-discipline with relief from that compulsion. Or, put the other way round: so that everyone feels comfortable, everyone has to maintain a certain degree of self-discipline. The self-discipline of each person is rewarded with the sense of well-being of the other.²⁸⁴ That the self-discipline of the individual leads to respite for all, or can do so,²⁸⁵ is something we can see in the Cortegiano by Castiglione (1528).²⁸⁶ He writes there about the court of Urbino (I 4): “The most honest manners were united with the greatest freedom [con grandissima libertà congiunti]”; free exchange with the ladies of court was permitted. All were permitted to talk, sit, and joke with whoever they liked. Self-discipline on the part of the men made possible a freer exchange with the women, who did not have to be kept at a distance since the men were able to respect their will.²⁸⁷ Self-discipline becomes the prerequisite for the neutralisation of particular social restrictions, in the Middle Ages as in modernity.²⁸⁸

script Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, Karlsruhe 1177: (accessed 18 June 2018), here fol. 72v.  Of course, then as now not all people held to these norms of civilised seeing. For this reason, Johann Tucher d.A., Reise in das Gelobte Land (Nürnberg: Konrad Zeninger, 1482), fol. k 4r, advises pilgrims wishing to set out on a pilgrimage to buy six ells of coarse black cloth in Venice: they could then use this to make two curtains that would shield them from the curiosity of others during their sea voyage while going to bed or getting up, or when undressing or getting dressed.  Clara Hätzlerin mentions that the person sitting at the head of the table is particularly subject to the gaze of others (given that he also sets an example); Liederbuch der Clara Hätzlerin, ed. Carl Haltaus (Quedlinburg and Leipzig: Basse, 1840: reprint with an afterword by Hanns Fischer, Berlin: De Gruyter, 1966), part 2, Nr. 71, vv. 147– 150.  Evidence for this can be found in the work of the French diplomat and scholar Antoine de Courtin (1622– 1685). See [Antoine de Courtin, Nouveau traité de la civilité], The Rules of Civility, or, Certain Ways of Deportment […]. Newly revised and much enlarged (London: Printed for J. Martin […], 1678), 126 – 127. The table is a place where complete freedom must prevail. Hence, the host should not observe how and what his guests eat and drink. No one should be afraid that someone will laugh at them if they eat clumsily. The host should give his guests the feeling, by a friendly face and a degree of joviality, that they are heartily welcome.  Baldassar Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano, ed. Amedeo Quondam, 11th ed. (Milano: Garzanti, 2003), 22 (I 4).  The tracts for novitiates (De institutione novitiorum) and the monastic rules (Consuetudines) did not believe in this ideal-typical exchange between the sexes. They therefore prohibit any contact between female and male religious persons, since they assume the uncontrollable power of sex.  Axel T. Paul, “Die Gewalt der Scham. Elias, Dürr und das Problem der Historizität menschlicher Gefühle”, Mittelweg 36.2 (2007), 77– 99 (p. 92) (reprinted in: Michaela Bauks and Martina F. Meyer, eds., Zur Kulturgeschichte der Scham [Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2011], 195 – 216, here at 210), argues that the display of (naked, female) bodies on twentieth-century beaches was possible only because

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In my opinion, Elias placed too great an emphasis on the socio-psychological pressure on the individual, and more or less entirely ignored the way that this resulted in the socio-psychological unburdening of everyone.²⁸⁹ Of course, all rules of behaviour involve a degree of compulsion, but in a kind of dialectical balance the selfcontrol of one person reduces the pressure of discipline for all: to some extent, one can think oneself unobserved.²⁹⁰ Taboos on looking protect one person from the others, and create even in a public space a kind of protected ‘privacy’.

of the effectiveness of visual taboos and the control of affect. Drawing a conclusion about uninhibitedness from nudity is said to be a “modern phantasm” (Paul [2011], 199).  Stephen Mennell, “The Other Side of the Coin”, is of the opposite opinion. Mennell deals with isolated historical phenomena of the twentieth century that suggest a reversal of the civilising process, that show either a weakening or the abandonment of constraints (the Holocaust, increasing domestic violence, civil wars). I am interested in the mutual synchronic conditioning of burdening and relief.  The same principle prevails where people move around naked and meet up naked (in a sauna, on a nudist beach). Here the barrier involves controlling one’s eyes: one does not ‘stare’, one looks at another only in the face. See Martin S. Weinberg, “Sexual Modesty, Social Meanings, and the Nudist Camp”, Social Problems 12,3 (1965), 311– 318; Hans Peter Duerr, Nacktheit und Scham (Der Mythos vom Zivilisationsprozeß 1) (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1988, 1994), 150 – 164; Jean-Claude Kaufmann, Frauenkörper – Männerblicke, 2nd. ed. (Konstanz: Universitäts-Verlag, 2006), on norms regarding the gaze on the beach: looking without staring.

V Histories of Terms and Concepts Many emotion historians seek to demonstrate the existence of historical shifts in emotion by referring to changes in conceptions of and names for emotion. But this approach has still not led to any new general account of emotion history. The assumption that the history of conceptions of emotion and the history of emotional experience follow the same path needs questioning.

1 Discourse and Experience In this section, we will examine whether, and to what extent, the historical sequence of conceptions of and names for what might vaguely be called the ‘affective-emotional’ matches the real historical transformation of emotional experiences. Do changes in the names for ‘emotion’ (pathos, perturbationes animi, affectus, motus, sentiment, emotion, feeling, …) always go together with changes in affective and emotional states of mind? Do studies of the conceptualisation and naming of emotions in premodern and modern times also give us insights into possible changes in the emotional experience of people? Some aspects of this problem will be addressed here.¹

a The Plurality of Conceptions In contrast to widespread belief, it is not enough to analyse the views of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, or Descartes on pathe, affectus, or passions to establish what theory of emotion prevailed in ‘the’ classical period, ‘the’ Middle Ages, or ‘the’ seventeenth century. This is because each of these writers had contemporaries – philosophers, physicians, or theologians – who worked with other terms and conceptions.² During the Middle Ages, for example, physicians and moral theologians explained the origin of affect or emotion differently. Physicians and natural philosophers thought that human affect was a natural, biological occurrence, brought about by the varied mixing of the four bodily fluids (blood, yellow and black gall, and phlegm); they consequently directed their therapies at the human body. Moral theologians, on the other hand, treated affective experience as the consequence of a per-

 For more detail, see Rüdiger Schnell, “Historische Emotionsforschung. Eine mediävistische Standortbestimmung”, Frühmittelalterliche Studien 38 (2004), 173 – 276 (esp. 202– 211); Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 49 – 51 and 59 – 64.  For instance, Aristotle, De anima, trans. Christopher Shields (Oxford: Clarendon, 2016), 3 (I 1), was clear that physicians and philosophers defined the emotion of ‘anger’ differently. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110692464-007

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son’s psychic condition, and so classified some affective conditions as either virtues or as vices. Catalogues of virtues and vices can therefore be read as lists of emotions.³ The pathology of humours involved a hydraulic model⁴ that conceived human beings as a container full of fluids that, under specific conditions, burst out. Alongside this, there was also in antiquity and the Middle Ages the idea that the individual was targeted, invaded, and overcome⁵ by emotions as if they were alien powers. And we also encounter the idea that particular feelings develop slowly in an individual,⁶ and likewise the idea that several feelings compete with one another,⁷ as well as the idea, on the one hand, that emotion and understanding are in conflict within any one individual,⁸ and on the other, that they mutually reinforce each other.⁹  Concepts of virtue function as words for emotions: schame (‘shame’), misericordia, compassio, erbarmunge (‘pity, empathy’); Hugh of S. Victor, De triplici compassione (PL 177,577– 79), col. 577 (compassio ex virtute est […]); Alanus de Insulis, Liber de vitiis et virtutibus, ed. Odon Lottin, Psychologie et morale au XIIe et XIIIe siècles, vol. VI (Gembloux: Duculot, 1960), 27– 92 (esp. 55: misericordia est virtus; “pity is a virtue”). Conversely, vices involve emotional states: ira (‘anger’), cupiditas (‘desire’), timor (‘fear’), voluptas (‘lust’), superbia (‘pride’), invidia (‘envy’); for instance, Ambrosius, De virginitate, ed. Franco Gori (Mailand: Biblioteca Ambrosiana, 1989), XV 75. Most recently, cf. Silvana Vecchio, “Passions de l’âme et péchés capitaux: les ambiguïtés de la culture médiévale”, in Laster im Mittelalter/Vices in the Middle Ages, ed. Christoph Flüeler and Martin Rhode (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), 45 – 64; Spencer E. Young, “Avarice, Emotions, and the Family in Thirteenth-Century Moral Discourse”, in Ordering Emotions in Europe, 69 – 84.  On the ‘hydraulic model’ that is at the root of the medieval pathology of the four humours, see Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 101– 106; Derschka, Individuum und Persönlichkeit; Christopher Gill, “Die antike medizinische Tradition”, in Handbuch Klassische Emotionstheorien, ed. Hilge Landweer and Ursula Renz (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2012), 97– 120; Simo Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004; Reprint 2010), 94– 96 and 214– 217; Julius Rocca, Galen on the Brain (Leiden: Brill, 2003); Noga Arikha, Passions and Tempers. A History of the Humours (New York, N.Y.: Ecco, 2007). See also nn97– 119 below.  This view exists in ancient poetry and had a number of vivid formulations: someone acted as if struck by lightning; rage ‘came over’ someone. The story of the gods Amor and Venus, who sparked love in a human being, is part of the same idea (under the motto amor vincit omnia, “love conquers all”). See also IVnn65 – 70.  See Schnell, Causa amoris, 322– 323, on the slow blossoming of love through a life lived together; see also Schnell, Sexualität und Emotionalität, 131– 135, on the formation of an emotional bond in marriage from living together. In the nineteenth century, there was also the idea of a love that erupted suddenly, in addition to the gradual development (as evidenced in literature and social exchange) of love between two young people: Sebastian Susteck, Kinderlieben. Studien zum Wissen des 19. Jahrhunderts und zum deutschsprachigen Realismus von Stifter, Keller, Storm und anderen (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter 2010).  There are very many examples of this in Gottfried of Strasbourg’s Tristan (ca. 1210/1220): Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan und Isold, ed. Friedrich Ranke, 7th ed. (Berlin: Weidmannsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1963).  This dichotomy can be found in the moral-theological conception that ratio und sensualitas are in conflict. If one takes account of the following idea (that emotion and cognition reinforce each other), it is clear that emotion and rationality were conceived both as conflicting and as complementary factors in the Middle Ages. See IInn167– 175.

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A striking example of theoretical controversy over emotion in the premodern era is the discussion about whether it was possible for contradictory affective impulses to arise simultaneously in one and the same person’s soul (or heart).¹⁰ This idea ran from Plato via Augustine to Thomas Aquinas. Augustine was of the view that contrary feelings, such as love and hate, could not arise simultaneously, but Aquinas followed Aristotle’s teaching, according to which contrasting impulses could coincide.¹¹ But Aquinas did make some distinctions. Two contrary affects could form at the same time only in thought (secundum rationem), not in reality (secundum rem). In actuality, one would follow the other. The idea that two opposite affects could coexist is supported by the fact that medieval philosophers assumed the existence of two properties of the soul: the vis concupiscibilis (capacity for desire: pleasure, pain/sadness, love, hate, among others) and the vis irascibilis (power of resistance: hope, doubt, daring, anger, fear). Since the question of simultaneous existence of contrary emotions could not be resolved in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, new solutions and distinctions were repeatedly brought forward.¹² How, insofar as we assume an interdependence between conceptions of emotion and experiences of emotion, can we talk of emotional experience specific to any one era, given this diversity of conceptions of emotion?¹³ Are we to believe that people

 The keyword for this in Gottfried of Strasbourg’s Tristan is the term trahte (‘consideration, thinking, deliberation’). Here a figure’s reflection plays an important role in the development of love (for Riwalin and Blanscheflur, for instance; Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan und Isold, ed. Ranke, vv. 681– 1118); for the connection of love and reason in other works, see Urban Küsters, “Die Liebe und der zweite Blick. Wahrnehmungshaltungen in höfischen Liebesbegegnungen”, in Personenbeziehungen in der mittelalterlichen Literatur, ed. Helmut Brall, Barbara Haupt, and Urban Küsters (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1994), 271– 320; see also Andreas Capellanus, De amore, ed. E. Trojel, 2nd ed. (München: Fink, 1972), 5 and 7 (love arises primarily through cogitatio, ‘thought’).  See Anja Kühne, Vom Affekt zum Gefühl. Konvergenzen von Theorie und Literatur im Mittelalter am Beispiel von Konrads von Würzburg ‘Partonopier und Meliur’ (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 2004), 185 – 187; Alexander Brungs, “Charakteristische Aspekte des Zorn in seiner Darstellung durch Philosophen des Mittelalters”, Das Mittelalter. Perspektiven mediävistischer Forschung 14 (2009), Heft 1, 28 – 40, esp. 32– 33; Carla Casagrande und Silvana Vecchio, Passioni dell’anima. Teorie e usi degli affetti nella cultura medievale (Firenze: Sismel – Edizioni del Galluzo, 2015), 317– 318 and 331– 332.  See Thomas von Aquin, Summa Theologiae, vol. 19, 110 – 113 (I 2, q. 29 art. 2); and on this, Kühne, Vom Affekt zum Gefühl, 185 – 186.  Hence, William of Auvergne was of the view (ca. 1228) that only those emotions could coexist in the soul that had the same tendency, or where one arose out of the other. Thus, for instance, the lover of a married woman could at the same time feel desire, shame, and fear (of the woman’s husband). William thought it impossible, however, to feel concupiscentia (‘cupidity’) and castitas (‘chastity’) at the same time. Wilhelm of Auvergne, De sacramento poenitentiae, in Guilielmus Parisiensis, Opera omnia (Paris: Pralard, 1674; reprinted Frankfurt a. M.: Minerva, 1963), vol. 1, 451– 512 (469); on this, see Casagrande and Vecchio, Passioni dell’anima, 330 – 331. On the simultaneity of different emotions in one person, see VI.4 and VIInn83 – 84 below.  Thus, for example, Ildiko Csengei, Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), has shown that the ‘sentimentalism’ of the

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who had heard of the scholarly thesis regarding the simultaneity of contrary emotions had corresponding emotional experiences? And that those who had not heard of that thesis, or did not ‘believe’ it, experienced their affective circumstances differently? This leads to the next point.

b Learned Discourses and Everyday Experiences If competing conceptions coexist in the same era, we would, according to the thesis of the interdependence of emotional and conceptual history, have to assume a variety of distinct, even competing emotional experiences within any one era. The thesis of the plurality of emotional communities – each with its own evaluation of emotion – within any one era runs counter to the tendency of historical emotion research to derive the emotional circumstances of any era from one sole theory of emotion (Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Hume, Descartes, and so on). There is another reason for questioning the viability of the interdependence thesis: it is doubtful that the views of learned writers found an echo in the everyday affective and emotional experience of those living at the time, or that those writers had adequately integrated these everyday experiences into their theories. In such writings, we never learn what emotions ‘really were’, but instead how particular writers in particular centuries in a particular place speculated about them. Once we realise that all premodern theorists of affect and emotion subordinated¹⁴ their object to specific moral or religious interests and ‘unrelated’ prejudices, we can hardly assume that emotional conceptions guided by such interests had much in common with the everyday emotionality of their contemporaries. These premodern writers wanted primarily to teach, not to inform; this remained true right up to the nineteenth century.¹⁵ Talking about emotion, affect, and passion was a means of moral, religious, or philosophical indoctrination. It is for this reason that in Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas we often read about how ‘emotions’ should be: which are good, which are bad.¹⁶ The descriptions of the affective and emotional by premodern theorists are dominat-

eighteenth century was subject to some criticism and was regarded as a thoroughly ambiguous phenomenon.  Striking evidence for this is given by Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Taking Pleasure in Virtues and Vices: Alcuin’s Manual for Count Wido”, in Pleasure in the Middle Ages, eds. Naama Cohen-Hanegbi and Piroska Nagy (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), 167– 177 (176 on Alcuin’s theological conception of tristitia, ‘sadness’). Even the fact that premodern philosophers or theologians thought in dichotomous categories like activity and passivity, form and matter, facticity and potential, body and spirit determined their perspective on the affective and the emotional.  Gesa Stedman, Stemming the Torrent. Expression and Emotion in the Victorian Discourses on Emotions, 1830 – 1872 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 41– 44.  Cf., for example, Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, ed. and trans. Roger Crisp (New York: CUP, 2014), II 5 (1106 b 18 – 23): one can have too much or too little of each affect, each emotion. Neither is considered a good thing. The best thing is to maintain a good balance; that is characteristic of virtue.

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ed by an ethical, or theological, evaluative perspective; this is why they cannot be employed as measures of contemporary emotional experiences. During the Middle Ages, even theologians repeatedly acknowledged that people’s behaviour did not conform to the doctrinal stipulations of the Church.¹⁷ In his Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas wrote something that might well present a stumbling block for many emotion historians: in the section “On Ordering Love” (De ordine charitatis), he raised the question of whether a husband should love his wife more than his father or his mother. He stated in response, without a hint of criticism: “The husband loves his wife mainly because of physical union.”¹⁸ It may be that in other contexts he was critical of sexual desire. But in this context he recognised that married love is bound up with sexual pleasure.¹⁹ We have to recognise that feelings, or emotions, are accessible not as physical or psychic circumstances but as interpretations of physical and psychic circumstances.²⁰ A history of emotion would thus be a history of constructions of ‘emotionality’ and their interpretations.

c Premodern Terminology and Modern Languages There are also difficulties with the idea that we can translate the conceptual framework of emotions as conceived by Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, or Kant into present-day linguistic conventions.²¹ Very many of those who study emotion subscribe to the idea that the historicity of the objects of emotion research – emotions – can be read out of the historicity of (the meanings of) the signifiers of these objects. If this is true, emotion research can no longer employ the familiar term emotion, and would instead have to take the historical change of relevant terms seriously and employ the respective historical terms (adding explanations and paraphrases in brackets). This procedure would be laborious, but correct.²² For if Aristotle talks of pathe, Thomas Aquinas of affectus, Descartes of passions,

 See IVn161 above (on Robert of Courson); Schnell, “Mittelalter oder Neuzeit?”.  Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 34, 150 – 151 (II 2, q. 26a.11: diligit enim homo uxorem suam principaliter ratione carnalis coniunctionis). See also IVn179 above.  The account in Liutprand’s historiographical work discussed in the first chapter can also be read as bearing on this.  Breitsameter, Liebe, 353 and 355. Breitsameter goes as far as to describe emotions themselves as interpretations.  On the problems of distinguishing the language in a source from modern scientific language, see I. Van’t Spijker, “Exegesis and Emotions. Richard of St. Victor’s ‘De quatuor gradibus violentae caritatis’”, Sacris Erudiri 36 (1996), 147– 160 (157); Schnell, Sexualität und Emotionalität, 15 – 20; Maddern, “How Children Were Supposed To Feel”, 121– 122; John Dryden, “Passions, Affections, and Emotions. Methodological Difficulties in Reconstructing Aquinas’ Philosophical Psychology”, Literature Compass 13.6 (2016), 343 – 350. See now Boddice, A History of Feelings (2019), passim (see VII below).  Boddice, The History of Emotions, 41– 58, now also points this out.

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Kant of Leidenschaften or Gefühle, it is likely that each of these authors defines the object ‘emotion’ differently and, above all, generally means something different from what we are used to referring to with the meta-category ‘emotion’.²³ If it is true that the emergence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of the word Gefühl, or a new sense of the term feeling, was linked to new kinds of sensation,²⁴ it would seem that we have to accept that a change of name in premodernity was tied to a corresponding change in inner psychic experience. And in that case, we cannot translate the relevant historical terms with the current term emotion,²⁵ especially since this one term emotion has, since the early nineteenth century – according to Thomas Dixon – apparently brought together the meaning of two previously distinct names for emotion – passion and affection. ²⁶ All the same, a range of terms for affect (passio, affectio, emotion, sentiment, and so forth) does not always imply a range of affective states of mind. This has already been indicated in the previous section. My thoughts on this are now supported by a newly published study on the semantics of the Latin terms affectus and passio in the sixteenth century.²⁷ Essary, engaging critically with the arguments of Thomas Dixon, has established that the sixteenth-century onomasiological duality of passio and affectio did not correspond to any semantic distinction.²⁸ The use of both terms by sixteenth-century authors was unsystematic, and seems to have been mostly a matter of chance. Differing usage seems to have been more rhetorical than semantic.²⁹ A study of the use of the terms affectus and affectio from classical antiquity (Cicero) up to the

 Boddice, The History of Emotions, 44– 45, criticises Plamper (Plamper, The History of Emotions. An Introduction [Oxford: OUP, 2015]) for using the word emotion as a meta-category for historical analysis. But Plamper is only following a widespread practice. See, for instance, Sturkenboom, “Battlefield Emotions”, 282n3, who writes that “in this article I generally use the word ‘emotion’ in the familiar broad sense of the word, that is, emotion as a catch-all term for all kinds of affective phenomena, not only emotions in the strict psychological sense of the word but also feelings, moods, passions, and sentiments”. Sturkenboom refers to Nico H. Frijda, The Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). For Trigg, “Introduction: Emotional Histories”, 7– 8, the term emotion is likewise “an umbrella term”.  Eugen Lerch, “‘Passion’ und ‘Gefühl’”, Archivum Romanicum 22 (1938), 320 – 349; Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions; Nicole Eustace, Passion in the Gale. Emotion, Power and the Coming of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 481– 486; Stalfort, Die Erfindung der Gefühle.  It has, however, been shown above that it is difficult to maintain a convergence between conceptions of emotion and experiences of emotion in one’s argument.  Dixon, From Passions to Emotions. See IVn71 above.  Kirk Essary, “Passions, Affections, or Emotions? On the Ambiguity of 16th-Century Terminology”, Emotion Review 9.4 (2017), 367– 374.  Likewise, Catherine Newmark, “From Moving the Soul to Moving into the Soul”, in Rethinking Emotion, 21– 35 (25n17), is of the opinion that no systematic distinction was made between passions and affects before Spinoza (1632– 1677).  Essary, “Passions, Affections, or Emotions?”, 373 (“Humanist writers preferred rhetorical flexibility to dialectical precision”).

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seventeenth century comes to a very similar conclusion. It maintains that some premodern writers used the terms (including passio) interchangeably, whereas others sought to maintain semantic distinctions. Nonetheless, no linear semantic development of the two terms can be detected. Linguistic practice was dominated more by textual genre and authority. In many cases, nothing speaks against using our modern term emotion to translate affectus and affectio. ³⁰ It has also been shown for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that there was difficulty at that time in making semantic distinctions between central words for emotion like affection, feeling, emotion, passion, and sentiment. They were often used interchangeably.³¹ These findings are of consequence for our present question: whether, and to what extent, we might be able to use modern concepts of emotion to describe premodern affective conditions. If the premodern terms affectio and passio (or affectus and affectio) do not relate to different affective conditions,³² we need no longer worry about Thomas Dixon’s dictum that by translating affectio and passio with a common term (emotion) we commit an impermissible blurring of two affective conditions that were once distinct.³³ In fact, even the opposite is true: it would be unhistorical to seek to apply a semantic distinction to terms that were used interchangeably in the sixteenth century, and then compound this by equating them with the distinct English meanings of ‘passion’ and ‘affection’. How, then, should one go about translating the premodern terms affectio and passio? Essary makes a pragmatic proposal: even if the use of the modern term emotion might seem anachronistic, this term is no more anachronistic than any other modern English term. Given the lexical breadth of the terminology used to describe affect in Latin writers of the Renaissance, Essary argues, the use of the term emotion is legitimate and does more justice to premodern terminology than any artificial distinction between passion and affection. What Essary has shown for the sixteenth century can also be shown for the Middle Ages. Latin medieval writings has no semantically precise generic term for the emotional.³⁴ The breadth of meaning of the Latin terms affectus, affectio, passio, as well as that of the Middle High German muot, is enormous, rendering difficult any semantic demarcation of this plural terminology – just as we have seen for

 Michael Champion, Raphaële Garrod, Yasmin Haskell, and Juanita Feros Ruys, “But Were they Talking about Emotions? Affectus, Affectio, and the History of Emotions”, Rivista Storia Italiana 128.2 (2016), 521– 543. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 33, suggests that pathe in Plato means something akin to the modern English emotion.  Stedman, Stemming the Torrent, 25 – 45. Stedman maintains the constancy of emotional words and conceptions (30, 230).  Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604), ed. Thomas O. Sloan (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 7– 11, uses passions and affections synonymously.  Dixon, “‘Emotion’: The History of a Keyword in Crisis”.  Damien Boquet, L’ordre de l’affect au moyen âge. Autour de l’anthropologie affective d’Aelred de Rievaulx (Caen: Publication du CRAHM, 2005), takes a semasiological approach; his index contains the modern terms émotion/sentiment but not the medieval lemmata affectus, affectio.

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the Latin sixteenth century.³⁵ It only needs to be recalled that the term passio was also used for the sufferings of Christ (Passio Christi).³⁶ Among Middle Latin terms for affective-emotional states, semantic crossovers even exist. Affectio, affectus, passio, perturbatio: they all mean spontaneously developing, powerful, and transitory psychic conditions³⁷ in need of control, and so roughly mean what we today call affect as opposed to mood. ³⁸ In moral-theological literature, they are mostly understood as negative, interfering with understanding.³⁹ It was for this reason that affects were also referred to as ‘passions’ (passiones), as something from which people suffered, something that happened to them, affecting the soul.⁴⁰ But Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225 – 1274) did not associate passio with passive suffering.⁴¹ Often no semantic distinction was made in the Middle Ages between affectus, affectio, and passio, contrary to a widespread view today. Augustine (354– 430) argued for the terms perturbationes, passiones, affectus to be used synonymously.⁴² Ambrosius (339 – 397) distinguished harmful passiones such as lust, anger, and fear from the good passiones; both kinds of passio were nonetheless called affectus. ⁴³ To these semantic convergences between affectio, affectus, and passio can be added the fact that the generic term affectus was also used to signify individual emotions, as in Aelred of Rievaulx (twelfth century), for instance, for whom affectus

 This makes Essary’s proposal of using the modern word emotion to translate premodern terminology seem plausible.  On the differing meanings of the Middle English passion (fifteenth century), see Maddern, “How Children Were Supposed To Feel”, 121– 122.  This is still the meaning of the terms affect, Affekt in the eighteenth century.  Aelred von Rievaulx, Speculum caritatis, ed. C.H. Talbot (Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis 1) (Turnholt: Brepols, 1971), 3 – 161, here at 119 (III 11,31): Est igitur affectus spontanea quaedam ac dulcis ipsius animi ad aliquem inclinatio (“Affectus is therefore a certain spontaneous and sweet inclination of the heart towards a person”). See Brian Patrick McGuire, “Aelred’s attachments. Individual Growth in Community Life”, in Das Eigene und das Ganze. Zum Individuellen im mittelalterlichen Religiosentum (Vita regularis 16), ed. Gert Melville and Markus Schürer (Münster: LIT, 2002), 439 – 465 (440: affectus does not here mean ‘love’, but a general feeling of ‘being attached, bonded’).  As already in antiquity. See, for example, Seneca, De ira (“On Anger”); Lucius Annaeus Senece, Anger, Mercy, Revenge, trans. Robert A Kaster and Martha C. Nussbaum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Affectus are for Seneca vitia (‘unvirtues’); anger is the counterpart to ratio.  Already in Plato; see Knut Eming, “Die Unvernunft des Begehrens. Platon über den Gegensatz von Vernunft und Affekt”, in Affekte. Philosophische Beiträge zur Theorie der Emotionen, ed. Stefan Hübsch and Dominic Kaegi (Heidelberg: Winter, 1999), 11– 31 (esp. 15 – 17).  Brennan, Thomistic Philosophy, 151– 152.  Augustin, De civitate Dei, ed. Bernardus Dombart and Alphonsus Kalb (Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 47– 48) (Turnholt: Brepols, 1955), IX 4; on this, Katrin Ettenhuber, “‘Tears of Passion’ and ‘Inordinate Lamentation’: Complicated Grief in Donne and Augustine”, in Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture, ed. Brian Cummings and Freya Sierhuis (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 201– 216 (203 – 205). See also Isidor, Etymologiae sive origines, ed. Wallace Martin Lindsay, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1911; reprinted 1966), VII 1,24.  Ambrosius, De Noe, ed. Carolus Schenkel, Ambrosii Opera, vol. 1 (Wien: Tempsky, 1897), 476 (24,88).

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could mean ‘affect’ but also ‘love’.⁴⁴ There were, of course, attempts to make a semantic distinction in medieval Latin discourses on emotion.⁴⁵ In addition, there was also the view that the motus cordis (‘movements of the heart’) were not in themselves bad, only their use in committing bad deeds.⁴⁶ Some affectus did count a priori as exemplary, like compassio (‘sympathy’) or (to some extent) verecundia (‘shame’).⁴⁷ But the term affectus did not have any negative meaning attached to it. The purpose to which an affectus was directed was also of great importance: affectus devotionis (‘the desire for devotion’) could mean a lasting, positively connoted condition of feeling.⁴⁸ Even the pope (Innocent VIII in 1484) could claim of himself that he was working summis affectibus (“with great desire”) for the reinforcement of Christian belief.⁴⁹ Contrary to widespread belief that affectus or passio in the Middle Ages always denoted something to which people were passively subject, or only designated a spontaneously emerging and transitory psychic condition, there was in fact also the idea then of affectus as an active emotional disposition answerable to oneself, as for example in religious devotion.⁵⁰ What in the Middle Ages was described as affectus (‘emotion’) was not always distinct from the will or from reason!  Aelred of Rievaulx, De institutione inclusarum, ed. Anselm Hoste and C. H. Talbot (Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis, vol. 1) (Turnholt: Brepols, 1971), 637– 682 (668, cap. 31): timorem excludat affectus; “love should drive out fear”). On affectus as a generic term in Aelred, see n38 above.  William of St. Thierry, De natura et dignitate amoris, ed. Migne (PL 184,379 – 408), col. 389 (VI 14), differentiates between affectus (constant inner movement) and affectio (changing inner movement). See also F. Sirovic, Der Begriff ‘Affectus’ und die Willenslehre beim Hl. Bonaventura (Mödling bei Wien: Missionsdruck St. Gabriel, 1965).  M.-D. Chenu, “Les passions vertueuses”, Revue philosophique de Louvain 72 (1974), 11– 18; Schnell, Causa amoris, 66 – 71; Van t’Spijker, “Exegesis and Emotions”, 157. See also, among others, St Augustine, De civitate Dei, XIV 6; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Vols. 19 – 21 (I 2 q. 22– 48; “De passionibus animae”): the passiones are described as neither good nor bad, but have to be subordinated to the will and reason. According to Hartmann von Aue, the ‘affect’ of love (minne) can cause both good and bad actions; Hartmann von Aue, Erec, ed. Christoph Cormeau and Kurt Gärtner (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1985), vv. 3684– 3721.  On verecundia, David of Augsburg, De exterioris et interioris hominis compositione, 20 (I 1,15); here verecundia (‘shame’) is described as ornatus omnium virtutum (“the jewel of all virtues”) and so conceived as a virtue. In Galatians 5:22, Paul names some emotions that are good in themselves: caritas, gaudium, pax, longanimitas, bonitas, benignitas, fides, modestia, continentia.  David of Augsburg, De exterioris et interioris hominis compositione, I 1,18 and I 1,21 (III 29 even talks of affectus virtutis, ‘desire for diligence’). See also Klaus Schreiner, “Soziale, visuelle und körperliche Dimensionen mittelalterlicher Frömmigkeit”, 24, who notes of biographical texts that piety was “understood as affectus, a loving desire for union with God”.  Die Hexenbulle Innozenz’ VIII. vom 5. Dez. 1484 (Summis desiderantes affectibus), ed. C. Mirbt und K. Aland, 6th ed. (Quellen zur Geschichte des Papsttums und des römischen Katholizismus, vol. 1) (Tübingen: Mohr, 1967), 492– 493.  See also Odo of Morimond (died 1161), Homilia in Ioh. 19,25, Exordium, ed. José M. Canal, “Dos homilías de Odón de Morimond”, Sacris erudiri 13 (1962), 377– 460 (394: sic nimirum ex inflammata affectione, quam devota et sancta parit in anima meditacio, omnis fidelium profectus procedit; “so it is no wonder that a passionate desire that a God-given and divine contemplation of the soul produces

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We encounter similar difficulties with the term affectio. This is because affectio as a generic term can designate both a general affectivity and individual affects/emotions,⁵¹ both the moderate and orderly affects⁵² and the sinful affects such as anger, lust, and fear.⁵³ Finally, we need to take into account the fact that the Latin theories of emotion were linguistically and culturally representative only to a very limited degree. Medieval Latin terms for the ‘emotional’ (passio, affectus, affectio, perturbatio, inclinatio, motus, and so on) are not only hard to translate into our contemporary language; they are also hard to translate into the vernacular languages of the time.⁵⁴ Vernacular terms often give only unsatisfactory translations of the Latin. The cultural specificity of the Latin language is a result, in particular, of the fact that the descriptions of emotions and theories relevant to emotion come from clerics, and so reflect their conception of the world.⁵⁵ Their texts and speeches were aimed at bringing about an inner transformation in people. The Christianisation of discourse on emotion brings with it the danger that the texts written by the religious elite provide us with a distorted picture of ‘medieval’ emotionality. The difficulty of transferring premodern categories of emotion into modern language(s) is that in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and early modern times there was not just one term for affect/emotion; several different terms were used, but often without any clear semantic distinction. For example, Quintilian, author of an influential first-century AD text on rhetoric, adopted the Aristotelian names for supposedly different affects (pathos and ethos), but in so doing introduced a qualification: that while the affective circumstances that these terms indicated were for the

is of use to every believer”). On the relation between psychic ‘suffering’ und acting in Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, see Susan James, Passion and Action. The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: OUP, 1997), 27– 81.  Ambrosius, De virginitate, ed. Gori, XV 75.  Christoph Huber, “Geistliche Psychagogie. Zur Theorie der Affekte im Benjamin Minor des Richard von St. Viktor”, in Codierungen von Emotionen im Mittelalter, ed. C. Stephen Jaeger and Ingrid Kasten (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2003), 16 – 30 (esp. 18 – 19).  Ambrosius, De virginitate, ed. Gori, XV 75; Isidor, Etymologiae sive origines, ed. Lindsay, VII 1,24. According to David of Augsburg, De exterioris et interioris hominis compositione, 215 – 218 (III 28), timor (‘fear’), moeror (‘sorrow’), odium (‘hate’), pudor (‘shame’) are affectiones that are aligned with what is bad; spes (‘hope’), gaudium (‘pleasure’), and amor (‘love’), by contrast, are subject to the judgement of reason and truth.  Even if there is some agreement in respect of theories of perception between Latin scholars and vernacular poets (Schnell, Causa amoris, 242– 243; Philipowski, Die Gestalt des Unsichtbaren, 35 – 149), the descriptions of affective conditions in vernacular narratives are mostly a long way from the terminological and semantic speculations of medieval theoreticians.  Nagy, “L’historien médiéviste et les mots de l’émotion” (Lecture on February 27, 2009 in Paris [DHI: Deutsches Historisches Institut]); (14 March 2009), also draws attention to this (accessed 19 February 2013).

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time being essentially the same (interim ex eadem natura), the difference between them was not an absolute one.⁵⁶ The changeable, uncertain terminological basis of source texts presents us with difficulties of both an onomasiological and a semasiological nature.⁵⁷ Given this confusing state of affairs, it hardly seems possible for today’s emotion research to use the same modern term emotion for all those passages in medieval texts that are relevant to emotions.⁵⁸ Yet the very onomasiological plurality of premodern terms, as well as their semantic ambiguity, supports the idea that we should work with the neutral term emotion in rendering these terms today. The specific terms can always be noted as seems appropriate for the context of a textual passage. One passage might require translation with affect; the sense of another might need the term inclination, that of another perhaps emotion or passion. It is not only premodern names for the ‘affective-emotional’ that vary; modern scholars are also somewhat inconsistent in using terms interchangeably (Emotion, Affekt, Gefühl; sentiment, emotion, feeling, and so forth). It is not surprising that studies of emotion use the terms emotion, affect, affection without clear distinction.⁵⁹ Of course, we still need to establish possible terminological and semantic differences between different discourses, and between discursive and narrative texts. But in my view, the dividing line runs not only between premodern and modern but also within these two periods. For the Middle Ages, it is important to pay due regard to the difference between a Latin specialist language and vernacular translations.⁶⁰ We repeatedly encounter serious semantic difficulties when examining vernacular translations of Latin terms for affect. Identity of words does not imply conceptual agreement, nor do differences between words and differences between concepts always coincide.⁶¹ This can be easily demonstrated by considering the variety of dialects within a ‘national’ language. If in the medieval German language area two dialect variants for ‘love’ (minne/liebe) were

 Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, Institutio oratoria, ed. Ludwig Radermacher, 2 Bde. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1969), 323 – 324 (VI 2, 12).  Holly A. Crocker, “Medieval Affects Now”, 83 – 84, confuses the onomasiological and semasiological aspects. She wants to examine medieval terminology but talks only about what ‘affects’ mean in medieval moral philosophy.  Das Mittellateinische Wörterbuch bis zum ausgehenden 13. Jahrhundert, vol. 1: A – B, edited by Otto Prinz with Johannes Schneider (München: Beck, 1967), Col. 352– 353, s.v. “affectus”, distinguishes the spectrum of a broader meaning (“geistige Regung”; “Sinnesart, -äußerung”; “Wille, Eifer, Streben”) from a narrower sense (“Gemütserregung, Affekt [in the sense of passio]”; “(Zu‐)Neigung, Liebe”).  See n70 below.  See, for example, Klaus Schreiner, “Laienfrömmigkeit – Frömmigkeit von Eliten oder Frömmigkeit des Volkes?”, in Laienfrömmigkeit im späten Mittelalter, ed. Klaus Schreiner (München: Fink, 1992), 1– 78, esp. 42– 50 on vernacular translations of affectus (begerunge, begird) and devotio (innicheit).  The principle that words and concepts are two different things is emphasised by Thomas Dixon, The Invention of Altruism, 33 – 40; John Deigh, “Comments on Dixon, Scarantino, and Mulligan and Scherer”, Emotion Review 4.4 (2012), 371– 374.

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used alongside each other, one would not want to impute to the respective speakers of those dialects different conceptions of the experience of love.⁶² The same is true for a multilingual (Latin, French, English) medieval England.⁶³ On the one hand, the conceptual lack of clarity in the names for ‘emotion’ and ‘feeling’ typical of both the Middle Ages and modernity intensifies the problem of any contrast between epochs in conceptions of emotion; on the other, it weakens the methodological aporia of such a comparison. If both objects of comparison are ‘emburdened’ with fuzzy terminology, it does not matter so much if both medievalists and early modern historians use the term ‘emotion’. It seems to me that lexical work in emotion research is only in its very early stages, despite the large number of studies. Each new study of the historical terminology of ‘affect’ revises the theses of preceding studies, so that at present one cannot but be sceptical of earlier surveys such as Thomas Dixon’s book of 2003.⁶⁴ This also means that the widespread view in emotion research that the history of words for ‘emotion’ provides the key to the history of emotion is in need of revision.⁶⁵ We need constantly to keep in mind that the possible semantic change in the name for a feeling (feeling, happiness, compassio, among others) is established through a comparison of linguistic utterances, not through a comparison of emotions. The existence of onomasiological plurality and semantic ambiguity in the lexical field of affectivity should prompt medieval and early modern historians to join together and study why it is that affective and emotional terminology resists any precise universal conceptualisation. If countless medieval poets asked waz ist minne? (“what is love?”), I regard their attempts to describe the puzzling and contradictory feeling of ‘love’ simply as one special case of a deeper (and openly admitted) inability to adequately capture the affective and the emotional in language.⁶⁶ If that is the case, the problems faced by medievalists and historians of early modernity are not all that different after all.

 Rüdiger Schnell, “Alemannisch und Bairisch im Spätmittelalter”, in Alemannisch im Sprachvergleich, ed. Elvira Glaser, Peter Ott, and Rudolf Schwarzenbach (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2004), 383 – 399.  Begona Crespo Garcia, “Historical Background of Multilingualism and its Impact on English”, in Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain, ed. David A. Trotter (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), 25 – 36. The fact that in England during the Middle Ages older English words for ‘emotion’ were displaced by Latin and French expressions is not to do with any historical emotional change, but is a result of linguistic politics; see Michiko Ogura, Words and Expressions of Emotion in Medieval English (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 2013), 127.  See Heli Tissari, “Current Emotion Research in English Linguistics: Words for Emotions in the History of English”, Emotion Review 9.1 (2017), 86 – 94.  See section (b) in v. 2 below.  VI.4 suggests that poetic language is best placed to do this.

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d Conceptualisations in National Languages The issue becomes even more complicated when we take into account the fact that there is no unified meaning in modern ‘Western’ languages for the term emotion, which is thus a word poorly suited to be a standard ‘currency’ for exchange in international scholarship.⁶⁷ There is not only a diachronic problem but also a synchronic one that takes a twofold form: in each national language, the general phenomenon ‘affective-emotional’ is named in different ways (emotion in English, sentiment in French, Gefühl in German, to give just a few examples), and on top of that it is subdivided into categories with different names in each of them (sentiments, affects, emotions in English).⁶⁸ Nonetheless, current emotion research almost exclusively uses the term emotion as though there were no problem in so doing, not least in publications dealing with premodern affect.⁶⁹ Emotion and feeling are used interchangeably,⁷⁰ but not however affect and feeling. ⁷¹

 See further Schnell, “Historische Emotionsforschung”, 206; Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 3 – 4; Nagy, “L’historien médiéviste”.  For the history of the meaning of emotion in English from its earliest appearance in the seventeenth century, see Thomas Dixon, “‘Emotion’: The history of a keyword in crisis”. He argues that emotion should be rendered more semantically precise by distinguishing it from passion and affection. For a discussion of the semantic interference between the German Gefühl and the English emotion at the end of the nineteenth century, see Claudia Wassmann, “On Emotion and the Emotions”, Emotion Review 4.4 (2012), 385 – 386; Claudia Wassmann, “Forgotten Origins, Occluded Meanings: Translation of Emotion Terms”, Emotion Review 9.2 (2017), 163 – 171. Wassmann thinks that a focus on the English term emotion ignores the influence that the German-language discussion of Gefühl in psychology in the late nineteenth century had on the English term emotion. She argues that around 1900 the term emotion was open to the meanings of the German terms Gefühl and Empfindung, whereas in today’s usage of emotion this legacy has been lost.  Boddice, The History of Emotions, also addresses this problem (41– 58) and is aware of it, but has no satisfactory solution to offer.  Thus, for instance, Margarete Rubik, “Decoding the Emotions in Aphra Behn’s and Anna Maria Falconbridge’s Travel Narratives”, in Understanding Emotions in Early Europe, 191– 211; Maddern, “How Children Were Supposed To Feel”; Charles Zika, “Violence, Anger and Dishonour in Sixteenth-Century Broadsheets from the Collection of Johann Jakob Wick [second half of the sixteenth century]”, in Violence and Emotions, 37– 58 (55); Lisa Beaven, “Murder and misericordia. Reconstructing Violent Death and Emotion in the Roman Campagna in the Seventeenth Century”, in Violence and Emotions, 59 – 75 (passim); Claire Walker, “An Ordered Cloister? Dissenting Passions in Early Modern English Cloister”, in Gender and Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Destroying Order, Structuring Disorder, ed. Susan Broomhall (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 197– 214 (uses emotions, sentiments, passions, feelings together; feeling rules are at the same time emotional standards). Ian Germani, “Mediated Battlefields of the French Revolution and Emotives At Work”, in Battlefield Emotions 1500 – 1800, 173 – 194 (emotions, sentiments, feelings are used interchangeably).  Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect, 5, distinguishes semantically between affect and feeling. Conversely, Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect. A Critique”, Critical Inquiry 37.3 (2011), 434– 472, argues against a semantic differentiation of affect, emotion, and feeling because she fears that would raise the prospect of an ontologising perspective (esp. 442). Trigg, on the other hand, sees a semantic distinction as positive: “Introduction: Emotional Histories”, 6 – 8, and Trigg, “Affect Theory”, in Early

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Terminological confusion in emotion research is further increased by the fact that in some national languages, the lexical field of leading concepts (Affekt, Gefühl, Trieb, Empfindung, Stimmung; sentiment, feeling, mood, affect, emotion, sensibility, drives) has different content and so is structured differently:⁷² the anglophone affect does not directly correspond to the German term Affekt. ⁷³ Conversely, it is very hard to find a German equivalent for the English word sensibility. At the same time, the lack of a central term in the lexical field reveals a different semantic relation between the relevant terms, such that the English word emotion has a different semantic value from the German Emotion. The English word emotion covers what is in French distinguished as émotion (a short-lived, physical phenomenon) and sentiment (a longer-lasting, less physical phenomenon).⁷⁴ Someone who uses the word Emotion in the sense of ‘Gefühl’ in German places themselves closer to the French sentiment than to émotion. ⁷⁵ From the French point of view, this raises the question of whether ‘friendship’, ‘marital love’, ‘envy’, or ‘bashfulness’ should belong at all to a histoire des émotions. They would belong more to a histoire des sentiments or a histoire de l’affect. ⁷⁶ Conversely, it is hard to find an exact correspondence in French for the German terms Gefühl, Empfindung, Bewegtheit. ⁷⁷

Modern Emotions. An Introduction, 10 – 13. Ruth Leys’s position has come in for criticism from Barbara H. Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling. A History of Emotions, 600 – 1700 (Cambridge: CUP, 2016), 7n24. Anyone who separates ‘affect’ as a physical state outside of discourse from ‘emotion’ as a cognitive condition must be prepared to say whether, for them, the history of affects has taken a different course than the history of emotions.  H. Wagatsuma, “Problems of Language in Cross Cultural Research”, in Issues in Cross-Cultural Research, ed. Leonore Loeb Adler (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1977), 141– 150; Anna Wierzbicka, “Everyday Conceptions of Emotion. A Semantic Perspective”, in Everyday Conceptions of Emotion. An Introduction to the Psychology, Anthropology and Linguistics of Emotion, ed. James A. Russell, José-Miguel Fernández-Dols, and Anthony S. R. Manstead (Dordrecht: Kluwer Acad., 1995), 17– 47 (esp. 20 – 25).  Thomas Städtler, Lexikon der Psychologie. Wörterbuch, Handbuch, Studienbuch (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1998), 231– 232. Kenneth Thomas Strongman, The Psychology of Emotion (Chichester: Wiley, 52003), 268, does speak of an “affect control theory”, but under affect in his subject index (325) he refers to the entry for emotion. It seems to me that, thanks to the reception of Elias, affect in American English has gained a meaning close to the German Affekt; see Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, 555 (lists of page numbers for the index entries affect, affect-control). Interestingly, there are no entries for emotions (559); instead, the reader is referred to affects – the opposite approach to that of Strongman .  See also Nagy, “L’historien médiéviste”; Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy, “Pour une histoire des émotions. L’historien face aux questions contemporaines”, in Le sujet des émotions au moyen âge, ed. Nagy and Boquet (Paris: Beauchesne, 2009), 15 – 51, esp. 43 – 47.  Boquet’s book, L’ordre de l’affect au moyen âge, subsumes the individual emotions such as anger, sympathy, pain, hope, and so on under the lemma sentiment, not under émotion.  Nagy, “L’historien médiéviste”, 1– 2. Similar distinctions are made in Stalfort, Die Erfindung der Gefühle, 62– 65. For the historical semantics of the French émotion and sentiment, and their possible interference with German terms, see Wassmann, “Forgotten Origins”, 168.

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Hence, what anglophone and German-speaking historians understand by a history of emotions or a Geschichte der Gefühle is by no means identical with a histoire des émotions, even if the internationalisation of emotion research has tended to create a convergence on the semantics of the English emotion and the francophone émotion. ⁷⁸ In my discussion here, I do not attempt to create any special semantic and terminological distinction of the historical terms for the affective and the emotional. In analysing historical texts, I retain their own vocabulary, while at the same time seeking to connect this to the current dominant generic term emotion on the one hand and to feeling (a focus on an inner subjective experience) on the other.

