The history of emotions: Second edition

By Rob Boddice

This book introduces students and professional historians to the main areas of concern in the history of emotions and its intersection with emotion research in other disciplines. It discusses how the emotions intersect with other lines of historical research relating to power, practice, society and morality. The revised and fully updated second edition of the book demonstrates the field’s centrality to historiographical practice, as well as the importance of this kind of historical work for general interdisciplinary understandings of the value and the meaning of human experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Feb 13, 2024
• ISBN: 9781526171184

Rob Boddice

ROB BODDICE (PhD, FRHistS) is Senior Research Fellow at the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences. He is the author/editor of thirteen books, including 'Knowing Pain: A History of Sensation, Emotion and Experience' (Polity Press, 2023), 'Humane Professions: The Defence of Experimental Medicine, 1876-1914' (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and 'A History of Feelings' (Reaktion, 2019).

Book preview

THE HISTORY OF EMOTIONS

HISTORICAL APPROACHES

Series editor

Geoffrey Cubitt

The Historical Approaches series aims to make a distinctive contribution to current debate about the nature of the historical discipline, its theory and practice, and its evolving relationships to other cultural and intellectual fields. The intention of the series is to bridge the gap that sometimes exists between learned monographs on the one hand and beginners’ manuals on the other, by offering works that have the clarity of argument and liveliness of style to appeal to a general and student readership, while also prompting thought and debate among practising historians and thinkers about the discipline. Titles in the series will cover a wide variety of fields, and explore them from a range of different angles, but will have in common the aspiration of raising awareness of the issues that are posed by historical studies in today’s world, and of the significance of debates about history for a broader understanding of contemporary culture.

Also available:

Geoffrey Cubitt History and memory

Joanna de Groot Empire and history writing in Britain c.1750–2012

Matthew Kempshall Rhetoric and the writing of history, 400–1500

THE HISTORY OF EMOTIONS

Second edition

Rob Boddice

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Rob Boddice 2018, 2023

The right of Rob Boddice to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First edition published 2018 by Manchester University Press

This edition published 2023 by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 7116 0 hardback

ISBN 978 1 5261 7117 7 paperback

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover: Hieronymus Bosch, Christ Carrying the Cross, c. 1510 (Getty Images). Image of open books by Kerrtu via Pixabay

Typeset

by Cheshire Typesetting Ltd, Cuddington, Cheshire

For Sébastien

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Preface to the second edition

Introduction

1Historians and emotions

2Words and concepts

3Communities, regimes and styles

4Power, politics and violence

5Practice and expression

6Experience, senses and the brain

7Spaces, places and objects

8Morality

Conclusion

Select bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is the product of years of exposure to different ways of doing the history of emotions. I was fortunate enough to be in one of the major centres of research as the field exploded, and was present as many of its core ideas either took shape or had their shape changed. In Berlin I was part of both the Languages of Emotion Excellence Cluster at Freie Universität and the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. Without those five years of conversation – listening, speaking, reading, writing – I could not have written this book. In the years since the first edition, I have stayed at the heart of the field and have taken an active part in its maturation and development, from the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences (HEX), Tampere University, Finland. I extend my thanks to my colleagues at HEX for continuing to stimulate critical exchange about the history of emotions, what it is and can be, and about its limitations. Many of the revisions were undertaken during a research fellowship at Complutense University in Madrid, with special thanks to Lydia Feito Grande.

There are far too many individuals to thank from the community of historians of emotions and from scholars in related fields of psychiatry, psychology and the neurosciences, who have put up with my questions, listened to my papers, hosted me and engaged me in critical discussion. I reserve mention for a select few whose influence, collegiality and friendship I hold dear. Their names, if not already familiar, will become so as you read this book: Peter Stearns, Susan Matt, Charles Zika, Thomas Dixon, William Reddy, Nicole Eustace, Piroska Nagy, Jan Plamper, Rhodri Hayward, Joanna Bourke, Karen Vallgårda, Ville Kivimäki, Raisa Toivo, Javier Moscoso, Dolores Martín Moruno, Katie Barclay, Stephanie Trigg, Mark Smith, Bettina Hitzer, Ilaria Scaglia, Nancy Khalek, Lauren Mancia, Suparna Choudhury, Laurence Kirmayer, Jerry Parrott, Otniel Dror, Ya Zuo, Manos Tsakiris, Seth Pollak, Alan Fridlund. To this list I add three special graduate students who help keep me on my toes: Marie van Haaster, Cigdem Talu and Ryan Tristram-Walmsley.

