Miraculous Affects and Analogical Materialities. Rethinking the Relation between Architecture and Affect in Baroque Italy

Hills, Helen

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-44185-6_10

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“…Helen Hill examined the production of devotional space as an architectural response to relics and miracles at San Gennaro in Naples, arguing that this space can be seen as 'an effect of the working of materiality in imbricated economies'. 41 However, objects and spaces can also work to delineate different emotional communities from one another, excluding one group in order to produce cohesion within another. While war memorials work as a focus for community mourning, they exclude those whose war-related deaths did not fit within the strict limitations of the memorial, for reasons such as timing, nationality, or gender.…”

Section: Emotional Communities and Materialitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Sources for the History of Emotions

Barclay¹,

Rosa²,

Stearns

2020

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The study of how human emotions interact with materiality is a relatively new field, despite growing out of well-established bodies of research both in material culture and the history of emotions. 1 This work attempts to carve a theoretical space at the intersection of historical emotions and materiality, in which to consider how emotions affect the material world, and how materiality defines and changes human emotions. Using material culture as a source and focus for the history of emotions, based on an understanding that both emotions and materiality are historically and culturally constituted, provides a way of looking beyond the textual sources which have previously dominated the field.The term 'material culture' is usually taken to mean the physical items that a society produces and uses for itself, including built environments and the adaptation of naturally occurring objects and places. 'Materiality' is a broader term, which includes aspects of the material world which are experienced and adapted, but not necessarily created by people.Humans also interact emotionally with phenomena that have materiality but which are neither objects nor places. Fire, for example, is material, but becomes part of material culture only as it is used deliberately, or when it impinges on the built environment or other objects. Light, similarly, is produced both artificially and naturally, and can be manipulated through building orientation and glass windows. Humans also have emotional relationships with the natural environment, ascribing it meaning within cultural and religious frameworks and reacting to it aesthetically. The study of the material world through the history of emotions is, therefore, inherently interdisciplinary, drawing on anthropology, archaeology, art history, religious studies, philosophy, museum studies and literary studies among other disciplines. Interacting emotionally with the material worldHumans respond directly to the material world in emotional ways. They may be filled with delight or awe when standing in a Gothic cathedral, be overcome with terror at the edge of a precipice, or disgust when confronted with the physical manifestations of illness. They also modify and manipulate materiality, creating objects and environments in order to express, produce and regulate emotion. They exchange love tokens as both private and public testaments of affection; build churches, mosques and temples to express religious devotion; landscape wilderness into pleasure gardens, and give flowers in celebration or leave them on graves. Some objects are not specifically created for emotional purposes but acquire emotional meaning as they are used: a child's shoe becomes a sentimental treasure, or an apotropaic talisman; the site of a massacre becomes a shrine; a brick becomes a symbol of political anger when hurled through a window in protest. Just as humans respond to materiality with emotions, so too are those emotions manifested materially. Sara Ahmed labelled this the reciprocity of objects and emotions, maintainin...

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Section: Emotional Communities and Materialitymentioning

confidence: 99%