2 Taking Stock (a) The various aspects of the problem outlined here make one sceptical of the claim that “conceptual change equates to experiential change”.⁷⁹ The contradictory variety

 The degree to which national-language terms for individual emotions are comparable is also questionable, since the related lexical fields do not match up: the semantic closeness or distance of the English anger, fury, and rage is distinct from the semantic relationship between the German Wut, Ärger, Groll, Unmut, Entrüstung, Empörung, Rage, Ingrimm, Jähzorn, Hass, and Zorn. See, for example, Edda Weigand, “The Vocabulary of Emotion. A Contrastive Analysis of Anger in German, English and Italian”, in Contrastive Lexical Semantics, ed. Edda Weigand (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1998), 45 – 66; Valerij Dem’Jankov, “Zur kontrastivsemantischen Analyse von Emotionen. Semantische ‘Ärgerdörfer’ im Russischen und im Deutschen”, in Contrastive Lexical Semantics, ed. Edda Weigand, 95 – 118; Robert S. Wyer, ed., Perspectives on Anger and Emotion (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1993); Howard Kassinove, ed., Anger Disorders. Definition, Diagnosis, and Treatment (Washington: Taylor & Francis, 1995); Giovanni Stanghellini, ed., Anger and Fury. From Philosophy to Psychopathology (Basel: Karger, 2000); James R. Averill, Anger and Aggression. An Essay on Emotion (New York: Springer, 1982) (73 – 101 also on the Middle Ages); Henning Bergenholtz and Ann-Theres Faets, “angest, Angst, vorhte, Furcht: Vorschläge für ein historisches Wörterbuch des Gefühlswortschatzes”, in Zur historischen Semantik des deutschen Gefühlswortschatzes, ed. Ludwig Jäger (Aachen: Alano, 1988), 56 – 94; Karl Galinsky, “The Anger of Aeneas”, American Journal of Philology 109 (1988), 321– 348; Daniel Lord Smail, “Hatred as a Social Institution in Late-Medieval Society”, Speculum 76 (2001), 90 – 126; Barbara H. Rosenwein, ed., Anger’s Past. The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998); Grubmüller, “Historische Semantik und Diskursgeschichte” (s. IVn74).  Internationalisation has ensured that the French terms émotion and sentiment are used interchangeably in the three-volume Histoire des Émotions (2016 – 2017).  Boddice, The History of Emotions, 49 (in similar vein, 45). This argument can also be found in Johannes F. Lehmann, “Geschichte der Gefühle. Wissensgeschichte, Begriffsgeschichte, Diskursgeschichte”, in Handbuch Literatur & Emotionen, 140 – 157 (esp. 146 and 149). Rob Boddice, “The Affective Turn: Historicizing the Emotions”, in Psychology and History. Interdisciplinary explorations, 147– 165 (156), thinks that (historically changing) individual emotional experience can be read out of the change in conceptions of emotion. The same view can be found in Rebecca Kingston, Kiran Banerjee, Yi-Chun Chien, and James McKee, “Introduction”, in Emotions, Community, and Citizenship, 3 – 32 (23).

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of emotional discourses, emotional conceptions, and emotional terminology even during premodernity should lead us to question the assumption that each epoch displaces and replaces the emotional experience of its predecessor.⁸⁰ The impression arises that emotion historians homogenise the course of emotion history. Competing conceptions of emotion in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, as also in the seventeenth century, are marginalised. The plurality of coexisting conceptions of emotion once more suggests that emotions are accessible to us not as psychic or physical conditions, but instead as interpretations of psychic or physical conditions.⁸¹ Historical emotion research needs to take into account the fact that the relation of scholarly conceptions or theories of emotion to everyday emotional experience changes from era to era. The distance between the two will be especially large during those periods in which learned discourse takes place in an idiom different from the one used by ‘the people’. This distance will also be especially large if there is no ‘public’ space for communication, as was true before the invention of printing. Moreover, it must be expected that contemporary learned theories can have different degrees of affinity to lived emotional experience. The doctrine that the affective state of a patient was owed to a faulty mixing of the four bodily fluids certainly had a more secure foundation in everyday life than any of Thomas Aquinas’ scholastic distinctions. The broad-brush idea of a constant and steady convergence between conceptions of emotion and emotional experiences seems to me highly questionable if one considers the changing history of education and literacy in the Western world. If, in his Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1820), the Scot Thomas Brown abandons the distinctions in the affective made above (for instance passion, sentiment, affection), leaves behind their associated moral evaluations, and instead seeks to introduce the morally uncontaminated term emotion as the sole term for all diverse affective conditions,⁸² the affective state of his contemporaries will not have changed as a consequence. The fact that one and the same term (Affekt, Gefühl, or Empfindung) was used by different disciplines (psychology, physiology, medicine, so-

Lewis and Stearns, “Introduction”, 4, do describe as a “crude statement” the belief of early emotion history “that changes in stated emotional values equated readily with actual emotional experience”.  By contrast, it is widely acknowledged that the modern ‘feeling culture’ is riven with contradictions. See Landweer and Newmark, “Seelenruhe oder Langeweile”, 103. They identify three contradictory elements of modern culture (first, a longing for authenticity and intensity of feelings; second, a striving for stoic serenity, cultivated through coaching; third, the control of feelings as a kind of emotional labour); but they then argue that “these three systematically incompatible tendencies” do not conflict since they are spatially and socially separated (because, for instance, authenticity is limited to the private sphere). But I see real conflicts here. The idea of “expressing oneself authentically about one’s own feelings” has become a fixed staple of German television in recent years.  See n20 above.  See Dixon, From Passions to Emotions. Dixon’s presentation is supplemented by Wassmann with reference to the German debate in the nineteenth century, “On Emotion and the Emotions”, 385 – 386 (s. n68 above); Wassmann, “Forgotten Origins”.

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ciology, literary studies), each with its own meaning, in Germany around 1900⁸³ entirely undermines any attempt to determine the affective state of Germans according to the terms or conceptions then in use. (b) We can also cast doubt on the parallels drawn between the history of words and emotional history that are commonly found in historical emotion research.⁸⁴ According to this thesis, the history of words for emotion(s) and the history of emotions move in lockstep: where a term for an emotion is missing, there the corresponding emotion is also absent.⁸⁵ Only those emotions would be learned and cultivated, it is argued, for which there was a corresponding name in a given language.⁸⁶ The validity of this view can be questioned not only on account of the contradictions in the arguments of its supporters,⁸⁷ but also because of some basic facts.

 Wassmann, “Forgotten Origins”, 164– 166.  On convergence between emotional processes and linguistic structures, see in detail Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 223 – 227, 233 – 246, 685 – 692 and 773 – 788. See also the scepticism of Susan J. Matt, “Recovering the Invisible. Methods for the Historical Study of the Emotions”, in Doing Emotions History, ed. Susan J. Matt and Peter N. Stearns (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 41– 53 (42– 44; “There are then obvious difficulties in studying words to understand emotions”, 43).  See, for example, 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), 193 – 220 (214: there is no emotion in the absence of the corresponding emotion word; change in the terminology of emotions indicates a change in emotions). The absence of an emotion term by no means implies the absence of that emotion; see, for example, Erich Auerbach, “Passio als Leidenschaft”, Publications of the Modern Language Association 56.4 (1941), 1179 – 1196, 1179 – 1180. He argues that it is careless to conclude from the absence in antiquity of a word exactly corresponding to a modern word that the substance of that modern word must have also been absent (Martin Elsky, “Introduction to Erich Auerbach, ‘Passio as Passion’” [“Passio als Leidenschaft”], Criticism 43.3 [2001], 285 – 308 [290]). See also VI.3 below.  See, among others, Frevert, “Was haben Gefühle in der Geschichte zu suchen?”; Frevert, Vergängliche Gefühle (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013), 13 and 15 (language generally facilitates feelings); Barbara Rosenwein, “Emotion Words”, in Le sujet des émotions au Moyen Âge, ed. Piroska Nagy and Damien Boquet (Paris: Beauchesne, 2009), 93 – 106; Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling, 6 – 7, 67– 87, 144– 168, 288 – 313; Rosenwein and Cristiani, What is the History of Emotions?, 41– 42.  In her work, for instance, Rosenwein constantly argues that historical-linguistic analysis of words for emotion provides adequate insights into the emotional experiences of people in the past. But in AHR Conversation 2012, 1496, she implies that the possibility of lending our feelings adequate expression is limited. For “our […] expressions are willy-nilly constrained by our emotional vocabulary and gestures” (my emphasis). In stating this, Rosenwein concedes that there is something prior to and external to language that we cannot capture in our words. This position contradicts not only social constructivism (we can only feel what the language of a community has already provided us with) but also Rosenwein’s conviction that one can get at people’s feelings through the analysis of their words. While Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?”, 213 – 214, equates the history of words and of emotions, she concedes in a contribution written with Pascal Eitler that a difference between language and emotion is possible; Eitler and Scheer, “Emotionengeschichte als Körpergeschichte”, 283.

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If one and the same name for an emotion is used for two completely different manifestations of an emotion, this word will give no precise information about the inner emotional experience denoted. In Greek antiquity, the anger of men and women was given the same word (orgè, chólos), but in the understanding of cultivated Greeks the anger of the man had nothing in common with the anger of the woman.⁸⁸ A man’s anger was the expression of his strength and doings, whereas that of a woman was thought to be the sign of a lack of self-control inherent to her gender. In this case, it was not the words orgè and chólos that determined the emotional state, but instead the social construction of gender. That language and emotion do not relate to each other unproblematically is also indicated by the fact that language is structured in a different manner from the inventory of emotion. The binary principle that dominates the set of words for feeling (pleasure/pain, love/hate, trust/mistrust, brave/cowardly) is embedded in the structure of ‘Western’ languages, and has nothing to do with the structure of emotions, which, in any case, are today thought of more in terms of a bundle or combination of emotions.⁸⁹ Analyses of emotional words have, for this reason, often led to false findings, since they tend to reproduce the structure of language, organised as sets of dichotomies, rather than the spectrum of emotions, which is in no respect dichotomous in structure – even if attempts have been made ever since antiquity to impose such an order. Clearly, no precise discrimination can be made between affective phenomena (jealousy, envy, amazement, and so on) in the way that our words lead us to think.⁹⁰ If, however, experiences and emotional terminology do not (always) coincide,⁹¹ it cannot be excluded that there are also cases in which it is not language that shapes emotion, but emotion that shapes language. Constructivist emotion research would then have to address the challenge posed by the possibility that language might, in fact, be shaped by emotion. The very many metaphorical expressions for emotional inner experience (“my spine tingled”, “it was as though he was struck by lightning”) give us some sense of how emotions can shape language. Linguistic imagery is preceded by corresponding emotional experiences. There are other factors that place in question the idea that the history of language and that of emotions can be set in parallel to each other. There is today a consensus that emotions are bound up with very complex cognitive and psychological processes, but we must also distinguish between oral and written accounts when individuals attempt to describe their affective states. The written account of an emo-

 Maurice Sartre, “Les Grecs”, 23 – 26.  See VI.4.  See Kenneth J. Gergen, “History and Psychology. Three Weddings and a Future”, in An Emotional History of the United States, 15 – 29 (23 – 24).  Jerome Kagan, What is Emotion? History, Measures, and Meanings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 191– 192, notes that emotionally relevant linguistic distinctions cannot capture the differentiation of emotional inner experience.

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tional state is not produced as rapidly as an oral description. And speech is not as quick as thought.⁹² Linguistic accounts of emotional states must therefore lag behind the ‘actual’ emotionally relevant cognitive processes,⁹³ if only because the written (and oral) reporting of emotional states can describe them only sequentially, whereas the sequence that is described actually happens simultaneously. The view that emotions are linked to the presence of words is also shared by performance theorists. If it is assumed that “emotion is formed through its articulation (and is not prior to its performance)”,⁹⁴ it follows that emotions emerge only with speaking or writing. But this contradicts everyday experience. A young girl can feel love even if she does not write a letter or does not confess her love orally. A husband can be tormented by jealousy even if he does not talk about it. Emotions exist in the absence of words.⁹⁵ The fact that certain words become taboo belongs in this context: if particular words or phrases cannot be uttered in a particular situation (“I hate you”, “I envy him”, “he’s an arsehole”), do the corresponding emotional states vanish? Finally, empirical studies call into question the idea that the history of words and of emotions follows the same path. The social constructivist idea that the emotional vocabulary of a society also determines the emotional experience of that society’s members finds little support in everyday life. Billie Melman (2012), for instance, records a range of individual emotional reactions elicited in visitors to the London Museum’s visualisation of nineteenth-century history.⁹⁶ On this basis, she rejects (32, 43 – 44) the constructivist account of the history of emotions, even though she acknowledges the influence of contemporary emotional vocabulary on the emotional experiences of Londoners (37– 38) and even though she rejects a universalist understanding of ‘horror’ (36). (c) There is no ignoring the fact that there is a degree of inconsistency regarding the theories with which we should study the history of emotions. Barbara Rosenwein has repeatedly criticised emotion historians who, in seeking to explain the emotional history of premodernity, make use of the hydraulic model.⁹⁷ Rosenwein rejects this explanatory approach,⁹⁸ pointing to two more recent theories of emotion that are better suited to understanding medieval emotional history: the cognitive and the social

 See Jonathan H. Turner, On the Origins of Human Emotions (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 93 – 118; and on this Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 213 – 216. See also IInn125 – 132 above.  See Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 776 – 781.  Barclay, “Performance and Performativity”, 15. A similar formulation can be found in Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 13 (“The feeling does not simply exist before the utterance […]”).  The fact that, conversely, the verbal expression of an emotional state can have emotional effects (what Reddy describes as emotives) is not affected by this.  Melman, “Horror and Pleasure”.  Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions”, 834– 836; Rosenwein, “Eros and Clio”, 434– 435 and 440 – 441; Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 13 – 15. See also Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 193 – 194. and 269 – 273.  See n4 above.

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constructivist ones. But from antiquity right up to the eighteenth century, physicians treated patients according to the Galenic understanding of emotion, according to which the mixture of the four bodily fluids influenced the given emotional state of a person.⁹⁹ According to the social constructivism favoured by Rosenwein, it cannot be ruled out that precisely this medical-natural philosophical teaching also determined the inner emotional experience of individuals.¹⁰⁰ There can be no doubt that Galen’s pathology of humours – the foundation of the hydraulic model – had a great influence on thinking, writing, and feeling right up to the eighteenth century: the idea that people’s bodily fluids influence their affective state.¹⁰¹ This can be shown with reference to very many linguistic metaphors. The idea of emotions as physical energies that force their way out retains a place in language even today. “He was almost bursting with envy”, “his blood boiled”, “he just had to let off steam”, “I was boiling with rage”, “the hatred he had suppressed for so long at last broke out”; someone is either “hot-blooded” or “has a cold heart”; we are “burning with rage”; someone “exploded with anger”.¹⁰² The traditional nature of these expressions would – in a social constructivist reading – allow one to conclude that the emotions to which they refer are also traditional. Centuries-old linguistic im-

 Knuuttila, Emotions, 94– 96, 107– 109, 214– 217 and 284; Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy, Sensible Moyen âge. Une Histoire des Émotions dans l’Occident Médiéval (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2015), 194– 204 (they even talk of a physically determined “mécanique des affects”, 194; in the English edition [2017], 135: “the emotional mechanism”); Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, 1– 39; Paster, Humoring the Body, 243 – 246; Douglas Trevor, The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England (Cambridge: CUP, 2004), 3 – 4 and 10 – 12; Robert L. Weston, “Medical Effects and Affects: The Expression of Emotions in Early Modern Patient-Physician Correspondence”, in Ordering Emotions in Europe, 263 – 281, here at 267, 271 and 274; Mareike Böth, Erzählweisen des Selbst. Körperpraktiken in den Briefen Liselottes von der Pfalz (1652 – 1722) (Köln: Böhlau, 2015), 304– 334 (the conception of melancholy has an impact on the individual); Jan Purnis, “Renaissance Discourses of Emotions”, in Emotions, Community, and Citizenship, 52– 74. For historical sources, see Jacques Chaillou, Traité du mouvement des humeurs dans les plus ordinaires émotions des hommes (Paris: Jean Couterot, 1678); Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall (London: Simmes, 1604).  McNamer, Affective Meditation, 13, admits this possibility but selects a different theoretical (performative) approach for her own study: emotions first arise with the expression of emotional utterances.  Paster, The Body Embarrassed, 17 (the doctrine of bodily fluids is said to have had a broad impact in the seventeenth century on the “discourse, experience, and expression of bodiliness and on the enculturation process in general”). Paster, Humoring the Body, 77– 134, describes the influence of bodily fluids (Galen’s pathology of humours) on the (imagined) affective state of female figures in Shakespeare’s dramas. See also Allison P. Hobgood, Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England (Cambridge: CUP, 2014), 12 ff.; Jennifer Radden, Melancholic Habits. Burton’s Anatomy and the Mind Sciences (Oxford: OUP, 2017), 18 – 48, 87– 93 and 253 – 265.  For the way in which sayings continue Galen’s pathology of humours, see Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, 169 – 170 (we “catch colds”, we “burn with anger”, we “have the stomach for” a particular activity); Paster, Humoring the Body, 244; Asifa Majid, “Current Emotion Research in the Language Sciences”, Emotion Review 4.4 (2012), 432– 443 (436 – 437); Jan Purnis, “Renaissance Discourses of Emotions”, in Emotions, Community, and Citizenship, 52– 74 (69).

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agery links emotions above all to physical feelings: “his hair stood on end” (fear, shock), “it sends shivers down my spine” (shock), “to rub someone up the wrong way” (bad mood), “lovestruck” (spontaneously falling in love). The Middle High German bëlgen (‘to be angry; to swell up’) and its derivatives (erbolge, ‘fit of rage’; erbolgen, ‘irate’) are striking proof of the traditional connection between ‘knowledge’ centred on the body and emotional experience.¹⁰³ For the Middle High German bëlgen (‘to rage against’), erbolgen (‘irate’), and so on derive from the Germanic root bëlg, which means ‘to swell up’ (Old Norse bëlgja, ‘swell up’). But what is the connection between ‘being angry’ and ‘swelling up’? Clearly, there is the idea that something swells up in the person who is angry, an idea retained in the New High German Blasebalg, meaning a bellows – an apparatus used to create a stream of air (for playing an organ or to strengthen a fire in a smithy). The anger of a person is thus linked to the swelling of the lungs, hence of the chest, pulling in more air. This was how premodern people described their anger (and experienced it?). Given that Barbara Rosenwein has argued in numerous studies that the history of words for emotion makes insight into the history of emotions possible,¹⁰⁴ it is surprising that she rejects any consideration of the knowledge of emotion that is embedded in words because it does not conform to modern theories of emotion.¹⁰⁵ Even if the original, literally understood formulation now has mainly a metaphorical sense (“I’m bursting with rage”),¹⁰⁶ the semantic influence of such metaphors on associated emotion words should not be underestimated.¹⁰⁷ At any event,

 The expression balgen (‘talk angrily’) still exists today in southern German dialects.  Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 32– 56; Rosenwein, “Thinking Historically about Medieval Emotions”, History Compass 8.8 (2010), 828 – 842 (833 – 836); Rosenwein, “Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions”, Passions in Context. International Journal for the Theory and History of Emotions 1 (2010), 1– 32 (13 – 17; separately, Rosenwein mentions “emotional metaphors”; 18); Rosenwein, “Emotion words”.  Jon Frederickson underlines that words for emotion and metaphorical expressions should not be treated separately, because the meaning of an emotion word (for example, anger) is ‘infiltrated’ by metaphor: Jon Frederickson, “The History of Emotions: An Introduction by Jan Plamper”, Psychiatrie 79.4 (2016), 351– 357 (354): “For instance, the word anger does not exhaust the content of the meaning of the word. That word is part of a network of words, including categories such as metaphor and metonymy: ‘I feel like I’ll explode.’ Researchers find that the metaphor networks by which we describe our emotions are universal, based on physiological functioning of the body.” Even if one does not accept the final statement, there is no question that there is a semantic entanglement of emotion words on the one hand and related metaphors on the other. For a thorough discussion, see Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 685 – 692.  Paster, Rowe, and Floyd-Wilson, “Introduction: Reading the Early Modern Passions”, 16 – 18.  See n105. Cf. also K.J. Gergen, “Metaphor and Monophony in the Twentieth Century Psychology of Emotions”, History of the Human Sciences 8.1 (1995), 1– 23; Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor and Emotion. Language, Culture and Body in Human Feeling (Cambridge: CUP, 2000).

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what is notable is the long life that such metaphorical formulations have.¹⁰⁸ This is all the more remarkable given that the scientific foundation for these linguistic formulations has long been removed by the modern natural sciences. Although cognitive science and psychopharmacology have long since given up thinking in dichotomies (mind/body, understanding/feeling, inward/outward), our everyday descriptions of emotional experiences still adhere to these categories.¹⁰⁹ Has the (unchanged) emotional experience of people perhaps contributed to the “durability of this vocabulary”?¹¹⁰ If so, we would be faced with a discrepancy that historical emotion research has not anticipated: between contemporary (cognitive) theories of emotion and everyday emotional experience.¹¹¹ From a constructivist point of view, the hydraulic model should not be dismissed as a ‘false’ construction but has to be taken seriously as a sociocultural ‘reality’.¹¹² Why should a view of how a person’s affective state is determined that is today regarded as ‘false’, but which was for centuries thought to be ‘true’, not have led to people experiencing their emotions in terms of this ‘false’ view?¹¹³ The pathology of humours in the form of a hydraulic model even formed the basis for argument in late medieval court proceedings.¹¹⁴ If one also takes into account the fact that the ancient therapeutic practice of blood-letting, based on the

 Douglas Cairns and Damien Nelis, “Introduction”, in Emotions in the Classical World. Methods, Approaches, and Directions, ed. Cairns and Nelis (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2017), 7– 30, point to the similarity of ancient and modern metaphorical (mostly relating to the body) descriptions of emotional experiences (16).  Paster, Humoring the Body, 244– 245.  This is what Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, 170, suspects.  In another context of argument, even the cultural relativist Monique Scheer concedes that what today count as obsolete ideas, such as the opposition of understanding and feeling, did in fact shape the way people felt, and that anyone who wishes to grasp the habitus of an era has to study the way that these norms were established. These emotional norms, which according to Scheer’s theory function as regulating emotional practices, make emotions; Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?”, 216.  This is how the philosopher Solomon, True to Our Feelings, 237, argues. He does not see in the hydraulic model any generally valid model of explanation for “emotional experience”, and calls it a myth; in particular, he regards the related image of emotions passively suffered as false. But he does concede: “Thus the hydraulic model represents an important part of the phenomenology of at least some emotions” (142– 149, quotation on 149). Cowan, “In Public. Collectivities and Polities” (2019), 159, does not reject “Elias’ hydraulic view of the emotions” outright, but points out the long tradition behind this conceptual model.  A report in a broadsheet about the dismemberment of a female body attributes to the attacker an outbreak of rage in terms of the hydraulic model; Charles Zika, “Violence, Anger and Dishonour in Sixteenth-Century Broadsheets”, 42; see n70 above.  In Helmut Puff, “The Reform of Masculinities in Sixteenth-Century Switzerland. A Case Study”, in Masculinity in the Reformation, ed. Scott H. Hendrix and Susan C. Karnant-Nunn (Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2008), 21– 44, a court case is presented in which a man accused of sodomy described the feelings he sensed in terms of the hydraulic model (ibid., 29).

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doctrine of the four bodily fluids, lasted well into the nineteenth century,¹¹⁵ one cannot maintain that the hydraulic model, or the idea that ‘anger is heat’, was a purely academic theory unknown to the common people and so incapable of influencing their affects.¹¹⁶ In view of my previous critical remarks regarding the tendency of historical emotion research to link the history of emotional conceptions with the history of emotional experiences, my support for relating the hydraulic model to everyday emotionality might be a source of some surprise.¹¹⁷ Yet the impact of the hydraulic therapeutic model on the everyday understanding of emotion seems to have far exceeded the influence of the emotional discourses of Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas. This is shown not only by the endurance of the corresponding linguistic formulations¹¹⁸ but also by the self-descriptions of people in courts of law.¹¹⁹

3 The Thesis The range of premodern and modern emotional conceptions, emotional terminology, and emotional discourses outlined above could provide a foundation for a new perspective on emotion history. The ethical or moral-theological bent of the major premodern theorists of emotion (Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and others) meant that they picked up on only some aspects of the difficult, complex phenomenon of the affective and the emotional. Once this is acknowledged, it follows that a large gap separated their treatment of emotion from the everyday emotional experiences of their contem-

 Ortrun Riha, “Der Aderlaß in der mittelalterlichen Medizin”, Medizin in Gesellschaft und Geschichte 8 (1989), 93 – 116.  Mullaney, The Reformation of Emotions, 21, is of the view that Galen’s learned pathology of humours did not influence the everyday feelings of people (cf. also Mullaney, ibid., 54– 62). Mullaney’s refusal to employ Galen’s pathology of humours as an explanatory model for the affective state of people in the English sixteenth century did not, however, meet with agreement from reviewers. See Richard McCabe in The Spenser Review 45.3.11 (winter 2016), (accessed 26 March 2018); Tanya Pollard in Theater Survey 58.1 (2017), 113 – 116, (accessed 26 March 2018).  My insistence on the hydraulic model as an emotional conception present in everyday life might also seem to conflict with my earlier critique of Elias’s image of the Middle Ages (see IV.3.a for my remarks on table manners). But the two positions do not have to be contradictory. On the one hand, the hydraulic model can be introduced as an explanation of, or excuse for, the emotional behaviour of people in premodern times. On the other hand, other people or social strata were able to, or thought themselves capable of, controlling their emotions and so refuted the hydraulic model. See Rüdiger Schnell, “Liebe und Freiheit. Ein literarischer Entwurf des männlichen Adels”, in Mittelalterliche Menschenbilder, ed. Martina Neumeyer (Regensburg: Pustet, 2000), 35 – 78. In this way, we once again find that we need to recognise the existence of differences within premodernity.  See n102.  See n114.

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poraries. Ancient and medieval theorists of emotion did not grasp the totality of the then-existing, or even possible, affective conditions, but dealt with those aspects of the complex phenomenon of affect/emotion that seemed important to them, given their philosophical, ethical, or moral-theological convictions, and that they could discern from their own limited standpoint in each case. It was the perspective of the observer that determined what was observed, what each found in their object.¹²⁰ Exactly the same occurred in eighteenth-century debates about what ‘sentiments’, ‘passions’, ‘affections’, ‘emotions’, ‘interests’ might be. Then, too, ethical and moral considerations led to the categorisation of various affective ‘movements’: powerful (negatively connoted) affects (passions, interests) were separated terminologically from gentle and social (virtuous) affects (affections, moral sentiments). Once again, the levels of observation and object became entangled.¹²¹ In the course of the nineteenth century, this interdependence of the studying subject and the studied object became very much more marked. Increasing numbers of new disciplines concerned themselves with affective processes, and this altered the perspective on the object and opened up new aspects of it. New light was thrown on it, and ever more features were revealed that played a part in the emergence of these affective states. Psychiatry, physiology, neurology, medicine, psychology, philosophy: they all dissected their object of study and developed new knowledge. But since they all proceeded from particular assumptions, they not only discovered something that was there but at the same time constructed this object for themselves. No wonder, then, that various scientific disciplines discovered different things in the same object, or thought that they had done so. Nor is it any surprise that competition both between and within disciplines led to competing views, theses, and positions. This process continues today. It is clear from these discourses of dispute between differing conceptions of emotion within an epoch that the history of conceptions of emotion does not always coincide with the history of affective experiences: those who live in such an age of competing conceptions of emotion cannot in their inner affective experience follow all the concurrent conceptions at one and the same time. Augustine maintained in opposition to the Stoics that ‘affects’ can perfectly well be compatible with reason, but the affective experiences of his contemporaries will not have been any different just because of this ‘new’ (or ‘other’) evaluation. This historical point makes it necessary to correct some widespread views of emotion history held today. These views hold, among other things, that the emergence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of the new German word Gefühl, or the (presumed) new meaning of feeling, indicate a new kind of sensibility. But the possibility cannot be ignored that the new, diverse and increasingly differentiated scholarly engagement with the object ‘affect’ merely discovered something that had

 This will become apparent in the treatment of melancholia and depression; see VI.1.  Cf., for instance, Stedman, Stemming the Torrent, 41– 44.

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long been there and just had not been noticed.¹²² It can be argued that this ‘new’ form of affect (feeling/Gefühl) was first discovered in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries because it was only then that this feeling/Gefühl became an emotional experience. However, this can be countered with the fact that there was by no means a consensus among the scholars at the time who described and explained this supposedly new ‘feeling’. This was not least because the description or identification of the phenomenon depended on the epistemological and moral systems of those considering it. Moreover, the term Gefühl was used both as a generic term and as a label for a particular category of ‘emotion’ from the late nineteenth century onwards. This ‘Gefühl’ does not seem to be as unambiguously clear as has been supposed. At the very least, the newly discovered physiological, neurological, and biochemical processes of affect did not suddenly appear in the nineteenth century: they were ‘only’ discovered and elaborated then. People’s emotional experiences do not (always) conform to the ‘new discoveries’ of academics. Consequently, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we are dealing with a combination of ‘discovery’ and ‘construction’. But dis-covering means to reveal something that was already there. We must also qualify the argument that the emergence of the term Gefühl, or the semantic change of the term feeling, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is connected with the emergence of ‘subjectivity’ and ‘sensibility’ in the eighteenth century and thus demonstrates a new kind of perception, and that therefore whatever was associated with the new term Gefühl could not have existed previously. Over the last twenty years, very many studies of subjectivity and inwardness in premodernity have been published.¹²³ The conception of ‘Gefühl’ might have been new. But the condition that this signifies – the subjective inner experience of sensual-physical arousal, or a feeling of inclination or aversion, of pleasure and pain – that can have existed previously. The present study provides evidence of this.¹²⁴ My thesis, then, is that ever-different and ever-new aspects of this potential for human affect have been constructed through discourse and experienced in the everyday world in the course of history. For this reason, the object ‘affect’ appears in a new light over and over again. There is no constant, linear development, but rather a historical process in which new things are continually appearing, one that is marked by repetition, fractures, and new beginnings. If one subscribes to Barbara Rosenwein’s thesis that a person can “without difficulty” move from one emotional community to

 Michael Krewet, Die Theorie der Gefühle bei Aristoteles (Heidelberg: Winter, 2011), 602, is of the view that Aristotle had a genuine understanding of “what we have described by the concept ‘feeling’ since the eighteenth century”.  See IV.2.a–b.  See IV.2.b–d, VI.4. Very many medieval texts mention subjective inner experience when they describe the emergence of love: see Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan und Isold, ed. Ranke, vv. 915 – 1076 and 11711– 12036; Andreas Capellanus, De amore, ed. Trojel, 5 (I 1; love grows out of thought [cogitatio] about the loved person).

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another,¹²⁵ this presupposes the simultaneity of different forms of emotion, not only epistemologically but even existentially and phenomenologically.¹²⁶ But let us stick to the question of the role played by what the ‘observer’ knows and the stance taken (episteme) by that observer. Over the past two thousand years, theorists of emotion have circled the phenomenon of ‘affect’ – difficult to grasp, a source of anxiety, experienced both joyfully and painfully – viewing it from everchanging positions and consequently accounting for it in different ways.¹²⁷ It is therefore quite understandable that even in the Middle Ages affect was construed in terms of a wide range of quite distinct (long-lasting or passing) circumstances with contradictory origins and effects. It is not the general phenomenon ‘affect’ itself that changed; instead, the perspective from which it appeared shifted, and with it the particular form that it assumed. The ways in which it was seen, the interests, the knowledge brought to the phenomenon – they were constantly changing. And so we are not dealing with different theories and conceptions of emotion in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and early modernity because the emotions of those living in each period were different; rather, writers on the subject dealt with the object emotion/affect from different standpoints, whether they were ethics, moral theology, natural philosophy, medicine, neurophysiology, or evolutionary biology.¹²⁸ Different cultural assumptions, different religious and moral convictions, different scientific and scholarly perspectives have led to the puzzling phenomenon ‘human affect’ being approached from different angles, constantly shifting the shape that it takes. I am aware that this proposition moves dangerously close to an idea that is taboo for contemporary historical emotion research: that there are emotional constants, that there are emotional experiences that are timeless, whether biologically or ontologically. That is not, however, what I am proposing; I am seeking to lay emphasis on a more complex and differentiated understanding of emotion/affect. I propose a mul Rosenwein, “Worrying about emotions”, 842; Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 128; Rosenwein in Plamper, “The History of Emotions”, 256.  Maddern, McEwan, and Scott, “Introduction”, in Performing Emotions in Early Europe, xv sq. (“There is no reason to suppose that the range of possible emotions would be smaller in past societies”).  Michael Champion, “Representing Emotions in Three Byzantine Orations of Michael Psellos”, in Understanding Emotions in Early Europe, 30, refers to the fact that Psellos (eleventh century AD) presented a wide spectrum of different psychic conditions and activities that is considerably more differentiated than many modern definitions of ‘emotion’.  Thus, for instance, a single emotion like ‘sympathy’ (whether understood as compassion or empathy) might be a constant of human existence, albeit one found in different forms in different eras. Ute Frevert, Emotions in History – Lost and Found (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2011), 149 – 204, places the development of secular and humanitarian conception of ‘empathy’, ‘sympathy’, ‘pity’, and ‘compassion’ in the eighteenth to the twentieth century; for criticism, see Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 609 – 619. Rob Boddice, “The Affective Turn”, 152, thinks “that ‘empathy’ as a concept did not exist before the twentieth century”. See also Boddice, The History of Emotions, 55 – 56. But also see Thomas Fischl, Mitgefühl – Mitleid – Barmherzigkeit. Ansätze von Empathie im 12. Jahrhundert (München: Herbert Utz, 2017), 231.

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tilayered, very complex biological-neurophysiological foundation – developed at the very latest in high Greek culture by 2000 BC – whose rich potential was realised in very many different ways in the course of history, a potential which still has not been exhausted today. I am not afraid of assuming the existence of a biological-ontological basis for human affect. But, first, I do not assume a basis that is fixed and predetermined for all time, but instead assume a broad spectrum of affective possibilities. Second, in the historical manifestations of this complex potential I in fact see no ‘progress’, no development, no inevitable movement towards sensitivity, inwardness, subjectivity, love of children, and so on. Instead, on the one hand I see many changes emerging, while on the other hand these changes often come to an end abruptly (see IV.1). In addition, I assume the simultaneity of many different affective circumstances in every era (see the introduction). Thinking in terms of developmental processes – as in for instance the civilising process – does, I feel, obstruct the formation of an appropriate approach to emotion history. ‘The’ history of emotion does not follow a continuous and linear developmental path; the history of the Western world is instead marked by a wide range of differing, conflicting, competing forms of affective potential. I present a model that is quite distinct from the idea that there is a historical development of biological foundations.¹²⁹ My approach instead assumes that the various eras, cultures, societies, and social strata, in different forms of social interaction and different communication situations, have all simply realised individual elements of the vast potential of ‘human affect’. Otherness and plurality, repetition and new departures, breaks and continuities, contradiction and harmony, dominance and marginalisation:¹³⁰ that is what marks my own approach to emotion history, not only for modernity but also for premodernity. In contrast to the developmental model favoured by emotion history, I present a model of conflict in discourse history and a model of plurality in emotion history. In every era, there are rival positions in the discourses on emotion, and various real experiences of emotion that differ according to situation, class, and gender. This also deals with the possible objection that my assumption of a biologicalontological basis supports the very view that I have been criticising – that there is such a thing as the history of emotion.¹³¹ The different historical forms of the assumed biological basis have to be interpreted and ordered according to our conception of emotion history. This means that there are two ways of proceeding, which have to be combined in studying these historical forms: revealing their ‘being’ and construing their ‘sense’. Since the biological basis is accessible only through historical forms, and because the latter require interpretation and these interpretations in  See, for example, Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?”.  It hardly seems likely, for instance, that the Germanic tribes of the early Middle Ages simply continued the physical emotional practices of Roman citizens (which according to practice theory were bound to the body).  See n11 in the introduction.

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turn differ, there will always be different histories of emotion. The great variety of such interpretations of the historical forms of emotions in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modernity testifies to the interplay between discovery and construction. The discursivisation of affect in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modernity has therefore been able to keep taking different features into account, because the phenomenon ‘affect’ was and is fantastically complex. A discussion of the historical sequence of shame and guilt cultures will support my argument that the historical study of emotion is less about development and more about ever-changing actualisations, or activations, of particular aspects of a much broader spectrum of emotional manifestations. It is, of course, recognised that there probably never was a pure culture of shame.¹³² All the same, it is tempting for the historical study of emotion to treat cultures of shame and of guilt as following a historical sequence. For wherever we postulate a culture of guilt, we also impute a degree of internalisation of affect. The individual feels guilty, and responsible for bad behaviour. In a culture of shame, by contrast, it is assumed that a social sanction – hence an external force – affects the individual. Accordingly, an outward loss of honour (shame culture, sociability) contrasts with an inner feeling of guilt (guilt culture, individuality). Hence, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a guilt culture are contrasted with the shame culture of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries.¹³³ If, on the other hand, it could be demonstrated that a shift from shame to guilt already took place in early antiquity,¹³⁴ and then in late antiquity from an (ancient-heathen) shame culture to a (Christian) guilt culture,¹³⁵ it would not be a huge leap to argue that in the history of the West there have often been shifts from shame to guilt cultures and back again. Above all, it would have to be conceded that in each era there were societies and social domains in which the fear of being shamed and feelings of guilt dominated to varying degrees.¹³⁶ There is a lot to be said for contrasting a monastic medieval guilt culture with a lay-aristocratic shame culture.¹³⁷ But in medieval monasteries young people were also brought up to fear shame, for instance by being shown up

 Millie R. Creighton, “Revisiting Shame and Guilt Cultures: A Forty Year Pilgrimage”, Ethos 18.3 (1990), 279 – 307; Peter von Moos, “Einleitung: Fehltritt, Fauxpas und andere Transgressionen im Mittelalter”, in Der Fehltritt. Vergehen und Versehen in der Vormoderne, ed. Peter von Moos (Köln: Böhlau, 2001), 1– 96 (66 – 67), on “crossovers between cultures of shame and of guilt”.  Stearns, “Shame, and a Challenge”.  Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational. See IVnn65 – 70 above.  Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin. The Christian Transformation of Social Morality in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013).  A similar argument can be found in Rita Werden, Schamkultur und Schuldkultur. Revision einer Theorie (Münster: Aschendorff, 2015), 20 – 21, who argues that guilt and shame are universal emotions and so are present in both cultures of shame and those of guilt, but that their culturally specific signatures and specific interrelationships distinguish a culture of shame from one of guilt.  Schnell, “Wer sieht das Unsichtbare?” (here I emphasise the difference between the monastery [guilt before God] and the court [shame before fellow humans]).

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in front of all other monks for some mistaken behaviour.¹³⁸ The distinction of shame and guilt meant little in the English late Middle Ages; for contemporaries, both were “relatively synonymous in the description and evaluation of human error”.¹³⁹ It therefore seems barely possible that cultures of shame and guilt can be arranged into a clear historical sequence. In my view, hardly anything has disappeared from the broad affective legacy of the long Western history of emotion.¹⁴⁰ The emotions that we declare to be ‘lost’ have in no way disappeared. They have just become invisible to us.¹⁴¹ The continual breaks and new beginnings in history – also in premodernity – may have meant that the whole affective potential has only ever been realised piecemeal in the course of history. Above all, the fact that some emotions are either not mentioned at all, or only in passing, in any given era does not in any way mean that those emotions were never, or rarely, experienced in that era.¹⁴² A change in the theoretical classification of affect does not always have to be linked to a corresponding change in affective inner experience. Any change in the perspective on a given phenomenon ends up rendering different aspects of that phenomenon apparent, but this does not mean the observed object itself has changed. Changes in perspectives on a given object make it seem different, but this does not always mean it is different. This reopens the debate over the relationship between the roles played by cultural and biological-anthropological forces in the phenomenon ‘affect’.

 Consuetudines Oigniacensis Monasterii, ed. Edmund Martène, De antiquis ecclesie rebus libri tres, Editio novissima, vol. III (Antwerpen and Venedig: Novelli, 1764), 340 – 344 (342a; chap. 12): shame also in the monastery.  Behrens, Scham, 309 and 318. Behrens, ibid., 320, summarises as follows: in the later fourteenth century, shame had both an externalised version with tendencies to social discipline and an inner variant involving internalisation (confession, for instance). Anne McTaggart, Shame and Guilt in Chaucer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), comes to a similar conclusion, arguing that in Chaucer shame is likewise linked to self-reflexivity.  ‘Affect’ and ‘feeling’ (the latter in the sense of emotions consciously experienced in the soul) were already distinguished in antiquity and the Middle Ages; Knuuttila, Emotions, 18 ff., 38 – 42, 107, 182 ff., 224 ff.  Every day there are reports in the newspapers that someone or other has acted (positively or negatively) in a way that no one could have anticipated.  See VIIn21. Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards”, The American Historical Review 90 (1985), 813 – 836 (824 and 826); Stearns, “Shame and a Challenge”; Behrens, Scham, 320 – 321. All of these studies reach the conclusion that the degree of discursivisation of an emotion (shame, for instance) in any one century says little about the social importance of that emotion during the period in question.

VI Premodern/Modern Emotions. Case Studies The preceding chapters have dealt with the methods, theories, master narratives, terminologies, and aims of historical emotion research. The various aspects of the problems described there will now be consolidated and elaborated with regard to particular emotions.¹ This will reveal the recurring continuities in emotional history. Regard for continuities is an important element of a balanced history of emotions. The military historian Dorothee Sturkenboom (2016) suggests that from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, “an attentive observer might […] be struck by the continuities in the military’s emotional experiences, standards and practices over the centuries. […] readers cannot fail to notice the prolonged presence of particular key emotions and feelings which were imposed, performed, and experienced in European ancien régime armies – such as courage, comradeship, compassion, devotion, calmness, and the desire for honour.”² Of course, she writes, historians must guard against the premature projection of “trans-historical emotions on to historical actors”, but “the final word is still out on whether emotions are hard-wired in the human brain or not”.³ If we move away from a historical chronology that seeks to distinguish the Middle Ages from the early modern period, and both periods from modern history, and if we also end the separation of those observing these periods, which has led to their objects of observation being contrasted with one another, we discover quite remarkable continuities.⁴ The history of anger has, for example, been constructed in quite different ways, depending on the era on which the emotion historian is working. His Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, “Enough Already with ‘Theories of the Emotions’”, in Thinking about Feeling. Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions, ed. Robert C. Solomon (Oxford: OUP, 2004), 269 – 278, makes clear that emotions should be looked for “within the context of a narrative scenario” (278).  Sturkenboom, “Battlefield Emotions”, 275 – 276.  Sturkenboom, “Battlefield Emotions”, 277. Summarising the contributions to Battlefield Emotions (2016), Sturkenboom maintains “that in Europe in the early modern period – even with the secularising trend mentioned above – changes in military emotional cultures may not have been all that drastic or fundamental: for centuries a small number of soldierly emotions and feelings continued to form the affective hard core of military culture. Armies used ‘emotional practices’ to grind certain affects into the men’s minds and bodies, and thus make them part of their ‘emotional habitus’”; Sturkenboom, “Battlefield Emotions”, 277.  See, for instance, Jean-François Thomas, “Sur la lexicalisation de l’idée de honte en latin”, in ‘Rubor’ et ‘Pudor’. Vivre et penser la honte dans la Rome ancienne, ed. Renaud Alexandre, Charles Guérin, and Mathieu Jacotot (Paris: Éd. Rue d’Ulm, 2012), 13 – 31. The semantics that Thomas establishes for the words pudor, verecundia, rubor is more or less identical with the modern definition of honte that he gives at the beginning of his essay: an unpleasant, embarrassing sentiment of one’s own inferiority, or one’s own unworthiness, of the depreciation of one’s status in the eyes of others (13). Thomas, ibid., 31, states the outcome of his lexical analysis of Roman antiquity thus: shame is the sentiment of a subject that has internalised the poor image society has formed of it, but the image is reinforced by the fact that this process of consciousness takes place under the gaze of others. Modern conceptions of shame are no different. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110692464-008

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torians of the modern period have treated the eighteenth century as the decisive shift in the history of conceptions of anger: the control of anger is said to have become a dominant theme then.⁵ By contrast, early modern specialists claim that there is a decisive change in the conception of anger during the sixteenth century. They suggest that at that time anger ceased being seen as external behaviour and was henceforth treated as an inner emotion that one had to control.⁶ Medievalists, finally, have demonstrated that the control of anger was an issue in medieval discourse.⁷ These different perspectives on one and the same object generate different histories of emotion. The following sections can provide only fragmentary contributions to the history of emotion. With that caveat in mind, they can be understood as case studies, since for every emotion discussed a distinct and basic problem of historical emotion research is raised.

1 Acedia – Melancholia – Depression The point of departure for this section is whether the three terms acedia, melancholia, and depression represent a historical sequence of three emotions:⁸ acedia (antiquity, Middle Ages) – melancholia (early modern period) – depression (from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries). Ute Frevert certainly supported this idea in her monograph Emotions in History – Lost and Found (2011).⁹ She argued that ‘depression’ was first named as such in 1905, and so at the beginning of the twentieth century became the successor to the medieval acedia (German Trägheit, English sloth) or the early modern melancholia (German Schwermut). Frevert described the medieval emotion acedia as at first being displaced by the early modern melancholia, which in turn was replaced by the feeling ‘depression’ (31– 36). Even if many signs of acedia, melancholia, and depression coincide, “the labelling, framing and contextualising of those signs” is said to be “vastly different”. Frevert argues that the three emotions belong to three “diverse systems of reference (magic and religions [acedia], arts and sciences [melancholia], neurobiology [depression])” (36). She therefore treats

 Carol Zisowitz Stearns and Peter N. Stearns, Anger. The Struggle for Emotional Control in America’s History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986), 30 – 31. On the historicity of anger, see IVnn72– 73 above.  Edward Muir, Mad Blood Stirring. Vendetta and Factions in Friuli during the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1993), xxvi; Enenkel and Traninger, “Introduction”, esp. 7– 9.  Rosenwein, ed., Anger’s Past; Thorsten W. D. Martini, Facetten literarischer Zorndarstellungen. Analysen ausgewählter Texte der mittelalterlichen Epik des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts unter Berücksichtigung der Gattungsfrage (Heidelberg: Winter, 2009); Freudenberg, Irarum nutrix. See also IIIn31 and IVnn74– 79 above.  I will not deal here with the question of whether acedia, melancholia, and depression are in fact emotions.  Ute Frevert, Emotions in History, 31– 36.