Although all sections have undergone significant revision, I retain the following credits from the first edition: some sections of Chapter 1 have been adapted from ‘Medical and scientific understandings’, in S. Matt [ed.], A Cultural History of the Emotions (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), which was written before but published after the first edition. Some parts of Chapter 3 have been adapted from ‘The affective turn: historicizing the emotions’, in C. Tileagă and J. Byford [eds], Psychology and History: Interdisciplinary Explorations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 147–65, © Cambridge University Press 2014, reprinted with permission. Parts of Chapter 6 may still overlap with ‘Neurohistory’, in P. Burke and M. Tamm [eds], Debating New Approaches in History (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), though this section in particular is now much changed.

I extend my gratitude, once again, to Tony Morris for his work on my behalf. Stephanie Olsen, as always, has influenced every sentence, in both editions of this book. As a historian of emotions herself, and a leading scholar of the field in its intersection with the history of childhood, I could not have wished for a better sounding board, disputant and emotion modifier. And since the first edition, Sébastien has come along and brightened everything. I knew a lot about emotions before him, but I will always owe him for teaching me joy.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

It is difficult to keep pace with the continuing proliferation of works in the history of emotions. When this book was first written, I had in mind the importance for neophytes to have a first port of call, where the key themes, theories and methods – as well as the key findings – of the field could all be discovered in one place. While I think the first edition of the book still does this, I have become increasingly aware of the need to update almost everything. It is not just the sheer quantity of new scholarship since its publication, though this alone would be sufficient to augment the text’s subtextual and bibliographic framing; it is that the stakes of the field seem to have changed dramatically, in a number of important respects. Such things are unusual for a field of historical research that is moving with, I think, unprecedented speed. If I simply regard my own publications since I first wrote this book, I cannot fail to note the development of my theoretical and methodological approaches. I have built upon and responded to the work of others, as well as extending my own ideas about what it is historians of emotions do and why, with and for whom. Since the first edition, I have accumulated both editorial roles (the Bloomsbury series on the history of emotions; Emotion Review; the Cambridge Elements series on Histories of Emotions and Senses; the HEX Handbook) and advisory roles (the Centre for the Politics of Feelings in London; the Centre for Health, Humanities and Science in Bristol), as well as maintaining scholarly networks around the world. I am, I think, even better placed than I was to keep abreast of new publications and new research initiatives, and it is clear to me that the field is not in stasis. While of sufficient size and vintage to be disciplinarily both secure and mature, the field’s means and ends are still up for grabs. It is vital, under these conditions, that we – that is, the growing community of scholars and students in the field – do not sacrifice quality for quantity, or critical caution for popularity. This community must remain internally critical, since its future will be secured only by intense critical dialogue. We can pat each other on the back for our productivity, but we cannot leave it at that. So, apart from mere volume, what am I responding to with this second edition?

First, it was strikingly clear in 2016, when I was writing the first edition, that the history of emotions desperately needed to shake off its overwhelmingly ‘western’ orientation. The majority of works in the field between 1985 and 2016 were about Europe and North America, and focused on white people, usually of the middle and upper classes. After repeated calls, this has begun to change. The growth of scholarship on emotions in Latin America, South and East Asia, the Middle East, and on subaltern emotions everywhere, has not only augmented the bibliography but also challenged some foundational assumptions and some core methodological principles. It seems to me to be vitally important to try to represent this scholarship and its impact, even if it is still nascent, in a book such as this. While there is still the inescapable impression that many of my operative examples are drawn from a western orientation, I am striving to disrupt the normativity of that orientation.

