The History of Emotions: An Interview With William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns

Abstract

The history of emotions is a burgeoning field-so much so, that some are invoking an "emotional turn." As a way of charting this development, I have interviewed three of the leading practitioners of the history of emotions: William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns. The interviews retrace each historian's intellectual-biographical path to the history of emotions, recapitulate key concepts, and critically discuss the limitations of the available analytical tools. In doing so, they touch on Reddy's concepts of "emotive," "emotional regime," and "emotional navigation," as well as on Rosenwein's "emotional community" and on Stearns's "emotionology" and offer glimpses of each historian's ongoing research. The interviews address the challenges presented to historians by research in the neurosciences and the like, highlighting the distinctive contributions offered by a historical approach. In closing, the interviewees appear to reach a consensus, envisioning the history of emotions not as a specialized field but as a means of integrating the category of emotion into social, cultural, and political history, emulating the rise of gender as an analytical category since its early beginnings as "women's history" in the 1970s.

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“…18 This potential problem is overcome here by the use of testimony and by the focus on individual experience, which contrasts with recent studies of "emotional communities." 19 This article supports John Urry's assertion that "emotions are intimately tied into place," but, while Urry's focus is on the visitor, the leisured "outsider" (Benjamin's flâneur, in essence) and upon the novel experience (Niagara Falls, the seaside resort), ours is on the familiar and routine everyday environment. 20 It would be a mistake to assume, however, that this combination of the individual and subjective with the mundane and familiar would produce insignificant emotions.…”

‘Providential Discourse’ Reconsidered: The Case of the Delft Thunderclap (1654)

“…47 As Jan Plamper (2012) has argued, emotional communities can also be 'textual communities', in which people are interconnected through media, without ever having to meet each other. 48 Religious ministers such as Petrus de Witte, poets such as Vondel, and authors of similar responses to disasters in broadsheets and in pamphlets directed their emotional appeals to audiences understood in the sense of emotional communities shaped by their texts. They therefore contributed to a discourse against social disintegration and collapse in disastrous times.…”

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“…11-12). Reconstructing the history of emotion is a notoriously fraught affair, and it might be argued that we should not presume to impose present-day emotional mores upon the past (Plamper, 2010). While some caution in this regard is indeed necessary, it might also be contended that we do the past an even greater disservice by failing to engage at all with such questions, as if life in the past were somehow lived in an emotion vacuum.…”