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acedia and melancholia as “lost emotions” (36). I will examine here the historical sequence of the three terms and the associated emotions that Frevert proposes, since this approach seems to me very typical of contemporary emotion research. We encounter the terms melancholia and acedia from late antiquity right up to early modernity. Rather than one simply following the other, they existed alongside each other. Since the time of antiquity, physicians associated melancholia with the depressed mood of a person who had a surplus of black bile (Greek melaina chole) in their body, which surplus could be attributed to an imbalance of the four bodily fluids (phlegm, blood, black and yellow bile). Black bile was regarded as the cause of melancholia, and the basis of this diagnosis could be found in Galen’s pathology of humours (second century AD), according to which the combination of the four bodily fluids determined the temperament, character, and mood of a person.¹⁰ In late antiquity, acedia was initially thought to be mainly an illness suffered by hermits and monks, then later thought also to affect lay persons. Acedia was believed to express itself, among other things, in a reluctance to work or to pray, and also in boredom or persistent sadness. For premodern times it is not possible to make a clear and consistent distinction between the affective conditions denoted by acedia and melancholia. This arises from the complexity of the affective conditions themselves. The complexity of affective conditions is evident from the attempts in recent emotion research to use modern expressions for what was supposedly understood by acedia and melancholia in premodern times. The medical historian Stanley W. Jackson has described the meaning of melancholy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as covering all senses of “sorrow, sadness, grief, dejection, or despair”.¹¹ During the entire Middle Ages, he writes, melancholia was a diagnosis for someone who was “fearful, sad, misanthropic, suspicious, tired of life, and often, but not always, afflicted with one of a number of circumscribed delusions” (74). The meaning of acedia was likewise plural, covering among other things dejection, sorrow, sadness, sloth, lassitude, weariness, inaction, carelessness, neglect.¹² This broad range of symptoms relating to acedia as well as to melancholia meant that both ‘illnesses’ shared many symptoms. No clear distinction was possible.¹³ Many scholastic writers

 On Galen’s pathology of humours and the history of melancholy, see Harald Derschka, Die Viersäftelehre als Persönlichkeitstheorie. Zur Weiterentwicklung eines antiken Konzepts im 12. Jahrhundert (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2013); Rainer Jehl, Melancholie und Acedia. Ein Beitrag zur Anthropologie und Ethik Bonaventuras (Paderborn: Schoeningh, 1984); Andrea Sieber and Antje Wittstock, eds., Melancholie – zwischen Attitüde und Diskurs. Konzepte in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Göttingen: V & R unipress, 2009). See also Vnn97– 119 above for the pathology of humours and the hydraulic model.  Stanley W. Jackson, Melancholia and Depression. From Hippocratic Time to Modern Times (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986), 76 (quotation), 5.  Jackson, Melancholia, 66.  The study by Jan Söffner, “Dürer – Castigione”, in Codierungen von Emotionen im Mittelalter, ed. Ingrid Kasten (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2010), 334– 364, esp. 339 – 344, shows how close acedia and melancholia are. Several emotions are involved in acedia: “anxiety, gloominess, idleness,

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attributed some cases of acedia to melancholia, and so to an imbalance of the four bodily fluids. One (melancholia) was declared to be the cause of the other (acedia).¹⁴ The Franciscan monk David of Augsburg (thirteenth century) distinguished three forms of acedia. One of these, which he characterised as bitterness of the mind, as despair, diffidence, suspicion, grief, sorrow, and an inclination to suicide, was, he said, sometimes caused by a surplus of black bile, and so by melancholia. ¹⁵ Hence, the difference of acedia from melancholia has less to do with the object described and more to do with the perspective of any given observer. Likewise, the difference in characterisation has less to do with the distinction between two emotional conditions than with the varying assessments of theologians and physicians (see below). Not every emotional category signifies a distinct and separate emotional experience. It is much the same with depression. This term arose in order to characterise, as an independent phenomenon, something that was already contained semantically in another term. That is the only explanation for the way that Stanley W. Jackson, in his history of the concepts acedia and melancholia, repeatedly uses the term depression when seeking to clarify the meaning of melancholia/melancholy. ¹⁶ Jackson cites the same symptoms for melancholy and depression: feeling down, being dispirited, discouraged, dejected, sad, melancholy, depressed, despairing.¹⁷ The concept depression, he argues, can be found for the first time in the seventeenth century, denoting “dejected states”, sometimes also meaning “depression of spirits” or “dejection”.¹⁸ But this was already the meaning of melancholy, which meant that the term depression could denote a form of melancholy in the eighteenth-century discussion of melancholia. ¹⁹ In the nineteenth century, depression signified “depression of minds, mel-

lethargy, pain, grief” (339). Erin Sullivan, Beyond Melancholy. Sadness and Selfhood in Renaissance England (Oxford: OUP, 2016), 38 – 41, points out that the symptoms and forms of behaviour associated with acedia and melancholia were substantially the same, any distinction between their everyday forms being difficult. Jennifer Radden, ed., The Nature of Melancholy. From Aristotle to Kristeva (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 69 – 71, taking as her point of departure some sections of texts by John Cassian (ca. 360–ca. 435), criticises the way in which acedia, melancholia, and depression are equated today, but concedes that acedia has many layers of meaning. Acedia can, she writes, describe “a mental state of despondence, lethargy, and discouragement” (69), but also involves “dejection and despondency” (69) and “weariness, inaction, carelessness, and neglect” (71).  Jackson, Melancholia, 71.  See Siegfried Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth, Acedia in Medieval Thought and Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), 160.  Jackson, Melancholia, 3 – 6.  Jackson, Melancholia, 3 – 4.  Jackson, Melancholia, 5. See also Trevor, The Poetics of Melancholy, 17: melancholy and sadness denote in the seventeenth century “a similar kind of depression”. The distinction between melancholy and depression will not, therefore, have been great, especially since in the seventeenth century a broad range of symptoms was attributed to melancholy; Schmidt, Melancholy and the Care of the Soul, 8 and 150.;s. n23 below.  Jackson, Melancholia, 5.

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ancholia, and melancholy”.²⁰ Depression was primarily used in cases where melancholia was described as an affect. Around 1900 the term melancholia gave way to depression. ²¹ The period in which the meaning of ‘depression’ was contained within the term melancholia/melancholy was followed by a period in which this meaning got a separate name. It was not a new emotion that emerged, but a new name for something familiar.²² The number of specialist medical terms has grown enormously since the nineteenth century. All the same, newly discovered and newly named affective states can have been in existence already. The discovery of a medical condition in the twenty-first century does not always have to mean that the condition did not exist centuries before. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century neurologists and physicians did not discover a new illness, but studied familiar symptoms more carefully and from this arrived at a new understanding of a pathological condition. The terminology employed acquires a substantive function in the process, as Jeremy Schmidt’s study of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries demonstrates. Physicians diagnosed and prescribed for ‘melancholy’ in terms of a “medical language”, whereas moral theologians worked with a “theological language”.²³ A unitary melancholy gave rise to a “religious melancholy” and a “medical melancholy”. The reason why acedia and melancholia are now mostly – as in Frevert – understood as two different affective conditions is that in premodernity it was almost exclusively theologians who wrote about acedia, whereas physicians mainly wrote about melancholia. But the symptoms of both conditions largely coincided, so that it can be said that what medieval theologians described as acedia was described by physicians as melancholia. ²⁴ Hence, the framework for the representation of acedia was also used for the representation of melancholia in sixteenth-century paint-

 Jackson, Melancholia, 6.  Jackson, Melancholia, 6. But Jackson, ibid., 7, does make the point that the term melancholia underwent a revival during the second half of the twentieth century, now being thought of as a subtype of a “major depressive episode”.  Michael Mecklenburg, “Traurig töten. Depressionsabwehr in der historischen Dietrichepik”, in Melancholie, ed. Sieber and Wittstock, 159 – 178; Mecklenburg suggests that the condition of depression existed as early as the Middle Ages. For Frevert, by contrast, depression is a characteristic of modernity.  Jeremy Schmidt, Melancholy and the Care of the Soul. Religion, Moral Philosophy and Madness in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 8 – 11, 150 – 162 and 186.  Pierre Levron, “Mélancolie, émotion et vocabulaire. Enquête sur le réseau lexical de l’émotivité atrabilaire dans quelques textes littéraires du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle”, in Le sujet des émotions, 231– 271 (231– 235); Stanley W. Jackson, “Acedia the Sin and its Relationship to Sorrow and Melancholia in Medieval Times”, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 55 (1981), 172– 181; Atwood D. Gaines, “Medical/Psychiatric Knowledge in France and the United States: Culture and Sickness in History and Biology”, in Ethnopsychiatry. The Cultural Construction of Professional and Folk Psychiatries, ed. Atwood D. Gaines (New York: State University of New York Press, 1992), 171– 201 (esp. 182 ff.); Walter Blank, “Der Melancholikertypus in mittelalterlichen Texten”, in Mittelalterliche Menschenbilder, ed. Neumeyer, 119 – 145.

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ing.²⁵ Acedia was however branded by moral theologians as a sin, whereas physicians diagnosed melancholia as an illness that could be cured.²⁶ There are substantive indications that acedia and melancholia sometimes involved the same emotional condition in the Middle Ages – albeit one that from a moral-theological standpoint was construed as acedia, but from the standpoint of medicine and natural philosophy was treated as melancholia. ²⁷ Unlike Frevert, I am inclined to propose a change not in the observed phenomenon – a change in the objects – but instead a change in the observing subjects. It is not the object that has changed, but the view of that object.²⁸ The same move is repeated in modernity with the term depression. ²⁹ The knowledge, methods, and framing questions of the observing subject – whether that be a physician, neurophysiologist, social psychologist, psychotherapist, or biochemist – change, and hence also the assessment and description of what is one and the same pathological condition. It could also be the case that the way in which the ideal of ‘cheerfulness’ has increasingly become a model for the American middle classes since the nineteenth century has itself contributed to the fact that, more than ever before, any sign of rumination or sorrow is taken as a sign of depression.³⁰ It is not that melancholy has changed into depression; instead, the changed perspective of the social psychologist has made depression out of melancholy.³¹ I wanted to demonstrate here that the history of names for emotions in no way unfolds in parallel to the history of emotions. It has become clear that it was not always changes in emotion that were responsible for changes in the names for emotions, but instead changes in the standpoint of observers. Both theses are confirmed

 Jackson, Melancholia, 76.  Medieval physicians regarded ‘melancholy’ and lovesickness as having the same manifestations; Schnell, “Mittelalter oder Neuzeit? Medizingeschichte und Literaturhistorie”, 263 – 269.  The theologian Bonaventura (thirteenth century) did discuss acedia a n d melancholia, and their relationship to each other; but for him melancholy was primarily a somatic condition for the explanation of which he turned to physicians and natural philosophers (Jehl, Melancholie und Acedia, 15 – 89). By contrast, he understood acedia primarily as a moral phenomenon (vice, sin), for whose description he drew on theology and ethics (Jehl, 91– 262). He related the two phenomena (Jehl, ibid., 263 – 306) by ascribing to (somatically conditioned) melancholy (or the somatic disposition to melancholy) a certain amount of blame for the emergence of the sin acedia (Jehl, 281). David of Augsburg argued in a similar way; see nn14– 15 above.  See also Giovanni Colombetti, “What Language Does to Feelings”, Journal of Consciousness Studies 16.9 (2009), 4– 26 (16 – 17).  The contribution by Pierre-Henri Castel, “Le cas de la dépression”, in Histoire des Émotions, t. 3 (2017), 326 – 342, clearly shows how medical debate regarding the correct diagnosis and treatment for depression in the twentieth century contributed to the construction of the pathology of depression.  See Christina Kotchemidova, “From Good Cheer to ‘Drive-by Smiling’. A Social History of Cheerfulness”, Journal of Social History 39.1 (2005), 5 – 37 (esp. 6 – 8).  Erin Sullivan has shown for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries how consistent engagement with the symptoms of acedia and melancholia on the part of physicians and natural philosophers led to a deeper understanding of these ‘dis-eases’; Sullivan, Beyond Melancholy, 38 – 49.

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by a study conducted by the philosopher and psychologist Rom Harré together with a psychiatrist.³² We can conclude from their work that both phenomena, acedia and depression, were intermingled at the level of discourse for centuries (229). In addition, the psychiatrist establishes that, while no one talks of acedia any more now, we still encounter its symptoms, albeit hidden behind other terms (ennui, Weltschmerz, neurasthenia, neurosis). “The condition has three symptoms: First there is a mood disturbance of fear and sadness. Second, there is the complaint of doing nothing useful, and behaviour which supports that. Third, there is an insensibility to both the pain and the pleasure of the world.”³³ The constructivist Harré has to admit “that there may be evidence to support the idea that accidie is with us once again, though lacking a supporting vocabulary” (220). A 2011 study by Werner Post also supports the idea that forms of acedia still exist in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and that the distinction of melancholy from depression is not easy.³⁴ Features of acedia (apathy, gloom, weariness, indolence, melancholy, resignation, pessimism), he writes, can be found in the writings of the philosopher Kierkegaard (1813 – 1855), in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), and in Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (1927).

2 Disgust and Aesthetics Disgust is considered as a primary, basic emotion.³⁵ But can a history of this emotion – beyond Norbert Elias’s thesis that disgust first emerged in the early modern period – be written?³⁶ Quite possibly, it is not the feeling of ‘disgust’ that has changed, but what prompts or expresses it. In this section, however, I am less concerned with proving historical changes than with demonstrating the contradictory variety of emotion in any one era.³⁷ This makes efforts to write a ‘history of emotion’ extremely difficult. Even with

 Rom Harré and Robert Finlay-Jones, “Emotion Talk Across Times”, in The Social Construction of Emotions, ed. Harré (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 220 – 233.  Harré and Finlay-Jones, “Emotion Talk Across Times”, 232.  Werner Post, Acedia – Das Laster der Trägheit. Zur Geschichte der siebten Todsünde (Forschungen zur europäischen Geistesgeschichte 12) (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 2011), 117– 140. See also IIn49 above.  A few references from an extensive literature on disgust are Winfried Menninghaus, Ekel. Theorie und Geschichte einer starken Empfindung (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1999); Susan B. Miller, Disgust: The Gatekeeper Emotion (Hillsdale: Analytic Press, 2004); Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Demmerling and Landweer, Philosophie der Gefühle, 93 – 110; Paul Rozin, Jonathan Haidt, and Clark R. McCauley, “Disgust”, in Handbook of Emotions, ed. Michael Lewis, Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones, and Lisa Feldman Barrett, 3rd ed., (New York: The Guilford Press, 2008), 757– 776.  Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, 97– 99, 114– 119, 159 – 160 and 414– 421.  Kagan, What is Emotion?, 142– 189, draws attention to the differences of emotional experiences within the twentieth century (social stratum, gender, individual character, age, ethnicity); s. Vn91.

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such a basic emotion like disgust, the differences within one and the same century seem to be greater than those between people living in quite different eras. If such differences can be shown to exist within one family, the idea that the family forms an emotional community will also lose the validity that is so often taken for granted. My textual foundation here is the autobiography of the Swiss physician Felix Platter (1536 – 1614), written between 1609 and 1614 about events that took place during the years 1536 to 1567.³⁸ Platter repeatedly reports situations of emotional relevance in his childhood, such as a serious injury to a playmate (85 – 86), his anxiety about evil spirits at night (59), his fear of entering a room in which a child had just died (60), the corporal punishment meted out to him by his father (60 – 61), and the affective impression that his father’s sermons made on him (79). But I would like to focus here on his frequent remarks about one emotion: that of disgust. When Felix Platter was one year old – he was told about the events later – the following happened (54): My mother had a nursemaid with part of her finger missing. She looked after me. I did not want to take any food from her, and when she tried to push gruel into my mouth with her stump I began to cry, and sometimes spat the gruel out. It was plain to anyone that her stump disgusted me. And so the nursemaid had to be dismissed. From this people concluded that I was, as they say, ‘slick as a cat’ [katzenrein], which later turned out to be true. Throughout my life, people who had parts of their limbs missing, or who lacked an arm or a leg, have disgusted me; and in my youth I was frightened of those who had a visible physical disability of some kind, and avoided them.

Little Felix felt disgust in the presence of people with a physical disability. Those around him drew the conclusion that the child had a very marked sense of neatness or wholesomeness. A person had to be ‘clean’ or ‘neat’ – one could also say ‘perfect’. In fact, Felix Platter seems to have had a very marked sense of perfection or beauty on the one hand, and a revulsion against anything distorted or fragmentary on the other. When he was nine, the following happened (78): A beautiful woman from Solothurn was with my father for a while, and she always kissed me, which I liked, even though I was a child. But when the old and infirm sister of my mother wanted to kiss me, I fled and began to scream.

Even as a youth, Felix had a weakness for female beauty. He would mention that the daughter of a farmer, or a bride at a wedding, or even a woman he did not know at all was beautiful (90, 95). The connection between his liking for everything neat and beautiful on the one hand, and his disgust at everything that was impure on the other, is especially clear in another incident (101):

 Felix Platter, Tagebuch (Lebensbeschreibung) 1536 – 1567, ed. Valentin Lötscher (Basel and Stuttgart: Schwabe, 1976). Page numbers from this edition are given in parentheses in the text.

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I hated everything that was impure and so was disgusted by lots of things: I was, as they say, ‘slick as a cat’. Everyone knew that; and so I was often tormented. When my sister was cutting rings from boiled animal throats at the table and putting them on her finger, I was overcome with such disgust that I couldn’t watch any longer but had to run away from her. And when she came after me, and tried to touch me with the fingers on which the rings were hanging, I fled, and she chased me back and forth. She often did this, and so eventually it was not just rings of meat, but all rings, whether they were gold or silver, that disgusted me, so that later I never wore a ring. Nor could I, without repugnance, take in my hand something that was round and had a hole, like a bobbin on a spinning wheel; I was revolted by anything like that, and this revulsion lasted all my life. To try me, someone would hide a ring in a piece of bread, or some food, or a cup, or some such. As soon as I saw this, I felt quite ill and could hardly stop myself from being sick.

The detail of the report testifies to the significance that Felix attributed to this emotional reaction. He reacted in a different way, and more strongly, to particular external phenomena than anyone else in his family. He liked beauty, and was revolted by everything that was ugly and imperfect.³⁹ What is of interest here for emotion history is that those around Felix interpreted his disposition to feelings of disgust as a personal quality. Felix differed in this from his siblings, who teased him precisely because of this ‘weakness’. Felix Platter had a very individual and marked sense of disgust.⁴⁰ As a historical conclusion, it can be said that some feel disgust, whereas others do not. It is not just Felix Platter who claims that he is disgusted by more things than other people: this is confirmed by third parties. Hence, this is not merely a subjective perspective on the events involved. If Felix is treated within his own family as an ‘outsider’ when it comes to disgust, it cannot any longer be maintained that this family forms an emotional community.⁴¹ Every social community (a family) is by no means also an emotional community. Felix Platter reacted to several situations and stimuli differently from his siblings. What does social constructivism have to say about this kind of finding? We are not dealing here with a culturally formed emotional reaction; quite the opposite, Platter’s sense of beauty, for music,⁴² and for cleanliness can be understood as an

 On the interdependence between sensitivity to beauty and feelings of disgust, see Schnell, “Ekel und Emotionsforschung. Mediävistische Überlegungen zur ‘Aisthetik’ des Hässlichen”, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 79 (2005), 359 – 432; Schnell, “Die höfische Kultur”.  See Hans Christoffel, “Psychiatrie und Psychologie bei Felix Platter (1536 – 1614)”, Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie 127 (1954), 213 – 227 (esp. 224– 225 on Platter’s phobia regarding rings).  This applies less strongly to the family of Felix’s father, Thomas Platter. His familial bonds were very fragile, since he was looked after by distant relatives from an early age. See Thomas Platter, Lebensbeschreibung, ed. Alfred Hartmann, 2nd ed., revised and supplemented by Ueli Dill (Basel: Schwabe & Co, 1999).  See Felix Platter, Tagebuch, 70: “I had a special liking for music, and particularly for musical instruments. When I was still very young, I began to stretch strings on clothes pegs, made a bridge un-

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individual disposition that was associated with a very marked and powerful sense of disgust at everything lacking in beauty and at physical dirtiness. Felix Platter could not himself explain the origin of this feeling at all. He only stated his childhood liking for beautiful women and his loathing for ugly ones. His disgust cannot be dismissed as a cultural construction, for even his siblings felt quite differently about such things. When he was a child, he really liked it when he was kissed by beautiful women. He was disgusted by ugly women, physical disabilities, and above all by that which was unclean. These individual emotional experiences resist attempts on the part of historical emotional research to typify particular eras.⁴³

3 Angst/Furcht (Fear, Dread, Anxiety) Contemporary emotion research has seen the establishment of an approach that reads the history of emotion out of the history of terms employed for emotions: (a) if the terminology used for emotions changed, this is treated as a reliable indicator that the emotions thus signified also changed; (b) where there is no name for a specific emotion, this is treated as meaning that the corresponding emotion is also absent.⁴⁴ In accordance with this parallelisation of word and emotion, each emotion is signified by one particular word. The lexical field ‘fear’, for example, is made up of a number of words (anxiety, trepidation, dread, fright, worry, terror, horror, awe). Each of these words refers to a particular kind of ‘fear’. None of these terms is fully semantically identical with any of the others. The fact that each emotional signifier relates to a specific and separate emotion lends supports to the approach in question. All the same, there are cases in lexical history where this rule of ‘one word – one emotion’ does not hold. The following case study illustrates that. In present-day German, two words are mainly used for the feeling prompted by the possibility of danger or of pain: Furcht and Angst. ⁴⁵ In colloquial speech, however, no semantic distinction between the two is usually made: one can say “Ich fürchte mich vor einem dritten Weltkrieg”, but also “Ich habe Angst vor einem dritten Welt-

derneath, and then started scratching them with my hands and a bow; I really liked that.” See further Felix Platter, Tagebuch, 63 and 73.  The theory that individuals within families had “a range of emotional styles at their disposal” (Alston and Harvey, “In Private. The Individual and the Domestic Community” [2019], 139) is not a sufficient explanation either. Psychoanalytic models of explanation seem to me to lead further than explanations based on emotion history.  See, for example, Monique Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?”, 214. For criticism of such a close connection between lexical history and the history of language, see Matt, “Recovering the Invisible”, 42– 44. See also Vnn84– 96 above.  Angst (fear) can also be an attitude, such as for instance a fear of strangers; Erhard Oeser, Die Angst vor dem Fremden. Die Wurzeln der Xenophobie (Darmstadt: Theiss, 2015). For the distinction of sympathy as an emotion from sympathy as an attitude, see Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 611– 617.

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krieg” (“I am afraid of a Third World War”), without any semantic difference being made. Granted, the psychology of emotions and philosophy do make a distinction – Angst is “an undirected, free-flowing feeling”, whereas Furcht is “an emotion directed towards a particular object or circumstance”. But this effort to make a semantic demarcation is not fully convincing.⁴⁶ The question arises of whether the supposed semantic difference between the two emotion words relates to differing emotional experiences, or whether the difference is purely one of discourse. Modern efforts to make a semantic difference between the terms Furcht and Angst appear to correspond to the distinction between timor (‘Furcht’) and anxietas (‘Angst’) in the work of Thomas Aquinas (died 1274). He argued that timor is a feeling “directed at a future evil that is anticipated and sufficiently threatening”, coupled with the hope that it will be avoided. Brungs has argued that Aquinas regarded anxietas, by contrast, as a “feeling of oppression”, as “numbed, frozen behaviour” linked to pain or grief.⁴⁷ In Aquinas, Brungs writes, the (frequently used) word timor (‘Furcht’) has connotations of hoping to avoid what is feared, and the (rarely used) word anxietas/angustia (‘Angst’) conveys pain or grief.⁴⁸ By contrast, many passages in the Middle High German love romance Partonopier und Meliur by Konrad von Würzburg (died 1287) do not distinguish the meaning of the term vorhte (‘Furcht’) from that of the term angest (‘Angst’).⁴⁹ Both terms are used where a character is subjected to a feeling of being hemmed in. A character can be inwardly seized by vorhte as well as angest, both indicating a feeling of being constricted.⁵⁰ Consequently, no consistent semantic distinction can be found between angest and vorhte in Konrad’s Partonopier und Meliur. ⁵¹

 Demmerling and Landweer, Philosophie der Gefühle, 63. Demmerling and Landweer do deal with philosophical attempts to discriminate between Angst and Furcht in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (76 – 91), but use the two terms interchangeably in their own description of the phenomenon (63).  Alexander Brungs, Metaphysik der Sinnlichkeit. Das System der Passiones Animae bei Thomas von Aquin (Halle a.d. Saale: Hallescher Verlag, 2002), 174 and 176.  Brungs, ibid., 144– 176.  The fact that the terms angest and vorhte coincide in many passages of Konrad’s romance is certainly due to the fact that angest itself has a broad range of meanings. In many places where he uses the word angest, the translation Befürchtung or Besorgnis (‘anxiety, apprehension’) would be more appropriate than Angst.  The Middle High German term angest shares with New High German Angst the idea of a feeling of confinement, constriction. Philosophical emotion research associates ‘Angst’ with a physically sensed feeling of being confined, associated with an impulse to flight; Demmerling and Landweer, Philosophie der Gefühle, 23 and 63 – 91.  Annette Gerok-Reiter, “angest/vorhte – literarisch. Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Emotionsforschung zwischen Text und Kontext”, Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften 2010, Issue 2 (Topic “Emotions”), 15 – 22, does not differentiate between the meanings of vorhte and angest. See, nonetheless, Gerd Fritz, Historische Semantik (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 1998), 119 – 120 (arguing that angest and vorhte do coincide in some aspects of their meaning, and that the range of usage of angest does not correspond to New High German Angst).

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What is worth noting in regard to the argument being presented here is that the Latin scholar Thomas Aquinas sought to distinguish anxietas and timor semantically in a manner that did not coincide with the poetic practice of the contemporary vernacular poet Konrad von Würzburg, who used angest and vorhte interchangeably. Obviously, Aquinas adhered to a discourse practice that differed from that of Konrad. In one and the same century, Angst (anxietas) and Furcht (timor) were in the one case distinguished, in the other equated. To what feeling does the former term refer, to what the latter? Do we need to treat the emotional concepts of a medieval Latin scholar as distinct from those of a vernacular writer? That would mean having to assume divergent linguistic ‘socialisations’ for the Middle Ages. At any event, given such differences within a single era, it is difficult to maintain that the history of words and emotions runs in parallel.⁵² In Konrad’s presentation of angest, we can see an “early, very precise description of today’s clinical symptoms of anxiety”.⁵³ It reminds us of the expressions that we still use to describe Angst in German: the hero Partonopier becomes white with fear (verses 1248 – 1249), he loses control of his limbs (1245), he freezes (1264– 1267), his hair stands on end (1278 – 1279), and he breaks out in a cold sweat (728 – 733, 1212– 1215). The fact that these idioms are still used today in connection with the term Furcht testifies to the interchangeability of Furcht and Angst in modern colloquial German. Recent studies that deal with fear as an emotional condition treat it more in terms of discourse than in terms of emotional experiences. The collections of Scott and Kosso (2002) and Naphy and Roberts (1997) are less concerned with the emotion Angst/Furcht than with conceptions of Angst/Furcht, or with social strategies for overcoming fear.⁵⁴ Nonetheless, an anthropological substratum remains in these studies. Anne Scott and Cynthia Kosso assume,⁵⁵ for example, that “the general nature of fear”, and also the “physiological responses” of Furcht/Angst, are the same across cultures. They argue, however, that despite the “universal qualities and categories of fear”, the forms of expression, social functions, and assessments of fear are culturally specific. If one follows this idea through to its conclusion, this means that

 See also V.1– 2.  Gerok-Reiter, “Die Angst des Helden und die Angst des Hörers. Stationen einer Umbewertung in mittelhochdeutscher Epik”, Das Mittelalter 12.1 (2007), 127– 143 (141).  The Scott and Kosso (2002) anthology demonstrates, moreover, the variety of aspects that can attract the attention of current study of a particular emotion (Furcht/Angst). They include how people used to deal with their emotions, or how they responded to them; how they expressed those emotions; how they assessed them; what role those emotions played in their lives; what functions were ascribed to those emotions. Here we learn about “experiences” of an emotion only via literary texts. See Anne Scott and Cynthia Kosso, “Introduction”, in Fear and its Representations in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Scott and Kosso (Turnholt: Brepols, 2002), xi – xxxvii. Many contributions, indebted as they are to the history of ideas, could have been written forty years ago.  Scott and Kosso, “Introduction”, xii. See also William G. Naphy and Penny Roberts, eds., Fear in Early Modern Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997).

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there is an anthropological emotional substratum, ‘fear’, that ‘merely’ undergoes sociocultural modification (in expression, function, and assessment).⁵⁶ This would undermine any emotion history that sought to identify emotional experiences that are specific to time and culture. The problems touched on here can be examined in the scenes of anxiety that the Swiss Thomas Platter (1499 – 1582) outlined in his autobiography of 1572.⁵⁷ It is well known that diaries and autobiographies do not (only) describe real events but also modify them in several respects.⁵⁸ What the present, speaking ‘I’ tells us about the past, described ‘I’ always precedes the moment of speaking or writing. Both historical and literary emotion research have to take account of this difference between present utterance and represented feeling.⁵⁹ But the situations described by Thomas Platter do not give the impression that ‘Angst’ or ‘Furcht’ are dominant as qualities on the level of discourse. There is more a sense of a real, lived anxiety, one that is encountered again and again, not only in many sixteenth-century autobiographical texts but also in people’s lives today. Here I will cite two scenes that are related to the semantic differentiation of Angst from Furcht. Between the age of seven and eight, Thomas Platter lived with relatives in a small Swiss village. He looked after goats, which he drove up the mountain every day. One day the following happened:⁶⁰ One day I was driving my goats across a ridge. They clambered to the right up a cliff. The path was only one pace wide, the drop was 1,000 Klafter [about 1,800 metres]. One goat after the other went across the crag, scrabbling to get a foothold in the thin scrub on the cliff. When they had all got up I set out to follow them. But I had only gone a little way up the grass

 See the criticisms raised by Andreas Bähr, Furcht und Furchtlosigkeit, 23 – 33.  Thomas Platter, Lebensbeschreibung, ed. Hartmann and Dill.  Relevant in this respect is, in particular, the distinction between statements in the first person (in a poem, autobiography, letter, or similar) that evoke authenticity on the one hand and the speaking subject that reports about this ‘I’ on the other. From the moment that this subject narrates about itself in the first person, there is a discrepancy between the describing and the described subject/‘I’, the latter always being an earlier, former ‘I’. The ‘I’ doing the talking can never fully comprehend the ‘I’ being described. A distinction has to be made between the stating ‘I’ and the described ‘I’ in the case of poems (where there is a textual ‘I’), autobiographies, and letters.  For the most recent account of this debate in medieval literary studies, see Sonja Glauch and Katharina Philipowski, eds., Von sich selbst erzählen. Historische Dimensionen des Ich-Erzählens, (Heidelberg: Winter, 2017). See also Fabian Brändle, Kaspar von Greyerz et al., “Texte zwischen Erfahrung und Diskurs. Probleme der Selbstzeugnisforschung” in: Von der dargestellten Person zum erinnerten Ich. Europäische Selbstzeugnisse als historische Quellen (1500 – 1800), ed. Kaspar von Greyerz, Hans Medick, and Patrice Veit (Köln: Böhlau, 2001), 3 – 31; Kaspar von Greyerz, “Erfahrung und Konstruktion: Selbstrepräsentation in autobiographischen Texten des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts”, in Berichten, Erzählen, Beherrschen. Wahrnehmung und Repräsentation in der frühen Kolonialgeschichte Europas, ed. Susanna Burghartz, Maike Christadler, and Dorothea Nolde (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 2003), 220 – 239. The recounting of a narrative orients itself around the addressee’s framework of expectations.  Thomas Platter, Lebensbeschreibung, ed. Hartmann and Dill, 29 – 30.

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when I could not go any further. I could move neither forwards nor backwards. Nor could I jump down behind me, since I feared [ich forcht] that I would lose my balance and tumble over the terrible cliff. So I stayed put for a while and waited for God’s help. I could not help myself, apart from holding tight to a bunch of grass with both hands. […] In my plight what gave me greatest anxiety [was mier aller ängstest] was that I feared [forcht] the great eagles that flew in the air below me, that I feared [forcht] that they would carry me off. That sometimes happens in the Alps, that eagles carry off children or lambs.

Thomas Platter uses the word fürchten where there is a substantive danger (that if he steps backwards he will fall, that the eagles will carry him off). Angst is used where a condition is referred to (his fear of eagles makes him anxious). But the question remains of whether the emotions signified by the two emotion words really are distinct. If German grammar requires that Furcht is used where the object of anxiety is referred to, and that the term Angst is used where the condition of anxiety is referred to, it cannot be taken for granted that two different emotions are involved. For in the section cited above, the two emotion terms come so close together that their meanings seem to blend into each other. In New High German, at any rate, the differentiation of Angst from Furcht would disappear; the two terms would become interchangeable. Translated into New High German, the most important statement here would become: “Dass ich mich vor den großen Geiern fürchtete, bereitete mir die größte Angst” (“That I feared the large eagles made me very anxious”). But it could also be said in New High German thus: “Die größte Angst bestand in der Angst, die Geier könnten mich forttragen” (“The greatest anxiety consisted of the anxiety that the eagles could carry me off”). At any event, however one linguistically reproduces the circumstances to which Thomas Platter refers, it becomes clear that even in Middle High German the semantic difference between the terms angst and vorhte is barely discernible. Angst involves the condition, Furcht the object; but the emotion related to the object (‘Furcht’) is at the same time an element of the condition (‘Angst’). This is also evident in the second passage I have selected here.⁶¹ Once again it concerns something that happened while watching over the goats. Due to inattention on the part of Thomas the goatherd, the flock has got lost among the rocks. Attempting to find them again, Thomas himself gets into a very dangerous situation. He just about manages to cling onto some tree roots on a steep slope. Night falls. While trying to find somewhere to sleep under a tree, he hears loose earth running down the slope. He is cold because, while playing with the water-supply channels earlier in the day, he left his shirt behind when he was suddenly seized with a fear that he had lost his goats. For I had left the shirt lying where I was playing with the water, fearful [vor angst] that I had lost the goats. The ravens now looked at how I was lying under the tree, they were cawing on the tree. Then I became anxious [do was mier gar angst], because I feared [den ich forcht] that the bear was there. I crossed myself and fell asleep. […] When I woke up in the morning and saw

 Thomas Platter, Lebensbeschreibung, ed. Hartmann and Dill, 31– 32.

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where I was, I was more shocked than I had ever been in my whole life. Because if in the night I had gone down two steps more, I would have fallen over a terrible high precipice of many thousand Klafter. ⁶² I was very fearful [was ich in grosser angst] about how I would get out of there. But I pulled myself up from one root to the other, until I came again to the point where I could run down the mountain to the houses.

Here, once again, the expressions angst and forcht are very close together. Even if angst means the emotional condition (“I was very fearful”) and forcht directs attention to the object of this fearfulness (being frightened of the bear), both referents are mixed in the emotional reality. They work towards each other: Thomas was fearful because he was frightened of the bear. In the reality of the emotion, the semantic distinctions blend into each other. There is another respect in which the question of the dependence of emotional experiences on sociocultural (linguistic) constructions arises in the two scenes described by Thomas Platter. Did Platter learn the emotions Angst or Furcht from those around him? Was he taught them? As far as fearing for one’s own life is concerned, that is hardly something that can be called a socially learned emotion. In the case of the life-threatening scenes described by Thomas Platter, we cannot talk of a prior sociocultural emotional disposition.⁶³ Nor would practice theory offer any additional knowledge of these life-threatening events.⁶⁴ The fear of the young Platter is not a performance but an emotional condition that lasted several hours. What can be seen in the case of Thomas Platter’s descriptions is the fact that Angst, as an affect, becomes remembered as a ‘feeling’: “I was very fearful”. This is not a short-term affect but an enduring emotional condition. Even if Thomas Platter only felt an ‘affect’ in the situation he experienced back then, in writing down and remembering the life-threatening situation an emotional situation will have arisen in which the danger that he had previously experienced was recalled once more. The memory of fear (erinnerte Angst) seized Platter while writing and arouses in him a new, current fear.⁶⁵

 Certainly an exaggeration, since even a thousand Klafter would have been about 1,800 metres high.  Ute Frevert, “Gefühlvolle Männlichkeiten. Eine historische Skizze”, in Die Präsenz der Gefühle. Männlichkeit und Emotion in der Moderne, ed. Manuel Borutta and Nina Verheyen (Bielefeld: transcript-Verlag, 2010), 305 – 330, is of the view that “the intensity and the force with which people sense feelings” is culturally and socially determined (312). It seems to me that every person, whether in antiquity or modernity, will feel just the same kind of intense fear in such a dangerous situation. Possible differences are more to do with individual psychic makeup than with contemporary culture.  Nor can it explain why, within one family, one child is fearful, another not.  Turner and Stets, The Sociology of Emotions, 47– 49, review the position of Morris Rosenberg, “Reflexivity and Emotions”, Social Psychology Quarterly 53 (1990), 3 – 12. He considers that people often have contradictory feelings in a situation but when later writing up this contradictory condition clarify it into a homogeneous inner experience, in part as a result of reflection on it.

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Discussion in historical emotion research of whether, with the emergence of the words Gefühl or feeling in the eighteenth century, a new era in emotion history began, needs to take account of this fact: that in the writing of a diary or an autobiography the earlier experiences of the author assume a new quality. I pointed out above that the writing ‘I’ can never entirely capture the described ‘I’. The opposite also applies: the emotional experiences of the described ‘I’ cannot simply be equated with those of the writing ‘I’. What was once experienced as ‘affect’ (fear, anger, disgust) becomes a ‘feeling’ of fear, anger, disgust in a ‘rear-view mirror’.⁶⁶ And this is all a long time before the eighteenth century. The idea that it was only in the eighteenth century that affect became feeling fails to take into account differences in the media with which emotional experiences are expressed. When earlier emotionally relevant occurrences are written down, these historical events can provide their own affective nature with a new quality for the writer. A new field of research opens out here for those working in literature, language, history, and psychology, bringing them together to study what happens when someone fixes in writing an emotionally impressive situation that had been experienced some time previously. We must reckon here with the possibility that authors will depict the situations they experienced more dramatically in order to achieve a certain effect on their readers. In such cases, the quality of the experienced emotion will be retrospectively modified on the basis of an author’s intention when writing a text. The interaction between the inner experience of emotion, the ability to recall, linguistic competence, writing conventions, intended textual function, and the new emotions arising in the writing process – studying all this would be a promising and challenging interdisciplinary task.

4 Jealousy The emotion of ‘jealousy’ and the signifier jealousy also prompt some fundamental considerations. I will deal first with the historicity of the emotion described by the term jealousy/Eifersucht; second, with the relation between signifier and signified emotion; third, with the traditional nature of descriptions of jealousy; and fourth, with the controversial evaluation of the emotion of jealousy in the past and in the present. These various aspects will be examined with regard to one special case of jealousy: that of jealous husbands. That jealousy is a “social emotion” is undisputed.⁶⁷ On the other hand, jealousy is understood in emotion research as a basic emotion that is universal in character.⁶⁸  In writing down the two scenes cited above, Platter could have been overcome by an even greater feeling of anxiety than what he had at the time in his childhood, because, being older, he was now properly conscious of the danger in which he had been.  Peter N. Stearns, Jealousy. The Evolution of an Emotion in American History (New York: New York University Press, 1989), xi.

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It is not only the question of the historicity of jealousy that presents problems, but also determining the content of this emotion. To what extent can jealousy be treated as an emotion completely separated from other emotions? The fact that all European languages have separate names for ‘jealousy’ suggests that one might consider jealousy as a separate emotion distinct from anger, irritation, sadness, hate, envy, disappointment, and so on. But the relation of signifier and signified is more complex. It has long been demonstrated that jealousy is, like most emotions, a ‘mixed emotion’.⁶⁹ For example, the Greek Church Father John Chrysostom (died 407) described in detail the psychic condition of a jealous person.⁷⁰ This condition, in his assessment, was characterised by anger (irasci), fury (furor), sadness (maeror), grief (luctus). The jealous person was said to be in constant agitation; his soul was consumed with suspicion, misery, and grief. In Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer (ca. 1342/1343 – 1400) has the leading female figure say that with jealousy, one never knows what sort of emotion it is: only God knows whether jealousy has more to do with love, or hate, or grief.⁷¹ Read in this way, jealousy is composed of quite different emotions. Which of these emotions dominates will change, one can assume, from second to second. If one turns to recent studies,⁷² jealousy does seem to be characterised by a constant flux between different emotions (fury, disappointment, love, fear of loss, grief,

 Stearns, Jealousy, xi; Demmerling and Landweer, Philosophie der Gefühle, 195 – 217, on envy and jealousy, writing that it is disputed whether envy and jealousy “can be conceived as anthropologically constant phenomena”. But the fact that envy and jealousy have recurred thematically in various historical contexts can be taken as an indication that these “feelings are at root universal, even if one concedes there are varied, culturally determined triggers and forms of envy” (195). Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks, 220 – 224, disputes the universality of jealousy; he considers (243) that the Roman poet Horace was the first to outline a triad of relationships that is close to what was later characterised as erotic jealousy.  For Stearns, Jealousy, xi, jealousy is an “amalgam of more basic emotions”: “fear of impending loss, grief, and anger at the source of loss”. See also Stearns, ibid., 190 ff. (on the affinity of anger and jealousy since the 1920s); Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks, 220 – 221 (“jealousy as an aggregate or alloy of other, more fundamental sentiments”).  Johannes Chrysostomus, De virginitate (in Patrologia Graeca, ed. Migne, vol. 48, 543 – 596), 574– 575 (chap. 52).  Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Crisyde, trans. Nevill Coghill (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971), III 147 (V. 1023 – 1029). The decisive verse is not correctly given in the translation: verse 1028 reads in the original: If it [jalousye] be lyker love, or hate, or grame.  Madeleine Chapsal, La jalousie (Paris: Fayard, 1977); Madeleine Bertaud, La jalousie dans la littérature au temps de Louis XIII (Genf: Droz, 1981), on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; Stearns, Jealousy; Peter Kutter, Liebe, Hass, Neid, Eifersucht. Eine Psychoanalyse der Leidenschaften (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994; 2nd. ed. 1998); Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), 175 ff.; Peter A. Andersen and Laura K. Guerrero, eds., Handbook of Communication and Emotion. Research, Theory, Applications, and Contexts (San Diego: Calif.: Academic Press, 1998), 155 – 188; C.R. Harris, “A Review of Sex Differences in Sexual Jealousy, Including Self-Report Data, Psychophysiological Responses, Interpersonal Violence, and Morbid Jealousy”, Personality and Social Psychology Review 7.2 (2003), 102– 128; Luke Purshouse, “Jealousy in Relation to

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hate, irritation, envy, …). This means that any historical study of the emotion ‘jealousy’ has to take into account a variety of emotions. If jealousy is understood as an extremely labile, constantly changing succession and mixture of fury, fear, hate, grief, and so on,⁷³ jealousy can no longer be so easily distinguished from other emotions. This raises a problem with historical emotion research that is gaining an increasing amount of attention. Recent research on the psychology of emotion is increasingly abandoning the idea that emotions are experienced in isolation, and now talks in terms of bundles of emotions. It seems to be accepted that in many communication situations very diffuse combinations of emotion are experienced.⁷⁴ As a consequence, it is increasingly recognised in the psychology of emotion – and not only there – that people do not experience one single emotion when they cognitively process an event, but that in this instant several emotions are overlaid or succeed one another in quick succession. The emotional conditions of a person are marked less by individual, basic emotions and more by an intermingling of emotions.⁷⁵ Sometimes one emotional condi-

Envy”, Erkenntnis 60.2 (2004), 179 – 205; Dawn Keetley, “From Anger to Jealousy. Explain Domestic Homocide in antebellum America”, Journal of Social History 42.2 (2008), 269 – 297; Ed Sanders, Envy and Jealousy in Classical Athens. A Socio-Psychological Approach (Oxford: OUP, 2014); Kristján Kristjánsson, “A Philosophical Critique of Psychological Studies of Emotion: The Example of Jealousy”, Philosophical Explorations 19.3 (2016), 238 – 251; Anna Welpinghaus, “Jealousy: A Response to Infidelity? On the Nature and Appropriateness Conditions of Jealousy”, Philosophical Explorations 20.3 (2017), 322– 337.  Jealousy consists of at least three emotions: fear (of impending loss), grief (over the experience of loss), rage (at the person causing the loss); Stearns, Jealousy, xi; see n67 above. According to Matthias Kettner, “Neid und Eifersucht. Über ungute Gefühle und gute Gründe”, in Gefühle – Struktur und Funktion, ed. Hilge Landweer (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2007), 57– 89, 61, envy and jealousy contain a “complete palette of the most varied emotions”.  This was already claimed by Robert Plutchik, “A General Psychoevolutionary Theory of Emotion”, in Emotion. Theory, Research, and Experience, ed. Robert Plutchik and Henry Kellerman (New York: Academic Press, 1980), 3 – 33 (S. 6). Recognition that one emotion (‘anxiety’) is a combination of emotions can be found in Carroll E. Izard, Human Emotions (New York and London: Plenum Press, 1977), 372– 382. See also Söffner, “Die Macht der Melancholie”, 339 (in the condition of acedia several emotions are layered on one another: ‘Angst’, ‘Trübsal’, ‘Faulheit’, ‘Trägheit’, ‘Schmerz’, ‘Leid’). According to Heinz-Günter Vester, Emotion, Gesellschaft und Kultur. Grundzüge einer soziologischen Theorie der Emotionen (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1991), 33, love is treated “in most theories of emotion […] as the result of a blending of basic feelings”. From the careful methodological study of Melman, “Horror and pleasure”, 37– 38, we learn that very different, even contradictory feelings can ‘attach themselves’ to one single emotional disposition (‘horror’): “dread, repugnance, disgust, anxiety” on the one hand, “thrill, excitement, joy, ridicule” on the other, hence yielding a mixture of “attraction and repulsion”. Laura Suski, “Humanitarianism as a Politics of Emotion”, in Emotions Matter, 124– 136 (124 and 135), concedes that quite different emotions can be prompted by the sight of poverty in others: compassion, piety, anger, sadness, disgust, fear.  Plamper, The History of Emotions. An Introduction, ascribes this view to several scholars (19, 41, 144– 145, 172, 254, 277).

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tion can be formed from a mixture of contradictory emotions.⁷⁶ In this way, it is considered possible⁷⁷ that someone can at the same time be sad and also relieved at the death of a loved one – “people also may be confused as to what they are feeling because they are unable to identify the specific sources of the different emotions”.⁷⁸ What conclusions can we draw from this for historical emotion research? Any focus on one single emotion seems to be problematic at best against this background. In some, mainly German-language studies, account is taken of the fact that “historians of feeling rarely encounter emotions in a pure form. ‘Mixed feelings’, as well as emotional roller-coasters, are the political, cultural, religious, and literary order of the day.”⁷⁹ Accordingly, the terminology of ‘emotions research’ or ‘emotions history’ is preferred to that of ‘emotion research’ or ‘emotion history’.⁸⁰ What is of interest is “not a particular feeling, but rather an emotional field”.⁸¹ This approach distances itself from “earlier emotion research”, and is critical of its “detailed compartmentalisation of emotions” on the grounds that it runs the risk “of perpetuating timeless patterns of classification”. “Clear and distinct terms for feelings do not do

 See V.1.a above and VIIn83 below on the simultaneity of contrary emotions. The contributions in the Special Section “Mixed Emotions” in Emotion Review 9.2 (2017), 99 – 154, deal not with mixed emotions in the sense meant here but with emotions that are experienced ambivalently; see James A. Russell, “Mixed Emotions Viewed from the Psychological Constructionist Perspective”, Emotion Review 9.2 (2017), 111– 117. In the nineteenth century, aesthetic theorists argued that infringement of a person’s disgust threshold gave rise to a very strong feeling that, although a feeling of repulsion and disgust, was enjoyed as a stimulus: a strong feeling was in itself, whether it was of shock or disgust, felt to be pleasant in itself. See Schnell, “Ekel und Emotionsforschung”.  See Turner and Stets, The Sociology of Emotions, 47, in their presentation of Morris Rosenberg, “Reflexivity and Emotions”; see n65 above.  Turner and Stets, The Sociology of Emotions, 47. See also Mick Power and Tim Dalgleish, Cognition and Emotion. From Order to Disorder (Hove: Psychology Press, 1997), 111 and 193 – 194 (they even think that the combination of two basic emotions is possible) and 379 (Descartes is said to have talked of a husband who was at once sad and happy at the death of his wife). See also Keith Oatley and Jennifer M. Jenkins, Understanding Emotions (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996), 184– 186 (on the simultaneous occurrence of conflicting emotions in children).  Puff, “Nachwort”, in Performing Emotions, ed. Claudia Jarzebowski and Anne Kwaschik (Göttingen: V & R unipress, 2013), 321– 332 (323). Christian Thomasius (1655 – 1728) was aware that a variety of affects are mixed together in any reaction to a situation; see Stephan Buchholz, Recht, Religion und Ehe. Orientierungswandel und gelehrte Kontroversen im Übergang vom 17. zum 18. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 1988), 116 – 117 and 125 ff.  See, for example, Eitler and Scheer, “Emotionengeschichte als Körpergeschichte”; Helena Flam, “Quo vadis? Wege der Emotionenforschung zwischen den Disziplinen”, in Performing Emotions, ed. Jarzebowski and Kwaschik, 7– 16; see also Puff, “Nachwort”, 323.  Puff, “Nachwort”, 323. The new Berlin Sonderforschungsbereich SFB 1171, “Affective Societies”, is moving in this direction too. The object of study is not individual emotions but the influence and power of feelings in politics, media, and social movements. See IIn32 above. The insight that individual emotions cannot be registered separately – because they arise in the form of bundles of emotion – has recently led to engagement with the idea of so-called scripts (norms of behaviour and language); Rosenwein, “Thinking Historically”, 832. On scripts, see II.2 above.