Second, there have been some significant breakthroughs in what I will present here as an emerging multidisciplinary consensus about how emotions are ‘made’ and what they do in the world. The needle has moved considerably from the hackneyed debate about whether emotions are universal and automatic or nurtured, cognitive (bio)cultural constructions. The preponderance of emotion scholarship across the disciplines has abandoned the former view, though it remains powerful and, in some ways intractable. I see no point in trying to inject new life into the old debate, primarily because it does not seem like a debate at all. The methods of the universalists have been found wanting on numberless occasions, their results not replicable. The genealogy of those methods and the assumptions that they operationalise have been thoroughly picked apart. And scholars from as far afield as neuroscience, history, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, psychiatry and social psychology have supplied empirical evidence of the mutability of human emotions. As far as I can tell, the universalist school has not substantially engaged with any of this, but rather carried on regardless, wielding a not insignificant amount of institutional and cultural power. But despite the pessimism I have encountered among historians who are comfortable borrowing from other disciplines but disquieted by active interdisciplinary collaboration, I see clear signs that the silo walls that stand between emotion researchers in many different disciplines are beginning to crumble. Historians can still take a leading role here, and I think it is important to address the question of what collaboration with emotion scientists might look like. I want to underscore at the outset that this is not about signing up uncritically and wholeheartedly to the assumptions, theoretical orientation or methods of any other discipline. Rather, it is about the extent to which all assumptions, theories and methods can be critically challenged and improved by working together.

Third, it seems necessary to address some fundamental sticking points or bifurcation points, as well as new innovations, concerning what it is that historians of emotion do. There are ongoing questions of periodisation and national foci of research that, being the result of the inertia of our own disciplinary logics, politics and institutional structures, frustrate innovation and new research framing. There are significant challenges, being newly tackled, that might free the history of emotions from its automatic attachment to subjectivity, with novel approaches to the collective that probe at the sharing of experience. There are both new possibilities of collaboration with closely allied sub-fields, such as the history of the senses, and new wrinkles of antagonism, between fields and within the history of emotions itself, concerning the goals of our research and the assumptions historians carry to the archive. Much of this centres on the positionality of the historian, and the extent to which their status as feeling, sensing humans gives them any automatic insight into the experiences of humans past. Though I do not align with Joan Scott’s discourse-centred view, readers familiar with my work will not be surprised to hear that I agree with her in rejecting any notion that the evidence of our own experience is of any value whatsoever when conducting historical analyses. Psychohistory, despite its useful insights, is dead for a reason, and I see no mileage now in resurrecting a Freudian approach or, worse, simply putting historical actors under the gaze of the historian as therapist, with no qualifications at all beyond an assumption about a core of shared humanity. The continuing popularity of affect theory in disciplines adjacent to or bleeding into historiography therefore remains of some concern, since it rests, often implicitly and often unwittingly, on both Freudian and universalist pillars. I think it is important at least to make these points of tension visible, since the field is now so large as to accommodate historians of emotion with radically different understandings of what it means to work in this field. It is important here to represent the new turn (not a return) to experience as a way of connecting historiographical threads – emotion, sensation, knowledge, belief, practice, the body, society – that perhaps should never have become separated in the first place.

The fourth point is connected but has its own distinct challenges. Increasingly, scholars in the humanities are asking how to account for their own emotional responses to and motivations for their research. This becomes a particularly acute problem when dealing with challenging material, concerning trauma, abuse, violence and so on. While eschewing the evidence of our own experience as a valid analytical approach, it is inescapable that historians have their own experiences and that their research motivations often come from presentist political agendas. The question is how to handle these things and the extent to which historians should own them in historical writing. I have been highly critical of the casual deployment of ‘empathy’ as a universal licence for connecting present and past experiences and feelings, but in emphasising the politics of such practices (and the dubious pop-psychology they enable), it seems incumbent on me to address an otherwise unmet ethical question about the production of emotions history and the emotions of historical production. Insofar as I reject the notion of using history to justify or connect to present political and identitarian concerns – it is Whiggish – I do see the value, through historicism, of highlighting the situated biocultural contingencies of contemporary concerns. If historians can demonstrate that emotions and experiences in the past were of their moment in time, then logically people of the present can assume that their own are too. This situatedness, and this mutability, does not alter the status of anyone’s experiences as real. Rather, it prompts people to probe at the political dynamics that set the terms of validity and invalidity, inclusion and exclusion, community and ex-community. The history of emotions can be a tool for understanding how authority and prescription work at the level of feeling. That would be a most useful tool indeed – for the past, and for the present.