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justice to the complex emotional landscape of history – this is the current direction in thinking.”⁸² However, the timeless classifications criticised here – ‘jealousy’, ‘anxiety’, ‘anger’, and so forth – remain the basis for the majority of historical studies of emotion. In particular, the broadly accepted view that historical analyses of individual terms for, or evaluations of, emotions can provide a foundation for the development of a history of emotional experiences⁸³ is itself based on the conviction that emotions can be dealt with individually as separate emotional experiences. Our Western languages do suggest a one-to-one correspondence between emotion words and emotion experiences. But this resort to linguistic resources is only a means to an end. The practice in Western culture for the last two thousand years has been to treat an emotional reaction to a specific situation (for example, one’s wife loves another man; someone is mortally offended) in terms of one single emotion word (jealousy, anger). But in reality that one emotion word refers not to one single emotion but to a bundle of emotions. ‘The’ emotion of jealousy is, in fact, a variety of emotions. This difference between an actual individual experience of emotion (often a contradictory mixture of several emotions) on the one hand, and a sociocultural practice of signification involving a single word on the other, suggests that the vocabulary of feeling (or the sociocultural practice of signification) fails to fully grasp actual lived emotional experience. Signifiers of emotion homogenise and limit emotional factors, and seem to function to remove intersubjective ambiguity. In everyday language, it is still taken for granted that such and such a person is either ‘jealous’, or ‘in love’, or ‘irate’, or ‘upset’ – and not at the same time upset, angry, in love, disappointed, and full of fear and rage. Linguistic work on historical semantics reinforces linguistic practice, since it identifies changes of meaning in one individual emotion word.⁸⁴ All the same, criticism of the study of individual words is on the increase.⁸⁵ Geoffrey M. White, for example, criticises the practice of analysing single words in ethnology, psychology, linguistics, and historical studies;⁸⁶ he argues that such work focuses only on the denotative function of emotion words, implying that emotions are natural objects like trees or colours (which verges on a psychophysiological universalism). Moreover,

 Puff, “Nachwort”, 323.  See V.1– 2.  See, for example, Anna Wierzbicka, “The ‘History of Emotions’ and the Future of Emotion Research”, Emotion Review 2.3 (2010), 269 – 273 (on the historical semantics of the word happiness); Heli Tissari, “Current Emotion Research in English Linguistics”.  See, for instance, Stedman, Stemming the Torrent, 31– 32. For criticism of the analysis of individual words, and for a distinction between the signifying and semantic function of words, see Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 685 – 688, 773 – 776 and 784– 786. See also Asifa Majid, “Current Emotion Research in the Language Sciences”, Emotion Review 4.4 (2012), 432– 443.  Geoffrey M. White, “Representing Emotional Meaning: Category, Metaphor, Schema, Discourse”, in: Handbook of Emotions, ed. Michael Lewis and Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones, 2nd. ed. (New York: The Guilford Press, 2000), 30 – 44 (32– 36).

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White argues, treating emotion words as nouns (fear, peur, Angst) suggests that they signify a state, whereas emotions should really be understood as “processes”.⁸⁷ Our names for emotions do not cover the lability of emotions. Fundamentally, there is a “gap between experience that has become fixed in everyday language and the findings of emotion research”.⁸⁸ Those working with literature note that “the broken relationship between language and emotion has from the very beginning given rise to those modes of expression that are called ‘poetic’. The difficulty of formulating particular emotional states in everyday language is one of the greatest productive forces for poetic language.”⁸⁹ Indeed, it is in models of poetic description that the lability of emotions is evident. A poetic image will, for example, compare lovers with a ship drifting without an anchor, uncertain, driven this way and that by the waves.⁹⁰ Poetry has also created an adequate descriptive model for the representation of the labile state of jealousy. That jealousy has been understood as a contradictory emotion, and that this understanding is documented from antiquity to early modern times, can be shown using a central motif in Western representations of jealousy – the jealous husband wants to know the truth (about the sexual unfaithfulness of his wife) but at the same time does not want to know about it. The story of Tristan and Isolde is one of the best-known love stories of the Middle Ages. In the version written by the German poet Gottfried of Strasbourg (ca. 1210), a great deal of attention is paid to the jealousy of the husband, Marke. Gottfried provides a detailed account of how the jealous King Marke vacillates between the wish to know the truth about whether his wife is unfaithful or not, and the wish not to know this at all. He is torn between wanting to know and not wanting to know.⁹¹ Gottfried devotes a long passage (Tristan und Isold, vv. 13748 – 13852) to the view that it is foolish to doubt the love and faithfulness of a loved wife. He writes that anyone who stakes everything on being certain of whether his wife is unfaithful will, in the moment of gaining certainty, experience even greater grief. The doubt that has

 In contrast to the analysis of individual words, White, ibid., 33 and 39 – 40, argues that the connotative potential of emotion words and how it develops in concrete situations should be taken seriously. Beyond their referring function (signifying function), emotion words, White argues, assume pragmatic or social functions (often with moral connotations). Similar criticism is raised by Douglas L. Cairns, “Ethics, Ethology, Terminology: Illiadic Anger and the Cross-Cultural Study of Emotion”, in Ancient Anger. Perspectives from Homer to Galen, ed. Susanna Morton Braund and Glenn W. Most (Cambridge: CUP, 2003), 11– 49 (13n9).  Von Koppenfels and Zumbusch, “Einleitung”, 6.  Von Koppenfels and Zumbusch, “Einleitung”, 7.  Ovid (Amores II 4,8) handed this image down to the Middle Ages; see, for example, Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan und Isold, ed. Ranke, vv. 8085 – 8105. See Schnell, “Liebesdiskurse im Mittelalter”, 50.  Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan und Isold, ed. Ranke, vv. 13660 – 13669, 13756 – 13852, 15257– 15266, 17723 – 17800. Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan, trans. A.T. Hatto (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1960).

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before weighed on his heart will now seem beneficial. He would gladly exchange certainty for doubt. No matter how painful mistrust in a relationship between lovers might be, it is better to continue to suffer this pain than the hatred that arises with certainty (V. 13798 – 13820). In love, no one can avoid doubt (i. e. mistrust). Doubt is part of love – doubt in the love of the other. When it stumbles upon truth, discovering the unfaithfulness of the loved person, then love dies (V. 13821– 13828). From these remarks by Gottfried, we can conclude that he was of the view that love is always combined with a degree of mistrust. But this doubt is easier to bear than the certainty that the loved wife is unfaithful. This is the basis of King Marke’s vacillation: on the one hand, he wants to know if Isolde is deceiving him, but on the other he fears certainty and so closes his eyes to the fact that Isolde and Tristan exchange loving glances (V. 17781– 17809). Gottfried calls Marke, who wants to know the truth but at the same time is frightened of it, the “doubter” (zwîvelaere; v. 14010, 15265, 17712). Jealousy (doubt, uncertainty) is characterised as an emotional contradiction: the jealous person seeks certainty, but is afraid of it. This emotional vacillation of a jealous husband is a topos of premodern literature. The line begins with Ovid (died ca. AD 17),⁹² continues through the Latin didactic poem Urbanus magnus (late twelfth century),⁹³ via the French troubadour Gace Brulé (died after 1213) and the German Minnesänger Reinmar (second half of the twelfth century),⁹⁴ to Boccaccio’s Filocolo (1336).⁹⁵ Described there is a jealous lover’s inescapable misery, which lies in part in his search for a truth that he does not want to find.⁹⁶ Boccaccio sees the emotion of fear as being solidly connected to jealousy,

 Ovid, Amores, II 2,57– 58 (the jealous lover does not want to believe that his loved one is unfaithful); Ovid, Amores, III 14. Ovid’s Erotic Poems: ‘Amores’ and ‘Ars amatoria’, trans. Len Krisak (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Press, 2014).  Urbanus magnus, ed. Smyly, vv. 2002– 2007: a husband should not be jealous; he should lock away in his heart that which is obvious (the adulterous pursuits of his wife) as if he did not know, and in imagination dismiss it as a lie.  Gace Brulé. Trouvère champenois, ed. Holger Petersen Dyggve (Helsinki: Société Neophilologique, 1951), Nr. 65 (395 – 399), Str. 2 (Je di que c’est grans folie): it is a great foolishness to put one’s wife or lover to the test (of whether she is unfaithful) as long as one wants to love her. One should guard against asking, out of jealousy (par jalozie), what one does not want to know. The German Minnesänger Reinmar translates the verse of the French poet almost word for word: Des Minnesangs Frühling, edited by Hugo Moser and Helmut Tervooren, vol. I: Texte, 38. Aufl. (Stuttgart: Hirzel, 1988), 313 (MF 162,7).  Boccaccio, Filocolo, in Giovanni Boccaccio, Tutte le Opere, ed. Vittore Branca (Verona: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1967), 45 – 675 (416; IV 38).  Boccaccio, Filocolo, 416 (IV 38): S’ e’ trova quello che cerca et trovare non vorria, chi è più doloroso di lui? (“And if he finds what he is looking for and doesn’t want to find, who is more grieved than he?”); Giovanni Boccaccio, Il Filocolo, trans. Donald Cheney (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1985), 270.

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since a jealous man lives with the fear of losing that which he can scarcely properly call his own.⁹⁷ In these poetic examples, jealousy is treated as a cognitive process (wanting to know something) that is at the same time seen as an emotionally contradictory process: being jealous for the sake of love, but at the same time led into hatred; wanting to know the truth about unfaithfulness, but at the same time being afraid of the truth and not wanting to know it.⁹⁸ This topos of the contradictory actions of a jealous husband found a wider audience in the many versions of a small fifteenth-century economic tract, Epistola de cura rei familiaris (“Letter on Householding”), which was also translated many times.⁹⁹ Although it is true that only one aspect of jealousy, or mistrust, was dealt with here – that of not wanting to know – wanting to know was presupposed: “If you suspect your wife, guard against finding out the truth about her. For when you have gained certainty [that your wife is deceiving you] no physician will be able to help you any longer.”¹⁰⁰ The husband should behave as if he knew nothing about the unfaithfulness of his wife. The argument presented in this economic tract is fully in line with the tradition of the contradictory intentions of a jealous person presented above. By contrast, in moral-philosophical and theological writings we find a strict rejection of jealousy in marriage. This brings us to the evaluation of jealousy in the Middle Ages. Although the Epistola de cura rei familiaris – like the other literary works discussed – deals only with the disadvantageous consequences of jealousy for the jealous husband, the issue was elaborated in tracts on marriage, mirrors for princes, and sermons on marriage. They argued that husbands should not allow themselves to be led into jealousy because this will only bring unrest to their hearts; because, in their jointly-run households, it will provoke arguments¹⁰¹ and lead men to treat their wives cruelly; and because keeping the wife under constant observation due to jealousy will cause her to do precisely what is forbidden, to commit adultery. Jealousy is seen as the greatest problem for marital harmony. For this reason, wives should give their husbands, and conversely husbands their wives, no cause for jealousy. For jeal-

 Boccaccio, Filocolo, ed. Branca, 417: colui con paura vive di perdere quella cosa che egli appena tiene sua (“he lives in the fear of losing that thing that he scarcely calls his own”); Boccaccio, Il Filocolo, trans. Cheney, 270.  Gottfried of Strasbourg concentrates his account of Marke’s jealousy to a very great extent on the cognitive discrepancy between wanting to know (he has her followed and sets traps) and not wanting to know (ignoring the situation: Marke ignores obvious signs of love), because he wants to show that Marke could have recognised the love between Tristan and Isolde if he had wanted to.  C. D. M. Cossar, The German Translations of the Pseudo-Bernhardine ‘Epistola de cura rei familiaris’ (Göppingen: Alfred Kümmerle, 1975).  Cossar, The German Translations, 98,19 – 21; 104,28 – 30; 297,11– 13.  See Schnell, “Concordia im Haus”.

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ousy on the part of the wife can, like jealousy on the part of the husband, have terrible effects.¹⁰² Altogether, we find a varied assessment of jealousy in the Middle Ages. When reviewing the sources, one is initially tempted to propose that jealousy was viewed positively in the discourse of courtly love (courtly romances, troubadour songs), whereas it was criticised in the moral-theological discourse on marriage. But looking more closely, we can detect a more differentiated image that is full of tension, one that in many respects coincides with what Peter N. Stearns has described for the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.¹⁰³ On the one hand, in the Middle Ages and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was thought that jealousy went together with love. It kept love alive.¹⁰⁴ On the other hand, it is claimed in the Middle Ages, as in the twentieth century, that true love – based on trust – cannot live with jealousy.¹⁰⁵ It is condemned as a harmful corollary of love.¹⁰⁶ Jealousy between married couples

 I can cite only a selection of references here: Jacques de Vitry (died 1240), Sermo secundus ad coniugatos (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS lat. 17509, fol. 138vb); Aegidius Romanus, De regimine principum, II 1,22 and 23; Konrad von Megenberg (died 1374), Yconomica, Buch II, ed. Sabine Krüger (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1977), 165 (II 4,1); John Gower (died 1408), Confessio amantis, ed. G.C. Macaulay, 2 vols. (London: Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1900 – 1901), book 5, vv. 510 ff.; Antoninus Florentinus (1389 – 1459), Summula confessionis, III 1 (fol. 50rb); Johannes von Paltz, Supplementum Coelifodinae [1504], ed. Bernd Hamm (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1983), 354– 356; Andreas Tiraquellus (1488 – 1558), De legibus connubialibus et iure maritali, 5th ed. (Lyon: Rovillius, 1554), XVI. lex (fol. 238 – 247); João de Barros, Espelho de casados [1540], ed. De Noronha and Cabral, III 3; Johann Rist, Der Adeliche Hausvatter [1650], in Rist, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Eberhard Mannack, vol. 7 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1982), 153 – 380 (279 – 282).  Stearns, Jealousy.  Stearns, Jealousy, 13, 16, 19, 21– 23, 58 – 59, 151; medieval sources: Andreas Capellanus, De amore, ed. Trojel, 310 (Regulae amoris, no. 2: Qui non zelat, amare non potest; “Whoever is not jealous cannot love”) and 311 (Regulae amoris, no. 21: Ex vera zelotypia affectus semper crescit amandi; “The inclination to love always arises out of true jealousy”); L’Art d’Amours. Traduction et commentaire de l’Ars amatoria, ed. Bruno Roy (Leiden: Brill, 1974), lines 1014– 1028, 1604– 1611, 3063 – 3078 (cf. Ovid, Ars amatoria, II 439 – 454).  Stearns, Jealousy, 30 – 33 and 121. Medieval sources: Sylvia Huot, The ‘Romance of the Rose’ and its Medieval Readers (Cambridge: CUP, 1993), 101– 102 (on a version of the Roman de la Rose by Gui de Mori [1290]; jealousy turns love into hate; jealousy is a form of despair); Un art d’aimer anglo-norman, ed. Östen Södergård, Romania 77 (1956), 294– 328 (320 – 322; vv. 1008 – 1084: jealousy originates in mistrust and is the product of falsity); Deux Traités sur L’Amour, ed. Arthur Långfors, Romania 56 (1930) 361– 388 (373; §14: jealousy means mistrust; mistrust and love cannot be reconciled). Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Crisyde, trans. Coghill, III 147 (V. 1023 – 1029), has the heroine say that she does not agree with the proverb that jealousy is a part of love, for there is often more hate than love in jealousy.  Within the discourse of courtly love, jealousy was blamed where the husband of the lady in question was seen as a threat to the loving couple. The husband was often presented to the reader as a comical gilos (‘cuckold’). He functioned as a counterpart to the loving couple, with whom the author expressed sympathy. See Dietmar Rieger, “Le motif de la jalousie dans le roman arthurien. L’example du roman d’Yder”, Romania 110.3 – 4 (1989), 364– 382; Leslie Brook, “Jalousie and jealousy

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is criticised both in the Middle Ages and in modernity.¹⁰⁷ It is said to endanger marital harmony (pax, concordia). The negative assessment of jealousy in marriage is something that seems to have lasted for centuries. Likewise, the view that true love and jealousy are mutually exclusive can be found in the Middle Ages as well as modernity. As regards the affective experience of jealousy, both ancient and medieval sources tend to be contradictory: jealous husbands on the one hand seek certainty about the fidelity or infidelity of their wives or lovers, but on the other hand fear such certainty and try to ignore reality. The cognitive and affective tension between wanting to know and not wanting to know is also something that we might assume to be part of jealousy in modern times. As an emotion, jealousy remains a complex, constantly shifting mixture of different emotions. It is this paradox that makes it so hard to make jealousy part of a history of emotional experiences.

5 Shame and Love Writing a history of shame would also be a difficult enterprise. Little evidence – for instance, an increasing intensity over time – is likely to be found for historicising the sense of shame. At best, one might be able to speak of a history of situations, forms of behaviour, ideas, and assessments related to shame. Social shame expresses itself in the fear of being thought inferior by others. Sexual shame, or shame related to intimacy, involves a fear that some other person will force their way into one’s own intimate sphere; this includes the sense of shame related to nakedness. Shame can relate to the body (shame of being naked, shame of one’s body, shame of one’s genitals); it can also relate to feelings (being ashamed of having wept). Shame of being naked, or shame of one’s own body, are not aspects that can be historicised, for sexual freedom and sexual taboos have coexisted in every era. If in one situation there was no shame at one’s own bare body, or those of others, in other situations there was a taboo on nakedness. Different norms for shame applied to encounters with social superiors than to encounters with social inferiors. Hence, instead of presenting the way in which a sense of shame is specific to particular eras, we need to examine the situations in which shame is felt. This situational specificity of shame would then have to be elaborated according to specific forms of literature, differentiating between literary genres. In some literary genres, discussion of sex was permitted, whereas in others it was not.¹⁰⁸ Finally, we also

in Jean de Meun’s Rose”, Romance Quarterly 41 (1994), 57– 70; Susanne Fritsch-Staar, Unglückliche Ehefrauen. Zum deutschsprachigen malmariée Lied (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1995), 76 – 82.  On its rejection in the twentieth century, Stearns, Jealousy, 115 ff. In the eighteenth century, jealousy was apparently on occasion still accepted as a form of protection against adultery; Stearns, ibid., 15.  See Schnell, Sexualität und Emotionalität, 265 – 283.

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need to take into account the possible difference in emotional reactions on the part of men and women, since there are rules of behaviour that are gender-specific. Were women more likely to suffer shame about their body, whereas men were more likely to suffer shame about their feelings? In addition to specificity by situation, literary genre, and gender, there is differentiation by individual. In some historical accounts, it is reported that in one and the same situation – for example, answering the call of nature on a pilgrim ship – some men behaved differently from others because of their greater sense of shame.¹⁰⁹ Shame has taken on so many different forms in the course of Western history that it is very difficult to construct a history from them.¹¹⁰ Recognising the plural phenomenology of shame, this section pursues a modest objective. First, it will be shown that a particular situation has been associated with the feeling of shame for two thousand years – that a situation-specific shame is present. Second, it will be shown that feelings of shame can be overcome by another feeling, that of love as an erotic desire. From this it follows, third, that all efforts to write a history of shame must observe a particular ‘free space’ in which shame of one’s body has lost its influence: the intimate life of two lovers (and married couples). The absence of sexual shame is not limited in Western history to the extraordinary occurrences that are repeatedly cited (bathing in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the sexual revolution of the generation of 1968, and so on); it also marks the intimate life of almost all lovers and married couples since antiquity at least. In a world overflowing with situations involving shame, there has from time immemorial been one sphere in which shame of one’s body is absent. I assume a broadly accepted definition of the feeling of shame. One is ashamed as and when something becomes visible that one would prefer to keep concealed.¹¹¹ One wants, therefore, to hide something. The term Scham/shame is derived from the Indo-Germanic root *skev-, which means to ‘cover up’. In the case of a shame of nakedness, it is one’s own body (especially the genitals) that one seeks to hide from the gaze of others. In studies of shame, it is constantly emphasised that shame arises

 Felix Fabri (1441– 1502), Evagatorium in terrae sanctae, Arabiae et Egypti peregrinationem, ed. Cunradus Dietericus Hassler, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Litterarischer Verein Stuttgart, 1843), 140 (some of those travelling as pilgrims were ashamed of being seen naked while defecating, and so did their business in an out-of-the-way spot; Verecundia in hoc actu est multum nociva […]. Aliqui nolunt notari et procumbunt ad alia loca). Félix Fabri, Les errances de frère Félix, pèlerin en Terre sainte, en Arabie et en Égypte, t. 1, General introduction and critical edition by Jean Meyers, translation and notes by Jean Meyers and Michel Tarayre (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2013), 438.  Attempts have, of course, already been made to write such a history: Jean-Claude Bologne, Histoire de la Pudeur (Paris: Orban, 1986); Stearns, Shame. See also David Nash and Anne-Marie Kilday, Cultures of Shame. Exploring Crime and Morality in Britain, 1600 – 1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 1– 25 (“The History and Theory of Shame – Then and Now”).  See Dieter Ulich and Philipp Mayring, Psychologie der Emotionen, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2003), 181.

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from the gaze of an other, or others.¹¹² Elaborating somewhat, shame of nakedness or of one’s body arises from the invasion of one’s intimate sphere by another person. Right up into the present, it has, no doubt conditioned by behavioural social norms, been especially marked with regard to women.¹¹³ There is evidence from antiquity right up to modernity that the shame of being seen naked by another becomes conflicted, contradictory, at the moment someone desires sexual contact with that other person.¹¹⁴ Shame and love fight each other in a person’s heart.¹¹⁵ The German Spruchdichter Frauenlob (died 1318) taught that a woman should show no shame before a partner that she loved honestly and legitimately; if lovers in bed are ashamed of themselves in front of each other, then love cannot fulfil its calling properly.¹¹⁶ In Reinfried von Braunschweig (ca. 1300), the anonymous author inserts a long excursus on the relationship between love, women, and shame at the

 See, for example, Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and the Nothingness. An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London: Methuen, 1957), 252– 302 (“The Look”: the moment that prompts shame is “being-seen-by-another”; 257); Demmerling and Landweer, Philosophie der Gefühle, 149, 151 and 226 – 227 (being seen and shame are linked together). Literary examples: Wolfram von Eschenbach (ca. 1200), Parzival, trans. Cyril Edwards (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004): the young Parzival is ashamed to be seen naked by young women (V. 167,21– 22); on this, Martin Baisch, “man bôt ein badelachen dar: / des nam er vil kleine war (167,21– 22). Über Scham und Wahrnehmung in Wolframs Parzival, in Wahrnehmung im ‘Parzival’ Wolframs von Eschenbach, ed. John Greenfield (Porto: Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto, 2004), 105 – 132. Joachim Camerarius (1500 – 1574), Narratio de Helio Eobano Hesso. Latin and German, trans. Georg Burkard, ed. and comm. Georg Burkard and Wilhelm Kühlmann (Heidelberg: Manutius, 2003), 52– 55 (Eobanus Hessus swam naked to the far side of a lake. Out of shame [pudor, verecundia] about being seen by people, he did not return on foot but swam back the same way).  I will not enter here the discussion of whether, and to what degree, conceptions of the body and nakedness are anthropological constants, or are determined socially and culturally. See, among others, Hans Peter Duerr, Nacktheit und Scham. Der Mythos vom Zivilisationsprozeß, vol. 1 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1988, 1994); Hans Peter Duerr, Intimität. Der Mythos vom Zivilisationsprozeß, vol. 2 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1990, 1994); Jean Claude Bologne, Pudeurs féminines. Voilées, dévoilées, révélées (Paris: Le Seuil, 2010); Michael Maurer, “Der Prozeß der Zivilisation. Bemerkungen eines Historikers zur Kritik des Ethnologen Hans Peter Duerr an der Theorie des Soziologen Norbert Elias”, Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 40 (1989), 225 – 238; Hilge Landweer, Scham und Macht (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999), 160 – 169; M. Schloßberger, “Rezeptionsschwierigkeiten. H.P. Duerrs Kritik an Norbert Elias’ historischer Anthropologie”, Leviathan. Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaft 28 (2000), 109 – 121.  In the following, I discuss only the shame that prevents someone sleeping with a loved one. Shame is also of great importance when it comes to a confession of love. See Rüdiger Schnell, “Medialität und Emotionalität. Bemerkungen zu Lavinias Minne”, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 55.3 (2005), 267– 282 (276 – 279).  Here we touch again on an example of the ‘coincidence of contrasting emotions’ phenomenon. See nn76 – 78, Vnn10 – 12.  Frauenlob (Heinrich von Meissen), Leichs, Sangsprüche, Lieder, 1. Teil, ed. Karl Stackmann and Karl Bertau (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1981), 490 (VII 40,10 – 11) and 555 – 556 (XIII 45 and 46).

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point where the (now married) lovers are about to consummate their union.¹¹⁷ The author welcomes the idea that a woman abandons her shame for the love of a man, as this is the only way in which they will be able to give each other sexual pleasure (V. 10780 – 10798). Where, by contrast, out of shame two lovers withhold physical signs of their love, no such pleasure can arise. The writer describes how the wife, sunder vorhtecliche scham (“without anxious shame”; v. 10823), becomes active herself, and draws her husband lovingly to her. In Tristan und Isolde (ca. 1215), Gottfried of Strasbourg twice turns to discussion of ‘love and shame’. First, he describes the struggle in the heart of Isolde, whose shame prevents her from casting loving glances at Tristan but who is then after all overwhelmed by her desire.¹¹⁸ When the lovers join together, Gottfried comments that the distance and strangeness between them vanished with their sexual union. The intimacy between the two has now become great and powerful. Lovers who do not confess their love to each other for sake of shame, and who thus remain estranged, are their own thieves, we read, for they rob themselves of their own pleasure.¹¹⁹ In Meister Otte’s Eraclius (ca. 1200), we read of the first union between an adulterous couple: “The two lovers had cast off their shame. That brought about the great love of both.”¹²⁰ Chaucer also took up this idea in Troilus and Criseyde: he has Pandarus advise both Criseyde and Troilus that they should abandon their shame because it obstructs the fulfilment of love.¹²¹ It is taken for granted that love and sexual desire go together.¹²² The view that shame hindered a fulfilling love also took hold in religious poetry. In the religious tract of the mystic Mechthild von Magdeburg (died 1282), the soul longing for union with God is told that it must – as a precondition for such a union – shed shame and fear.¹²³ In the religious instructions that he wrote for nuns, the Cistercian Abbot Aelred of Rievaulx (1110 – 1167) likewise described the anticipated mystic meeting of a nun with Christ. This was on condition that she lose her

 Reinfried von Braunschweig, ed. Karl Bartsch (Stuttgart: Litterarischer Verein, 1871), vv. 10780 – 10855.  Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan und Isold, ed. Ranke, vv. 11819 – 11842.  Gottfried, Tristan und Isold, vv. 12358 – 12391.  Eraclius. Deutsches Gedicht des dreizehnten Jahrhunderts, ed. Harald Graef (Strassburg: Karl J. Trübner, 1883), vv. 4004– 4005.  Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, trans. Coghill, II 184 (vv. 1285 – 1288: Pandarus to Criseyde; the word in the original is shame!), II 215 (vv. 1499 – 1500: Pandarus to Troilus).  See IV.2.c above.  Mechthild von Magdeburg, Das fließende Licht der Gottheit, ed. Gisela Vollmann-Profe (Frankfurt a. M.: Klassiker-Verlag, 2003), I 44 (lines 80 – 86); Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, trans. Frank Tobin, Preface by Margot Schmidt (New York: Paulist Press, 1998), 62.

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feeling of shame before a manly presence; “love must now conquer shame, love must exclude fear”.¹²⁴ This is by no means just a medieval topos. In his poems on love, the Roman poet Ovid (43 BC – AD 17) constantly conveyed the idea that shame and love are irreconcilable. One of his poems describes the struggle between love and shame, allowing love to finally triumph (Victus amore pudor; “Through love, shame is conquered”).¹²⁵ Shame harms love, Ovid is convinced.¹²⁶ Love and shame are incompatible for him.¹²⁷ Proof – if any were needed – that we have here not just a literary topos but an aspect of real life can be found in Thomas Platter’s autobiography. He reports that, after being married, it took six weeks before he and his wife were united sexually, because they were ashamed in front of each other (wir waren bede schamhafftig).¹²⁸ The sources cited here testify to the view that shame of the body or of being naked hinders lovers or married couples from fulfilling their sexual desire. With the very first sexual union, the conflict between love and shame is settled: love wins out over shame. With this decision and the action related to it – allowing one’s own naked body to be seen, and even be touched – two persons enter into an entirely new relationship with each other. So long as shame defines their relationship, it is characterised by detachment, distance, and estrangement. Along with shame, the boundary between two bodies is removed. Instead of estrangement there is now intimacy; distance gives way to (permitted) physical closeness. Love as erotic desire needs this physical closeness. Shame obstructs this closeness. And so it has to be abandoned.¹²⁹ Sexual union, and the mutual exposure it involves, does not only end the estrangement of two people. The ‘otherness’ of the other also disappears. For shame means that one person seeks to hide something from the other. Shame arises where one fears the glance of the other. Shame marks a dividing line between ‘intimate’ and ‘non-intimate’, between ‘ego’ and ‘other’.¹³⁰ A categorically new relationship arises at the moment when the shame of being subject to the gaze of a loved one while naked is overcome – and when that person likewise surrenders their shame of

 Aelred von Rievaulx, De institutione inclusarum, ed. Anselm Hoste and C. H. Talbot (Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio mediaevalis 1) (Turnholt: Brepols, 1971), 637– 682 (668, chap. 31: Uincat uerecundiam amor, timorem excludat affectus).  Ovid, Amores, trans. Krisak, III 10, 27– 30.  Ovid, Amores, trans. Krisak, I 2,31– 32 and III 7,37– 38.  Ovid, Heroides, XV 121; Publius Ovidius Naso, Heroides and Amores, ed. and trans. Grant Showerman, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002).  Thomas Platter, Lebensbeschreibung, ed. Hartmann and Dill, 86,16 – 28.  The medieval romance Erec by Hartmann von Aue (ca. 1180) provides a nice example of this. At the beginning of the romance, the young Enite lays Erec, exhausted from battle, in her lap, but is full of shame in the process. The author remarks that she will later lose this shame – when the two have slept together; Hartmann von Aue, Erec, ed. Cormeau and Gärtner, vv. 1316 – 1333.  Günther H. Seidler, Der Blick des Anderen. Eine Analyse der Scham (Stuttgart: Verlag Internationale Psychoanalyse, 1995), 51. There is a connection between shame and ego-identity.

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nakedness. This other is no longer an other. One no longer fears their gaze, because they are now part of one’s own ego. The duality of ego and other has become a unity.¹³¹ The feeling of being an other for the other has dissipated. Fusion with the other has resulted in a kind of supersession of one’s own ego. Premodern discourse on marriage created a dual formulation for this. “They became two in one flesh”;¹³² “that which has one body must also have one mind”.¹³³ In vernacular courtly love poetry, we also fund a dual formulation. “Lovers possess two hearts and one body”; “lovers have a physical and spiritual unity”.¹³⁴ Two lovers wish to be one.¹³⁵ Love takes the form of a uniting force. But the condition for this, as has been shown above, is the overcoming of shame. And so we can sum up as follows: wherever shame determines the relationships among people, distance, the division of you and me, a degree of estrangement, prevails. Wherever love leads to the supersession of shame, intimacy and closeness determine behaviour. This is of central importance for emotion history understood as a discourse history. On the one hand, we can take this topos of the overcoming of shame by erotic desire to be a discourse constant from antiquity to modernity: shame determines the initial behaviour of lovers.¹³⁶ On the other hand, we recognise that a history of shame has to take account of a sphere of life from which shame has always been excluded: the world of two lovers, or of spouses, who have overcome their shame of being naked or of their bodies, and who have joined in sexual

 Sudhir Kakar and John Ross, Tales of Love, Sex and Danger (New York, N.Y.: Blackwell, 1987), 7: “Conquering a woman, a man simultaneously surrenders as he cedes to her his self and his sex. […] Intermingling with the beloved, one at least momentarily loses consciousness and awareness of a being who no longer has the contours of a separate life seen from a distance.” Kakar and Ross, ibid., 63: “passionate love” consists in “the longing for oneness with the beloved”. The medieval writer Andreas Capellanus (late twelfth century) said the same thing; De amore, ed. Trojel, 5 – 6.  Erunt duo in carne una (Gen. 2.24; Matt. 19.6; 1 Cor. 6:16; Eph. 5:31).  Walter of Mortagne, De sacramento coniugii (PL 176,153 – 174), col. 158 – 159 (Quorum enim unum corpus est, unus debet esse et animus); Ivo von Chartres, epistola 134 (PL 162,143); Nikolaus Selnecker, Ehe Spiegel (Eisleben: Petri, 1589), fol. 133v; Joh. Ludwig Hartmann, Hochzeit-Predigten (Giessen: Petri, 1679), Sermon 4. See also Schnell, Sexualität und Emotionalität, 239 – 241; James Turner, One Flesh. Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987); Gregory Chaplin, “‘One flesh, One Heart, One Soul’. Renaissance Friendship and Miltonic Marriage”, Modern Philology 99 (2001), 266 – 292; Jutta Klapisch, “Duae animae in carne una. Spouses as Witnesses in the American Law of Evidence between 1839 and 1944”, in Subjektivierung des justiziellen Beweisverfahrens, ed. André Gouron, Laurent Mayali, Antonio Padoa Schioppa, and Dieter Simon (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 1994), 301– 336. See also IVnn147– 148 above (on Pope Urban II).  Margreth Egidi, Höfische Liebe. Entwürfe der Sangspruchdichtung (Heidelberg: Winter, 2002), 139 – 146.  Tullia d’Aragona, Dialogo dell’ infinità d’amore (1547), ed. Giuseppe Zonta, Trattati d’Amore del Cinquecento (Bari: Gius. Laterza & Figli, 1912; Reprint Rom and Bari: Laterza 1980), 185 – 247 (222); Tullia d’Aragona, Dialogue on the Infinity of Love, trans. Rinaldina Russell and Bruce Merry (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), 90.  Elias, The Civilizing Process, 114– 119, 147– 160, 414– 421, places the beginning of the sense of shame in early modernity.

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union. With the union of bodies, the shame of the body in front of the other person is lost. If today two young people in love send images of themselves naked to each other through the Internet, they do so because they are not (any more) ashamed in front of each other. But if such intimate images become available to third parties through social media, they both feel shame before those third parties.¹³⁷ If shame of one’s body and shame of one’s sexuality is determined by society and culture, this is something that has remained constant for over two thousand years. This would be a social-emotional ‘constant’ – which would itself be a paradox. There is a dual explanation for this. Either the shame of being naked (and the associated shame of one’s genitals) is really part of our anthropological inheritance, or we will have to treat the period from antiquity to modernity as one single culture that has not necessitated any changes in the emotional behaviour of people. The supersession of shame by love created a domain within shame culture over which shame had lost its power. A shame-free region became embedded in the world of shame. Anyone who talks about the shame culture of an era or of a society has to bear in mind that there will be shame-free regions within that culture. Following William Reddy, we might talk of an “emotional refuge”: lovers and married couples create, through their sexual intimacy, a virtual shame-free space in which the rules of a shame culture no longer prevail. And in this domain, the discourses of honour and of rank that characterise a culture of shame lose their influence. Emotional closeness arises where the shame of nakedness and of bodies has vanished between two people.¹³⁸ In turn, this makes demonstrations of honour superfluous. A lowering of the shame threshold, intimate behaviour, and abandoning the need to demonstrate honour – these all reinforce one another. For this reason, many premodern authors, both clerical and lay, warned against being too trusting of persons from whom one should expect demonstrations of honour, respect, and distance.¹³⁹ Considering this discourse connecting love, shame, honour, and distance makes plain the thematic breadth that any attempt to write a history of shame has to take into account.

6 Conclusions The individual case studies have led to very different findings. In the case of acedia and melancholia, it became clear that changes in designations for emotions are the result not always of changes of emotions but also of changes in the standpoints of

 See also Szreter and Fisher, Sex before the Sexual Revolution, 2– 3 and 359 – 360. The couples who were interviewed mostly refused to talk about their marital sexuality. It was clearly a domain to which they did not wish to admit third parties. See IVnn102, 130 above.  One might doubt whether this applies to swinger culture. But such exceptions seem to prove the rule.  See IVnn251– 258.

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those considering them. The section on disgust and aesthetics showed that different emotional experiences could be had within one and the same (supposed) ‘emotional community’. The section on Angst/Furcht highlighted the difference between the writing and the described ‘I’. What has essentially become clear is that the idea that emotions are historically and culturally determined – the historicity of emotions – cannot be unconditionally accepted. Even regarding culturally determined testimony, the timelessness of many emotions, or emotionally relevant practices and forms of behaviour, is quite evident. Descriptions of the emotions of jealousy and shame display a remarkable continuity in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modernity. It might be objected here that although texts do employ timeless frames of representation, the emotions therein evoked were experienced quite differently in the contemporary everyday world in any given case. But this would be an admission that texts do not inform us reliably about the emotional experiences of people in a particular era. In chapter V.1, I indicated just such a difference between conceptions of emotion and emotional experience. But if the representations of emotions in historical texts suggest a continuity of emotions, even though changes in affective experiences in everyday life are likely, and if concepts of emotions and emotional experiences diverge, it becomes necessary for historical emotion research to revise its approach, since it has for a long time worked mostly on the assumption that texts from past centuries provide us with indications of the actual world of feeling of those living at that time. We cannot limit the power of texts to provide evidence and proof to cases in which they conform to our assumptions, while denying their evidential value when they contradict our assumptions.

VII Historical Emotion Research in 2019 Given the contemporary demand for interdisciplinarity, one might expect it to be beneficial if a literary scholar enquires into the cognitive interests and cognitive limits of emotion research in the humanities. On the other hand, no scholarly discipline likes being told – least of all by representatives of a different field – what its shortcomings are. Intense resistance is thus preprogrammed, and it has a readily available stock of ripostes on which to draw: that individual sentences in a study of emotion history have been torn out of context, that straw men have been set up, that this or that theoretical approach to emotion has not been taken into account. Many historians of emotion will also object that the shortcomings I have criticised in the preceding chapters have long since been overcome, pointing to much newer studies of emotion that supposedly yield completely new insights. The aim of this penultimate chapter is to show how mistaken such protests are, for ‘the’ study of emotion in the humanities has systemic problems it needs to deal with. This was apparent in the AHR “Conversation” of 2012 (see II.1 above), and is again apparent in two recent publications: A History of Feelings, by Rob Boddice (London: Reaktion Books, 2019), and the six-volume A Cultural History of the Emotions, edited by Susan Broomhall, Jane W. Davidson, and Andrew Lynch (London, New York, Oxford, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019).¹ I was prompted to subject these two particular works to a critical assessment for several reasons. They involve, on the one hand, the first overall history of emotions presented in English (A Cultural History of the Emotions) and, on the other, the first monograph account of a history of emotions (A History of Feelings). The publications thus chosen involve studies by historians of emotion who have a strong reputation in the field,² whose work is cited again and again as a model, and who therefore have a strong representative status. With their different approaches, finally, the two publications offer an opportunity to consider a number of different aspects of historical emotion research. The differences between the two works could not – despite the similarities in their titles – be greater. Boddice’s book spans around 230 pages; the six volumes of A Cultural History of the Emotions, including the indexes, around 1,200. Boddice is the sole author of his book; the six-volume anthology is composed of forty-eight individual studies by the same number of authors. Boddice confines himself to a small number of ‘stations’ in the history of emotions, whereas A Cultural History of the Emotions aspires to a comprehensive presentation. Boddice thinks he stands at the beginning of a history of emotions that is only now being established; the ambitious Cultural History of the Emotions gives the impression of summarising emotion

 Contributions to the latter work are cited by volume and page number (e. g. “IV 108”).  We read on the cover of Boddice’s book that it is “written by one of the world’s leading scholars of the history of the emotions”. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110692464-009

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research that has been under way for decades.³ Boddice rejects the traditional eras into which emotion history is divided; the six-volume history of emotions is structured in terms of the usual schema: antiquity, Middle Ages, Renaissance/Reformation, baroque, Enlightenment, romanticism, French Revolution, modernity, postmodernity. The possibility that the phases in emotion history might run a course of their own is not considered in A Cultural History of the Emotions. The findings that it presents concerning the history of emotions are understood as confirming the traditional characterisations of different eras.

1 A History of Feelings (Boddice) Just one year after his 2018 monograph The History of Emotions, Boddice presented a publication with a somewhat different title: A History of Feelings. He prefers the term feeling to that of emotion on the grounds that emotion is a conceptual category that has no equivalent in the majority of historical texts (13) and is unable to capture the complex affective experiences of premodernity. But Boddice also admits that the term feeling remains “semantically vague” in contemporary English (188). His description of ‘feeling’ is correspondingly vague as well: “Feelings are formed and experienced in a dynamic relation of brain-body and world” (11). “How we feel” is, for Boddice, “the dynamic of the existence of our minds and bodies in moments of time and space” (9 – 10). Despite this very widely cast definition, Boddice feels hopeful of being able to grasp the feelings of people in the past. His aim is “to try to find how the dead once felt” (9). To achieve this goal, he intends to track down feelings in their cultural, social, religious, and political contexts. Accordingly, ‘context’ becomes the keyword at the forefront of Boddice’s methodological approach. “Affective lives, styles and systems have to be reconstructed in context” (17). He thus describes his approach as a “contextual reading” of the sources (13). By context, Boddice understands the entire sociocultural setting to which a word or a text belongs. Boddice thinks of people’s worlds of feeling in terms of the equally vague affective life (15). “Affective life is inextricably bundled with human activities of all kinds”, such that no activity, no experience, no decision happens without accompanying feelings (15). Everything people think and do, he believes, points to feelings. The semantically vague feeling is extended in the even vaguer term affective experience (188 – 189): in Boddice the “affective experience of historical actors” (11– 13, 188) is identical with what people felt in the past. Affective experience moves to the fore as the central object of the study. Given the scale of this undertaking, it is all too understandable that Boddice sees his study as no more than a preliminary attempt that other emotion historians can

 The contributions to volume IV are, however, introduced as “the beginning of a much bigger history of emotions” (IV 14).

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extend or modify (9). But Boddice does at least want to show how we can ‘do’ a history of feelings/emotions: “I seek to exemplify how to do a history of emotions in the broadest possible strokes” (9; emphasis in original). Boddice sees breaking free from traditional epochal divisions as an important prerequisite for ‘doing’ this – for creating a history of feelings in a new sense. Even so, he believes, the road to a comprehensive history of emotions/feelings is still a long one. For that reason, he employs a selective (or fragmentary) approach (17– 18) that he calls an “episodic approach to feelings in context” (15): he selects some “important and influential episodes” in the history of emotions (Homer, Galen, Augustine, Hildegard von Bingen, Descartes, Spinoza, and so on), and therefore calls his History of Feelings “a messy history of feelings” (9). In spite of this, Boddice intends to present his History of Feelings as a narrative. He describes the study as “an attempt at a narrative of affective life in the epic mode”,⁴ as “one narrative, a story to begin with, for others to challenge, embellish, colour and augment” (9). Boddice hopes to encourage “a radical new periodization” (18) of the history of emotions on the basis of analyses of individual texts and words. In the process of new studies of the historical texts, Bodice writes, “traditional periodization comes into question, for affective threads do not always run or end when our common markers of continuity and change would like them to” (17). The new history of emotions is to offer “a history-of-emotions narrative” transcending “traditional historical periodization and limitations of expertise” (9).⁵ Boddice’s ambition in pursuing a ‘history of feelings’ as a single author on his own is to be admired. His careful word analyses foster an awareness of the fact that we do not do justice to the frequently complex and different semantics of premodern emotion words with our own emotion words of today. The textual panorama he presents makes for stimulating reading. I am sure the book will meet with considerable approval among his fellow specialists. Yet fundamental problems in the history of emotions (or a history of feelings) at present can also be demonstrated with reference to the book. Boddice thinks it is possible to track down experienced feelings in a wide variety of texts from the past. Like many other emotion historians, he is convinced “that what people thought they knew about human passions directly influenced how those passions were experienced” (49), suggesting that even theoretical writing can give us an insight into the affective experiences of people in the past. Boddice’s choice of historical sources recalls the accepted canon of intellectual and cultural history. It includes, among others, Homer’s Iliad (ca. 800 BC, epic), Thucydides (ca. 460 – 400 BC, historiography), Aristotle (384 – 322 BC, ethics), Hippo-

 This does not mean that Boddice’s approach manages to sidestep the danger of offering a new master narrative before the necessary preliminary work has been completed.  Against the background of Boddice’s approach, the Cultural History of the Emotions edited by Broomhall, Davidson, and Lynch seems premature and at the same time outdated: premature because the new insights called for by Boddice are not currently available, and outdated because it follows a conventional historical schema that Boddice rejects for the history of emotions.

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crates (460 – 370 BC) and Galen (AD 120 – 210, medicine), Plutarch (AD 46 – 120, moral philosophy), Augustine (AD 354– 430, autobiography and theology), Hildegard of Bingen (1098 – 1179, vision literature), Machiavelli (1469 – 1527, political tract), Castiglione (1478 – 1529, tract on the ideal courtier), Descartes (1596 – 1650) and Spinoza (1632– 1677, philosophy), Madeleine de Scudéry (1607– 1701, novels), and Edward Jenner (1749 – 1823, medicine). The nineteenth-century discourses on cruelty, callousness, and sympathy (131– 163) are then presented, and finally there is an overview of Western ideas of happiness from Aristotle to the twenty-first century (164 – 187). My critical appraisal is confined to the individual texts on which Boddice draws (20 – 130).⁶

a Homer’s Iliad (ca. 800 BC) Boddice sees in his first text, Homer’s Iliad, evidence of the “affective experience” of an archaic-heroic age (20 – 33). He hopes to show how unfamiliar the “Greek passions” are to us today. He assumes in the process that these “Greek passions” were experienced in the way that they were written down (21). For Boddice, “written passions” are always at the same time “experienced passions” (20). In his view, the feelings described in the Iliad represent “the feelings of the poet and his Achaean audience” (25). His theses on Homer’s Iliad are as follows. (1) Boddice proposes that the distinctive affective experience we encounter in the Iliad can be pinned down to the word ménis, the semantics of which are almost impossible to reproduce with a modern word (wrath, anger, rage; or German Groll). He thus leaves the word ménis untranslated, arguing that it refers to an affective state that has cosmic elements and characterises the archaic epoch of a figure such as Homer. For Boddice, the ménis of Achilles is apparent in his passivity, in his “inaction” (25 – 26), in his absence from battle due to his ‘wrath’ at Agamemnon; Achilles’ ménis ends when he resumes the fight (book XIX). (2) Boddice argues that Homer‘s Iliad praises the ménis of Achilles, and that “the Greeks” in Homer’s age understood (25) and experienced (20) Achilles’ ménis in exactly that way. Unlike other interpretations of the Iliad,⁷ Boddice translates the opening Ménin aeíde theá (“Sing the wrath, goddess”) not with “sing” but with “praise” (22, 25). His reinterpretation of the word aeide serves to support his theory that Homer’s contemporaries admired and endorsed Achilles’ ménis: “the Iliad as a whole is just such a praiseworthy account of ménis” (25). (3) Boddice seeks to demonstrate what is specific to its time about ménis not only by analysing the word but also by considering reception of the figure of Achilles in

 Boddice chose his authors and texts on the basis that they “characterize the affective context of the time” (15).  Boddice is aware that his interpretation will provoke “the further consternation of classicists” (22).

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later centuries. He proposes that the critical responses of later epochs allow us to grasp the huge distance between the era of Homer and the post-Homeric age: later, the affective state referred to by ménis was not “experienced”, and became alien to people. In his view, Achilles abdicates as a hero, is criticised, from Plato into the nineteenth century. According to Boddice, with the ménis of the Iliad we begin to grasp the Greeks’ world of feelings in the archaic-heroic era. The literary facts do not support Boddice’s interpretation. (1) The Iliad does not praise the ménis of Achilles; instead, even in the prologue of the first book it describes ménis (German Groll; English wrath, anger) as accursed (ouloménen; German vermaledeit, unselig) and states the awful collective consequences of Achilles’ ménis (I 1– 3). And it is not just the author but also the epic characters who criticise the behaviour of Achilles (especially in book IX). Within the Iliad, the ménis of Achilles is seen in a very critical light. Ultimately, even Achilles recognises the failings in his behaviour and displays remorse (XVIII 108 ff., XIX 62 ff.). Criticism of Achilles’ behaviour does not, therefore, begin only with Plato but is already present in the Iliad. (2) Not only the evaluation of ménis but also its semantics present themselves differently in the Iliad from what Boddice’s remarks suggest. What we find in Homer’s Iliad is very interesting. It is reasonably well known that the affective state of ménis is ascribed only to the gods and Achilles, and that Achilles thereby acquires a status equal to that of a god. Less well known is the fact that the human characters in the Iliad refer to Achilles’ affective state not as ménis but as chólos (IX 157, 260 – 261, 299, 436, 675, 678, XVI 30, 206; in XVIII 108 ff. Achilles himself refers to his earlier state as chólos).⁸ For them, there is nothing remarkable about Achilles’ affective state. This is all the more noteworthy given that Boddice insists on the semantic distinction between ménis and chólos, in consensus with Iliad research, which distinguishes between ménis, a long-lasting wrath, and chólos, a short-lived outburst of feeling.⁹ What in the eyes of the narrator (Homer) is ménis (I 1, XIX 75), is by contrast chólos in the eyes of the (human) characters of the epic.¹⁰ (3) When considering the relevance of the word ménis for the history of emotions, we need to start with the following observation: the human protagonists, like the narrator/author, ascribe ménis (German Groll; English wrath) to the gods. But for the anger of people, including for the ‘wrath’ of Achilles, they almost without exception use the term chólos. They are clearly not familiar with a ménis of people.¹¹

 Only on one occasion does a non-divine character in the epic refer to Achilles’ state as ménis (Phoenix, IX 517)  This distinction was already made in classical commentaries on Homer; Leonard Muellner, The Anger of Achilles. Ménis in Greek Epic (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), 2.  They do, however, like the narrator (Homer), ascribe ménis to the gods (I 75, V 178, XIII 624).  Muellner, The Anger of Achilles, 192– 193, considers it possible that ménis was a taboo word, and that the epic mortals in the Iliad therefore avoided saying it. But they most certainly do utter this supposedly taboo word with reference to the anger of the gods (Calchas, I 75; Aeneas, V 178; Menelaus,

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It can therefore, contrary to Boddice, be assumed that the contemporaries and recipients of the Iliad experienced not the affective state of ménis but that of chólos. Chólos (the brief outburst of feeling), however, is likely to have been very close to the affect of ‘wrath’, ‘anger’. Ménis is the preserve of the gods, not people (apart from Achilles). (4) When Homer the poet – in contrast to the mortals in his epic – includes Achilles among those to whom he ascribes ménis, he will not have been drawing on emotion-historical experiences of his contemporaries. Instead, he will have created a new affective situation for the first time: he ‘grafts’ an affective state that people at the time did not experience onto a human epic character in order to mark him out. The fact that Achilles – as the only mortal to do so – has ménis in the Iliad should not be treated as evidence of an affective state that was specific to, and characterised, the archaic-heroic age. Achilles’ ménis is a result of the narrative strategy of Homer the poet. It is a literary creation of Homer. How can this exceptional state of Achilles be representative of the “affective experience” of people at the time (“the Greeks”; 25)? It is indicative that Achilles’ companions call his emotional state chólos not ménis. Historians of emotion might object here that Homer’s contemporaries must themselves have experienced a wrath such as that of the gods (ménis), as they would otherwise not have had a word for it. But if Homer’s contemporaries marked the gods out as special beings by attributing to them a special affective state (ménis), it would not be logical to suggest at the same time that the people who set them apart like this also experienced that special affective state themselves. They created the idea of a special affective state, the ménis of the gods, without having experienced it themselves. Homer’s Iliad does not tell us “how the dead once felt”. (5) The final point to be raised here concerns, once again, the differences in how historians and literary scholars work. It involves change in medium (orality/literacy), genre history (individual songs/epic), and textual history (Urfassung/transmission), all of which are aspects sidelined by Boddice.¹² Research on the Iliad has long been aware that structural and conceptual mismatches become apparent in Homer’s work. This is no surprise, given that Homer produced for the first time a written version of the many songs that had been transmitted orally for hundreds of years. Homer’s Iliad itself reflects a cultural change. Archaic-heroic thought can be grasped only in ‘broken’ form, through the medium of writing. It might, therefore, be an interesting challenge for historical emotion research to ascertain the extent to which, as an interface between orality and literacy, the Iliad generates a particular representation of emotions.

XIII 624). A different explanation must therefore be found for the fact that the epic mortals call the ‘anger’ of Achilles not ménis but chólos.  Boddice, 196n3, mentions these problems only in passing.

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b Thucydides (ca. 460 – 400 BC) This section in Boddice’s book (34 – 43, 49 – 54) is not really about “how the dead once felt” either; instead, it concerns the commentaries of the historian Thucydides on the role played by (political and military) power in relations between the Greek city states. Boddice’s presentation of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War is designed throughout to serve the goal of refuting the widespread view according to which Thucydides intended the work to characterise timeless – i. e. universal – human nature. Boddice’s starting point is a reinterpretation of the expression katà tò anthrópinon (I 22).¹³ Thucydides is suggesting here that those who understand the past can also know the future, because future things will be identical or similar katà tò anthrópinon (I 22). This expression, according to Boddice, does not mean “according to human nature”, as almost all interpretations hold, but “according to human things” (38). For Boddice, then, Thucydides is not talking about an unchanging human nature, but is saying that “human things” of the future (40) will unfold in the same, or a similar, way as in the Peloponnesian War. Boddice argues that Thucydides’ work does not present an ever-constant human nature, and that, on the contrary, the actions and behaviour of people in the Peloponnesian War are characterised by “contingency”, “fickleness”, and a “tendency to be overwhelmed by” their own “passions” (38). Yet the previous research consensus and Boddice’s ‘reinterpretation’ do not have to be mutually exclusive, for it is entirely possible for the expression katà tò anthrópinon (“according to human things”) to include particular character traits of people. In the famous dialogue between emissaries from Athens and a delegation from Melos (V 84– 116), Thucydides has the Athenians declare that it is in the nature of people (tó anthrópinon) that they want to rule as soon as they possess power, and that this is a necessity, a law (V 105). It should not be contentious to see a human character trait in this statement. Elsewhere Thucydides remarks on the constant conflicts between and within the cities, saying that such unrest will always be present for as long as the nature of people remains the same (héos àn hè autè phýsis anthrópon é; III 82,2), but that these conflicts will be relatively benign or problematic depending on the circumstances. The mindset of people is better in times of peace, it is said, but in war people follow their affects: doing ill elicits praise; prudent caution is seen as fear, scheming against others as wisdom; oaths are only of use in the moment; and so on (III 82). In a public speech, the Athenian Cleon holds (III 39,5) that it is the general habit of people to scorn those who are conciliatory and to admire those who do not budge (kaì állos ánthropos tò mèn therapeúon hyperphroneín, tò dè mè hypeíkon thaumázein). Another speaker at the same gathering (III 45) makes the matter-of-fact observation that human nature (tes anthropeias physeos), when it is driven by affects of some

 Boddice is reading Thucydides “against the grain of modern historiography” (43).

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kind (such as hope or desire: he te elpis kaì ho eros), cannot be turned away from its goal by any law or sanction. Boddice’s argument against the theory that Thucydides depicts a human character that never changes can equally well be turned against his own theory, for it is perfectly possible to understand fickleness and being overwhelmed by one’s emotions/affects as a characterisation of human nature.¹⁴ Changeability would then need to be treated as an unchanging human trait. The chance, or unpredictable, nature of human actions, with which Boddice counters the unchanging-human-character reading, can likewise be considered a characteristic of the human race. Thucydides shows us exactly this repeatedly when he has one of the protagonists in the war say that he anticipated this or that behaviour among his fellow citizens. What is meant here is the knowledge of the political leaders that ‘the people’ often change their mind and rescind (or want to rescind) decisions after they are made (II 59 – 60, II 64 – 65, VIII 51). Human behaviour and action is predictable precisely because it is part of human nature to keep amending decisions after they are made and to vacillate in one’s feelings/affects. The very example on which Boddice draws to prove his theory – that there is no fixed, timeless human nature in Thucydides – evidences an unchanging behaviour in people: the description of the Plague of Athens (II 48 – 54). Awareness of this takes shape if one brings the description of the Great Plague by the Italian poet Boccaccio (1313 – 1375; Decamerone, day 1) into the picture. The descriptions of how people behave when faced with the dreadful scourge of the sickness – in the city of Athens in one case, in the city of Florence in the other – are uncannily similar. In the Greece of the fifth century BC and in the Italy of the fourteenth century AD, people react in the same way to the awful effects of the illness: it leads to disdain for the existing laws and norms. Complete neglect of moral customs becomes widespread. All shame was abandoned when it came to burying the corpses. For the most part, the corpses were simply burned on giant pyres (Thucydides) or thrown into gaping trenches “like cargo onto ships” (come si mettono le mercatantie nelle navi; Decamerone, I 1). People no longer cared for relatives who had fallen ill. Those who survived appropriated the possessions of the dead. The fear of not having long to live prompted people to live out their desires in the here and now, the longings that they had previously repressed. Reputable women revealed their bodies to male carers without shame. As punishment for one’s misdeeds could no longer be expected – the corresponding authorities no longer existed – there were no barriers to prevent people from acting egoistically and as their affects directed. In a word, the disease led to the dissolution of all civilising achievements, that is, to the destruction of a coexistence regulated by social and legal norms.

 Thucydides presents a perfect example of the changeability of people’s affects in the position of the Athenians towards the Mytilenians (III 36): they first decide to kill all the Mytilenians, but the very next day brings a change of mood and a new discussion is convened.

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Although the two texts are widely separated by some two thousand years, their reports about the behaviour of people in the same exceptional situation coincide. Can we take this agreement as evidence of an anthropological constancy, insofar as people acted in similar ways during catastrophes in antiquity and the Renaissance? A convergence of the descriptions, at least, can be observed.¹⁵ However, as Thucydides and Boccaccio both give accounts of the situation in Athens and Florence respectively that are highly detailed and based on their own observations, we can assume that the actual behaviour of people corresponded to the historical accounts.¹⁶ Where possible correspondences in affects are concerned, we can only speculate. I feel it is highly significant that neither Thucydides nor Boccaccio has all the inhabitants of the cities act in the same way; instead, they both distinguish several groups: those that continued to look after their friends, those that retreated into their homes and led a modest life, those that had survived the illness and now showed compassion for the sick. The importance of such a distinction is also apparent in another part of Thucydides’ work (III 37– 49). Boddice takes this section as a cue for discussing the influence of public speeches on affect (50 – 54). The Athenians end their deliberation over what to do with the rebellious city of Mytilene in anger, deciding to kill all its men, but the next day they regret this decision (human fickleness, in other words). Another debate takes place, in which Cleon and Diodotus support opposing views: the former endorses a firm response, the latter argues for a sanguine assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of harsh punishment. After other figures have spoken, a vote is taken; it is close, but the position of Diodotus, whose aim was to avoid bloody retribution, comes out in front (III 49). Boddice sees the victory of Diodotus in the vote as evidence that a speech operating with rhetorical means can not only incite anger but also remove it: “the triumph of his rhetoric also diminished or even eliminated the anger of the Athenians” (54; my emphasis). But the rhetoric has by no means removed “the anger of the Athenians”, for in that concluding vote almost half of the citizens voted for the harsh, anger-led position of Cleon. “How the city felt” (emphasis in original) depended, in Boddice’s view, on “how the city deliberated”, such that Athens saw itself as “an aggregate feeling entity in its own right” (54). This statement ignores the fact that the Athenians’ world of feeling was divided: almost half the citizens sided in the vote with the defeated Cleon.¹⁷ “How the city felt” cannot be captured with

 The impression is almost as if Boccaccio copied from Thucydides.  Some historical sources of the fourteenth century, of course, do report sources of care in society during the Great Plague (1348); Nicole Archambeau, “Healing Options during the Plague. Survivor Stories from a Fourteenth-Century Canonization Inquest”, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 85 (2011) 531– 559.  Before the debate begins, Thucydides mentions that Cleon (the subsequent loser) had the greatest influence among the people (III 36). He will have retained this influence after the debate as well.

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this generalisation and with this degree of abstraction. Boddice suggests a homogeneity of affect that the text does not actually support. The citizens of Athens speak the same language and have access to the same emotional knowledge. But they react to one and the same situation in entirely different ways. Thucydides’ historiographical work would seem to offer ideal material with which to test the theory of emotional communities.

c Aristotle (384 – 322 BC) In a section (43 – 48) on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Boddice again sets out “to find the strange in the past” (43). He hopes to show that neither Aristotle’s ideas about feelings and how they arise, nor the “affective experience” of people in (classical) antiquity, have any equivalent in the present-day world. Here too, he takes as his starting point the difficulties that present themselves when it comes to translating classical names for affective states into modern terms. He is able to show that the semantics of eudaimonia in Aristotle’s Ethics is not the same as the modern term happiness. ¹⁸ Eudaimonia, he writes, is not an emotion but “an affective activity of the rational soul” (45); it is a “disposition” and not necessarily bound to the feeling that a person has in a particular situation (44).¹⁹ Boddice claims to have ascertained an important difference between the affective experiences of people in the time of Aristotle on the one hand and our own ones today on the other. He draws the foundations for this thesis from the first two books of the Ethics. ²⁰ There Aristotle sets out how the way someone feels in a particular situation is dependent on how they responded to similar situations in the past. If somebody has always acted with fear or confidence, gently or irascibly (praxeis), this gives rise to particular characteristics (hexeis) – also called virtues (aretai) – that determine whether or not we behave properly with regard to our passions (pathe) and whether we behave in one way or the other – cowardly or courageously, gently or irascibly – in a particular situation. The nature of doing makes particular characteristics arise, which lead to particular affective experiences. The feelings that are elicited in a person in a particular situation are thus completely dependent on how the person is, and has been, accustomed to act in terms of affect.²¹

 Boddice reads Aristotle “against the grain of modern philosophy” (43).  Although Boddice attaches considerable importance to distancing the semantics of eudaimonia as far as possible from modern emotion terms, he does not hesitate to use the modern terms fear, anger, shame, jealousy, envy, and so on for the corresponding Greek ones (45 – 46).  Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, transl. C.D.C Reeve (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 2014).  Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics notes repeatedly the difference between general considerations and the feelings of an individual person in a particular situation (1103b, 1107a, 1109b). It also

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Aristotle’s ideas on habitualisation are, for Boddice, foreign to contemporary theories of emotion, in which he believes the control of feelings to be central (47). But the formulation with which Boddice describes Aristotle’s ethical model does recall one contemporary theory of emotion: “The feelings aroused in a person at a given time depend entirely on what the person is habituated to do” (47; emphasis in original). Practice theory²² also assumes that a person’s emotions are stored, as it were, in the body of that person as a result of numerous habitual actions and manners of behaviour (practices); it holds that the affective experiences of a person are coupled to those practices. Practice theory shares with Aristotle the idea of a predictable emotional state that is conditioned by habit. According to this, we do not have emotions; instead, we do them – in a habitualised manner.²³ The fact that contemporary practice theory presents similar ideas to those of Aristotle two thousand years ago disrupts the foundational thesis of historical emotion research, according to which the emotional experiences of an epoch can be read out of the contemporary theories of emotion at that time; the alternative would be to assume a degree of congruence between affective experiences in antiquity and modernity.

d Plutarch (AD 46 – 120) Boddice (61– 68) analyses Plutarch’s tract De esu carnium (“On the Consumption of Flesh”). Here too, he passes over the literary status of the text. In De esu carnium, (Pseudo‐)Plutarch²⁴ tries to explain why eating animal flesh should be avoided, and criticises people who nonetheless eat meat from animals. Boddice’s analysis of the text is concerned above all with the question of whether Plutarch’s rejection of eating animal flesh is grounded in his disgust, or whether that modern term prevents us from seeing his actual affective aversion: “The challenge, then, is to reconstruct the affective experience in the source without privileging a contemporary one” (65). As the “revulsion experience” depends on the meaning of the object of revulsion, Boddice argues, we need to take into account the context for Plutarch’s rejec-

says, moreover, that there are no terms for many affective states on a scale between two extremes (e. g. rashness and cowardice; 1107b, 1108a).  See II.3.d.  It is true that Aristotle means more the habitualisation of characteristics (temperant, audacious, cowardly) than that of emotions. But because these characteristics directly influence how we deal with passions/feelings (pathe) in his theory, we can speak of a habitualisation of affective experiences.  The text really consists of two separate texts. Neither part is preserved in complete form, and both of them have suffered considerably in transmission. The current text contains interpolations from an entirely different text. For this reason, it has been suggested that the current text is the work of a later compilator. It has been doubted whether Plutarch was the author of this text. These circumstances would seem relevant to the problem of whether the statements relating to emotions in this text are specific to their time.

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tion of eating animal flesh. Boddice identifies the crucial context as the Pythagorean idea of the transmigration of souls. According to this idea, someone who eats animal flesh runs the risk of consuming the soul of a friend or relative. Even if someone does not believe in the transmigration of souls, they still, (Pseudo‐)Plutarch argues, have to reckon with this possibility. What stops Plutarch from eating animal flesh is, for Boddice, indeed a “revulsion experience” (64 – 65) – but not the kind of disgust that people feel today; instead, his refusal is grounded in the prospect, connected to the eating of animals, of consuming the souls of relatives. In addition, Boddice continues (66 – 67), Plutarch brands the eating of animals as a raw, uncivilised behaviour, and derives the fact that many people will refuse to stop eating animal flesh from a certain “habituation” and a certain “bloodthirst”. Boddice’s theory that the Plutarch text is not talking about disgust has a lot to commend it. After all, Plutarch did not use the Greek word for ‘disgust’ (sikchos or aedes). But can we therefore assert that Plutarch was not talking about a disgust experience? Here (again) I feel that the spectrum of literary potential is unacceptably narrowed by the ‘law’ according to which a particular emotion/feeling can be meant if, and only if, the exact corresponding emotion term is used. Literary scholars will note that the beginning of Plutarch’s text argues not in moral-philosophical terms but with a rhetorical affective appeal that presents with visceral intensity the moment meat was first eaten.²⁵ The author forces readers to apprehend the flesh of a dead animal as a most unappetising object with all their senses. In this very direct manner, Plutarch confronts readers with the vile object in such a way that disgust at it has to follow. How was it possible, Plutarch asks, that a man touched dead bodies with his lips, limbs that shortly before were still lowing, moving, seeing? How was it possible for his eye to bear the sight of the dismembered bodies? How could he stand the stench of the dead animals? Why did he not revolt at the disgusting unclean taste of the animals? How was it possible that he had no qualms at chewing on the sores of another being? By presenting the process of eating animal flesh so intensely in all its repugnancy, Plutarch evokes disgust in the reader. He targets the five senses (touch, hearing, sight, smell, taste) and aims to achieve a direct affective response. And with this he creates the affective frame for the intended reception of the text. Long before Plutarch’s text mentions “fearful rawness” – and long before it picks up the theme of the transmigration of souls – it visualises the moment of eating meat and seeks to make this moment disgusting. In the remarks that follow, Plutarch no longer seeks to provoke a response of disgust. His account is now designed to create moral outrage in the reader at the consumption and killing of animals: people should neither act against nature nor engage in such “fearful rawness”. In this context, however, Plutarch’s approach is

 Plutarch, Moralia, vol. xii, with an English Translation by Harold Cherniss and William C. Helmbold (Loeb Classical Library 406) (Cambridge [Mass.] and London: Harvard University Press, 1957), 535 – 579.

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not to evoke disgust but to bring moral categories to mind. This is why he did not need to employ the term sikchos (‘disgust’) in these passages. Yet the picture drawn at the beginning of the text allows us to conclude that a text can provoke disgust without itself using the word for disgust (sikchos). To what extent is the affected experience elicited by (Pseudo‐)Plutarch characteristic of its time? There are clearly (at least) two entirely different affective experiences concerning the consumption of animal flesh. Which of them should we treat as characteristic of the age of (Pseudo‐)Plutarch? Once we find ourselves acknowledging opposing affective experiences (e. g. concerning the eating of animals) in the society of a period, it immediately becomes difficult to identify feelings specific to that epoch, and with that to distinguish feelings specific to the time from feelings specific to others. At the same time, the possibility of finding equivalents of the feelings in question in other eras becomes available. Even today people refuse to eat animal flesh or offal (brain, tripe, kidneys, heart) – but we cannot necessarily assume they do so because of disgust.

e Plato (Socrates) (428/427 – 348/347 BC) The difficulty of separating affective experiences in antiquity and modernity can be demonstrated with a passage from Plato’s Republic that Boddice discusses (68 – 72) after Plutarch’s De esu carnium tract. Here Socrates uses what was apparently a well-known anecdote to back up his teaching on the three parts of the soul (this context for the use of the events narrated should be kept in mind): “Leontius, the son of Aglaeon, was on his way up to town from the Piraeus. As he was walking below the north wall, on the outside, he saw the public executioner with some dead bodies lying beside him. He wanted to look at the bodies, but at the same time he felt unwillingness [duscherainoi] and held himself back. For a time he struggled, and covered his eyes. Then desire got the better of him. He rushed over to where the bodies were, and forced his eyes wide open, saying, ‘There you are, curse you. Have a really good look. Isn’t it a lovely sight?’”²⁶ Boddice sees, in contrast to the original Griffith translation and many other scholars, no indication of disgust in the hesitancy of Leontius’ behaviour. For Boddice, what holds Leontius back from looking at the dead is, on the basis of Socrates’ commentary on the scene, not disgust but an unwillingness – as a third force between desire and reason, indeed, but nonetheless on the side of the logistikon (‘rational part’) of the soul – that is struggling with the desire (of the eyes), epithume Platon, Der Staat. Politeia, Griechisch-Deutsch, übersetzt von Rüdiger Rufener (Düsseldorf and Zürich: Artemis and Winkler, 2000). The translation is from Plato, The Republic, transl. Tom Griffith (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), 136 (book 4; 439e–440a). I have replaced Griffith’s “disgust” (for duscherainoi) with “unwillingness” so that the text remains open to Boddice’s analysis – and to the interpretation of Socrates (!).

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tikòn (‘the desiring element’), and is thus not to be understood as an emotion (Ethics, 440e–441a). I do think that Boddice presents Socrates’ interpretation of the story correctly: Socrates does not speak of disgust. Socrates calls the force that tries to prevent Leontius from giving in to the desire of his eyes both duschéreia (‘anger, displeasure, repugnance’) and orgè (‘anger’). He sees in this a beneficial defence against desire (epithumoi). Socrates needs the idea that people can be dissatisfied about their own desires in order to support his teaching on the three parts of the soul. But we might well ask whether the story told by Socrates cannot also be interpreted differently. Let us put Socrates’ interpretation to one side and focus only on the course of the story as we witness it. A man passes a place where the corpses of condemned criminals are lying around. He is clearly attracted by the sight of the corpses, and approaches them in order to observe them more closely. Yet he suddenly turns away, seemingly unsure of how he should or wants to behave – but then incisively heads towards the corpses, albeit rebuking his eyes. This chain of events permits several interpretations. Socrates chose one of the possible ones: it was discomfort at the desire of his eyes that initially prevented Leontius from giving in to his desire. But it is certainly not the case that Socrates enlightens us about “how Leontius felt”, as Boddice claims (72).²⁷ Instead, Socrates has told us how Leontius should ideally have felt. As soon as we step back from Socrates’ interpretation and his theory of the three parts of the soul – something that only a few Greeks can have known about – it becomes possible to interpret the scene differently. One possible reading would be that two feelings/emotions were vying with each other in Leontius: curiosity on the one hand and revulsion (or disgust) at the corpses on the other.²⁸ We find this latter understanding in Augustine.

f Augustine (AD 354 – 430) People’s desire to see dead (mangled) human bodies was often the object of discussion in antiquity. Augustine (AD 354– 430) also took up this topic.²⁹ But unlike Plato/ Socrates, he does not describe conflict between the three parties of desire (curiosity), anger (at desire), and the rational part of the soul; instead, he constructs a ‘duel’ be-

 Boddice, 72, writes that the scene related by Socrates “tells us not merely how Leontius felt, but how we also should feel”. I think that Socrates is describing how we and Leontius should feel. Socrates is not relating a past experience but constructing that experience.  Scodel and Caston, “Literature”, 119 – 121, argue that the anecdote is an “example of what is disgusting”, and present further examples of the disgusting from classical literature; most of them involve rotting corpses.  S. Aurelius Augustinus, Confessiones. Libri xiii, ed. Martinus Skutella, verb. Aufl. ed. Heiko Juergens and W. Schaub (Stuttgart and Leipzig: Teubner, 1996); Augustine, Confessions, transl. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: OUP, 1991).

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tween curiosity about seeing something and dread or horror about what one wants to see. Boddice begins his section on Augustine (73 – 76) by writing that the latter “knew the heart of one who would look on dead bodies, ripped up ones at that. We can infer from his Confessions that he had looked at them, and that he knew it as a pleasure (voluptatis)” (73). Boddice refers to a statement in the Confessions (10,54– 55) where Augustine discusses the lust of the eyes (concupiscentia oculorum). Augustine there distinguishes two activities of the senses from each other, writing that seeing serves pleasure (voluptas) on the one hand and curiosity (curiositas) on the other, and that the latter comes into play, for example, when somebody wants to look at a mangled dead body (laniatum cadaver). In such a case, Augustine argues, we should not speak of pleasure (voluptas). Instead, a sick desire, curiosity, drives people on (ex hoc morbo cupiditatis); they want to see by the light of day something that they were afraid of if they saw it in a dream at night. But when people see such a corpse, they are struck and turn pale with horror (exhorreas […] palleant. timent […]; 10,55); and yet people come in crowds to see such an awful sight. Augustine is puzzled by this bizarre behaviour – wanting on the one hand to see dead bodies, on the other hand being afraid (exhorrere, timere, pallere) of the sight of them – and explains it in terms of people’s curiosity. At the theatre, too, he writes, all manner of strange things were put on show to satisfy this curiosity. Boddice argues that this description and explanation shows that Augustine had seen into the hearts of people (“he knew the heart of one […]”; 73). Leaving aside the fact that it was dogma in the Middle Ages that only God can see into the hearts of people (God as speculator cordis),³⁰ it must be noted that Augustine is interpreting a behavioural pattern in his contemporaries. His explanation is ultimately no more than an attempt to explain the curious affective connection between ‘fearing something’ and ‘wanting to see that something’. Augustine’s explanation, however, takes into account only one aspect of the phenomenon. This explanation – that curiosity is what drives people on – may well work for the other examples of ‘our’ curiosity (curiositas nostra) that Augustine sets out – watching a dog pursue a hare in the countryside, watching a lizard catching flies, watching a spider catching victims in its web (10,57). There is no sense of fear here at all, which is why Augustine can say that people’s curiosity is stimulated by such small and insignificant things (minutissimis et contemptibilibus rebus curiositas cotidie nostra temptetur). The example of mangled human bodies does not, however, fit into this category. How, though, might we explain better the behaviour of people that Augustine noticed but did not interpret well enough? In order to explain the fact that people can on the one hand be horrified and fear something, but on the other hand want at the same time to see this same dreadful thing, we need to draw on an observation that goes beyond the phenomenon of curiositas. It could be the pleasure of being shocked

 Schnell, “Wer sieht das Unsichtbare?”.

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that drives people to want to see something that they actually want to avoid. We are dealing with a complex, ambivalent psychic state of affairs that has attracted particular interest from philosophers since the eighteenth century but has primarily been considered in relation to how artistic creations are apprehended.³¹ It is a state of affairs that visual artists, theatre directors, and authors have been exploiting from antiquity to the twenty-first century. They present horrible and disgusting things, and gamble on people not only being attracted by the sensational but even enjoying the intense internal upheaval caused by feelings of horror and disgust.³² It would appear that we are dealing with an anthropological constant. An example from the sixteenth century may help to demonstrate this. In a small study, Charles Zika (2016) compares a number of broadsheets from 1540, 1542, and 1573 that report two very similar murders in word and image. ³³ A young man attempts to sexually assault a young girl – in one case aged five, in the other eighteen – in a barn or behind a church. In one case, the assailant, out of anger at not being able to penetrate the girl, dismembers her into fifteen pieces and subsequently abuses her. In the other, the assailant stabs her dead at the outset and then penetrates her, before dividing her into sixteen pieces with his sword. The dismemberment of the female body is captured in the illustrated portion, above the text, that occupies almost half the broadsheets. Analysis of text and image results in the following insight: in order to sell well, broadsheets in the sixteenth century had to work with titles that gained as much attention as possible. Those discussed by Zika achieve this by announcing an account of a “murderous and unheard-of crime” or a “true and heartrending account”. Reception of the broadsheets took place through curiosity in sensational reports. The interest of potential buyers in the stories of such horrific murders is also directed by another psychic process, specifically that of enjoying one’s own horror at the sight of an awfully injured person. The appeal that reading about dreadful murders had for people was ambivalent: dread and horror on the one hand, pleasurable enjoyment of that horror (and disgust) on the other. Indeed, the dismemberment of the female bodies is described in detail in the broadsheets covered by Zika, not so much to arouse pity but more to create a proper sense of horror in the reader. Fear of the dreadful and the affective attraction of that fear combine to form a com-

 On the theoretical background of the aesthetic debate since the eighteenth century, see Schnell “Ekel und Emotionsforschung”. Relevant literary examples can also be found in antiquity and the Middle Ages.  Scodel and Caston, “Literature”, 120, mention the fact that descriptions of corpses in classical poetry elicited disgust but also fascination in the recipient. The pleasure of reading and seeing actions that are performed by human monsters, as it were, draws people to the cinema today and is also exploited by museums, as well as ensuring the increasing success of tabloids.  Charles Zika, “Violence, anger and dishonour in sixteenth-century broadsheets from the collection of Johann Jakob Wick [second half of the sixteenth century]”, in Violence and emotions in Early Modern Europe (2016), 37– 58.

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plex and ambivalent affective state. Curiosity as the driving force is not enough. Pleasure in experiencing one’s own horror is also a factor. This affective reaction goes far beyond the curiosity cited by Augustine – wanting to see the lizard catching a fly. But Augustine still reduces the emotional process to mere curiosity. There is a remarkable resemblance between the anecdote of Socrates/Plato, the account in Augustine, and the broadsheets of the sixteenth century. They all involve people who feel the desire to see human corpses or mangled bodies and at the same time recoil from the sight. The fact that this recoil is explained differently – anger at the desire of one’s own eyes (Socrates) or fear of the sight (Augustine) – does not have to be due to a difference in affective experience, but might instead be conditioned by the context of the argument in each case: proving that the human soul is tripartite (Socrates/Plato) or using curiosity to substantiate a model of sin (Augustine). The three examples do, of course, diverge regarding one important point: Plato and Augustine give accounts of how people behave when they see mangled bodies in ‘real life’; the recipients of the sixteenth-century broadsheets were dealing with visual representations of such corpses. This means that there is a much greater possibility in the latter case that those seeing could ‘enjoy’ their horror or disgust, for what they saw will not have emotionally affected them as much as dead bodies perceived in reality.³⁴ Nonetheless, the starting point that is repeatedly taken up – wanting to see dead bodies, yet not wanting to see them – does result in a certain basic affective constant in ‘the’ Western human, at least on the level of discourse. Boddice (74– 76) analyses another text by Augustine, specifically an extract from De civitate Dei (“The City of God”, XIV 9).³⁵ Boddice argues that this Church Father had a special position in that he did not consider affects/emotions as sinful but, on the contrary, endorsed them as part of being human and as a characteristic endowed by nature (God). With this view, Boddice writes, Augustine distanced himself from Cicero (and Stoics), who treated affects and passions as vices. We read that the sensuality of people is part of their creaturely being and is not to be demonised (De civitate Dei, XIV 9).³⁶ Boddice gives the impression that a new age in the history of emotions began with Augustine – that of justifying human affects/feelings against positions from antiquity that took a different view. Three points can be raised against this. (1) Augustine shares the basic idea of seeing affects positively with a philosopher who lived some seven centuries before him: Cranton (ca. 300 BC). Augustine cites ap-

 Even today cinema audiences enjoy fear and horror as pleasure, just like those who purchased broadsheets in the sixteenth century. In his Poetics (1448b10), Aristotle registered that people do not like seeing corpses in reality, but happily look at the representations of corpses.  Augustine, The City of God, ed. and transl. P.G. Walsh, 9 vol. (Oxford: Aris & Phillips, 2005 – 2018).  On this, Boddice, 74– 75.

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provingly (De civitate Dei, XIV 9) his view, which was mediated to him through his reading of Cicero.³⁷ (2) Augustine’s intervention sanctioning people’s affects is due to his engagement with and departure from the dualistic teachings of the Manichaeans, who treated the human body as sinful and saw human affects as vices. All the same, Augustine had subscribed to these teachings for about ten years (ca. 373 – 382), before orienting himself on Cicero and finally (from 386) showing interest in Neoplatonism. This means that, thirty years before De civitate Dei (ca. 413 – 426) came into being, Augustine had supported a different view entirely. This biographical dimension also shows us that there were other assessments of human affects in Augustine’s time. Which assessment are we to take as typical? (3) Augustine himself by no means understood affects/feelings only as an enrichment of human life.³⁸ Alongside his positive treatment of emotions/affects, De civitate Dei also contains negative evaluations of human affects (VIII 17, XIV 9, XIV 19), turning affects/feelings/emotions into a flaw of being human. Given this ambivalent evaluation of perturbationes animi (passions, affects), the question of Augustine’s own emotional experiences presents itself. If, with Boddice and historical emotion research, we believe that the discourse of knowledge about emotions in an epoch influences those emotions, we would have to assume very diffuse, contradictory emotional experiences in Augustine, not just in his youth but also in old age. This raises not only the question of how representative Augustine’s remarks relating to the history of emotions are, but also that of how representative any one statement by this author actually is.

g Niccolò Machiavelli (1478 – 1529), Il Principe (1513) In his section (84– 86) on Machiavelli’s Il Principe (“The Prince”), it seems to me that Boddice’s aim “to try to find how the dead once felt” does not overlap with Machiavelli’s text. On the one hand, Boddice recognises that the ideal prince imagined by Machiavelli does not need to have a particular character, a particular trait, or a particular feeling, but only to give the impression that he has this trait or that feeling. Machiavelli repeatedly (especially in chapters 15 – 18) juxtaposes reality (essere) and appearances (parere, parere di avere) or ‘being taken for’ (essere tenuto). According to Machiavelli, what is crucial for a prince’s success are not the qualities he possesses but the ones that he seems to possess, or the ones that are ascribed to him. What a prince is really like and what he feels is of no interest to Machiavelli. He teaches princes the right way to present themselves externally, that is, how a prince

 Cicero, Disputationes Tusculanae, III 6,12.  Juanita Feros Ruys, “Literature”, in A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Medieval Age (2019), esp. 103 – 105, gives the impression that Augustine’s ideal was a life without any emotions at all.

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should present himself on the outside (loyal, God-fearing, merciful, cruel, generous, and so on). Boddice (85) rightly notes that there is no “authenticity of feeling” in Machiavelli, only an “appearance of authenticity”. If a prince wants to succeed, he does not have to possess “particular affective qualities”, just the ability “to simulate those qualities” (84). On the other hand, Boddice thinks that princes who act cruelly, mercifully, or humanely will also have the corresponding feelings in their heart (84). The change in (simulated) feelings that is necessitated by the changing dynamics of power in a state thus requires, Boddice argues (84), an “affective flexibility”. If, however, authenticity of feelings is not required and a mere simulation of feelings is sufficient, there is no need, in my view, for affective flexibility.³⁹ Where moral principles are absent, an important precondition for emotions arising is also absent. In addition, the simulation of emotions is bound to signs (gestures, facial expression, actions). For that reason, there can be no “misreading the emotions of others” (84), only a ‘misreading the signs of emotions of others’.⁴⁰ In that case, it is not necessary to speculate about what the affective quality of the prince’s pietà is (Boddice discusses the semantics of pietà on 85 – 86). What is crucial for Machiavelli is the impression that the simulated pietà makes on the people. In chapters 15 and 17, pietoso (‘compassionate’, ‘lenient’) and pietà (‘pity’) are used repeatedly, and thereby without semantic ambiguity, as opposites of crudele (‘ruthless’) and crudeltà (‘cruelty’, ‘ruthlessness’). But, just as the crudele/crudeltà of a prince in Machiavelli means not the prince’s affective experience but a cruel course of action, or ‘being considered cruel’, so pietoso/pietà means not an affective state but the attribution of pietà on the basis of particular actions of the prince. Since pietà and crudeltà, like many other emotion words in Machiavelli, thus denote not affective states but the assessment of a prince’s political action by the people, there is no historically specific way of feeling to be identified in Machiavelli’s tract. Machiavelli’s Principe does not answer the question of “how the dead once felt”. It is not affective experiences that we are dealing with in this text, but the construction of the ideal image of a successful ruler who cannot permit himself any authentic affective experiences. It might be a stimulating project for historical emotion research to pursue further the conceptual link between rulership and dissimulation.⁴¹

 Only in chapter 18 is it required that the prince configure his animo (‘mind’) in such a way that he can appear merciful and cruel, pious and godless, and so on.  See III above.  Long before Machiavelli, Eneas Silvius Piccolomini (1405 – 1464), the later Pope Pius II, wrote in his Pentalogus (1443), ed. Christoph Schingnitz (Hannover: Hahn, 2009), 288 – 289: Qui nescit simulare, nescit regnare (“He who does not know how to dissimulate, does not know how to rule”).

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h Baldassare Castiglione (1478 – 1529), Il Cortegiano (1528) Boddice characterises the relevance of Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (“The Book of the Courtier”; 1528) to the history of emotions as follows: Castiglione “fully explored the affective dynamics of courtly life surrounding such a ruler [as that presented by Machiavelli]. Here we find no shortage of prescriptions for display and representation, but here is also a clear connection to the lived experience of affective life in the courtly world” (87; my emphasis). In the first book of the work, Boddice writes, this “lived experience” is to be found in how the male interlocutors who appear in the Cortegiano, all courtiers and bound by friendship, speak about love in the presence of Duchess Elisabetta Gonzaga (1471– 1526) in an untroubled atmosphere. The “good-naturedness” of the men and women present is what characterises this community for Boddice, who believes it is possible due to self-control on the part of all present. The fact that Boddice shows little interest in textual aspects (the genesis, transmission, and function of texts, and intertextuality) in his History of Feelings comes back to bite with a vengeance in this section. It is the only possible explanation for why Boddice subscribes to an entirely obsolete scholarly position. Nobody now thinks that Castiglione provided a true-to-life picture of affective life at the Urbino court in the Cortegiano. ⁴² This earlier view is undermined simply by the way in which the text came into being. The conversations presented in the Cortegiano are supposed to have taken place at the Urbino court in 1506 – 1507. There is a first sketch of the Cortegiano from 1513 – 1514 – a time when the heyday of that court was long in the past. It is believed that a first version appeared in 1514– 1518 and a second one (with only three books instead of the later four) in 1518 – 1521. A third (and fourth) version are assumed for 1521– 1524, before the work was printed in 1528. A comparison of the different versions yields a result that refutes Boddice’s assessment. In the first and second versions, the atmosphere of the conversations was very tense due to numerous disputes between the participants, including between men and women. It even came to blows. There were also numerous autobiographical references. The reworkings in the subsequent versions tended in stages to soften the conflicts that flared up in the conversations and to expunge numerous autobiographical elements. From an ever-increasing temporal distance from the underlying events, there gradually arose an ideal of courtly conversation that was divorced from the historical reality. The conversations depicted in the Cortegiano are the outcome of a literary process that spanned a decade and was characterised by an ever-increasing idealisation and stylisation. The ideality of the court is a product of memory, not of the lived reality. In the Cortegiano, the time that Castiglione spent at the court of Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, the duke of Urbino (1503–ca. 1508) is transfigured. It is a Utopia set in the past.  Thus, for example, Thomas Frederick Crane, Italian Social Customs of the Sixteenth Century and their Influence on the Literatures of Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1920), 193. He argues that the dialogues in the Cortegiano are “undoubtedly a true reproduction of the conversations at the court of Urbino”.

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Castiglione’s Cortegiano does not offer what Boddice calls a “lived experience of affective life” (87). Instead, it presents the unattainable ideal of how a court should be. Castiglione wrote in a letter that he had never met this perfetto Castiglione in all his life. The Cortegiano thus requires a different question to be posed in contrast to that of Boddice: what is Castiglione seeking to achieve with his utopian vision of conflict-free, disciplined coexistence?

I René Descartes (1596 – 1650) Boddice’s discussion (88 – 97) gives an excellent account of Descartes’ theory of the interdependence of the movements of body and soul, positioning it masterfully in the Western discourse on the activities of the (different parts of the) human soul. For Descartes, people have affective experiences only because of the (rational) soul residing in them, whereas animals react mechanically to external influences and have no feelings, and are thus, unlike people, unable to feel pain. Boddice summarises the relevance of Descartes’ ideas to emotion as follows: “To think and to feel all depended on the presence of soul and its capacity to move” (97; emphasis in original). Boddice’s discussion of Descartes’ thesis is informative. But Boddice does not provide insights into “how the dead once felt”. Descartes formulates a theoretical answer to the question of how people are able to have feelings: because they have a soul. But it is not possible to elucidate any specific affective experiences on the basis of this thesis, not least given that Descartes’ doctrine is not immune to objections: we know today that animals can also have feelings.⁴³ Furthermore, Descartes’ position also faced competing views: his theories were the object of considerable criticism from many sides (clerics, philosophers, physicians) during his lifetime.⁴⁴ This relativises the basic theory of current research on the history of emotion, according to which the theories of emotion in a given era allow conclusions to be drawn about the affective experiences of that era because the two are linked.

j Madeleine de Scudéry (1607 – 1701), Carte de Tendre (1654) In his section (97– 105) on the Carte de Tendre (“Map of Tender”; 1654), Boddice hopes to show that an emotion (not feeling!), or the “experience of the ‘tender emotion’”, has been lost (“lost emotion”; 98) with the word tendre. The Carte de Tendre is part of the ten-volume novel Clélie (1654– 1660) by Madeleine de Scudéry (1607–  Even in antiquity, it was discussed whether animals have emotions; Stephen T. Newmeyer, Animals, Rights and Reason in Plutarch and Modern Ethics (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 29, 36, 66 – 75.  See, for example, Les Passions de l’âme et leur réception philosophique, ed. Giulia Belgioioso and Vincent Carraud (Turnholt: Brepols, 2020).

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1701).⁴⁵ The map is produced by the eponymous heroine, who wants to use it to show how one can win the affections of a lady. The Carte de Tendre is to be read as an allegorical map of “tender friendship” (l’amitié tendre). It indicates three paths that lead to three different forms of this amitié tendre: a friendship based on mutual affection, Tendre sur Inclination (“Tender by Inclination”); a friendship that arises out of the lady’s gratitude for the service of her admirer, Tendre sur Reconnaissance (“Tender on Gratitude”); and finally a friendship to which the lady agrees out of respect for the man, Tendre sur Estime (“Tender on Esteem”). The stations on the way to Tender on Esteem include, among others, Great Wit, Beautiful Verse, Love Letters, Sincerity, and Probity. One who hopes for Tender on Gratitude has to show, among other things, Submission, Constant Attention, Great Services, Fondness, Obedience, and Constant Friendship. Tender by Inclination, on the other hand, does not place the onus on the man to prepare the way in advance. As there is not really one tender emotion, but three of them, Boddice ends up saying that “tender emotion […] is not one lost emotion, but three” (103). Boddice is convinced that the tender emotion presented in the Carte de Tendre reproduces an affective experience of people in seventeenth-century Paris (101– 103). He writes that knowledge of the “experience of the ‘tender emotion’” (98) survived until the beginning of the twentieth century, but that this knowledge – and with it the corresponding term – was subsequently lost.⁴⁶ Boddice hopes to use the Carte de Tendre to reconstruct this lost emotion/feeling (98). His argumentation falls foul – once again – of the fact that he does not consider the context of the passages he chooses. He tears the Carte de Tendre out of its narrative context and thereby fails to recognise its narrative function. I can cover only a few points here. Clélie draws up the Carte de Tendre in response to a very specific situation. A stranger (Herminius) appears on the scene of the conversations that a small select group (including the heroine) are having about love and friendship. Herminius has heard about the beauty of Clélie and now seeks her favour. When she explains that she has numerous friends but makes a clear distinction between nouveaux amis (“new friends”), demi-amis (“half-friends”), solides amis (“respectable friends”), amis particuliers (“special friends”), and tendres amis (“tender friends”), the stranger wants to know which of these categories of friends Clélie includes him in. After Clélie assigns him to the group of new friends, Herminius wants to know how he can progress from Nouvelle Amitié (“New Friendship”) to Tendre Amitié (“Tender Friendship”). At this point, another participant in the conversation remarks that hardly anyone knows the lands called New Friendship and Tender Friendship.⁴⁷ Clélie now prom-

 Madeleine de Scudéry, Clélie. Histoire romaine, ed. critique Chantal Morlet-Chantalat (Sources classiques 44), 5 vol. (Paris: Champion, 2001– 2005), vol. 1, 177– 187. Boddice does not identify an edition.  This statement is surprising, given that both French tendre and English tender are still in use today.  Clélie, ed. Morlet-Chantal, vol. 1, 178, 180.

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ises to make a corresponding geographical map. This Carte de Tendre, therefore, presents not familiar terrain but imaginary worlds. Clélie’s admirer (Herminius) urges her to present the map the following day. The stations marked on it then become the object of further conversations.⁴⁸ In the process, we also learn why Clélie drew up this Carte de Tendre. The map is understood as un simple jeu de son esprit (“a simple game for her ingenuity”) and as un simple enjouement de son esprit (“a simple source of pleasure for her wit”).⁴⁹ The Carte thereby acquires the function of play and entertainment. Clélie takes pleasure in the map herself and wishes at the same time to bring pleasure to others (divertir).⁵⁰ The Carte de Tendre is not a document of an emotion that was experienced back then but is lost today; instead, it is a source demonstrating the jeux d’esprit (intellectual games, word games, riddles, and so on) of gallant society. One of the characters in the novel even acknowledges – en riant (“laughing”) – that Tendre and Tendresse involve an ideal, not an affective experience: if having everything that Clélie associates with tendresse in one’s heart is necessary in order to claim tendresse for oneself, he quips, he will never in his life use the term.⁵¹ It can be argued that the concept of friendship in the Carte de Tendre, which is new to all the interlocutors, could only be outlined in a game and as a game. Gallant society of the seventeenth century is characterised by a predilection for discussions of controversial matters in the casuistics of love.⁵² The parts of the definition of tendresse that concern emotion are so vague that it is hardly possible to define the emotion tendre. Even the characters of the novel hardly seem able to grasp what tendresse is; one conversant admits that he does not know what this tendre amitie is and is therefore not sure which of his friendships he can endow with the attribute tendre (‘tender’).⁵³ Our historical source does not offer an “affective experience”; it constructs one. It is significant that Clélie introduces her definition of tendresse with a degree of uncertainty: Mais pour bien définir la tendresse, je pense pouvoir dire que c’est une certaine sensibilité de coeur, qui ne se trouve presque jamais souverainement, qu’en des personnes qui ont l’âme nobel, les inclinations vertueuses et l’esprit bien tourne (“But to define tendresse, I think I can say that it is a certain sensibility of the heart, one that is present almost only in people who have a noble soul, virtuous tendencies, and a well-formed mind”). “A certain sensibility in the heart of a noble soul” is hardly enough to permit identification of a specific emotion.⁵⁴ It is true that tendresse is described as a quality,⁵⁵ but that quality

 Clélie, ibid., 180 – 186.  Clélie, ibid., 184– 185.  Clélie, ibid., 180 – 181, 186.  Clélie, ibid., 118 – 119.  See the list of the casuistic problems covered in Clélie in Madeleine de Scudéry, Clélie, ed. MorelChantalat, vol. 5 (2005), 487– 488.  Clélie, ibid., 115 – 116.  The medievalist will recognise in this definition a parallel to the prologue of Gottfried of Strasbourg’s Tristan (ca. 1215).

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is measured not in terms of affective categories but on ethical-moral lines. This is apparent in the effects that are ascribed to tender emotion.⁵⁶ They are named after the passage that has just been cited, and are understood as part of the definition: “This tendresse has the effect that all who possess this kind of friendship are sincere, and ardent, and that they feel the pains and pleasures of those they love as vigorously they do their own.”⁵⁷ Being sincere and being ardent in love, of course, are also hardly likely to be features that characterise an emotion specific to any one era. That said, it might still stand out that ‘ardency’ is attributed to a relationship not of love but of friendship. Yet the interchangeability of indications of love and friendship is familiar from the Middle Ages. Almost all the hallmarks or forms of behaviour of tendresse that Clélie names can be found in the literature of friendship from antiquity and the Middle Ages: feeling the joys and suffering of a friend like one’s own, not abandoning a friend in need, not avoiding a friend in a bad mood (melancholique), praising a friend, overlooking their weaknesses, being sincere to a friend, and so on. What we can conclude from the remarks of the characters in Clélie is that it is not just tender emotion that brings two people to interact with each other as friends in the way that is required. An underlying ethical attitude is also necessary: the obligations that accompany the establishment of friendship must be respected. The demonstrations of tender friendship (tendre amitié) named in Clélie are, indeed, characterised as obligations (obliger). If all these obligations are observed, the result is a parfaite amitie or perfection de l’amitié. ⁵⁸ Amitié tendre stands in the tradition of the classical ideal of amicitia and turns out to be an ethical, not emotion ideal.⁵⁹ Amitié tendre is an ethics of friendship. It is unfortunate for Boddice’s project that the terminology of the Carte de Tendre hardly gives any indications of an affective experience, for the vast majority of stages on the way to, or prerequisites for, a kind of amitié tendre concern actions, forms of behaviour, and virtues, not feelings: Great Wit, Gallant Letters, Love Letters, Generosity, Goodness, Submission, Great Services, Attentiveness, Obedience, and so on. This is why Boddice summarily treats social practices as indications of a particular affective experience. He argues that the social practices demanded of the male devotees allow conclusions to be drawn about their affective experience. “There is no distinction between these social practices and their accompanying feelings. In fact the feelings cannot exist without the practices, nor can the practices be carried out with[out] the feelings” (103). Boddice believes, that is to say, that social practices such as writing billet doux (love letters) or Iolis vers (pretty verses), or cultivating

 Clélie, vol. 1, 115, 119, 120 (la tendresse est une qualité).  Clélie, ibid., 117– 122.  Clélie, ibid., 118.  Clélie, ibid., 115 – 121.  At best, we might be able to identify a novel element of the tendre ideal in the transfer of the classical and medieval ideal of friendship to a relationship between different genders. But examples even of this can be found in the Middle Ages.

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obeissance (obedience), were always accompanied by corresponding feelings. What kind of feelings they were, of course, Boddice does not tell us. Indeed, he cannot tell us, because the Carte de Tendre does not say anything about that. Nonetheless, Boddice believes that the affective feelings he does not describe in further detail did exist in the social reality of the seventeenth century.⁶⁰ Can a general interdependency of social practice and affective experience be demonstrated for everyday life, as is assumed by Boddice and, with him, the greater part of historical emotion research? The seventeenth century, like the centuries before it as well, knew better.⁶¹ It was standard knowledge in the seventeenth century that one can (or should) not draw conclusions about corresponding feelings from social practices (writing love letters, deporting oneself respectfully, behaving magnanimously, approaching a lady attentively, and so on). In response to the general suspicion regarding the ‘authenticity’ of social practices or statements regarding emotions, people in the seventeenth century were taught how they could appear sincere to their fellows (addressees) when writing letters. Even the sincerity encouraged in the Carte de Tendre could – with the help of rhetorical ingenuity – be feigned. The eponymous heroine of the novel Clélie reckons with the possibility that her devotees – even though they have already made several steps on the way to amitié tendre – could deceive her.⁶² The social practices of a devotee do not yield information about his emotional state. Signs lose their unambiguous referents and become arbitrary.⁶³ Once the Carte de Tendre ceases to be seen in isolation, and is understood instead as the medium and object of a social game, its relevance for the history of emotions decreases. The Carte, understood as an intellectual game, takes its place alongside the other forms of entertainment in gallant society, which passed the time with word games, puzzles, and such like. Inventiveness, wit, and choice diction were the order of the day (ésprit). Before analysing the emotions represented or discussed in a text, we need to ask what function that text had.

 Boddice is forced into this assumption by the simple fact that if these feelings did not exist in social reality, it would not be the feeling ‘tender’ that was lost, but ‘just’ talk about, and the idea of, that feeling.  Jon R. Snyder, Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).  Clélie, ibid., 163 – 164. Another character in the novel says it is important to check whether a friend or lover is being deceptive; ibid., 121.  On this, see Gerhard Penzkofer, “L’art du mensonge”. Erzählen als barocke Lügenkunst in den Romanen von Mademoiselle de Scudéry (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1998), 186, 191– 195.

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k Edward Jenner (1749 – 1823) Boddice’s discussion (124– 130) of the physician Edward Jenner (1749 – 1823) is the only one of his textual examples where the reader has the sense of discovering “how the dead once felt”. It is significant, of course, that Boddice turns to a type of source that suggests authenticity: letters – and not published letters (in which stages of reworking can usually be identified) but private letters to friends. Even if research on ‘personal testimony’ has long known not to treat such testimonies as unfiltered descriptions of feeling, the reader of private letters such as these does have the impression that they are getting close to the affective life of the letter-writer. This is above all the case when the letters are from the modern period and are not all that far removed from our own language. They particularly touch contemporary readers when, as in the case of Jenner, very personal setbacks – the death of his wife and a son – form the content. In addition, we find in Jenner’s letters a rare example of a doctor who ‘dissects’ his own feelings, contemplating himself in detail.⁶⁴ Boddice seeks to obtain an overall impression by putting the many individual statements from Jenner’s letters together like the pieces of a puzzle. The usefulness of Boddice’s approach – writing the history of “affective experiences” rather than of individual emotions – is, for a change, apparent here. The question remains, of course, as to whether the affective experience described by Boddice can be considered typical of its age. We certainly find the individual components of Jenner’s affective experience – despair, hope, pain, the consolation of faith, melancholy, submission to God’s will, frustration at the limits of medicine – in medieval texts as well. Boddice identifies a personal pain of Jenner the individual in the latter’s inability, as an in other respects successful and respected physician, to prevent the death of close relatives. It is a pity that we do not, as far as I know, have any letters in which a medieval physician laments his helplessness in the face of the death of relatives. Boddice places the case of Jenner alongside his other textual examples without further commentary, which gives the impression that they are of the same evidential value as Jenner’s letters. In this way, a methodological levelling of the evidence takes place, one that in my view distorts our awareness of the disparate nature of the historical sources available. The levelling makes it seem as if all historical sources tell us about affective experiences in the same way. A literary scholar sees this differently from a historian of emotions.

 Even this physician, of course, turns to the topos of what cannot be said, writing that he is hardly able to describe the loss he has suffered.

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l Happiness in the Twentieth Century In his final chapter (164– 187), Boddice is entirely in his element. It is not individual literary texts or tracts that form the object of his analysis but posters, surveys, empirical tests, governmental agendas, UN reports, and academic research. In this way, Boddice succeeds in giving a highly informative and critical overview of the various efforts made by political and economic institutions to tell people how, when, for what reasons, and why they can and should feel happy: “happiness as a government project” (179). In the process, personal happiness is overlaid with a happiness prescribed by the state.⁶⁵ But this does not answer the question of what effect all these official measures have on people’s affective experience.

m Conclusions Passages from Boddice’s book were subjected to detailed criticism above for the sole reason that this allows us to address some fundamental shortcomings in historical emotion research. (1) The history of words and the history of emotions. Boddice’s book is distinguished by its many fundamental reflections on the study of the history of emotion. Yet Boddice does not reach the very goal that he sets himself – “to try to find how the dead once felt” (9). This is in large part due to the fact that Boddice, in line with current research on the history of emotion, holds to the basic theory that differences and changes in words always and everywhere mark differences in affects. But there is no shortage of counter-examples.⁶⁶ In Homer’s Iliad, Achilles’ companions describe his ‘anger’ as chólos, but Homer uses the term ménis for it, even though the same affective state is involved. It seems clear that the difference in word is the result of a changed perspective on the object rather being caused by the object itself. Augustine (AD 354– 430) is of the view that the emotion terms perturbationes, passiones, and affectus are not different from one another with respect to their semantics.⁶⁷ Augustine emphasises that the works of Christian authors do not distinguish between amor, dilectio, and charitas. ⁶⁸ It follows from this that a change in the use of these terms does not point to any difference in the emotion ‘love’. The terms for ‘love’ (amor, dilectio, charitas, amicitia) can be used interchangeably in the Middle Ages. Two different terms are also used in the Middle Ages for what we now know as ‘depression’: acedia and melancholia. One and the same affective state was described differently by physicians and theologians. The observer level, not the object level,  Boddice works with a term of William Reddy, ‘emotional regime’ (185 – 186).  See V.1.c above.  Augustine, De civitate Dei, ed. Bernardus Dombart and Alphonsus Kalb (Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 47– 48) (Turnholt: Brepols, 1955), IX 4, XIV 5.  Augustine, De civitate Dei, XIV 6.

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is the source of the differing terminology.⁶⁹ In the case of German Furcht (‘fear’) und Angst (‘anxiety’), matters are even more complicated. While Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1280) attempts to make a semantic distinction between timor (‘fear’) and anxietas (‘anxiety’), Konrad von Würzburg (ca. 1280), writing in German, uses the terms vorcht and angest interchangeably.⁷⁰ Different words do not point to emotional differences.⁷¹ In medical writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the terms emotion, passion, affect, adfectus, and perturbation are used interchangeably.⁷² (2) The history of concepts and the history of emotions. Theories and concepts of emotions by no means determine the emotional experiences of their contemporaries in any given case, even if historical emotion research persists in claiming that they do.⁷³ I will show this by means of two examples: (a) ideas about how emotions arise and (b) the idea that opposing emotions can exist simultaneously. (a) Boddice attaches importance to the observation that the pathe (‘passions’) of antiquity should not be equated with the emotions of modernity, on the grounds that the position of antiquity is that pathe (‘passions’) “happen to a person”.⁷⁴ The people of antiquity, in his view, bear pathe passively, whereas emotions in the modern view emerge from people (“projecting out of a person”; emphasis in original). Consequently, he argues, we must not simply insert the pathe of antiquity “into our own emotional schema”, describing them with our term emotions. Can we, though, assume, on the basis of terminological differences and different beliefs about the arousal of affective states, that people in antiquity (and into the eighteenth century) “experienced” their feelings differently from how we do in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? The situation is more complex than one might think from the contrast Boddice draws between pathe and emotions. During antiquity, it was debated from

 See VI.1 above.  See VI.3 above. The terminological distinction between object-related ‘Furcht’ and existential ‘Angst’ is not the result of different affective experiences but the product of philosophical constructs.  Conversely, many emotions lack the corresponding terms. Augustine, De civitate Dei, XIV 15, lists several kinds of libido (‘desire’, ‘lust’) – libido ulciscendi, libido habendi pecuniam, libido gloriandi – and finally says that there are further lusts that do not, however, have names of their own (vocabula propria). Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II 7 (1107b–1108a), remarks that there are no names available for many grades of fear (phóbos) and anger (orgè).  Stephen Pender, “Medical and Scientific Understandings”, in A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Baroque and Enlightenment Age (2019), 17.  See V.2 and, most recently, Katie Barclay, David Lemmings, and Claire Walker, “Introduction. What Were Emotions? Definitions, Understandings, and Contributions”, in A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Baroque and Enlightenment Age (2019) 1– 14 (5). In the collection Emotionen. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch (2020) single emotions are presented separately. This method makes sense, because there the focus is on discourses on emotions, not on everyday emotional experiences.  Boddice 2019, 203n51 (emphasis in original). Boddice argues that in the view of Aristotle and the Greeks in general, “the passions came from without” (198n43). Boddice, “Medical and Scientific Understandings”, in A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Age of Romanticism, Revolution, and Empire, ed. Matt (2019), 17– 18, argues that with the term passio/passion, the affective state it denoted also continued to exist into the eighteenth century.

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the sixth/fifth century BC whether ‘emotions’ (pathe) seized people from without (such that the gods had to be made responsible for them) or instead arose in people themselves (such that they themselves were responsible for them).⁷⁵ We have to acknowledge different – in fact opposing – views in antiquity about how emotions arise. Which of the two competing views should be considered “characteristic” (Boddice)? That is hard to say, if nothing else because both ideas can also be found in the Middle Ages. On the one hand, numerous poetic images transmit the idea that people are ambushed by emotions/affects as if by external forces.⁷⁶ It was widely believed throughout the Middle Ages that the Devil leads people astray to particular emotions/affects.⁷⁷ On the other hand, the position is taken that ‘emotions’ (such as love, for example) arise in the heart.⁷⁸ Even today, everyday language preserves – despite the findings of cognitive psychology to the contrary – the idea that people are hit by emotions from without, as it were: “love struck him in a flash”, “he was seized by anger”, “he was suddenly overcome with homesickness”.⁷⁹ We read in volume I (on antiquity) of the six-volume Cultural History of the Emotions that people today, as in antiquity, have the impression that emotions overcome them from without.⁸⁰ The introduction to that first volume even says “that emotions are to some extent things that happen to us rather than things that we do”.⁸¹ This latter statement is diametrically opposed to the view of Boddice that was quoted at the start of this paragraph. It also contradicts practice theory, according to which we ‘do’ emotions.⁸² Despite decades of research in neurophysiology and cognitive psychology into processes relating to emotion in people, there does not seem to be any consensus regarding a basic question of emotion research: how do people experience their emotions? Emotion historians are clearly unable to give a satisfactory answer either: their views are contradictory. (b) My scepticism towards the ‘founding charter’ of emotion history is reinforced by this second example. It concerns the medieval discussion about whether a person can feel two contradictory ‘emotions’ (affectus, passiones) simultaneously. The debate involved extends from Plato to Augustine to Thomas Aquinas and beyond.⁸³ At stake is the question of whether affective impulses that oppose each other can appear at one and the same time in a person (or the soul or heart of a person). Whereas Augustine was of the view that contradicting feelings (such as love and hate, for ex Schnell, Causa amoris, 359 – 373; Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 49n120, 146n119.  Augustine, De civitate Dei, XIV 9, shares the view that feelings often overcome us against our will (et saepe illis [affectionibus] etiam inviti cedimus).  Augustine, De civitate Dei, XIV 3.  Schnell, Causa amoris, 370 – 390; Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 105 – 107.  Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 49n120, 135n79, 146n119, 168 – 169n225.  Scodel and Caston, “Literature”, 109.  A Cultural History of the Emotions in Antiquity (2019), 5 (my emphasis).  See II.3.d above.  See Vnn10 – 12 above. Classical literature already offers examples of conflicting, even contradictory, emotions existing simultaneously in a single person; Scodel and Caston, “Literature”, 111.

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ample) cannot be felt simultaneously, Aquinas followed the theory of Aristotle, according to which opposing emotions can exist simultaneously.⁸⁴ The problem of simultaneous contradictory emotions was by no means considered settled in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; for that reason, time and again, new solutions were proposed and new distinctions put forward. Three questions now present themselves, all of which point to the dilemma of Boddice’s approach, that is, the argument that it is possible to determine “how the dead once felt” from discourses about “affective experiences”. (i) Which theoretical stance – in the event of controversial discussion within an era – can be treated as ‘characteristic’ of (or specific to) that era? (ii) Which of the competing theoretical conceptions influenced “affective experiences”? (iii) Did any of the theoretical positions influence affective experiences at all? Or is having contradictory emotions simultaneously itself an affective experience that can appear in any era without any theoretical conceptions being needed? The thesis that conceptions of emotion and affective experiences are interdependent does not seem very convincing when presented with the diversity of opposing conceptions and evaluations of emotion within the same educated class in a period. (3) Text and context. Boddice argues that considering the context in any given case helps to gain access to the feelings of people in the past. It is all the more surprising that Boddice hardly takes into account the immediate context of the textual examples he presents: the passages before and after the descriptions of feelings. Furthermore, Boddice hardly tells us anything about the genesis of a given text, about its history (reception), about its intention and function, about the genre to which it belongs, or about discourse characteristics, stylistic levels, perspective shifts and multiple perspectives (irony, parody), innovativeness, or structure. Yet it is precisely these factors that have a considerable influence on the representation and ‘performance’ of emotions in each case. (4) Experience. The term experience, which Boddice believes will make possible a better ‘history of emotions/feelings’, is accompanied by several problems. Boddice argues that “the category of experience” is not encumbered by the risk of anachronism (189), and that the concept of experience prevents other fields from intervening in the way that psychology or neurobiology do with emotions. This leaves us fully in control of what we mean by experience, Boddice believes, for the meaning of the term experience is not at present constrained by prior definitions. The semantic ‘innocence’ of the term experience, of course, means that remarks about what “affective experience” actually is remain (necessarily) very vague. In my view, Boddice has shifted the basic problem of emotion history – how can I comment on how people in the past felt? (individual emotions) – onto a different one. Even turning to the

 On the contemporary debate, see VI.4.

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term experience for help does not bring historians of emotion any closer to their goal of commenting on how people felt in the past. The changing historical faces of the term experience (experientia) show that it was interpreted in very different ways in previous centuries.⁸⁵ Proposing that emotion historians understand experience as an opposite of discourse or theory suggests an opposition that needs to be questioned when it comes to emotion history. After all, the so-called affective experiences are accessible to us only as experiences mediated by discourses and by interpretations. What the historical texts report – be it Socrates on the behaviour of Leontius, or the medieval Crusade accounts of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, or the autobiographical remarks of someone like Augustine – is not experience of the everyday world but the result of the post-factum interpretation of real events. We are dealing with constructions of reality, not with authentic experiences. Emotion historians certainly know this. Yet they repeatedly fall into the trap of wanting to reveal how it ‘really is’, or trying “to find how the dead once felt”. (5) Feelings and literacy. It might be objected that all these utopian, didactic, fabricated, instrumentalised, deceptive accounts of affective experiences belong to the affective life of an epoch and must therefore at least give us information about it. Yet it must be conceded that these affective experiences were not felt but instead, and before anything else, written down. Even if writing is understood performatively, a number of factors intervene between the (allegedly real) affective experiences and writing about those affective experiences, thus preventing us from taking the written affective experiences as authentic representations. The factors that influence writing include, among others, reflection, foreign-language terminology (Latin vs vernacular), different addressees (lays vs clerics vs monks, men vs women), an author’s level of education, the choice of a narrative or discursive representation, literary traditions, and descriptive vs normative poetics. All these factors determine how affected experiences are represented. Once historians of emotion not only admit that we cannot gain access to actual feelings (“how the dead once felt”), but also draw the necessary conclusions from this and see their primary cognitive object not in the emotions/feelings that are introduced to narrative and discourse but in the medium that narrates them and informs us about them, it will not only become possible for emotion historians and philologists to work together; it will become clear that such an exchange of ideas is, in fact, a necessity. At the end of his book, Boddice seeks to extend the horizons of his study’s enquiry. He argues that the questions he has addressed “speak to something beyond the presence of feeling itself, leading to an analysis of evaluation of feelings”  On the concept of ‘experience’ in the Middle Ages and early modern period, see most recently Paul Münch, ed., ‘Erfahrung’ als Kategorie der Frühneuzeitgeschichte (München: Oldenbourg, 2001); Thomas Bénatouil and Isabelle Draelants, eds., ‘Expertus sum’. L’experience par le sens dans la philosophie naturelle médiévale (Firenze: SISMEL, Ed. del Galluzzo, 2011).

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(190). Boddice’s book does not, in my view, open the way to analysing how feelings have been evaluated: most of it already does exactly that (Homer, Thucydides, Plutarch, Augustine, Machiavelli, De Scudery, Descartes, the Ministry of Happiness). This is also the case in the six-volume work edited by Broomhall, Davidson, and Lynch to which my critical remarks now turn.

2 A Cultural History of the Emotions (ed. Broomhall, Davidson, and Lynch) Boddice is the first person to have attempted on his own to write a history of feelings/ emotions, trying in the process to set out a self-contained narrative of the history of emotions. The six-volume Cultural History of the Emotions, by contrast, takes up the traditional historical model of social and cultural history.⁸⁶ The volumes are I: Antiquity, II: Medieval Age (350 – 1300), III: Late-Medieval, Reformation and Renaissance Age (1300 – 1600), IV: Baroque and Enlightenment Age (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), V: Age of Romanticism, Revolution and Empire (1780 – 1920), and VI: Modern and Post-Modern Age (twentieth century). An overview of the knowledge that has been accrued in historical emotion research is offered for each epoch, under eight rubrics in each case: “Medical and Scientific Understandings”, “Religion and Spirituality” (but also covering philosophy and literature), “Music and Dance”, “Drama”, “The Visual Arts”, “Literature”, “In Private. The Individual and the Domestic Community”, and “In Public. Collectivities and Polities”. It is not the history of individual emotions that is presented; instead, the relevance of emotions in various cultural spheres is demonstrated. A detailed criticism is not possible given the vast range of historical material that is put on display here.

a The Object of Research Rob Boddice formulated his cognitive aim clearly. His enquiry was directed at a “history of feelings”. He wants to “try to find how the dead once felt” (2019, 9), to grasp “the affective experience of our forebears” (16). In the introductions to the six volumes of A Cultural History of the Emotions, mention is made very rarely of affective experiences, and instead frequently of ideas, definitions, representations, conceptions, expressions, performances, styles, words, and languages of emotions.⁸⁷ One could be forgiven for thinking that the six-volume work cannot, and does not intend to, say anything about the emotional experiences of our ancestors, despite the fact  The history of emotions is slotted into the traditional sequence of eras as if it were self-evident (II 8 – 10, 134– 135).  The indexes to the six volumes do not include entries for experiences and affective/emotional experiences.

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that interest in exactly that played a crucial role in the emotional turn of the 1990s. The expressions “felt experience” (III 110), “bodily emotional experience” (III 118), “emotional experience” (IV 6, 113), “affective experiences” (IV 147), and “new emotional experiences” (IV 156 – 157) are used on occasion in the six volumes, but without the content of these experiences being identified. The contributions on “Music and Dance”, “The Visual Arts”, and “Literature” often refer to the emotional effects of these cultural products, but do not go beyond naming (timeless?) emotions (pity, compassion, disgust, horror, wonder, joy, grief, hate, desire, and so on). Yet the goal of investigating ‘affective experiences’ has not really been abandoned. It is still pursued, just by circuitous routes. Emotion historians are convinced that it is possible to learn about affective experiences by means of analysing expressions, conceptions, representations, words. They assume the interdependence of affective experiences on the one hand and expressions, definitions, and conceptions of emotions on the other. The “experience of emotion is shaped by how it is defined and articulated” (IV 5).⁸⁸ Even so, the reticence in use of the phrase affective/emotional experience in the introductions to the six volumes may be a result of the difficulties, despite the ‘back-up’ just mentioned, of commenting on precisely these emotional experiences:⁸⁹ covering the distance between the historical documents (texts, images, statues) and the affective experiences is no easy task. The introduction to the second volume presents its goal as the “recovery of emotions in the Middle Ages” (II 1). Yet one of the contributions to the same volume observes that “for historians, recovery of feeling is not an option” (II 134). The introduction to the first volume states: “Everything we have – even the data on body language and expression provided by the visual arts – must be interpreted in the light of categories and representations for which our only evidence is textual and linguistic […]. Equally, we have no access to the felt symptoms of ancient emotions except as they are embedded in language and texts” (I 4). The “In Private” chapter in this volume concedes with respect to private letters that “it is impossible to access the feelings (if any) behind the formulae” (I 145). Private emotions “are channeled through more or less conventional forms of expression” (I 145). The chapter concludes as follows: “The big question is the extent to which these conventional expressions of feeling might come to embody as well as express the content of many people’s feelings” (I 145). There is clearly a discrepancy in historical emotion research between the cognitive aim on the one hand and awareness of the limitations of the possibilities of knowledge on the other. These difficulties can (supposedly) be dealt with by simply equating (linguistic and physical) forms of expressing emotions with emotions, or at least supposing that they are interdependent (see above). Changes in the (visible) expressions of emotions are assessed as indications of changes in the (invisible) emotions. In this

 See also II.2 above.  The author of the contribution on the history of medicine in volume II admits in the final sentence that it concerns “medieval ideas about the individual’s interior life” (II 30; my emphasis).

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way, recommendations about correct behaviour in advice literature can be understood as indications of emotional experiences. Variants of this solution can be found in the approach that views emotions as performances (IV 7), or in the theory that emotions are practices (III 69). These approaches are able to do without the analysis of possible inner states.⁹⁰ The gap is also bridged by drawing conclusions about changed affective experiences from changed conceptions of emotions.⁹¹ Another attempt to escape the nature of texts as mere representations and get closer to affective experiences consists of assigning the texts the property of actions, such that representations of emotion “generate affective selves” and “shape experiences” (III 115, IV 139) or “elicit emotions” (I 83). Needless to say, we do not learn anything in the contributions in question about the historicity of the emotions elicited.⁹² Other lines of enquiry have abandoned entirely the cognitive aim of exploring affective experiences. Thus, for example, attention is directed at “how members of past societies represented, educated, privileged, enhanced, subdued, and organized feelings; how they recognized feelings in certain situations as relevant enough to record; how they misunderstood or disambiguated others” (II 134). These questions, it is suggested, enable us “to use the expressions, representations, and the discussions of emotion as pathways into medieval and political systems” (II 133), making it “possible to construct a history, not of emotions, but through emotions” (II 134). Such approaches have no need to consider ‘felt experiences’. Numerous contributions to the six volumes are concerned in a traditional manner with discourses about emotions (“Medical and Scientific Understandings”, “Religion and Spirituality”, “Music and Dance”). This diffuse variety of methods and areas of enquiry is subsumed under the label “study of emotions” (II 1, 7, 132, 149, III 107). This formulation, however, suggests a commonality of cognitive interests that does not exist.⁹³ Still, it manages to preserve the expectation that the studies will inform us about emotions as affective experiences of our ancestors.⁹⁴

 The “In Private” chapter in volume IV aims to examine “affective expressions, practices of emotions and affective performances in real and imagined domestic spaces” (151).  See II.2, V.2 above.  Instead, general formulations are all that is possible: texts “participated in the making of emotions in history” (III 115). Or we read of the “role of emotions in our lives” or “the role of emotions in the Greco-Roman world” (I 1, VI 1, 7). Such statements belong to the ‘emotions in history’ project (I 9). Studies “on emotion in literature” have different cognitive interests from studies “on the history of emotions (in literature)” (III 108). See II.1 above.  The question of “how emotion was performed in drama” (II 81) concerns the literary scholar; the question of “how the dead once felt” (Boddice 2019, 9) concerns the historian of emotions.  Contributors were asked “to write 9,000 words on emotions” in a particular cultural sphere in a particular period (VI 91).

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b Theories and Practice in Research To what extent do the so-called key texts, or the repeatedly cited theories of individual emotion historians, influence actual research?⁹⁵ Have the theses and theories formulated in emotion history over the past twenty years found a place in the six volumes of A History of the Emotions? Analysis of the (not entirely reliable) indexes yields a mixed picture. In the introduction to volume VI (on modernity and postmodernity), the works of the Stearns (on emotionology, 1985), William M. Reddy (emotives and emotional regimes, 2001), Barbara Rosenwein (on emotional communities, 2006), Monique Scheer (on emotions as practices, 2012), and Jan Plamper (2015) are designated “key texts” (VI 1).⁹⁶ But none of the eight contributions to the volume makes use of these “key texts”.⁹⁷ The same misplaced expectations apply to volume I (on antiquity).⁹⁸ In the introduction to volume IV, Stearns, Reddy, and Rosenwein are named (IV 5), but only Reddy and Rosenwein are mentioned in the rest of the volume (Rosenwein in three contributions, Reddy in two). The “key texts” receive greater attention in volumes II and III: Reddy is mentioned in two chapters in each, Rosenwein in four chapters in each, and Scheer once in volume III.⁹⁹ The differing reception of the supposed “key texts” in the six volumes suggests that they are of different degrees of relevance to the different epoch-oriented subdisciplines of historical emotion research. Several subdisciplines are able to do without them entirely.

c Theories of Emotion and Emotional Experiences One of the basic principles of historical emotion research is that theories of emotion and emotional experiences condition each other. Changes in emotional experiences can be read out of changes in theories of emotion. The emotions, or the emotional experiences, of people are held to be conditioned by how they are defined and articulated (V 5).¹⁰⁰ To what extent do the individual contributions confirm this principle? The contributions entitled “Medical and Scientific Understandings” lend themselves

 See also II.4 above.  In III 118, the following “key concepts and methods” are listed: “emotion lexicons, emotional communities, and emotional regimes (Reddy 2001, 2012; Rosenwein 2006, 2015)”.  Only in VI 112 is reference made to Plamper 2015.  It is indicative that in the “In Private” chapter in volume I, the term ‘emotional community’ is not used for members of a household (nuclear family and servants), in contrast to the “In Private” chapter in volume III, even though the same structural conditions are present.  Scheer is also mentioned in IV 144.  See also Boddice, The History of Emotions (2018), 49 (similarly 45): “conceptual change equates to experiential change, at least to some extent”. Critically on this, see V.1.a, V.2 above.

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to addressing this question because they are primarily concerned with theories of emotion. Volume I (17– 33). The influence of theories of medicine and natural philosophy in antiquity on affective experiences can hardly be determined, for the simple reason that opposing positions were adopted during antiquity. We read that the dominant position was that of the Hippocratic Corpus, according to which emotions are understood as “physical symptoms”, as “an extension of the body” (I 17). Emotional anomalies, it is argued, were traced back to disorders in the body, whereas Aristotle considered the possibility that emotions arise through “thoughts, evaluations, and judgments”, that is, “mentally” (I 18). Yet, the discussion continues, the priority of body or mind in Aristotle cannot be determined (I 22). Hippocrates, by contrast, is said “to sidestep the idea of a ruling mental faculty” (I 19); “it is the body that does the ‘feeling’” (I 19), reacting to its environment as if instinctively (I 25). This was why a physician was meant to address the physical state of a patient in order to combat emotional anomalies in them (I 25).¹⁰¹ Of course, there are also indications in the Hippocratic Corpus of understanding the mind “as a separate, autonomously acting entity” (I 28). Accordingly, “an emotional state can be increasingly felt on a mental level” (I 28). This even leads to the assumption that the mind “can sometimes serve as the locus of emotion” (I 28). If that is the case, it becomes possible to speak of emotional disturbance without any reference to the body (I 29 – 31). Emotions become free for a psychological reading (I 31). There is thus a degree of uncertainty in the Hippocratic Corpus as to whether emotions are a purely physical or also a psychological matter. There are differences between Hippocrates and Aristotle regarding the relevance of the mind (gnômê) for emotions. The chapter’s final sentence exposes the fact that we cannot talk of (medical) theories of emotion influencing the affective experiences of people, and that we must assume instead a disdain for affective experiences on the part of physicians and natural philosophers: due to their excessive authority, we read, physicians imposed their view of the body as the site of emotional processes “at the expense of the patient’s suppressed (emotional) agency” (I 33). This discrepancy between putative affective experience and basic emotion-theoretical positions within an epoch should give food for thought. Volume II (17– 30). What is the relationship between theory and emotional experience in the contribution on the Middle Ages (AD 350 – 1300)? Late antiquity and the early Middle Ages in the West had many approaches to the object ‘emotion’ (II 17– 22). Galen was by no means the sole prevailing authority in this period. Different local practices dominated medicine in this period (II 18, 22). From the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the chapter argues, Galenic and Hippocratic texts, translated  This could be seen as a (rare) example of a particular theory of emotion influencing a person’s affective experience. But it involves not the general cultural influence of a theory on the feelings of people in a particular era, but a physician exerting an influence on the emotional state of an individual patient.

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into Latin, and commentaries on them dominated medical discourse in the West. But, the chapter goes on, this by no means prevented controversial discussions about emotions from taking place, because certain contradictions were inherent to Galenic medicine, and because Galen and Aristotle represented conflicting ideas of the body (II 22– 23; see also IV 128). The chapter reports that it was unanimously assumed that the accidentia animae (‘movements of the soul’, ‘emotions’) were changing parts of the anima and influenced a person’s state of health, but that it was disputed what these ‘emotions’ were and how they functioned in body and mind (II 24). This lack of consensus, we read, was due on the one hand to the ‘flexibility’ of Galenic positions (see the remarks on volume I above) and on the other to the difficulty of harmonising Graeco-Roman ideas of the soul with Christian viewpoints. The controversies deepened, the chapter goes on, as a result of disagreement between physicians and natural philosophers (II 27– 29). Whereas Galen had emotions arising in the brain, we read, Aristotle placed this in the heart, and the confusion of the accidentiae animae (in the brain) with the passions (in the heart) was linked to the heart/brain debate. Thus, it has to be concluded that “the creation and experience of emotion was still not clear” (II 28). All that was clear was that ‘emotions’ (whether they be accidentia animae or passions) could affect the balance between the humours in a person. The physicians made use of this insight by influencing emotions (as a species of the non naturales res) to treat physical disorders (II 29 – 30). Volume III (13 – 29). The chapter here reports that, according to the ideas of physicians and natural philosophers in the period from 1300 to 1600, emotions were a matter of both mind and body. We read that affective experiences were interpreted in the medical literature as being produced by, or being connected to, the accidentia animae (‘movements of the soul’, ‘emotions’; see the remarks on volume II above). Even so, the chapter reports, the exact relationship between these ‘movements of the soul’ on the one hand and the visible and felt emotional phenomena on the other was a matter of debate – but there was, in spite of all the differences, a consensus that the body was where emotions were experienced. The effect of emotions on health and sickness prompted physicians to engage with them, we read, and the significance of the soul for the formation of emotions was undisputed throughout the epoch, even though emotions were also located in other organs of the body as a consequence of anatomical work – mostly in “the brain or heart, or in some form of communication between them” (III 21), with a preference for the heart.¹⁰² Volume IV (15 – 33). One finding regarding this period (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) should be noted because of how provocative it is in light of our interest in the interdependence of theories of emotion and affective experience: medical theory and practice go separate ways. “While medical theory changes, and while physicians and philosophers engage in rebarbative debate, medical practice remains

 In contrast to II 28, III 21 does not draw a distinction between Galen (brain) and Aristotle (heart).

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organized by more or less constant Galenic categories and practices, forms of intervention and counsel, including the ways in which the passions were probed, used, and understood, well into the Baroque period” (IV 16). Within the theoretical discussion, moreover, there were at this time a number of different approaches, not least the controversy between supporters of mechanism and those of vitalism. There was no generally valid position in the theory of emotion that could have influenced the affective experiences of people. While the theories became increasingly interested in “nerves and fibres”, medical practice continued to work with humours and temperaments. Volume V (17– 32). A crucial shift in the history of science took place in the long nineteenth century (1780 – 1920). New methods (experimentation, measuring, biometry), professionalisation, and the emergence of new disciplines (physiology, psychology, psychiatry, anthropology) brought new insights into what were now called no longer passions but emotions. ¹⁰³ Medical practice, this chapter reports, abandoned the humoral categories of temperamental imbalance, and directed its attention instead at nerves and viscera. The change in perspective, the chapter tells us, became apparent in, for example, new theories of neurosis, but this major new departure in the study of emotions, which affected numerous disciplines, by no means led to generally accepted insights. “On the contrary, a plurality of diverse notions of what emotions were, how they worked, and what they did emerged in this period. As scientific and medical disciplinary boundaries hardened, the range of approaches to the study and interpretation of emotions became increasingly incommensurate with one another. […], by the beginning of the twentieth century there were large chasms between distinct epistemologies of emotions” (V 17). The chapter describes solely the efforts in the natural sciences to achieve a better understanding of physiological and psychological processes relating to emotions. No mention is made of a possible influence of these theories of emotion on the affective experiences of people. How could such an influence have been exerted anyway, given the diversity of, and contradictions between, the explanations for how emotions arose and functioned? Volume VI (19 – 36). The debate that has accompanied us since the chapter on medicine in antiquity is extended in this contribution on the twentieth century: are emotions stimulated by physical-psychological or by mental-psychic processes? Related to this is the question of whether emotions influence physical processes, or physical processes influence the human psyche, or what a possible interplay would look like. As in the preceding chapters on “Medical and Scientific Understandings”, a confusing picture is painted here: on the one hand, we have constantly changing research paradigms, on the other constant disagreement within these guid-

 This change to research in the natural sciences did not, however, prevent popular ideas about gender differences finding their way into the evaluation of physiological findings concerning emotions (V 23 – 24).

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ing theories. We are dealing with “shifting models of emotions and health” (IV 35) and with “conflicting constructions of emotions” (VI 22). The professionalisation, specialisation, and institutionalisation of work on the “role of emotions in disease”, the chapter argues, led not to clarification of the relationship between body and mind, but rather to a separation of medicine, biology, and psychology on the one hand and psychology and psychiatry on the other. “The tendency for scientists and clinicians to disembody emotions was also evident in mid-twentieth-century debates about stress-related disorders” (VI 29), and “we know little about how doctors in everyday practice evaluated the role of emotions in disease” (VI 30). The result of this overview is sobering when it comes to the dogma that is repeatedly cited in historical emotion research – that theories of emotion and emotional experiences are interdependent. Different conceptions of emotions compete with one another in each era. How are we to imagine the influence of these differing theories on people’s affective experiences? Boddice’s thesis – “that what people thought they knew about human passions directly influenced how those passions were experienced” (Boddice 2019, 49) – cannot be accepted without reservations. People today ‘know’ opposing things about feelings/affects/emotions. Given the current disjunction between the popular contrast drawn between emotions and reason in everyday life on the one hand, and the neurophysiological scientific theory that emotion and cognition work in tandem on the other, it seems unlikely that we can assume a particularly significant influence of theories of emotion on people’s affective experiences in the present day either.

d Homogenisation Whereas the lack of consensus in the discourses of the relevant epochs is clearly brought out in the chapters on “Medical and Scientific Understandings”, a trend in the other direction can be observed in the chapters on “Literature”. We can sense an all-too-obvious effort to use literature as a simple indication of how emotions have developed through history. A clear answer to “the question of how literature serves, or might serve as source for the history of emotion” (III 114) is not given in the relevant contributions. The choice of texts and authors to discuss, however, leads one to suspect that literary history is being used in an attempt to demonstrate a course of emotion history that is as linear as possible. The presentation of literature is generally confined to the well-known works of high literature, whose themes and styles stand as representative of entire eras. Anything that might make a literary period appear complex, let alone contradictory, is excluded. A few points will have to suffice here. In the volume on the Middle Ages (II), the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are represented merely by (secular and religious) love poetry, specifically depictions of exemplary love. Texts that are parodistical rejoinders to this same courtly, or ‘high-style’, love (fabliaux, clerical parodies, obscene troubadour songs), or texts that present an entirely different world (such as heroic epic), are passed over. Grant-

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ed, Petrarch is mentioned in volume III, but the great body of anti-Petrarchian literature from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with its parodies and travesties against the Platonistically influenced love lyric, is omitted. The chapter in volume IV presents the literary discourse on the sublime, pity, compassion, passionate love, and melancholy in detail, but does not have a word to spare for the many parodies and satires of precious-gallant love poetry in the second half of the seventeenth century. In volume V (on 1780 – 1920), the dominant, long-lasting influence of sentimentalism is described, but such critical, irony-wielding writers such as Heinrich Heine go unmentioned. In a word, the dominant literary currents are presented but the countercurrents are missing. The simultaneity of the non-simultaneous is not discussed. Only in this way does one produce an uncomplicated picture of literary history on which an equally uncomplicated history of emotion can be built.¹⁰⁴ The fact, however, that literary-stylistic shifts often have less to do with changes in emotion history than with changes in educational history will be familiar above all to medievalists and historians of the early modern period.

e Modern – Premodern The division of the historical disciplines into classics, medieval studies, early modern studies, and studies on the modern period, resulting from the history of scholarship and the organisation of resources, is one of the greatest obstacles facing historical emotion research. The ‘history of emotions/feelings’ approach is founded on the conviction that people’s emotions/feelings have changed in the past two thousand years. But comparative studies would be required to prove this change in feelings. If every historical subdiscipline engages separately with the ‘history of emotions’ as its object, erroneous conclusions are inevitable. In spite of occasional efforts to close the ‘gap’ between modernity and premodernity, several prejudices of research on modernity continue to persist today. That, too, is evident from this six-volume work in many respects.¹⁰⁵ I will support my assertion that it perpetuates this ‘gap’

 I find it significant that the keywords parody or irony are not to be found in any of the indexes to the six volumes. Satire is mentioned only in connection with criticism of human behaviour (I 111, 121; III 43 – 45, 101– 102; IV 83), not in relation to criticism of literary fashions.  Rather than appearing only with the twentieth century (VI 22), recognition that emotions can influence health was also present in the Middle Ages (II 24). Although historians of the modern period believe that romantic love did not appear until the nineteenth century, medievalists hold that “the modern emotion of love” (romantic love) was discovered in the twelfth century (III 3, 108). One can only hope that Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History. From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), will cease to serve as a guide for specialists in the modern period. On fundamental issues in the historiography of marriage, see Schnell, “Mediävistik und Frühneuzeitforschung” (2000); Schnell, “Alterität der Neuzeit” (2013). Authors of the twentieth century were not the first to create narratives that appeal to compassionate emotions, and the eighteenth century was not the first to witness the emergence of “debates about empathy

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with reference to the contributions that cover people’s emotional dealings in ‘private space’: “In Private. The Individual and the Domestic Community” (I 125 – 145, II 119 – 132, III 123 – 139, IV 137– 153, V 137– 156, VI 137– 153). I begin with the presentation of the private in volume VI, before working through the corresponding contributions to the other volumes in reverse order. Volume VI (137– 153). The chapter here describes the twentieth-century shift in the history of emotions by drawing on the Victorian age of the nineteenth century for comparison. In the process, it notes numerous continuities but also identifies changes. The terms new and change/changes are used dozens of times. Whether or not an emotional change took place, however, remains an open question, for what the author compares with one another are not emotional experiences but emotion standards as they were formulated in etiquette manuals and advice literature. We read that the twentieth century is characterised by two tendencies: the trend to informalise behaviour in social interaction – discernible in, for example, casual clothing, greeting visitors informally, or interaction with colleagues at work – and the (opposing) trend to greater restraint or mastery of emotions (“effort to reduce emotional intensities”; 143). The author writes that the former was made possible by the latter. The following changes, among others, are discussed specifically: an even stronger demand for cheerfulness and happiness (including in children), the expectation of not displaying one’s suffering for too long or too intensely in bereavement,¹⁰⁶ jealousy and envy becoming negative qualities, the family no longer being treated as an area shielded from the outside,¹⁰⁷ same-sex emotional ties (friendship) becoming suspect, shame being shunned in the raising of children, and increasing fear (particularly relating to one’s own children). Volume V (137– 156). Given that the nineteenth century serves as a point of comparison for the twentieth in volume VI, one awaits with interest what the long nineteenth century (1780 – 1920) will be set apart from. The first thing one notices is that there is much less talk of continuity in this contribution, and all the more of change. The changes in the history of emotions at the end of eighteenth century and during

and reading” (VI 120, 127). See Uta Störmer-Caysa, “Mitleid als ästhetisches Prinzip. Überlegungen zu Romanen Hartmanns von Aue und Wolframs von Eschenbach”, in Höfische Literatur & Klerikerkultur. Wissen – Bildung – Gesellschaft (‘Encomia-Deutsch’) (Berlin: Universität Tübingen, 2002), 64– 93, esp. 66 – 75; Verena Barthel, Empathie, Mitleid, Sympathie. Rezeptionslenkende Strukturen mittelalterlicher Texte in Bearbeitungen des Willehalm-Stoffes (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2008). Anyone who thinks that it was only in the nineteenth century that “thinking and feeling came to be seen as two separate feelings” (V 2) is overlooking the fact that ratio (‘reason’) und sensualitas (‘sensuality’) formed an opposition in the moral-theological discourse of the Middle Ages.  That grief standards moved towards greater restraint in the twentieth century should, in my view, by no means be interpreted as a single-track development from an uninhibited expression of grief to greater repression. We have numerous medieval and Renaissance texts that advocate moderating (visible) sorrow when a relative dies.  More recent research, of course, takes the view that there was never really a family entirely shielded from the outside.

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the nineteenth seem to have been much more substantial than those in the twentieth. The long nineteenth century appears to mark an important caesura in the history of emotions. The chapter, of course, says less about changes in emotional experiences than about the shift in the emotional standards of “prescriptive literature” (147). The “new attention to family emotionality” (139) lies at the heart of this contribution. There were, we read, indeed emotional ties between spouses or family members before the late eighteenth century, but “the public emphasis on the family’s emotional value” (V 138) is new: “a new emotional climate within many families” (V 140), or a “new family emotionality” (V 142), emerged. The chapter argues that the separation of workplace and household, and the increasing demands of the world of work, mean that family and marriage became a place of emotional refuge above all for husbands. It notes “the new distinction between family as emotional haven and a crucial external world” (V 155), “the role of family emotionality in contrast to the competitive public world” (V 146), and “the family as a vital emotional contrast with the increasingly harsh and demanding world of work” (141).¹⁰⁸ Yet humanistic scholars credited marriage with this very function as early as the sixteenth century!¹⁰⁹ Equally misplaced is the claim that mutual affection was recognised as a prerequisite for marriage only from the end of the eighteenth century (V 144).¹¹⁰ Such parallels between the premodern and modern periods also call into question the economical explanations for purported emotional change in the nineteenth century (consumerism, separation of work from household). Volume IV (137– 153). Whereas the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are each given their own volume, the seventeenth and eighteenth are covered together in volume IV. The crucial shift in the history of emotions, though, is placed in the second half of the eighteenth century, thereby confirming the caesura marked in volume V. This chapter does show methodological reflection, aiming to demonstrate how and why “the home”, or “the domestic setting”, became a “distinctive emotional landscape” during these centuries (IV 137). The focus lies on the “association between the domestic and intimacy”, on “the interplay between individuals’ emotions and broader discourses, the wide range of affective relationships within the domestic environment and the role that affective domestic relations played in the wider public sphere” (IV 137). At the same time, the authors of the contribution dispute the traditional theory of the “increasing privatization and individualism of a more affectionate and loving home” (IV 153) at this time, writing that we cannot assume a contin-

 The Victorian marriage is also described in volume VI as a place to which “even men of affairs could repair to alleviate external stress” (VI 130).  See IV.2.b.  An especially provocative counter-example is Pope Urban II, who around 1100 encouraged the king of Aragon not to marry his niece to a man she did not love; Schnell, “Alterität” (2013), 63. See also Schnell, Sexualität (2002), 117– 123, 192– 200, 424– 427, on texts and legal judgments of the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries. Reading the latter monograph might help to prevent several misunderstandings on the part of specialists on the modern period.

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uous general tendency to greater love in marriage.¹¹¹ They argue that emotions were regulated by state, society, and community as they were before, and that there were a variety of processes of exchange between the home and the public sphere (IV 140 – 144).¹¹² The authors also advocate distinguishing between (idealising) literary representations and social reality (IV 153), as well as taking into account the diversity of different forms and practices of life together in a family; they observe that newer and older ideas about the right way to get along in a family coexisted at this time (IV 153). “More companiate marriages […] were emphatically not less patriarchal” in the eighteenth century (IV 147). Nonetheless, the authors of the chapter stick to the view that it was only in the late eighteenth century that “the concepts of privacy, the individual, and the domestic” came together and that “home” became “the ideal emotional community” as a result (IV 141; emphasis in original). In this respect, the traditional assessment is reinforced after all. The case is based on the theory that texts, images, material culture, and so on are not only representations of emotions but themselves create emotions. “Representations of emotions are […] agents or resources shaping the expression and experience of emotion” (IV 139; my emphasis).¹¹³ Thus, the authors argue, we should assume that “discourses […] shaped the experience of love” (IV 139; my emphasis). Did the advice literature, ideas, notions, discourses that are mentioned indeed have an effect on emotional experiences? The authors themselves admit that there are differences between literature (more affection and love) and experience; furthermore, they point to studies that suggest members of a family used emotions (anger and love) strategically: “The focus on individuals’ conscious and rational use of emotions as strategies is as clear in work on anger as it is in work on love” (IV 148). Family members are even said to have used these emotions “as strategies” in very personal love letters and in legal disputes (IV 148, 153). We might well, of course, suppose that it is not emotions that were used in these cases but expressions of emotions (words, gestures, postures, practices, and so on).¹¹⁴ The expression ‘to use emotions’ is therefore misleading.¹¹⁵ The authors themselves raise doubts in their argumentation insofar as they do not want to exclude the possibility that “the new emphasis on sensibility and feelings” did not generate “newly expressed and newly felt forms of love and affection” after all (IV 145): “attraction and affection”, they write, had already played a role in the preceding centuries (IV 145 – 146). Does this mean that the changed discourses of the eighteenth century did not create new affec-

 This position contradicts the contribution to volume V (see above), though the divergence does not give rise to any reflection.  This convergence of public and private runs against the grain of the separation of ‘private’ and ‘public’ throughout the six volumes.  Similarly, III 115.  The “Visual Arts” chapter for antiquity speaks – rightly – of “excessive use of emotion expression” (I 193; my emphasis).  On the conflation of emotions and signs of emotions, see III above.

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tive experiences after all? We might be tempted to draw such a conclusion, given that the authors quote approvingly a dictum of Anthony Fletcher from 1995, according to which we have to recognise “that there is ‘an essential continuity about human emotion’ and that ‘how it is expressed varies from one historical context to another’” (IV 147). Is a ‘history of emotions’ to be replaced by a ‘history of expressions of emotions’?¹¹⁶ Volume III (123 – 139). This volume covers a span of three centuries (1300 – 1600), yet there hardly seem to have been any changes in the history of emotions in the course of the period. The ‘early modern household’ system is presented, not the history of that system within the timespan chosen. Much of what is asserted with regard to the period 1300 – 1600 can also be found in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.¹¹⁷ The chapter argues that emotional coexistence in the household was marked by having to find a balance between, on the one hand, hierarchical structures and, on the other, the emotional ties, based on the principle of reciprocity, that developed as a result of living together there for a long time – a balance, in other words, between love and power (III 124– 128). It might, of course, be objected that these structural premises also apply to households of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, raising the question of what is specific to the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. The contributions on privacy in volumes IV and III do not, however, refer to each other. On the contrary, the contribution to volume III devotes itself in detail to two fields of private life that do not figure at all in the contribution to volume IV: the bed and the dining table. The contribution to volume IV, furthermore, thematises the relationship between the individual and the domestic community, whereas the individual is lacking from the chapter in volume III. As a result, the information in the two contributions cannot be compared. It becomes apparent in this contribution how misleading use of the expression ‘emotional community’ can be. Servants and apprentices are among those included in the emotional community of a household (III 125, 127). That may at times have been the case. But the oeconomic literature from antiquity into the eighteenth century exhorts householders not to trust their servants; under no circumstances were they to associate themselves with them.¹¹⁸ The authors of the chapter suppose a growing sensitivity to the “privacy of the home” in the second half of the fourteenth century because a married couple in London protest that neighbours who have had new windows added to their house can look into their garden (III 138). Yet in a French text on manners from the thirteenth century, it is already considered impolite to look into the houses of strangers: if one wanted to enter, one had to knock or clear

 Elsewhere the radical reshaping of the “expression of emotions in the private realm” is highlighted (VI 7; my emphasis).  The practice of several people sleeping in the same bed (III 128) even survived into the nineteenth century in some social classes and regions.  See Schnell, “Concordia im Haus” (2018).

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one’s throat first.¹¹⁹ The history of private intimacy in the Middle Ages has yet to be written.¹²⁰ Volume II (119 – 132). Here too, affective ties within the ‘family’ are central, but unlike the contribution to volume III, only the emotional relations between spouses and between parents and children are illuminated in detail; the servants and apprentices are left out. Can these relations be characterised as specific to the epoch in any respect? As the chapter is based above all on conduct manuals and advice literature, we learn little about feelings: it is true that this source genre does stipulate particular feelings towards particular people (such as love or fear), but the actual instructions have as their content not feelings but forms of behaviour and actions. And people from antiquity to the twenty-first century know that outer behaviour and inner attitude (can) deviate from each other (see VII.2.f below). Thus, for example, parents’ love for their children can be measured only on the basis of actual actions, or the love of a wife on the basis of how she shows her grief at the death of her husband and how she behaves obediently during his life. The fact that in the historical sources we find rarely emotions, but mostly signs of emotions, prompts the author of the chapter to say that “we can do little more than speculate about whether the spectrum of feelings medieval husbands and wives experienced for each other corresponds to the same kind of ‘love’ felt in other times and places” (II 128). This statement makes the fragility of the ‘history of emotions’ approach apparent.¹²¹ Volume I (125 – 145). The chapter here aims to show that “the emotional relationships of private life are played out in ways specific to those cultures” (I 24), that is, the Greek and Roman worlds. But its author is unable to achieve this goal, not least simply because she does not have the necessary knowledge of other cultures and eras. The Middle Ages also saw love magic practised, love potions prepared, curses uttered against female rivals,¹²² affective ties to husbands sworn after their death, mothers sent greetings by letter, or wives assured of affection by letter. That brothers fell out over an inheritance, or that the gods (or God) were thanked for the fortunate rescue of a relative – we also find all that in medieval sources. What is offered in this contribution is not a ‘history of emotions’; instead, the relevance of ‘emotions in history’ is demonstrated.¹²³ The value of the sources cited for the history of emotions is further diminished by the recognition that the feelings expressed in private letters are also subject to

 For this and other examples, see IV.3.b above.  Elsewhere “new European understandings of the private, individual self” (IV 112) are assigned to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  That the normative religious discourse of the medieval clerics says little about “lived experience” – quite in contrast to what this contribution suggests with reference to Barbara Rosenwein (II 120) – can be discerned from isolated complaints of clerics that lays do not follow the stipulations of Church teachings about married life and sex. See Schnell, Sexualität (2002), 236 – 238.  The author mentions curse tablets, magic spells, love magic, potions, and charms (I 131– 134).  See II.1 above.

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particular “forms of expression” (I 145) and that “in many cases it is impossible to access the feelings (if any) behind the formulae” (I 145).¹²⁴ This is a clear admission that written expressions of emotions, at least, tell us little about the feelings of those who write them. The author, furthermore, notes that we know little about whether the ideals, values, and emotional standards (I 127, 144) of proper emotional life together in the family (how individuals ought to feel) were actually realised in practice (I 144– 145).¹²⁵

f Emotions and Expressions (Outward and Inward) At the end of the eighteenth century, physicians were convinced that “physical expressions, not just facial expression, but the whole range of postures and gestures, were a direct representation of inner states” (V 19). This was, it is true, called into question during the nineteenth century, but since William James (1884) at the latest, the view that bodily processes and psychic states condition one another has found numerous supporters in emotion research. Many emotion historians today are convinced that emotion and expression of emotion always go hand in hand. In this view, it makes no difference whether we say we are communicating about emotions or about (body-centric) signs of emotions;¹²⁶ changes in emotions can be read out of changes in the expressions of emotions. In its extreme form, this view has found its way into practice theory, which rejects the dichotomous Western thinking (body vs soul/mind, inner vs outer) as a historical construct and understands emotions as embedded, as it were, in the body.¹²⁷ This position in the theory of emotion is contradicted by knowledge from cultural history that “inward states” and “outward behaviour” often do not coincide in everyday life.¹²⁸ The situationally conditioned discrepancy between outer and inner is a result of self-interest or politeness (emotional standards). Which is right, then – the current theories on the interdependence of expression and emotion, or the difference between them in the everyday experiences of people over the centuries? The histor-

 The fact that this contribution is based on a different text genre from the other contributions, specifically letters (I 134– 136, 138 – 141), hardly permits an epoch-specific description of emotions anyway.  Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 196, also concedes: “We cannot know how all people felt, but we can begin to know how some members of certain ascendant elites thought they and others felt or, at least, thought they ought to feel. That is all we can know” (my emphasis).  See III above.  See II.3.d above.  Examples: IV 163, 165 on the eighteenth century; III 118 on Christine de Pizan (ca. 1400); III 75 on Shakespeare’s dramas; I 135 on antiquity. On the twelfth to sixteenth centuries, see Schnell, “Curialitas und Dissimulatio”; on the eighteenth to twentieth, Stearns and Stearns, “Emotionology”. See also VII.1.j above on Boddice and Madeleine de Scudéry.

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ical knowledge presented in these six volumes undermines the contemporary theoretical positions.

g Conclusions This six-volume work presents not a ‘history’ but ‘histories of the emotions’. Not only do the six volumes stand unconnected alongside one another; there is a lack of connection between the contributions in each volume and between the contributions on parallel themes (religion, drama, literature, the private sphere, and so on) in the individual volumes.¹²⁹ Each contribution starts again from the beginning, as it were, setting out its own ‘history of the emotions’.¹³⁰ This makes for stimulating reading, but the gap between modernity and premodernity seems more to increase than to shrink as a result. As hardly any of the authors look beyond the epoch with which they are dealing,¹³¹ the work presents itself as a conglomeration of individual texts with no overall coherence. Readers will appreciate the fact that some contributions review the history of research on particular aspects. These reviews, of course, beg the question of how long current research positions are likely to last. It is also pleasing that disputes concerning a particular topic or work are – albeit far too rarely – covered. Yet this similarly acts as a caution against one-sided interpretations of emotion history.¹³² That research on the history of emotions sees itself as ‘in progress’ is apparent in those cases where desiderata are identified.¹³³ Conceiving emotion history as cultural history has the benefit that the impression of historicity of emotions appears of its own accord. It is sufficient to outline the culture of an epoch – which anyone will recognise as specific. The emotions included in the pictures of these specific cultures are then interpreted as epoch-specific

 Exception: chapter 6 of volume I (I 103, 107) refers to chapter 4.  In volume II, the contributions on religion, music, drama, the visual arts, literature, and the public sphere all refer to Augustine.  Exception: V 121– 136 (on literature in the nineteenth century) also draws on the eighteenth century.  The chapter on the visual arts in volume I initially (103 – 107) gives excellent information on the various interpretations and different possible emotional affects caused by a marble statue, but then attempts nonetheless to tie this diversity back to a shared order of values specific to the time. Yet such a plurality of possible interpretations of and responses to the statue (admiration, sympathy/pity, lack of pity, hatred of the represented figure, satisfaction at the death of the opponent) is also conceivable in the case of modern statues.  VI 138 (on friendship), VI 135 (on public vs private grief), III 121 (notes that there is no theoretical basis on which to measure the value of literature for the history of emotions), II 121, 132 (notes that affective ties between the members of early medieval households have hardly been studied).

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as though it were a matter of course.¹³⁴ This is what allows the chapters on antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance to use the current terms love, anger, jealousy, shame, and so on, while suggesting that they are not being used to mean the current emotions/feelings ‘love’, ‘anger’, ‘jealousy’, ‘shame’. The historicity of emotions, which actually remains to be demonstrated, is thereby taken for granted. The line that emotions make history should also be questioned. From antiquity to the twenty-first century, it is not (just) emotions that bring people to act, but linguistic actions or texts. The speeches of many politicians at election rallies or in committees or houses of parliament are so tedious that they do not emotionalise anyone, whereas other speakers can elicit emotional reactions to the highest degree in their audiences. One letter-writer can move addressees to tears, another not. Some sixteenth-century pamphlets were able to achieve an effect, others not. It is thus language – or the specific use of it in each case – that makes history, not emotions. Contemporary historical emotion research is founded on three basic assumptions. (1) Historical theories: changes in emotions or affective experiences can be read out of changes in theories about emotions. (2) Emotion lexicons: changes in and differences between emotion words always point to changes in and differences between emotions.¹³⁵ (3) Expressions: expressions of emotions – be they linguistic or bodily – are a reliable source of information about emotions (see above). The accounts in numerous contributions to the six-volume History of the Emotions make one justifiably sceptical regarding these basic assumptions.¹³⁶ Even after this wide-ranging cultural history of emotions, it remains an open question whether, and to what extent, the history of emotions – understood as a history of affective experiences – is defined more by continuities or by changes. Various emotion theories, emotional norms, emotional expressions, emotional practices, and emotion words coexist and contrast with one another in every age, and this makes it seem doubtful whether a history of epoch-specific affective experiences can be written at all. An indispensable prerequisite for such a history would lie, at the very least, in more systematic reflection on the conditions and functions of the media (texts and images) that give the appearance of presenting such affective experiences.¹³⁷ The insight might then be reached that the affective experiences thus presented are always functionalised affective experiences, be it in a chronicle, diary, poem,

 Gregory Eiselein (V 121– 136) attempts to distinguish a literary history of emotions from a cultural history of emotions. He argues that the continued influence of sentimentalism is apparent in the latter respect.  But how can this be possible if a central emotion word, passio/passion, had “conflicting and contradictory meanings” in premodernity (IV 120)?.  See also II, V above.  See VIII below.

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novel or romance, portrait, stage set, newspaper report, or film.¹³⁸ What prompts the feelings is never identical with what motivates writing or painting. So as not to be misunderstood: no one today would try to claim that the world of feeling of a Roman legionary in the time of Augustus (ca. 30 BC) was no different from that of a soldier in the US Army in the twenty-first century. In the same vein, no one would suggest that the affective style of the inhabitant of a late medieval town (ca. 1400) was identical with the affective life of people in a twentieth-century metropolis. The problems begin, however, as soon as we try to demonstrate the correctness of such assumptions. Are we in a position to describe the emotions/feelings of people in the past properly at all? Reading the Boddice book, and the Broomhall, Davidson, and Lynch anthology, makes one sceptical. Even the theory that emotions are learned or socialised finds itself confronted with diverging historical findings. This also goes for the idea of ‘emotional communities’.¹³⁹ If the children in a single family react in entirely different ways to disgusting objects in the sixteenth century, just as in the twentieth; if the members of a group of medieval pilgrims display different behaviours regarding shame during a sea voyage in the fifteenth century; if the nuns of a seventeenth-century convent are embroiled in struggles for power; if some Christian knights take flight when under attack by Muslims in the twelfth century, but others do not – it is not only the descriptive model of the ‘emotional community’ that reaches its limits.¹⁴⁰ The confidence of research on emotions in the cultural sciences that emotions are generally and universally bound to sociocultural factors is also shaken. Emotion history presents itself as a balancing act between making distinctions and imposing homogeneity.

 It would, in my view, be naive to try to explain the ‘I-statements’ of premodern love poetry with the help of Reddy’s concept of emotives (IInn63 and 125).  See II.3.c.  The historical observations mentioned here cannot be explained by the idea that every community has different ‘styles’ available to it (Benno Gammerl).

VIII Perspectives of Research on the History of Emotion To understand the current state of historical emotion research, it is necessary to pose the following basic question: what interests and impulses have fostered the emotional turn in the humanities? That there is no easy answer to this question, given the mass and confusion of factors involved,¹ is itself an explanation for why such a wide range of themes, cognitive interests, and lines of enquiry are mixed together in historical emotion research. Since the 1980s and 1990s, an impressive number of historical studies – too many to count – have been published that all claim to deal with emotion.² But what do these studies mean by the term emotion? If one takes what their authors say at face value, nearly all of them aim to understand the emotional experiences of our predecessors: what did they ‘really’ feel when they loved, hated, envied, were ashamed of themselves, were happy or angry? Did they have the same emotion that we feel today under similar circumstances, or was it something different? Studying ‘real’ feelings is thus bound up with the idea that they may have changed. This tight connection between what are actually two separate matters has led to an irresolvable clash in the objectives of emotion historians. On the one hand, like all historians they know that they cannot report “wie es eigentlich gewesen ist” (Leopold von Ranke); on the other hand, they need to be able to describe what people in the past really felt in order to demonstrate the historicity of emotions. Insistence on this objective, and the impossibility of actually realising it, has led to the diffuse state of current historical emotion research. Studies of emotion that pursue quite traditional lines of argument, for example, and that have nothing to do with the emotional turn, claim to be indebted to a new interest in the question of emotions.³ Other studies roundly reject the view that there are inner feelings. Still other studies content themselves with the mere description of conduct that is determined by emotion.

 These include arguments and discoveries from the natural sciences regarding neurophysiological processes in the human brain; an interest, promoted by social forces and the media, in what fellow human beings ‘really’ feel; and a conviction on the part of historians and others in the humanities and social sciences that emotions have hitherto been neglected as an object of research. On the contradicting impulses behind this turn, see Patrick Becker, “Rationalisierungen des Gefühls”, s. IIn.21.  Studies have addressed, for example, Aristotle’s concept of emotion, the behaviour of jealous wives in the twentieth century, the emotional practices of thirteenth-century nuns, terms for emotion in late antiquity, the semantics of the English word feeling in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, tomb inscriptions of the fifth century AD, music theories of the tenth century, nineteenth-century surgeons’ understanding of empathy, the Crusade account of a bishop around 1200, seventeenth-century burial rituals, the development of national sentiment in nineteenth-century America, and the conception of sexuality in the medieval Church.  The study of theories and concepts of emotion, which had been the preserve of intellectual history since the nineteenth century, has now been taken over by the emotional turn; see IInn42– 49. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110692464-010

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The aporia in historical emotion research is most obvious in the confusion of two entirely different lines of enquiry. One approach seeks to demonstrate the historicity of emotions, marking itself off from a biological and ontological conception of emotion. I call this the ‘history of emotions’ approach. The other approach – marking itself off from a rationalist conception of human behaviour – seeks to prove that emotions have played a significant role in history. I call this the ‘emotions in history’ approach. The former approach means that we have to establish what people in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modernity ‘really’ felt. Only in this way can historical changes in inner emotional experience be demonstrated. The latter approach turns out to be relatively unproblematic. To achieve this goal, it is not necessary to prove the historicity of these emotions, that is, to demonstrate that they have changed from one period to another. But because of that, this approach runs the risk of ontologising emotions. The fact that both approaches are unthinkingly combined in many studies testifies to a theoretical deficit; but it also shows that there is insufficient reflection on the cognitive interests of historical emotion research (see also VII). Showing that people in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modernity acted out of rage, love, envy, or hatred does not demonstrate the historicity of those feelings. Hence, there is a discrepancy in very many emotion studies between the aim of the research (recording past emotional experiences) and practice (studying discourses on emotions).⁴ The findings presented in the present study lead me to the following concluding remarks. (1) The ‘emotions in history’ approach, which seeks to describe the consequences of emotions in people’s behaviour, can be pursued further without great theoretical or methodological problems. It can usually be proved beyond doubt that the people have, in this or that situation, behaved on the basis of some kind of affect, emotion, or mood. Of course, as mentioned, this approach tends to ontologise emotions. (2) The ‘history of emotions’ approach should be clearly distinguished from this. It seeks to determine whether this affect or that emotion is specific to a particular era. This involves significant methodological problems (II, V). Above all else, important objections present themselves to the belief that the history of emotion concepts and terms for emotions lends us insight into the history of emotional experiences. Since quite different, even contrary, assessments of emotions appear in every era (V – VI), the model of explanation according to which emotional experiences specific to one era can be traced back to conceptions of emotion specific to that era does not work. Since, in addition, within each era emotions have different names, the assumption that the history of words and the history of emotional experiences run in parallel has to be questioned (V.1– 2). The fact, for instance, that premodernity is familiar with the emotionally relevant dichotomy of body (outer) and soul (inner), and

 As early as 1985, the Stearns warned in “Emotionology”, 814, that historians “often confused thinking about emotion with the experience of emotion”.

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with the idea that psyche and physis⁵ form a unity, is the result of differing discourses or text functions. Which conception of emotion released which emotion-historical effect has to be established with the aid of discourse-specific parameters. Learned and abstract Latin discourse certainly has less influence on everyday emotional experiences than a lay discourse related to practical daily life that, like medical therapy, connects with people directly. Historical emotion research deals mostly with discourse-specific theories and views rather than epoch-specific ones. Particular discourses and conceptions do indeed transcend epochal boundaries, surviving obstinately over many centuries. In this way, for example, oeconomic discourse from antiquity to early modernity transmits the idea that, in an ideal marriage, husband and wife are bound by friendship (amicitia).⁶ But this discourse also deals, from antiquity into the eighteenth century, with the difficulty of harmonising mastery (by the husband) with equal status (of the wife). The solutions found for this structurally conditioned contradiction in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries were no different from those that had already been used in antiquity or the Middle Ages. Modifications that do occur are due not (only) to a specific culture of emotions but to the function of any given text.⁷ All approaches that treat the inner/outer dichotomy as an obsolete historical construction, and instead argue for the coincidence of inner and outer (practice theory, performativity theory, habitus theory, ‘doing emotion’), can be challenged with the fact that the discourse of opposition between body and soul that prevailed for over a millennium – body and soul are at odds, the outer gives no indication of the inner – can be relevant for the history of emotion. Conceptions that might today be falsified can all the same have marked the emotional experience of people in a particular period. The degree of influence will depend, among other things, on the degree of abstraction of a concept of emotion. Hence, pragmatic discourses (for instance, medicine and pastoral theology) will have exercised greater influence than speculative and theoretical texts.⁸ Placing social, conceptual, and experiential history in parallel is also open to question when we are confronted with the fact that the members of socially conformant groups (for example, families or pilgrims) react in different emotional ways.⁹ Such findings have to be attributed either to diverging conceptions of emotion (social constructivism) or to the divergence of conceptions of emotion from emotional experience (in opposition to social constructivism).

 See II.3.d. The latter view is expressed in such vivid expressions as “I got a bit hot under the collar” (irritation) or “a shiver went down his spine” (fear).  Schnell, “Concordia im Haus”.  Nor is it always possible to make factors specific to any one era responsible for different ways of relating experiential knowledge to discourse-based knowledge (episteme).  See Vnn97– 119 on the hydraulic model.  See VI.2, VI. 4 on disgust and aesthetics, and shame and love.

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Anyone working only on one specific epoch becomes entangled in their own contradictory characterisations of that era. For example, in the three-volume Histoire des Émotions the culture of the Renaissance is credited with unbridled misogyny (“une misogynie décomplexée”) and a cult of male friendship,¹⁰ while the Renaissance is at the same time presented as a period in which love and women were revered, especially in the culture of the elites.¹¹ Concurrently praising women and despising them does, on the one hand, confirm my theory that different perspectives compete within any one era; on the other hand, however, this example shows that we cannot treat either view as culture- or epoch-specific – at best, we can do that only for their distribution and the relationship between them. Praise of women and criticism of women can be found to coexist throughout all Western literature. The history of discourses on emotion is characterised by synchronic variety and diachronic continuity. (3) The ‘history of emotions’ approach faces challenges from another angle too. In recent years, it has been increasingly recognised that we experience emotions not in the singular but rather as bundles (VI.4). If we add to this a recognition that the incidence of emotion is connected to cognitive processes (appraisal theory), while also taking into account that people experience cognitive dissonance when assessing a situation in many cases, it is evident that we are faced in such situations with a knotty bundle of emotions that is extremely hard to disentangle. Such cognitive dissonances arise in an endless number of cases. A soldier in a combat situation can ask himself whether to flee or to attack. A desperate mother struggles to decide whether to kill her new-born child or to let it live. A politician wonders whether to respond to a verbal attack by an opponent or to ignore it. A farmer fallen on hard times cannot decide whether or not to sell his last cow. Many citizens have no idea for whom they should vote on election day. A mistrustful wife is ‘tormented’ by cognitive dissonance because she does not know whether or not she should believe the assurances of her husband. Someone involved in a dispute with their neighbours cannot decide whether to give in or to insist on their rights. The list could go on and on. Before historical emotion research can come to terms with emotional experiences specific to a particular era, it has to deal with situation-specific combinations of emotions like these.¹² I rather doubt whether a sequence of emotional experiences, each specific to a particular period, can be constructed on the basis of the analysis of such complex, situation-specific ‘navigations of feeling’.

 Daumas, “Coeurs vaillants”, in Histoire des Émotions, t. 1, 340 – 341.  Daumas, “Coeurs vaillants”, 342. That the praise of women can also have misogynistic features is something familiar to gender historians (see, for instance, R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991]). All the same, the discourse positions in which one or the other is explicitly thematised need to be identified.  The case studies in VI contribute to this. The recently published collection Emotionen. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch (2020) does not link emotion theory and emotional experience. The contributions of this collection don’t ask about emotional experience.

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(4) As a consequence of the above points, we can say that the ‘history of emotions’ approach needs reformulating because the formulation involves a misunderstanding. Historical studies of emotion present not a ‘history of emotion’ but rather a ‘history of concepts of emotion’, or a ‘history of emotional terms’, or a ‘history of values of emotions’, or a ‘history of expressions of emotions’, or a ‘history of emotional standards’, or a ‘history of emotional practices’, or a ‘history of discourses on emotions’. In all of these spheres, historical studies can, working with the history of language, literature, philosophy, society, and religion, produce well-founded results. Project titles of this kind would relieve the historical study of emotions from having to demonstrate what it is not able to demonstrate: the historicity of emotional experiences.¹³ Moreover, this relabelling would give us more precise information about the object of study in question. (5) I think that it is important not to forget that, for emotion historians, the actual sources are not emotions but texts. Noting this is all the more important because of how, in the reception of Reddy’s term ‘emotive’, the fact that his theoretical position on emotions comes from speech act theory has been overlooked. His descriptions of the cognitive and psychological processes prompted by emotions relate to verbal communication. However, for the most part writing involves other conditions than, and produces emotions in a manner different from, oral communication. In written sources, emotions are doubly mediated: (a) in the medium of language and (b) in the medium of writing. These are not the same. Our historical sources can only very rarely be understood as emotives in Reddy’s sense. In comparing modern oral utterances and premodern written records, it is necessary to keep in mind the distinction between the written and the oral that is so important in media theory (II.3.b). (6) The four master narratives – that premodernity had no conception of subjectivity, of interiorisation and privacy, of the integration of love and sexuality, and of parental love – must be called into question. If we abandon these four master narratives, the idea of the processual character of history – an idea that still dominates the thinking of many historians because of the influence of Norbert Elias’s thesis of the civilising process – needs to face up to scrutiny. The concept of process prompts the idea that a thing, a situation, a point of departure, a historical constellation develops, or at least changes in one particular direction, over several hundred years. Nonetheless, I would like to abandon the idea that human affect has developed from one configuration to another, and instead talk in terms of breaks, new beginnings, repetitions, competition, and shifting dominance – including for premodernity.¹⁴ For example, in medieval texts we encounter a sensibility in behaviour towards others that also (again?) becomes an ideal in the twentieth century (IV.3.a). My argu It is fair to object that it is not only the emotional experiences of our predecessors that we cannot authentically grasp, but also those of our contemporaries; but putting it like this ignores the difference in linguistic level between modernity and premodernity, as well as the difference between written and oral communication; see IInn63, 125 – 133.  The term ‘process’ is, of course, derived from the Latin procedere, ‘to move forward’.

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ment is based on the idea that, from the very beginning, people were endowed with a great potential for affective experience, which has however been realised in different ways in different historical and sociocultural circumstances. Hence, quite different segments of this potential can show themselves over time (V.3).¹⁵ If we are reluctant to abandon the term process entirely, we should speak of very many short-term processes rather than one long-term process. Premodernity did not necessarily lead up to modernity. Many options remained unrealised. (7) Having run through all the caveats and warnings, attention should now be given to aspects and spheres that are more promising than so-called emotional experiences. Among them are the very many emotionally relevant instructions for behaviour in conduct literature (table manners, etiquette books, courtesy books), all of which focus on the expression of emotion;¹⁶ in particular, the ways in which people in different eras communicate emotionally, whether orally or in writing (see III); the interdependence of space and emotional state;¹⁷ objects and interactions that arouse emotion in general; the attribution of particular emotions to a particular gender;¹⁸ the part played by sense organs (above all, smell and touch) in the evocation of feelings; the various possible models for the representation of emotions in various textual genres such as legends, monastic/city/world chronicles, autobiographies, travel literature, origin myths, and the like;¹⁹ the instrumentalisation of emotions in political debate, in protest movements, and in advertising. Emotionally relevant conceptions, descriptions,²⁰ assessments, practices, forms of expression, and standards of behaviour should continue be studied. But the authors of these studies should not place themselves under any pressure to claim that they are in this way recording emotional experiences. (8) In the analysis of historical texts, the representation and conceptualisation of emotions must be understood as the standardisation or interpretation of emotions. Current studies of emotion have to engage in construing these historical interpreta The idea that emotional change, of whatever form, is unidirectional – towards greater inwardness, disgust, parental love, shame, sensibility, and so on – ignores the possibility of repetitions or analogues. Particular political constellations, military engagements, famines, and other natural catastrophes repeatedly create similar conditions for experiences of anxiety or fear. Cultures of shame and of guilt succeed one other as the dominant form (V.3). Similar social constellations always prompt the same emotions over the course of centuries (jealousy, envy, rage, pleasure, and so on).  Those studies that seek to demonstrate the existence of emotional communities, for example, could profit from this.  Locations such as concert halls, cemeteries, restaurants, domestic living rooms, cow-stalls, sites for competitive games, schools, market days, public viewings, and so on almost automatically give rise to a particular emotional state, and that even before anything has happened. For the relation of space and emotion, see Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 391.  Schnell, Haben Gefühle eine Geschichte?, 909 – 965.  Much could be gleaned here by contrasting statements made by the narrative ‘I’ with commentary given by the author.  In so doing, greater emphasis would need to be placed on contrasting Latin and vernacular words for emotions than has previously been the case – see V.1.c and VI.1.

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tions afresh – interpreting them, understanding them, and ordering them historically.²¹ If the ‘history of emotions’ is conceived as the ‘history of interpretations of historical interpretations of emotions’, this sheds light not only on the mediated nature of emotionally relevant expressions but also on the difference between observer and the observed object.²² This insight leads necessarily to scepticism towards the efforts made by historical emotion research to demonstrate the existence of a comprehensive transformation of emotional experience.²³ I am not saying anything new with that; but given the current state of research, it is something that cannot be said too often. The study of history should free itself of the expectation, implicit in the emotional turn, that we will be able to arrive at an adequate grasp of the historical quality of emotional experiences. By so doing, historical work would gain in transparency, precision, and persuasiveness.

 At this point, I freely admit that I have not dealt with one important interpretive model: psychoanalysis. This is because this interpretive model assumes so many forms. But it can lead to valuable insights, especially when it deals with timeless structures and individual experience. See Rüdiger Schnell, “Psychoanalyse, Historische Emotionsforschung, Literaturwissenschaft: Ein schwieriges Verhältnis. Überlegungen eines Mediävisten”, Zeitschrift für Deutsche Philologie 130.3 (2011), 388 – 417.  See VI.1.  This book was written from the standpoint of a literary scholar and a medievalist, but also with knowledge of the German-language academic discussion. If historical emotion research wishes to live up to its claim to be international, it should also take into account the work of non-anglophone scholars on such themes. Valuable points are made on this in Boddice, The History of Emotions, 214– 215.

Abbreviations Hain: L. Hain, Repertorium bibliographicum, 4 vols. (Stuttgart: Cotta, Paris: Renouard, 1826 – 1838). PG: Patrologiae cursus completus, Series Graeca, ed. Migne. PL: Patrologiae cursus completus, Series Latina, ed. Migne.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110692464-011

Select Bibliography No attempt has been made here to introduce any form of systematisation (by era, discipline, approach, or emotion), since I wish to make clear that aspects often considered distinct are treated together in this study. Historical sources and scholarly studies that are not included in this bibliography can be found in the index under the names of their authors.

Primary Sources Aegidius Romanus, De regimine principum (Rom: Zannettus, 1607). Leon Battista Alberti, I Libri della famiglia, trans. Renée Neu Watkins, The Family in Renaissance Florence (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1969). Andreas Capellanus, De amore, ed. E. Trojel, 2nd ed. (München: Fink, 1972). [Antoine de Courtin, Nouveau traité de la civilité], The Rules of Civility, or, Certain Ways of Deportment observed in France amongst all Persons of Quality, upon several Occasions, translated out of French (London: Printed for J. Martin […], 1671); Newly revised and much enlarged (London: Printed for J. Martin […], 1678). Antoninus Florentinus, Summula confessionis (Venedig: Johann von Köln und Johann Manthen, 1480). Aristotle, De anima, trans. Christopher Shields (Oxford: Clarendon, 2016). Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, ed. and trans. Rosper Crisp (New York: CUP, 2014). Aristotle, The art of rhetoric, ed. and trans. John Henry Freese (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006). Augustin, De civitate Dei, ed. Bernardus Dombart and Alphonsus Kalb (Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 47 – 48) (Turnholt: Brepols, 1955). Francesco Barbaro, De re uxoria, ed. Attilo Gnesotto, Atti e memorie della Royale Academia di scienze lettere ed arti in Padova 375 (1915/1916), 6 – 105. João de Barros, Espelho de casados (’Mirror of the Couple’), ed. Tito de Noronha and Antonio Cabral (Porto: Impr. Portugueza, 1874). Giovanni Boccaccio, Il Filocolo, trans. Donald Cheney (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1985). Baldassar Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano, ed. Amedeo Quondam, 11th ed. (Milano: Garzanti, 2003). Jacques Chaillou, Traité du mouvement des humeurs dans les plus ordinaires émotions des hommes (Paris: Jean Couterot, 1678). Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Crisyde, trans. Nevill Coghill (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971). Cicero, On the Ideal Orator. De oratore, transl. James M. May (New York: OUP, 2001). Cicero, Tusculan disputations, ed. and trans. E. King (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007). Cicero, Epistulae ad Familiares, ed. D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1988). Clement of Alexandria, Christ, the Educator, trans. Simon P. Wood (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1954). David von Augsburg, De exterioris et interioris hominis compositione (Quaracchi: Collegio San Bonaventura, 1899). Francesc Eiximenis, Lo libre de les dones, ed. Frank Naccarato, 2 Bde. (Barcelona: Curial Ed. Catalanes, 1981).

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110692464-012

Primary Sources

281

Erasmus of Rotterdam, Christiani matrimonii institutio, in Opera omnia, vol. 5 (Leiden 1704), 615 – 724. Félix Fabri, Les errances de frère Félix, pèlerin en Terre sainte, en Arabie et en Égypte, vol. 1, Introduction générale et édition critique par Jean Meyers, Traduction et notes par Jean Meyers and Michel Tarayre (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2013). Edmond Faral, ed., Les arts poétiques du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle (Paris: Champion, 1924; Reprint Genf and Paris: Slatkine, 1982). Giovanni della Casa, Galateo, ed. Giorgio Manganelli and Claudio Milanini, 2nd. ed. (Milano: Rizzoli, 1977). Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan und Isold, ed. Friedrich Ranke, 7th ed. (Berlin: Weidmannsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1963). Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan, trans. A.T. Hatto (Harmondsworth: Penguin Pooks, 1960). John Gower, Confessio amantis, ed. G.C. Macaulay, 2 vols. (London: Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1900 – 1901). Stefano Guazzo, La civil conversazione, ed. Amedo Quondam, 2 vols. (Modena: Panini, 1993). Johann Hartlieb, Secreta mulierum (deutsch) mit Glosse, ed. Kristian Bosselmann-Cyran (Pattensen and Hannover: Wellm, 1985). Horace, Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, ed. and trans. Henry Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1926; Reprint 2005). Adolph Freiherr von Knigge, Über den Umgang mit Menschen, ed. Karl-Heinz Göttert (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1991). Konrad von Würzburg, Partonopier und Meliur, ed. Karl Bartsch (Wien: Braumüller, 1871; Reprint Berlin: De Gruyter, 1970). Liutprand of Cremona, Antapodosis, in The Complete Works of Liutprand of Cremona, trans. Paolo Squatriti (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007). [Le Ménagier de Paris] The Good Wife’s Guide. Le Ménagier de Paris. A Medieval Household Book, trans. Gina L. Greco and Christine M. Rose (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009). Ovid’s Erotic Poems: ‘Amores’ and ‘Ars amatoria’, trans. Len Krisak (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Press, 2014). Publius Ovidius Naso, Heroides and Amores, ed. and trans. Grant Showerman, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). Felix Platter, Tagebuch (Lebensbeschreibung) 1536 – 1567, ed. Valentin Lötscher (Basel and Stuttgart: Schwabe, 1976). Thomas Platter, Lebensbeschreibung, ed. Alfred Hartmann, 2nd ed., durchgesehen und ergänzt von Ueli Dill (Basel: Schwabe & Co, 1999). Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, Institutio oratoria, ed. Ludwig Radermacher, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1969). Regula Benedicti: The Rule of St. Benedict, ed. and trans. Timothy Fry (Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1981). Heinrich Ribsch (Rybisch), Disceptatio an uxor sit ducenda in publica disputatione Lipsensi enarrata (Nürnberg: Weissenburger, 1509). Lucius Annaeus Senece, Anger, Mercy, Revenge, trans. Robert A Kaster and Martha C. Nussbaum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae. Latin Text and English Translation. Introduction, Notes, Appendices and Glossaries, ed. Thomas Gilby, 60 vols. (Cambridge: Blackfriars, 1964 – 1975). Andreas Tiraquellus, De legibus connubialibus et iure maritali, 5th ed. (Lyon: Rovillius, 1554). Tullia d’Aragona, Dialogue on the Infinity of Love, trans. Rinaldina Russell and Bruce Merry (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997). Urbanus magnus Danielis Becclesiensis, ed. J. Gilbart Smyly (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis, 1939).

282

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Ordericus Vitalis, Historia ecclesiastica, ed. and trans. Marjorie Chibnall, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969). Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, trans. Cyril Edwards (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004). Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall (London: Simmes, 1604).

Secondary Sources A Cultural History of the Emotions, 6 vols., s. Broomhall, Davidson and Lynch. A Cultural History of the Emotions in Antiquity, ed. Douglas Cairns (London, New York, Oxford, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Medieval Age, ed. Juanita Ruys and Clare Monagle (London, New York, Oxford, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Late-Medieval, Reformation, and Renaissance Age, ed. Andrew Lynch and Susan Broomhall (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Baroque and Enlightenment Age, ed. Claire Walker, Katie Barclay, and David Lemmings (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Age of Romanticism, Revolution, and Empire, ed. Susan Matt (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Modern and Post-Modern Age, ed. Jane W. Davidson and Joy Damousi (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburg University Press, 2004). AHR Conversation 2012: “AHR Conversation: The historical study of emotions”, American Historical Review 117 (2012), 1487 – 1531. Laura Alston and Karen Harvey, “In Private: The Individual and the Domestic Community”, in A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Baroque and Enlightenment, ed. Walker, Barclay and Lemmings (2019), 137 – 153. APA Handbook of nonverbal communication, ed. David Matsumoto, Hyisung C. Hwang, and Mark G. Frank (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2016) (also online). An Emotional History of the United States (The History of Emotions Series 4), ed. Peter N. Stearns and Jan Lewis (New York: New York University Press, 1998). A New Kind of History from the Writings of Febvre, ed. Peter Burke, trans. K. Folca (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973. Noga Arikha, Passions and Tempers. A History of the Humours (New York, N.Y.: Ecco, 2007). Caroline Arni, Entzweiungen. Die Krise der Ehe um 1900 (Köln: Böhlau, 2004). John H. Arnold, “Inside and Outside the Medieval Laity. Some Reflections on the History of Emotions”, in European Religious Cultures. Essays offered to Christopher Brooke on the Occasion of his Eighteenth Birthday, ed. Miri Rubin (London: Institute of Historical Research, 2008), 107 – 129. Assaulting the Past. Violence and Civilization in Historical Context, ed. Katherine D. Watson (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007). Andreas Bähr, Furcht und Furchtlosigkeit. Göttliche Gewalt und Selbstkonstitution im 17. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: V & R unipress, 2013). Katie Barclay, Love, Intimacy and Power. Marriage and Patriarchy in Scotland, 1650 – 1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). Katie Barclay, “Performance and Performativity”, in Early Modern Emotions. An Introduction, 14 – 17. Battlefield Emotions 1500 – 1800. Practices, Experience, Imagination, ed. Erika Kuijpers and Cornelis Van der Haven (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

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Katharina Behrens, Scham. Zur sozialen Bedeutung eines Gefühls im spätmittelalterlichen England (Historische Semantik 20) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014). Karl Bernecker, Kritische Darstellung der Geschichte des Affektbegriffs von Descartes zur Gegenwart (Berlin: Godemann, 1915). Dieter Birnbacher, “Emotionen im Wandel des Zeitgeists”, in Emotionen in Mittelalter und Renaissance, ed. Christoph Kann (Düsseldorf: Düsseldorf University Press, 2014), 21 – 53. Rob Boddice, “The Affective Turn: Historicizing the Emotions”, in Psychology and History. Interdisciplinary Explorations, ed. Cristian Tileaga and Jovan Byford (Cambridge: CUP, 2014), 147 – 165. Rob Boddice, The Science of Sympathy. Morality, Evolution, and Victorian Civilization (Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2016). Rob Boddice, “The History of Emotions: Past, Present, Future”, Revista de Estudios Sociales 62 (2017), 10 – 15. Rob Boddice, The History of Emotions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018). Rob Boddice, The History of Feelings (London: Reaktion Books, 2019). Body – Language – Communication. An International Handbook on Multimodality in Human Interaction (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2013) (online). Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy, “Pour une histoire des émotions. L’historien face aux questions contemporaines”, in Le sujet des émotions au moyen âge, ed. Nagy and Boquet (Paris: Beauchesne, 2009), 15 – 51. Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy, Sensible Moyen Âge. Une Histoire des Émotions dans l’Occident Médiéval (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2015). Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy, Medieval Sensibilities. A History of Emotions in the Middle Ages, trans. Robert Shaw (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018). Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy, “Una storia diversa delle emozioni”, Rivista Storica Italiana 128.2 (2016), 481 – 520. Christof Breitsameter, Liebe. Formen und Normen. Eine Kulturgeschichte und ihre Folgen (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 2017). Susan Broomhall, ed., Emotions in the Household, 1200 – 1900 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Susan Broomhall and J. Van Gent, “Corresponding Affections: Emotional Exchange among Siblings in the Nassau Family”, Journal of Family History 34.2 (2009), 143 – 165. Susan Broomhall, ed., Ordering Emotions in Europe, 1100 – 1800 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015). Susan Broomhall, “Hearts on Fire: Compassion and Love in Nicolas Houel’s Traité de la Charité chrestienne”, in Ordering Emotions in Europe, 1100 – 1800, 121 – 160. Broomhall, s. Early Modern Emotions. Susan Broomhall and Sarah Finn, eds., Violence and Emotions in Early Modern Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 2016). Susan Broomhall, Jane W. Davidson, and Andrew Lynch, eds., A Cultural History of the Emotions, 6 vols. (London, New York, Oxford, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility. Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). Glenn D. Burger, Conduct Becoming. Good Wifes and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). Douglas Cairns and Damien Nelis, “Introduction”, in Emotions in the Classical World. Methods, Approaches, and Directions, ed. Cairns and Nelis (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2017), 7 – 30. Edward Hallett Carr, What is History? (London: Macmillan, 1961; Reprint Basingstoke: Palgrave 2001). Carla Casagrande und Silvana Vecchio, Passioni dell’anima. Teorie e usi degli affetti nella cultura medievale (Firenze: Sismel – Edizioni del Galluzo, 2015).

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Sandra Cavallo and Silvia Evangelisti, eds., A Cultural History of Childhood and Family, Vol. 3: A Cultural History of Childhood and Family in the Early Modern Age (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). Michael Champion and Andrew Lynch, “Understanding Emotions: ‘The Things They Left Behind’”, in Understanding Emotions in Early Europe, ix–xxxiv. Michael Champion, Raphaële Garrod, Yasmin Haskell, and Juanita Feros Ruys, “But Were they Talking about Emotions? Affectus, Affectio, and the History of Emotions”, Rivista Storia Italiana 128.2 (2016), 521 – 543. Childhood and Emotion. Across Cultures 1450 – 1800, ed. Claudia Jarzebowski and Thomas Max Safley (London and New York: Routledge, 2014). Codierungen von Emotionen im Mittelalter. Emotions and Sensibilities in the Middle Ages, ed. C. Stephen Jaeger and Ingrid Kasten (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2003). Giovanni Colombetti, “What Language Does to Feelings”, Journal of Consciousness Studies 16.9 (2009), 4 – 26. Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History. From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Viking, 2005). Alain Corbin, s. Histoire des Émotions. Brian Cowan, “In Public. Collectivities and Polities”, in A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Baroque and Enlightenment Age (2019), 155 – 172. Holly A. Crocker, “Medieval Affects Now”, Exemplaria 29,1 (2017), 82 – 98. W. Ray Crozier, “Differentiating Shame from Embarrassment”, Emotion Review 6.3 (2014), 269 – 276. Ildiko Csengei, Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Maurice Daumas, “Coeurs vaillants et coeurs tendres. L’amitié et l’amour à l’époque moderne”, in Histoire des Émotions, vol. 1, 333 – 350. Lesel Dawson, Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern English Literature (Oxford: OUP, 2008). Carolyn J. Dean, “Redefining Historical Identities: Sexuality, Gender and the Self”, in Psychology and History, 129 – 146. Death, Emotion and Childhood in Premodern Europe, ed. Katie Barclay, Kimberley Reynolds, and Ciara Rawnsley (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Die Kunst der Aufrichtigkeit im 17. Jahrhundert, ed. Claudia Benthien and Steffen Martus (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2006). Discourses of Anger in the Early Modern Period, ed. Karl A. E. Enenkel and Anita Traninger (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015). Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions. The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: CUP, 2003). Thomas Dixon, The Invention of Altruism. Making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain (Oxford: OUP, 2008). Thomas Dixon, “‘Emotion’: The History of a Keyword in Crisis”, Emotion Review 4.4 (2012), 338 – 344. John Dryden, “Passions, Affections, and Emotions. Methodological Difficulties in Reconstructing Aquinas’ Philosophical Psychology”, Literature Compass 13.6 (2016), 343 – 350. Early Modern Emotions. An Introduction, ed. Susan Broomhall (London and New York: Routledge, 2017). Pascal Eitler and Monique Scheer, “Emotionengeschichte als Körpergeschichte”, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 35 (2009), 282 – 313. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process. Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmund Jephcott with some notes and corrections by the author. Revised Edition, ed. Eric Dunning, Johan Goudsblom, and Stephen Mennell (Maldem, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2000).

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Indices Authors Abbey, Ruth 118 Adams, Tracy 53, 76 f. Ahmed, Sara 44, 112, 180 Alston, Laura 81, 116 f., 200 Andenmatten, Bernard 145 Andersen, Peter A. 85, 207 Andrews, Walter 73 f. Angenendt, Arnold 131 Archambeau, Nicole 231 Arendt, Hannah 32 Arikha, Noga 163 Armstrong, Nancy 50 Arni, Caroline 21, 118 f., 126, 138 Arnold, Antje 63 Arnold, Günter 63 Arnold, John H. 6, 108 Arnold, Klaus 142 Ashley, Kathleen 50 Auerbach, Erich 32, 178 Averill, James R. 176 Bähr, Andreas 26, 109, 203 Baime, Jane 42 Baisch, Martin 217 Baldwin, John W. 131, 133 Balzaretti, Ross 15 Banerjee, Kiran 69, 176 Barclay, Katie 6 f., 81, 103 – 106, 111, 117 – 119, 126, 128 f., 143, 180, 250 Barnes, Diana G. 50 Barthel, Verena 263 Barrett, Lisa Feldman 2, 197 Bartlett, Robert 147 Beaven, Lisa 45, 174 Becker, Patrick 27, 272 Behrens, Katharina 111, 190 Belgioioso, Giulia 243 Bénatouil, Thomas 253 Benthien, Claudia 88, 120, 127 Benton, John F. 23, 152 Bergenholtz, Henning 176 Bernecker, Karl 32 Bertaud, Madeleine 207 Biess, Frank 4, 80 Birnbacher, Dieter 107

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110692464-013

Blanchfield, Lyn 89 Blank, Walter 195 Blauvelt, Martha Tomhave 34 Bloch, R. Howard 275 Boddice, Rob 3, 10, 24, 26, 29, 31, 41 f., 57, 65, 67 – 72, 75, 81, 91, 95, 112, 166 f., 174, 176, 187, 223 – 254, 256 f., 261, 268, 271, 278 Böth, Mareike 181 Boiger, Michael 30 Bollmann, Anne 54 Bologne, Jean-Claude 216 f. Boquet, Damien 23 f., 28, 34, 77, 86, 128, 136, 168, 175, 178, 181 Borgstedt, Thomas 120 Bowdler, Sandra 42 Brändle, Fabian 203 Braund, Susanna Morton 35, 211 Breitenberg, Mark 207 Breitsameter, Christof 116, 131, 166 Brennan, Robert Edward 92, 169 Brennan, Teresa 84, 174 Brook, Leslie 214 Brooks, Ann 29, 104, 106 Broomhall, Susan, 7 f., 11, 24, 31, 36, 44 f., 53, 74, 76, 81, 84, 92 – 94, 105, 174, 223, 225, 254 – 271 Brown-Grant, Rosalind 154 Brundage, James A. 90, 131 Brungs, Alexander 41, 164, 201 Bryson, Anna 150 Buchholz, Stephan 209 Burger, Glenn D. 102 f., 131 Burguière, André 23 Burkart, Günter 117 Burkart, Lucas 151 Burke, Peter 22 f., 25 Burrow, John Anthony 159 Byford, Jovan 14 Bynum, Caroline Walker 108 Cadden, Joan 96, 136 Cairns, Douglas 24, 73, 77, 183, 211 Campe, Rüdiger 88, 111 Campos, Joseph J. 91

Indices

Carpenter, Jennifer 75 Carr, E.H. 95 Carraud, Vincent 243 Casagrande, Carla 164 Cassidy-Welch 65, 76 Castel, Pierre-Henri 196 Caston, Ruth R. 236, 238, 251 Cavallo, Sandra 140 Champion, Michael 1, 5, 34, 41, 100, 168, 187 Chaniotis, Angelos 1 f., 7 f., 36, 45, 96 Chaplin, Grefgory 220 Chapsal, Madeleine 207 Charalampous, Charis 63 Chavasse, Ruth 76 Chien, Yi-Chung 69, 176 Chenu, M.-D. 170 Christoffel, Hans 199 Classen, Albrecht 120, 140 Clough, Patricia Ticineto 29 Cock, Emily 74 Cohen-Hanegbi, Naama 9, 34, 131, 165 Cohen, Deborah 125 Colombetti, Giovanni 196 Colonna, Enzo 15 Colwell, Tania M. 53 Coontz, Stephanie 116, 262 Corbin, Alain, 2 f., 9, 24, 28, 43, 72, 88, 97, 146 Cossar, C.D.M. 213 Courtine, Jean-Jacques 2 f., 9, 24, 28, 43, 72, 88, 97 Cowan, Brian 88, 104, 183 Crane, Thomas Frederick 242 Creighton, Millie R. 189 Cristiani, Riccardo 3, 28 f., 34, 37 – 40, 48, 55, 77, 178 Crocker, Holly A. 108, 172 Crossley-Holland, Nicole 123 Crouzet-Pavan, Elisabeth 36 Crozier, W. Ray 152 Csengei, Ildiko 164 Cummings, Brian 34, 169 Curtin, Michael 50 Dalgleish, Tim, 26 f., 209 Dallapiazza, Michael 142 D’Arcens, Louise 72, 106 Daumas, Maurice 98 f., 130, 275 Dawson, Lesel 64, 115

295

Dean, Carolyn J. 14 Deigh, John 172 Deluermoz, Quentin 4 De Mause, Lloyd 23 Dem’Jankov, Valerij 176 Demmerling, Christoph 27, 152, 197, 201, 207, 217 Den Uyl, Douglas J. 118 Deonna, Julien A. 14 Deri, Jillian 41 Derschka, Harald 108, 163, 193 Dienstbier, Richard A. 45 Diller, Hans-Jürgen 112 Dinzelbacher, Peter 131 Dixon, Thomas 1, 24, 34, 113, 167 f., 172 – 174, 177 Dodds, Eric R. 112, 189 Döring, Sabine A. 27 Domański, Bolesław 32 Draelants, Isabelle 253 Dreitzel, Hans Peter 157 Dryden, John 166 Ducrey, Pierre 36 Duerr, Hans Peter 159, 161, 217 Eder, Franz X. 131 Eiselein, Gregory 270 Eisner, Martin G. 142 Eitler, Pascal 62, 65, 178, 209 Ekman, Paul 91 Elias, Norbert 2, 10, 55, 97, 102, 104 – 107, 111, 128, 145 – 149, 152, 156 – 161, 175, 183 f., 197, 217, 220, 276 Elliott, Lisa Keane 73 Elovitz, Paul H. 23 Elter, Irmgard 142 Eming, Knut 169 Enenkel, Karl A.E. 35 f., 108, 113, 192 Erhart, Walter 117 Essary, Kirk, 167 – 169 Ettenhuber, Katrin 169 Euler, Harald A. 85 Eustace, Nicole 24, 34, 43, 80, 100, 167 Evangelisti, Silvia 140 Ewan, Elizabeth 140 Faets, Ann-Theres 176 Fajardo-Acosta, Fidel 108 Farmer, Sharon 99 Favret, Mary A. 26

296

Indices

Febvre, Lucien 22 – 25, 55 Fehr, Johannes 81 Feldman, Lisa 2, 197 Ferran, Ingrid Vendrell 85 Fetz, Reto Luzius 108 Fiehler, Reinhard 91 f. Finn, Sarah 105 Fischl, Thomas 187 Fisher, Kate 95, 119, 125, 221 Flam, Helena 101, 209 Flannery, Mary C. 5 Floyd-Wilson, Mary 6, 34, 96, 115, 182 Folkers, Gerd 81 Forster, Ellinor 21 Frank, Mark G. 84 Frederickson, Jon 137, 182 Freedberg, David 86 Freudenberg, Bele 89 f., 192 Frevert, Ute 24, 35, 96, 107, 109, 178, 192 – 196, 205 Friesen, Wallace V. 91 Fritsch-Staar, Susanne 215 Fritz, Gerd 201 Fuchs, Josef 136 Fumagalli, Vito 15 Fureiz, Emmanuel 4 Furger, Carmen 88 Gaffney, Phyllis 140 Gaines, Atwood D. 195 Galinski, Karl 176 Gammerl, Benno 3, 78, 271 Garcia, Begona Crespo 173 Gardiner, Harry Norman 32 Garrod, Raphaële 34, 168 Gaul, Niels 73 Gaunt, Simon 108 Gergen, Kenneth J. 23, 179, 182 Germani, Ian 53, 73, 75, 174 Gerok-Reiter, Annette 201 f. Geyer, Paul 109 Giddens, Anthony 117, 131 Gienow-Hecht, Jessica C.E. 37, 72 Gill, Christopher 35, 163 Gillis, John R. 23 Glauch, Sonja 203 Goetz, Hans-Werner 15, 105, 107 Goffman, Erving 85 Goldsmith, Elizabeth C. 88 Gouk, Penelope 63

Gowing, Laura 120 Greene Thomas Anthony 76 Greenblatt, Stephen 9 Gross, Daniel 34 Grubmüller, Klaus 114, 176 Grundmann, Herbert 77 Guerrero, Laura K. 85, 207 Haemers, Jelle 73, 81 Hagenbüchle, Roland 108 Hahn, Kornelia 117 Haidt, Jonathan 197 Haidu, Peter 108 Hall, Judith A. 84 Halley, Jean 29 Halsall, Guy 15 Hanawalt, Barbara A. 140 Harbsmeier, Martin 64 Hareli, Shlomo 81, 101 Harmening, Dieter 150 Harper, Kyle 189 Harré, Rom 3, 197 Harris, C.R. 207 Harvey, Karen 64, 81, 116 f. Haseldine, Julian 119 Haug, Walter 157 Haviland-Jones, Jeannette M. 2, 96, 197, 210 Heinzle, Joachim 9 Helms, Dietrich 130 Hemphill, C. Dallett 50 Henkel, Nikolaus 158 Herlihy, David 142 Highwater, Jamake 116 Hobgood, Allison P. 115, 181 Hochschild, Arlie Russell 40, 49, 78, 92 Hopkins, Debra 101 Huber, Christoph 154, 171 Hughes, Diane Howen 142 Huizinga, Johan 55, 107 Hunt, Alan 1, 44, 106 Hunter, Michael 120 Huot, Sylvia 214 Hwang, Hyisung C. 84 Hyatte, Reginald 119 Illouz, Eva 105 Izard, Carroll E. 208 Jackson, Stanley W. 193 – 196 Jaeger, C. Stephen 171 James, Carolyn 55

Indices

James, Susan 24, 171 James, William 82, 94, 268 Jamme, Armand 145 Jarzebowski, Claudia 6, 28, 140, 143, 209 Jeggle, Utz 157 Jehl, Rainer 193, 196 Jenkins, Jennifer M. 209 Jones, Doris L. 119 Jones, Lee 64 Jost, Jean 140 Jüngst, Peter 23 Kagan, Jerome 179, 197 Kakar, Sudhir 220 Kambaskovic, Danijela 104 Kann, Christoph 31, 39, 107 Kappas, Arvid 85 f. Karant-Nunn, Susan 127 Karnein, Alfred 124 Karras, Ruth Mazo 15, 120, 131 Kassinove, Howard 176 Kasson, J. F. 146 Kasten, Ingrid 114, 144, 171, 193 Kaster, Robert A. 46, 169 Kaufmann, Jean-Claude 161 Kay, Sarah 108 Keetley, Dawn 208 Kern-Stahler, Annette 128 Kerr, Heather 23, 36 Kettner, Matthias 208 Kiening, Christian 128 Kilday, Anne-Marie 216 King, Margaret L. 140 King, Peter 36 Kingston, Rebecca 69, 176 Klapisch, Jutta 220 Kleres, Jochen 46, 101 Kluckhohn, Paul 32 Knapp, Mark L. 84 Knuuttila, Simo 34, 163, 181, 190 Köhler, Theodor W. 135 Kövecses, Zoltán 182 Konstan, David 34, 36, 120, 207 Korb, Sebastian 81 Kosso, Cynthia 202 Kotchemidova, Christina 196 Kramer, Susan 108 Krauth-Gruber, Silvia 89 Krewet, Michael 186 Kristjánsson, Kristján 208

297

Kühne, Anja 164 Krüger, Caroline 120 Küsters, Urban 164 Kuijpers, Erika 45, 61, 73, 75, 78, 101 Kutter, Peter 207 Luzmics, Helmut 101 Kwaschik, Anne 28, 209 Lachaud, Frédérique 147 Landweer, Hilge 27, 64, 128, 152, 163, 177, 197, 201, 207 f., 217 Landwehr, Achim 39 Lange, Stella 113 Langhamer, Claire 98 Langlotz, Andreas 5 Lansing, Carol 142 Lanzinger, Margareth 143 Laukötter, Anja 25 Lauria, Federico 14 Lean, Eugenia 5, 78 f. Lebègue, Raymond 32 Leclercq, Jean 131 Lecuppre-Desjardin, Elodie 73 LeDoux, Joseph 91 Lehmann, Johannes F. 28, 113, 167 Lemay, Helen Rodnite 134 Lemmings, David 23, 29, 36, 81, 104, 106, 250 Lerch, Paul, 167 Lett, Didier 18, 84, 141 Levron, Pierre 195 Lewis, Jan 1, 28, 47, 177 Lewis, Michael 2, 96, 197, 210 Leys, Ruth 80, 174 f. Liddy, Lisa 74 Liliequist, Jonas 73, 95 Lively, Kathryn J. 44 Lochrie, Karma 134 Lommatzsch, Erhard 32 Luckmann, Thomas 129 Luhmann, Niklas 119 f., 126 f., 129 f. Lutz, Alexandra 90 Lutz, Catherine A. 26 Lynch, Andrew 1, 5, 11, 34, 41 f., 57, 64, 81, 100, 223, 225, 254, 271 Lyons, Martyn 6 Majid, Asifa 181, 210 McCabe, Richard 184 McCauly, Clark R. 197

298

Indices

McClary, Susan 31, 63 McEvoy, James 120 McEwan, Joanne 25, 28, 76, 84, 187 McGuire, Brian Patrick 169 McKee, James 69 McNamer, Sarah 1 f., 46, 49, 75 f., 79, 100, 181 McSheffrey, Shannon 151 McTaggart, Anne 190 Maddern, Philippa 25, 28, 64, 84, 97, 166, 169, 174, 187 Mageo, Jeannette Marie 26 Malegam, Jehangir 90 Martin, John Jeffries 87, 112 Martinelli-Huber, Franziska 155 Martini, Thorsten W.D. 192 Martschukat, Jürgen 37 Martus, Steffen 88, 120, 127 Matsumoto, David 84 Matt, Susan J. 8, 44 f., 53, 96 f., 106, 139 f., 178, 200, 250 Matter-Bacon, Nicole 60, 103, 115 Maurer, Michael 217 Mayring, Philipp 85, 216 Mazurel, Hervé 4 Mecklenburg, Michael 195 Meier, Matthias 32 Meine, Sabine 130 Melman, Billie 5, 65, 180, 208 Menin, Marco 35 Mennell, Stephen 104 f., 161 Menninghaus, Winfried 197 Mesquita, Batja 30 Metcalf, R.C.M. 32 Michaels, Axel 88 Millar, Charlotte-Rose 55, 62 Miller, Susan B. 197 Mitchel, Sharon C. 87 Möckel, Sebastian 64 Monagle, Clare 90 Montandon, Alain 99, 105, 150 Moos, Peter von 122, 189 Morgott, Franz 32 Morris, Colin 108, 120 Most, Glenn W. 211 Moulinier-Brogi, Laurence 145 Mourey, Marie-Thérèse 88 Muchembled, Robert 107 Müller, Michael 132 Müller-Oberhäuser, Gabriele 50

Muellner, Leonard 227 Münch, Paul 253 Münster-Swendsen, Mia 73 Muir, Edward 113, 192 Mullaney, Steven 1, 26, 29, 86 f., 96, 184 Nagy, Piroska 9, 23 f., 28, 34, 44, 77, 86, 128, 131, 136, 165, 171, 174 f., 178, 181 Naphy, William G. 202 Nash, David 216 Nash, Penelope 91 Nelis, Damien 24, 73, 77, 183 Newhauser, Richard 9 Newman, Barbara 76 Newmark, Catherine 64, 111, 128, 167, 177 Newmeyer, Stephen T. 243 Ngai, Sianne 197 Nicoud, Marilyn 145 Niedenthal, Paula M. 89 Nöth, Winfried 85 Northoff, Georg 69 Nugent, Janay 140 Nussbaum, Martha C. 26 f., 169 Nyssen, Friedhelm 23 Oatley, Keith 27, 46, 209 Oeser, Erhard 200 Oexle, Otto Gerhard 106 Ogrodnick, Margaret 118 Ogura, Michiko 173 Oosterhuis, Harry 116 Opitz, Claudia 144 Oualdi, M’Hamed 4 Ozment, Steven E. 121, 127 Pape, Walter 63 Paravicini, Werner 147 Parkinson, Brian 81, 85, 101 Parrott, W. Gerrod 23, 84 Paster, Gail Kern 6, 34, 96, 100, 115, 152, 181 – 183 Paul, Axel T. 160 f. Peham, Doris 21 Pender, Stephen 250 Penzkofer, Gerhard 247 Perfetti, Lisa 57, 141 Peters, Belinda Roberts 128 Petersen, Alan 137 Phiddian, Robert 23, 36 Philipowski, Katharina 109, 147, 171, 203 Piaget, Jean 107

Indices

Pinch, A. 95 Plamper, Jan 1, 3, 5, 23, 25, 37, 52, 56 f., 65, 68, 78, 85, 167, 182, 187, 208, 257 Plessner, Helmuth 58 Pollock, Linda A. 59 Poley, Jared 34 Pollard, Tanja 184 Post, Werner 35, 197 Power, Mick 27, 209 Plutchik, Robert 208 Prior, Anne 147 Puff, Helmut 183, 209 f. Pulcini, Elena 116 Purnis, Jan 115, 181 Purshouse, Luke 207 Radden, Jennifer 181, 194 Raga, Emmanvelle 149 Rawnsley, Ciara 143 Reddy, William M. 1, 8, 13, 17, 38, 44, 48 – 54, 56, 61 – 63, 66, 72 – 80, 86, 93, 97, 107, 116, 127, 131, 156 f., 180, 221, 249, 257, 271, 276 Reid, Charles J., Jr. 16 Reynolds, Kimberley 143 Ric, François 89 Ricciardelli, Fabrizio 106 Ridder, Klaus 114 Rieger, Dietmar 214 Riha, Ortrun 184 Riordan, Liam 24 Roberts, Penny 202 Rocca, Julius 163 Röckelein, Hedwig 23, 107 Rode, Christian 108 Roper, Lyndal 4, 80 Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg 191 Rosenberg, Morris 54, 205, 209 Rosenfeld, Sophia 73 Rosenwein, Barbara 1, 3, 23 f., 28 ß-40, 48 f., 52, 55, 58 – 62, 72 – 81, 84, 93, 95, 105 – 107, 165, 168, 174 – 182, 186 f., 192, 209, 257, 267 f. Ross, John 220 Roulston, Christine 116 Rowe, Katherine 6, 26, 34, 96, 115, 182 Rozin, Paul 197 Rubik, Margarete 174 Rubin, Miri 6, 108, 120 Russell, James A. 85, 175, 209

299

Rutter, N. Keith 36 Ruys, Juanita 57, 90, 141, 168, 240 Safley, Thomas Max 6, 140 Saliybury, Joyce E. 131, 135 Salmela, Mikko 39, 92 Sanders, Ed 208 Sandidge, Marilyn 120 Sartre, Jean-Paul 217 Sartre, Maurice 24, 179 Saurer, Edith 143 Scheer, Monique 49, 62 – 67, 72 f., 78 – 80, 85, 93, 178, 183, 188, 200, 209, 257 Scheff, Thomas J. 105 Scherer, Klaus R. 26, 81 Scherke, Katharina 32 Schlaffer, Hannelore 116 Schleissner, Margaret 135, 159 Schloßberger, M. 217 Schmidt, Jeremy 194 f. Schnell, Rüdiger 5 – 9, 12, 14, 18 f., 23, 25, 27 – 29, 35, 38, 45, 50, 52, 54 f., 57, 59, 61, 63 – 65, 69, 74, 79, 81 f., 84, 87 – 90, 92, 94, 97 – 99, 103 – 106, 108 f., 111 f., 116 – 118, 120, 122, 125, 128, 130 – 134, 137, 139, 143, 147 – 150, 152 f., 155, 157 f., 162 f., 166, 170 f., 173 f., 178, 180, 182 f., 187, 189, 196, 199 f., 209 – 211, 213, 215, 217, 220, 237 f., 251, 262, 264, 266 – 268, 274, 277 f. Schoenfeldt, Michael C. 115, 181, 183 Schreiner, Klaus 170, 172 Schützeichel, Rainer 44 Schulz, Peter 108 Scodel, Ruth 236, 238, 251 Scott, Anne 25, 28, 84, 187, 202 Sebastiani, Valentina 74 Seeber, Stefan 130 Seidler, Günther H. 219 Senge, Konstanze 44 Sère, Bénédicte 36, 155 Shaw, Diane 128, 152 Shoemaker, Robert 41 Sieber, Andrea 193, 195 Siehuis, Freya 34, 169 Simmel, Georg 118 Siraisi, Bancy G. 163 Sirovic, F. 170, 172 Smagghe, Laurent 89, 99 Smail, Daniel Lord 176

300

Indices

Smith-Lovin, Lynn 44 Snyder, Jon R. 88, 247 Söffner, Jan 193, 208 Soltysik, Agnieszka 5 Solomon, Robert C. 101, 112, 183, 191 Spearing, A.C. 108 Spencer, Dale 1 Städtler, Katharina 153 Städtler, Thomas 175 Stafford, Pauline 140 Stalfort, Jutta 113, 167, 175 Stanghellini, Giovanni 176 Stearns, Peter N. 1 f., 23, 28, 47 f., 52, 78, 96 f., 105 – 107, 111, 127, 131, 137, 139 – 141, 150, 153, 157, 177 f., 189 f., 206 – 208, 214 – 216, 257 Stearns, Carol Z. and Peter N. 23, 46 – 49, 56, 62, 72 f., 78, 80 f., 190, 192, 257, 268, 273 Steckel, Sita 73 Stedman, Gesa 36, 144, 165, 168, 185, 210 Stemmler, Gerhard 85 Stets, Jan E. 44, 54, 85, 91 f., 101, 205, 209 Störmer-Caysa, Uta 263 Strongman, Kenneth Thomas 175 Strosetzki, Christoph 155 Sturkenboom, Dorothee 24, 61, 101, 167, 191 Sullivan, Erin 33, 193, 196 Suski, Laura 27, 208 Susteck, Sebastian 163 Szreter, Simon 95, 119, 125, 221 Tarbin, Stephanie 74, 100 Tennenhouse, Leonard 50 Thoits, Peggy A. 44 Thomas, Jean-François 191 Thoral, Marie-Cécile 73 Tileaga, Christian 14 Tissari, Heli 173, 210 Tomkins, Silvan 45 Traninger, Anita 35 f., 113, 192 Trepp, Anne-Charlott 119, 126 Trevor, Douglas 181 Trigg, Stephanie 3, 5 f., 29, 33, 76 f., 80, 155, 167, 174 Turnbull, Lachlan 74 Turner, James 220 Turner, Jonathan H. 44, 54, 85, 92, 101, 180, 205, 209

Ulbrich, Claudia 6, 53 Ulich, Dieter 85, 216 Umbach, Silke 151 Van Bruaene, Anne-Laure 73 f. Van Gent, Jacqueline 78, 94 Van Krieken, Robert 104 Van Nijf, Onno M. 74 Van’t Spijker, I. 166, 170 Vaughn, Sally N. 6 Vecchio, Silvana 163 f. Vester, Heinz-Günter 208 Vial-Logeay, Anne 87 Vigarello, Georges 2 f., 9, 24, 28, 43, 72, 88, 97, 99, 112 Villa, Claudia 16 Von Greyerz, Kaspar 203 Von Koppenfels, Martin 5, 77, 89, 211 Von Plato, Alexander 23 Wack, Mary F. 120 Wagatsuma, H. 175 Walby, Kevin 1, 44 Walch, Agnes 128 Walker, Claire 73, 75, 81, 174, 250 Wassmann, Claudia 174 f., 177 f. Watson, Katherine D. 106 Weber, Hannelore 30 f., 91 Weber, Julia 111 Weber, Max 60, 97 Weed, Emi A. 44 Weigand, Edda 176 Weinberg, Martin S. 161 Wellbery, David 95 Welpinghaus, Anna 208 Wendt, Erwin 32 Wenzel, Siegfried 194 Werden, Rita 189 Weston, Robert L. 181 Wettlaufer, Jörg 36, 147 f., 155 White, Geoffrey M. 210 f. White, Stephen D. 23 Wierzbicka, Anna 101, 175, 210 Williams, Simon J. 101 Winkler, Martina 141 Wittstock, Antje 193, 195 Wouters, Cas 50, 105, 156 f. Wulf, Christoph 88 Young, Christopher 114 Young, Spencer E. 34, 163

Indices

Ziegler, Josef Georg 121 Zika, Charles 174, 183, 238 Zimmermann, Margarete 144 Zink, Michel 108

Zorzi, Andrea 106 Zotz, Thomas 147 Zumbusch, Cornelia

5, 77, 89, 211

301

302

Indices

Subjects Acedia 35, 71, 192 – 197, 208, 221 f., 249, s. also Melancholy Affect/ Affect 5, 29 f., 32, 80, 104 f., 114, 146, 157, 161 f., 165, 169 – 175, 181, 195 – Affect vs. Emotion 80, 162, 166 – 168, 174 f., s. also Feeling – Affect vs. Feeling 113 – 115, 166 – 168, 174 f., 186, 190, 205 – 208 Affection, Affection 93 f., 102, 131, 144, 167 f., 172, 177 Affective Reaction, s. Reaction Affectus/Affectio 16, 86, 162, 166 – 172, 214, 219, s. also Marriage Affect Theory 76, s. also Emotions (Theories) Anger 1, 35 f., 90 – 92, 113 – 115, 163 f., 169, 171, 175 f., 179 – 184, 191 f., 200, 206 – 210, 226 – 228, 231, 236, 238 f. Antiquity, s. History/Histories, Constants Autobiography 6 f., 53 f., 59, 152 f., 170, 198 – 200, 203 – 206, 219, 237 f., 240, 242 – Self-Description 69 f., 111, 184 Child/Children 93 f., 97, 107 f., 116, 127, 139 – 148, 198 – 200, 204 – 206, 263, 267, 271, s. also Family Civilisation, s. also Communication (with Strangers), Honour – Processes of Civilisation (Civilising Processes) 10, 50, 56, 102 – 106, 145 – 150, 155 – 161, 188, 220, 230, 234, 276 – Dialectic of Civilising Processes 156 – 161 Cognition – Cognitive Processes 29, 51, 53, 67, 70, 163, 175, 179 f., 208, 213, 275 f., s. also Emotions (Conflicting E.) – Cognitive Psychology 26, 51, 94, 251, 276 – Cognitive Reactions 31 – Cognitive Sciences 4, 77, 183, 261 Communication 42, 46 – 50, 81 – 94, 109, 123, 126, 128 – Communication of Signs vs. Communication of Emotions 7, 37, 49 f., 73, 81 – 94, 123, 265 – Communication Situations 83, 92, 109, 123, 126, 138, 143, 145, 149, 177, 188, 208 – Communication with Strangers vs. with Familiar Persons 84, 91, 145 f., 149 – 156, 266 f.

– Communication Theory and Emotion Theory 82 – 84, 91, 94 – (Social) Interaction 13, 24, 30, 40, 44, 49 f., 62, 81 – 94, 109 f., 113, 146, 149 – 161, 188, 263 – Written vs. Oral Commun. 8, 38, 53 f., 70, 79, 83, 92 f., 179 f., 228, 276 f. s. also Literacy, Writing Community 58 – 62, 82, 100, 121 – 128, 136 f., 145, 266 – Emotional Communities 49, 55 – 62, 73 – 78, 100, 186 f., 198 f., 257, 265 f., 271 – Social Community 58 – 62, 100, 123, 199 Compassio/Compassion 27, 49, 75, 79, 87, 163, 170, 187, 208, 231, 241, 262, s. also Empathy, Misericordia, Sympathy, Pity, Pietà Constants in the Emotion History 20, 48, 51, 56, 59, 66 f., 86 f., 116, 142, 146, 177, 187, 217, 220 f., 229, 238 f., s. also History – Antiquity and Middle Ages 54, 57 f., 97, 119 – 123, 134, 163 f., 183 – 185, 189 f., 192 – 197, 207, 213, 229 – 232, 246, 250, 257 – 261, 266, 274, s. also Hydraulic Model, melancholia – Middle Ages and Early Modern Age 2, 4, 6, 33 – 35, 45, 61 – 65, 74, 87 f., 96 – 99, 102 – 108, 111 – 161, 171, 173, 183, 187, 191 – 222, 262, 266 f., s. also Hydraulic Model – Middle Ages and Modern Age 2, 4, 8 f., 24, 30 f., 38, 49, 53 – 55, 63 f., 78, 86, 89, 96 f., 101 – 222, 274 – Early Modern Age and Modern Age 64 f., 117 – 145 – Premodern and Modern 1 – 3, 5, 9 f., 14, 31, 45, 53 f., 63, 66 f., 71, 77, 86, 89, 96 – 98, 101 – 161, 168, 171, 181 – 222, 235, 238 f., 250 f., 262 – 270, 272 – 277 s. also Shame, Jealousy Constructivism 25 – 27, 31, 42, 47, 51, 62, 66, 68, 85, 101 f., 112, 139, 142, 178 – 183, 197, 199, 274 Continuity, s. Constants Curiosity/ Curiositas 33, 43, 160, 236 – 239 Depression 35, 71,192 – 197, 249 s. also Melancholy

Indices

Dichotomies 47, 63, 116, 165, 179, 183, 268, 273 f. – Private vs. Public, s. Private – Theory vs. Experience s. Emotions (Theories) – Words vs. Experience s. Emotions (Terms) – Expression vs. Experience s. Emotions (Expressions) – Exterior vs. Interior 33, 43 f., 49, 63 f., 66, 80, 86 – 88, 91 f., 111 f., 115, 183, 189, 192, 250 f., 273 f., s. also Emotions (Mind/ Body), Shame – Mind and Body 4, 48 f., 63 – 72, 86, 129 f., 191, 224, 258 – 261, 263, 268, s. also Emotions – Observer vs. Observed Object 10, 29, 37, 49, 65, 85, 90 – 92, 153, 155, 184 – 197, 249 f., 278 – Reason vs. Feeling/Emotion 26 f., 32, 63 f., 163 f., 170 f., 183, 185, 235, 261, 263, 268 Discourses 6, 17, 19, 32, 41, 64, 76, 110, 112, 120, 124 – 134, 137, 162 – 177, 184 f., 188, 214, 252, 261 f., 274 Disgust 71, 146, 149 – 156, 197 – 200, 209, 222, 233 – 239, 271 Early Modern Age s. Constants Emotionology 28, 45 – 51, 56, 72 f., 78, 89, 190, 257 Emotions, s. also Communication, Constants – Conflicting/ Contrary Emotions (Plurality and Simultaneity) 36, 51, 54, 96, 163 – 165, 173, 177, 180, 187, 197, 205 – 221, 233 – 240, 251 – 252, s. also Bundle below – Actions and Emotions. 24, 28, 30, 39 – 41, 44, 52, 63, 65, 82 f., 90 f., 112 – 117, 213, 219, 230, 241, 267, 270 s. also Practice Theory – Activity vs. Passivity 53, 165 – Bundle/Mixture of E. 29, 179, 206 – 215, 251 f., 257, s. also Emotions (Conflicting) – Classification of E. 190, 209 f. – Concepts/Ideas of E. 22, 26, 33 – 36, 39, 41, 162 – 190, 272 – Competing (Differing) Concepts/Ideas of E. (Plurality) 10, 70, 96 – 99, 162 – 190, 226 – 240, 243, 250 – 252, 257 – 261 – History of Concepts of E. vs. History of E. 40, 165 f., 176 – 190, 222, 250 – 252, 276

303

– Discourses on E., s. also Discourses – Discourses and Reality 20, 138 f., 145, 162 – 176 – Discourses vs. Emotions 6, 26, 31 – 37, 40, 48, 77, 102, 113, 138 f., 162 – 190, 192, 197, 201, 249 – 253, 256 – 261, 264 – 267, 273, 275 – Conflicting Discourses 19, 102, 145, 176 f., 184 – 190, 202, 214, 257 – 261, 274 – Emerging (Arising) Emotions 51, 63, 70, 170, 180, 185 f., 195 f., 206, 250 f., 259 – Experiences of E. passim – Expressions of E. – Expression and/vs. Experience of E. 4 – 7, 17, 21, 25, 31 – 58, 63 f., 66, 69, 78 – 94, 100, 108, 133, 173, 178 – 182, 193, 211, 241, 255, 263, 265 – 270, 274, 276 f., s. also Communication (Signs), Dichotomies – Outer/Inner of E. 4, 44, 47, 49, 63 – 66, 78 – 94, 98, 111 – 116, 163, 181 – 183, 189, 191, 250 f., 267 – 269, 274, s. also Dichotomies, Hydraulic Model, Interiorisation – Mind/Soul and Body 26, 48, 63 – 66, 69, 86, 163, 224, 258 – 261, 268, 273, s. also Dichotomies – History of Expression 41, 266, 276 – Interpretations of E. 14 f., 20, 69, 83, 166, 177, 188 f., 235 f., 253, 260, 269, 277, 278, s. also Objects – Language and E. 5, 38, 42 f., 51 – 54, 62 f., 69 f., 73, 79, 92 – 94, 101, 160, 166 – 182, 195 f., 200, 206 f., 209 – 211, 228, 232, 248, 251, 253 – 255, 261 f., 270, 274, 276 f., s. also Communication (Written and Oral), Literacy (Self-Description), Terms – Performances of E. s. Performance – Representations/Displays of E. 5 – 8, 12, 20 – 22, 31, 36, 38, 45, 81, 103, 113 f., 195 f., 203,211, 222, 226, 228, 252 f., 256, 265, 277 – Terms of E. 1, 5, 10, 30, 34, 41, 48, 51, 57, 69, 76, 109, 116, 162 – 179, 182, 185 f., 192 – 197, 200 – 206, 209 – 211, 216 f., 224 f., 227 f., 232 – 235, 241, 245 f., 249 f., 252, 270, 272 f., s. also Affect, Affectus/Affectio, Feeling, Language (above), Sentiment, Passio/Passion, Perturbatio – Contradictions (Plurality) of Terms 162 – 184

304

Indices

– History of Terms vs. History of E. 162 – 190, 200, 249 f., 273, 276 – Terms/Words of E. vs. Experience of E. 109, 169 – 184, 192 – 197, 210 f., 270, 272 – Texts and Emotions 2 – 10, 12 – 21, 31, 38, 45, 53 f., 58, 70, 72, 76, 79, 92 – 94, 101 – 104, 113, 132, 137, 139, 143, 146 – 149, 158, 171 f., 202, 222, 242 – 244, 256, 261 f., 274, 276 f., s. also Autobiography, Genre, Objects, Reaction, Writing – Functions of Texts 2, 7, 12 – 21, 103, 132, 139, 143, 146 – 148, 206 f., 242 – 247, 270, 274, s. also Objects (Texts) – Theories of E. 30, 33 f., 40, 46 – 80, 82, 162, 165, 171, 177, 180, 182 f., 233, 243, 258, 260, 268, s. also Hydraulic Model – Competing Theories 96, 102, 162 – 166, 249 – 252 – Theories and Experiences of E. 67 f., 163, 176 – 190, 257 – 261, 274 – Theory and Practice 72 – 80, 257 – 261, s. also Practice Theory Emotives 8, 13, 17, 44, 48, 51 – 55, 72, 79, 86, 180, 257, 271, 276 Empathy 30, 41, 163, 187, 262 f., s. also Compassio, Sympathy Family 19, 57 – 59, 62, 71, 74, 77, 92 – 94, 100, 116 f., 122 f., 126 – 128, 140 – 143, 149 – 154, 198 f., 205, 263 f., 265 – 268, s. also Household, Intimacy, Love (Parental Love) Fear 16, 26, 71, 152, 158 f., 182, 189, 200 – 208, 212 – 215, 219 f., 229 f., 237 – 239, 250, 263, 274, 277 Feeling/Feeling 5, 111 – 116, 167 f., 172 – 174, 185 f., 205, 224 – 226, 272, s. also Affect – Feeling vs./and Emotion 31, 33, 42, 44, 76 f., 82, 87, 90, 111 – 116, 173 – 176, 185 f., 206, 208 – 211, 224, 243, 272 – Feeling vs. Reason s. Dichotomies – Feeling Rules 49, 78, 91 f., 174 – Culture of Feelings 9, 95, 177 Friendship 76, 100, 103, 109, 118 – 127, 130, 134, 175, 242 – 246, 263, 269, 274 f., s. also Marriage Gender 12 – 21, 59, 79, 97 f., 104, 109, 117, 130, 153, 179, 216, 246, 260, 275, 277,

Genre 6 f., 14 f., 33, 47, 58, 102 – 104, 115, 146 – 149, 168, 215 f., 252, 267 f., 277, s. also Emotions (Texts and Emotions) – Broadsheets 183, 238 f. – Etiquette Books 10, 50, 156, 277 – Monastic Rules (Consuetudines) 109 – 11, 160, 190 – Tischzuchten 50, 147 f., 150, 155 – Tracts for Novitiates 147, 155, 160 Happiness 38, 74, 104, 123, 210, 226, 232, 249, 263 Historians vs. Literary Scholars 1 – 8, 12, 21, 23 f., 31, 36 – 38, 53, 66, 84, 96, 106, 109, 146 – 149, 173, 223, 228, 253, 255, 272 f., 276, s. also Dichotomies, Objects History/Histories 1, 4, 30 – 35, 95 – 101, 139 f., 144, 189, 192, 269 – Dialectic of History 156 – 161 – Emotion History and Social History 30, 47, 55, 62, 95 f., 100, 104, 117, 254, s. also Methods – Emotions in History vs. History of Emotions 9, 22 – 30, 42, 52, 98, 104 f., 192, 256, 267, 272 – 276 – Emotions make History 24 – 28, 94, 270 – Emotion History as Discourse History 34, 40, 76, 130, 188, 220 f., 239 f., 252, 276, s. also Emotions (Discourses) – Historical Model 95 – 101, 105, 110, 254 – Histories of Emotion, s. also Constants – Antiquity 7 f., 36, 59, 67, 99, 111 f., 119 – 121, 130, 163, 167 – 172, 178 f., 189, 191 – 193, 226 – 240, 243, 250 f., 258 f., 272 – Middle Ages passim – Early Modern Age s. Constants – Modern Age s. Constants – Narratives of Emotion History 95, 101 – 146, 225, 254 – Master Narratives 10, 55, 95, 97, 101 – 146, 276 – Emotion as Narrative 45 f. – Neurohistory 67 – 71 – Synchronic Variety vs. Diachronic Continuity 275, s. also Emotions (Conflicting Discourses, Competing Theories), Methods, Plurality Honour 18 f., 59, 115, 149 – 157, 189, 191, 221

Indices

Household 24, 59, 62, 73 – 76, 84, 103, 118, 123 f.,141, 154, 213, 257, 264, 266, 269, s. also Family Hydraulic Model 163, 180 – 184, 193, 274 Intellectual History s. Objects Interaction, s. Communication Interiorisation 111 – 130, 276 – Intimacy 105, 116 – 139, 142, 144, 215, 218 – 221, 264, 267, s. also Private Jealousy

180, 206 – 215, 222, 263

Language s. Emotions Literacy 177, 228 – Literacy and Emotion 51 – 55, 165 f., 253 f. – Literacy and Orality, s. Communication (Written vs. Oral) Love 12 – 21, 38, 46, 57, 73, 83, 89 f., 93 f., 98, 108, 116, 130 – 139, 163, 170, 173, 182, 186, 208 – 211, 215 – 221, 245 f., 249 f., 262, 265, s. also Jealousy, Shame (and Love) – Love Letter 31, 41, 54, 92, 121, 180, 247, 265 – Love and Sexuality s. Sexuality – Marital Love s. Marriage – Maternal Love 34 – Parental Love 139 – 145, 267, 276 f. – Romantic Love 131, 262 Marriage 12 – 21, 57 – 59, 90, 95, 99, 142, 213 – 215, 220, 262, 264, s. also Intimacy – Affectus maritalis 16, 131 – Marriage and Love 9, 12 – 21, 57 f., 76, 99, 102 – 139, 163, 166, 265, 272 – Marriage as Friendship 103, 118 – 130 Master Narratives, s. History/Histories (Narratives) Melancholy/melancholia 32, 181, 192 – 197, s. also Acedia Methods 3 – 5, 9, 22, 28, 33, 38 f., 42 – 46, 69, 77, 79, 132, 139, 144, 173, 182 f., 208, 224, 248, 256 f., 260, 264, 273, s. also Plurality – Homogenisation/Homogeneity 54, 58, 61 f., 73, 96 f., 102, 146, 177, 205, 210, 232, 261 f., 271 – Macro-/Micro-historical approach 2, 97 – Observer/Object s. Dichotomies, Objects

305

– Synchronic vs. Diachronic Approach 9, 102, 145, 174, 275, s. also Emotions (Conflicting/Competing) – Traditional Objects/Methods 33, 36, 99, s. also Objects Middle Ages s. Constants Misericordia 27, 163, s. also Compassio, Empathy Modern Age s. Constants Neurobiology 4, 192, 252 Neurophysiology 4, 187, 251 – Neuropsychology s. Psychology Neurosciences 40, 42, 67 – 72, 94, 102 Objects/Objectives of Emotion History 3 – 5, 9, 21, 25, 28 – 42, 45, 76, 78, 93, 166, 185, 190, 192, 196, 249, 254 – 256, 262, 272, 276, s. also Dichotomies, Methods – Cognitive Interests 9, 22, 24 f., 30, 35, 41 – 45, 67 f., 223, 253 – 256, 272 f., s. also Objects – Emotions as Objects 5 – 8, 22, 24, 29, 30 – 36, 39 – 41, 55, 167, 185 – 187, 209, 224, 253, 258, 272 – Intellectual History 33 – 36, 42, 77, 116, 272 – Interpretations of Interpretations 188 f., 277 f. – Observer vs. Observed Objects 184 – 197, s. also Methods – Outer/Inner s. Dichotomies, Emotions – Texts vs. Emotions 5, 7 f., 54, 206, 276 f., s. also Emotions (Texts and Emotions), Historians, Writing – Textual Functions 2, 6 f., 17, 20 f., 31, 101, 103, 132, 140, 143, 146 – 148, 206, 242, 244, 247, 252, 270, 274 – Textual Analysis 9, 57, 93 Passio/Passion 17, 31 – 34, 36, 50, 74, 77, 112, 120, 163, 167 – 172, 178, 185, 232 f., 240, 249 f., 260, 270 – Passion vs. Affection 162, 166 – 169, 174, 177, 185, s. also Affect, Affection – Passion vs. Emotion 112 f., 166 – 172, 174, 177 Pathology of Humours 163, 181, 183 f., 193, s. also Hydraulic Model Performance 93, 180, s. also Practice Theory – Performance of Emotions 7, 21, 93, 180, 205, 252, 256

306

Indices

– Performance of Texts 58, 79 Perturbatio (animi) 27, 162, 169, 171, 240, 249 f. Pity 27, 187, 238, 241, 255, 262, 269 – Pietà 241 Plurality 9, 55 f., 61, 66, 96, 99, 102, 138, 162 – 177, 188, 249 – 254, 257 – 261, s. also Emotions – Model of Plurality 188 Practice Theory 27, 44, 49, 62 – 67, 77 – 80, 85, 87, 90, 101 116, 143, 188, 205, 233, 251, 268, 274 Private/Privacy 6, 76, 90, s. also Family, Intimacy – Private vs. Public 111, 116 – 130, 150 – 155, 159, 177, 200, 248, 255, 263 – 267, 269 – Privatisation 129 Psychohistory 23 Psychology 4, 22 f., 40, 47, 107, 167, 174, 177, 179, 201, 208, 252, 258, 261, 276 – Cognitive Psychology s. Cognition – Neuropsychology 40 – Psychological and Physiological 64, 86, 115, 135, 258, 260, s. also Hydraulic Model – Social Psychology 101 Reaction – Affective/Emotional Reaction 7 f., 31, 33, 45 f., 65, 71, 113, 116, 180, 199, 209 f., 216, 239, 270, s. also Disgust, Shame Refuge – Emotional Refuge 52, 56, 75 f., 118, 126 f., 156 f., 221, 264 Regime – Affective/Emotional Regime 46, 51 f., 56, 73 – 78, 99, 156 f., 249, 257

Script 6, 45 f., 75, 209 Sentiment/Sentiment 23, 102, 162, 167 f., 172, 174 – 177, 185, 191, 207, 272 Sexuality 14 – 19, 96, 130 – 139, 160, 272 – Sex and Love 12 – 21, 101 f., 130 – 139, 145, 215 – 221, 276 Shame (pudor, verecundia) 18 f., 36, 40, 54, 66, 71, 96, 104, 110 – 112, 115, 121, 149 – 159, 164, 170 f., 189 – 191, 215 – 222, 230, 263, 271, 274, 277 – Shame Culture 112, 189, 221 – Guilt Culture 111 f., 114, 189 f., 277 – Shame and Love 215 – 221 Style – Emotional Style 25, 46, 48, 56, 78, 94, 200, 271 Subjectivity/Subjectification 30, 67, 86, 107 – 113, 116, 145, 186, 276 Sympathy 7, 27, 74, 79, 90 f., 107, 170, 187, 200, 214, 226, 269, s. also Compassio Table Manners 10, 97, 105, 146 – 151, 158, 184, 277 Terms s. Emotions (Terms) Texts s. Emotions (Texts and Emotions), Genre, Objects Turn – Emotional/Affective Turn 26 f., 29 – 35, 42, 76 f., 145, 254, 272, 278 Writing 54, 70, 79, 93, 180 f., 203, 205 f., 228, 246 f., 253, 276, s. also Communication (Written vs. Oral), Emotions (Texts), Literacy, Objects – Writing emotions 6 f., 50, 53, 83, 206, 253 – Writing vs. Printing 38, 54

Indices

307

Sources Aegidius Romanus 154, 214 Aelred of Rievaulx 79, 119 f., 169 f., 218 f. Alanus de Insulis 163 Albertus Magnus 136 (Ps.‐)Albertus Magnus 134, 159 Al-Ghazāli 158 Ambrosius 54, 163, 169, 171 Andreas Capellanus 99, 124, 133, 164, 186, 214, 220 Antoine de Courtin 155, 160 Antoninus Florentinus 20, 133, 214 Alberti, Leon Battista 64, 122 f., 154, 230 Aristotle 30, 32 34, 77, 118 f., 130, 162, 164 – 166, 171, 184, 186 226, 232 f., 239, 250 f., 258 f., 272 (Ps.‐)Aristotle, Oiconomia 103 L’Art d’Amours 214 Augustine 164, 166, 169 f., 184 f., 225 f., 236 – 240, 249 – 253, 269 Barbaro, Francesco 122, 130 Barth, Johann Christian 159 Bartholomaeus Anglicus 158 Berthold von Regensburg 138 Boccaccio, Giovanni 19, 212 f., 230 f. Bonaventura 121, 196 Brant, Sebastian 151 Gace Brulé 212 Bruno, Christophorus 126 Camerarius, Joachim 217 Castiglione, Baldassar 99, 160, 226, 242 f. – Cato s. Disticha Catonis Chaillou, Jacques 181 Chaucer, Geoffrey 207, 214, 218 Chrétien de Troyes 42, 137 Christine de Pizan 87, 154, 268 Chrysostomus, Johannes 207 Chytraeus, Nathan 151, 159 Cicero 27, 54, 77, 87, 119, 167, 239 f. Clement of Alexandria 153 Consuetudines Oigniacensis Monasterii 190 Cusanus (Nicolaus de Cusa) 31 David von Augsburg 115, 155, 170 f., 194, 196 Descartes 30, 63 – 65, 111, 162, 165 f., 209, 225 f., 243, 254, Deux Traités sur l’Amour 214 Dionysius Cartusianus 20

Disticha Catonis Doctrina mense

150 158

Eiximenis, Francesc 125 f. Epictetus 27 Erasmus of Rotterdam 123, 146, 152, 158 f. Euripides 112 Fabri, Felix 216 Facetus cum nihil utilius 151 Francesco da Barberino 153 Frauenlob 217 Galen 163, 181, 184, 193, 225 f., 258 – 260 Gautier d’Arras 137 Gilbertus Anglicus 134 f. Giovanni della Casa 151, 159 Gottfried von Strassburg 163 f., 186, 211 – 213, 218, 245 Gower, John 214 Graf, Oscar Maria 59 Gratianus 129 Guazzo, Stefano 155 Guibert de Nogent 23, 132, 152 f. Guilelmus Peraldus 136 f. Hartlieb, Johann 133 – 135 Hartmann, Johann Ludwig 220 Hartmann von Aue 137, 170, 219, 263 Hatzlerin, Clara 160 Heidegger, Martin 197 Henry of Ghent 104 Heinrich von Neustadt 137 Herder, Johann Gottfried 63 Hildegard von Bingen 215, 226 Historia septem sapientum 15 Hollen, Gottschalk 125 Homer 111 f., 225 – 228, 225, 229, 253 Horace 87, 207 Houel, Nicolas Traité de la charité chrestienne 7 Hugh of St. Victor 163 Hugo de Prado Florido 143 Hugo von Montfort 125 Humbertus de Romanis 159 Hutten, Ulrich von 119 Huxler, Aldous 197 Isidor 169, 171 Ivo de Chartres 220

308

Indices

Jacques de Vitry 76, 214 João de Barros 125, 214 Johannes Cassianus 194 Johannes von Paltz 214 Johannes von Tepl 129 Kant, Immanuel 30, 111, 166 f. Karlsruher Hofzucht 154, 158 Kierkegaard, Søren 197 Knigge, Adolph Freiherr von 86 Konrad von Haslau 154 Konrad von Megenberg 214 Konrad von Würzburg 142, 164, 201 f., 250 Leonardo da Vinci 31 Liber Ordinis Sancti Victoris Parisiensis Liutprand de Cremona 12 – 20, 166

110

Machiavelli 81, 226, 240 – 242, 254 Mathesius, Johannes 127 Matthew of Vendôme 86 Mechthild von Magdeburg 216 Le Ménagier de Paris 123 f., 130 Meyer, Johannes 159 Moir, John 129 Montaigne, Michel de 119 Nevizzanus, Johannes

123

Odo of Morimond 170 Ovid 86, 212, 214, 219 Meister Otte, Eraclius 218 Ordericus Vitalis 17 – 20 Otfried von Weißenburg 114 Petrarca, Francesco 109, 149, 262 Petrus Lombardus 12, 20, 129, 133 Philippe de Mézières 154 Piccolomini, Eneas Silvius 241 Plato 32, 164, 168 f., 227, 235 f., 239, 251 Platter, Felix 198 – 200 Platter, Thomas 71, 203 – 206, 219 Plutarch 226, 233 – 235 Poliziano, Angelo 151, 154 Psellos 41, 187 Quintilian

87, 171 f.

Regula Benedicti 60 f. Reinerus Alemannicus 150 f. Reinfried von Braunschweig 137, 217 f.

Reinmar 212 Ribsch, Heinrich, Disceptatio 14 Richard of St. Victor 166, 171 Rist, Johannes 214 Robert de Blois 152 – 155 Robert (of) Courson 132, 166 Rolle, Richard 133 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 109, 116, 118 Ruodlieb 114 f. Schiller, Friedrich 59 f., 89 Scudéry, Madeleine de 226, 243 – 247, 268 Selnecker, Nikolaus 220 Seneca 169 Shakespeare 181, 268 Sordello 153 Spinoza 167, 225 f. Thomas Aquinas 27, 30 f., 34, 41, 92, 119 f., 136, 162, 164 – 166, 169 – 171, 177, 184, 201 f., 250 f. Thomas de Bretagne 136 Thomasin von Zirclaria 154, 158 Thomasius, Christian 209 Thucydides 225, 229 – 232 Tiraquellus, Andreas 214 (Ps.‐)Trotula 134 f. Tucher, Johannes d.A. 160 Tullia d’Aragona 220 Un art d’aimer anglo-norman 214 Un art d’aimer du XIIIe siècle 124 Pope Urban II. 129, 220, 264 Urbanus magnus 147, 149 f., 152, 154, 158 f., 212 Venantius Fortunatus 57 f. Vincent de Beauvais 88 Vives, Ludovicus 126 Walter de Mortagne 120, 129, 133 Waltharius 114 f. William of Auverge (Guillaume d’Auvergne) 164 Wirnt von Gravenberc 137 Wolfram von Eschenbach 87, 217, 263 Wright, Thomas 87, 168, 181 Zimmerische Chronik

155