Fifth, and really an extension of the previous point, I have been struck in re-reading my own text that perhaps the least impactful of its chapters, in terms of the book’s reception, has been the last chapter on morality and justice. Yet the intervening years have been dominated by political and social movements, left and right, that would seem to demand a closer inspection of that chapter’s themes. From Black Lives Matter to #MeToo, and from neo-fascist Christian fundamentalism to Trumpian counterfactualism, great swathes of people have voiced their long-held grief in the idiom of injustice, or else screamed the anger of white fragility. It is not my intention to address present-day themes directly, but simply to underline the point, throughout this new edition, that the history of morality and justice operates at the level of feeling, allowing for the full complexity of that category. Historians have a role to play here, not least historians of emotion, in showing how to critically form good questions about the mutability and politics of morality, and about how to contextualise senses of justice and injustice. To do so, they must also consciously address the potentiality of their own assumptions to both corrupt the past and to implicitly centre themselves in a politics of exclusion. Every historian of the emotions has, I think, a primary responsibility to self-scrutinise their reliance on contemporary psychological categories that privilege certain formulations of whiteness and assumptions about class and gender. It is the kind of thing historians have done for decades, in other areas, but the allure of western psychologism remains powerful. The final chapter is perhaps the least altered of all here (it is nevertheless substantially augmented) but it feels, to me, more relevant than ever.

I leave off with a personal reflection on revisiting the text. I have tried, in revising it, to keep in mind the numerous reviews the first edition received, as well as the feedback of a new round of thorough and obviously expert peer reviewers. I am gratified by the overwhelming praise in these reviews but, perhaps as most people would be, I am particularly focused upon and animated by the elements of negative criticism. I cannot meet or satisfy all of it, but I have aimed to fill in holes, strengthen weaknesses and clarify ambiguities. I am especially struck that this book is often used as a text for teaching and that, as such, it must fail sometimes. I have substantially expanded the bibliography and highlighted the most useful teaching texts and entry points. It is, insofar as anything can be, as up to date as possible. Still, teaching styles and learning environments vary, as does the capacity and time for close reading. I have tried, as I revised, to improve the reading experience. I hope that in 2023, with a million more words under my belt, I am a better writer than I was in 2016, and that the beneficiaries here are teachers and students. I regularly engage in the close reading of other people’s texts but I think it is rare, once the copy-editing and proofreading of one’s own book is done, to return to one’s own book and engage in a close reading of one’s own work. Many of my own constructions have surprised me and I confess I do not remember writing much of it. But most of all I have been stunned by a sense, not unlike the experience of seeing a young child again after an interval of a few years, of how much the field has grown in every way. The words I had originally prepared, like infant clothing on a five-year-old, no longer fit. I have felt compelled to make the words anew, enlarging the text, yes, but also casting aside a great deal that seems outdated and outgrown. My hope is to have provided a book that is fit for purpose for the history of emotions as it has become, but with a nagging sense of suspicion that in five years or ten I will have to re-outfit the text once again.

Rob Boddice

Tampere, April 2023

INTRODUCTION

History departments around the world have taken the ‘emotional turn’. Teaching in the history of emotions is now common, from London to New York, from Istanbul to Lahore, and across Australia. Since the early 2000s, an astonishing number of books and articles, as well as centres for research, have appeared specifically to address emotions in history, to the point that it is now clear that emotions history has cemented its place among mainstream practices in the discipline.¹ There is a sophisticated theoretical and methodological toolbox, generated by historians, that addresses what emotions are and what historians should do with them. Historians of emotions have engaged with – sometimes borrowing, sometimes abusing – other disciplines, most notably anthropology and the neurosciences, in the process of carving out a space in which the history of emotions can exist.

At the heart of this process are a series of radical claims that this book aims both to describe and, in many ways, defend: 1) Emotions change over time – that is to say, emotions are as much the subject of historical enquiry as anything else; 2) Emotions are not merely the effect of historical circumstances, expressed in the aftermath of events, but are active causes of events and richly enhance historiographical theories of causation; 3) Emotions are at the centre of the history of the human being, considered as a biocultural entity that is characterised as a worlded body, in the worlds of other worlded bodies; 4) Emotions are at the centre of the history of morality, for it is becoming increasingly unlikely that any account of human virtue, morals or ethics can be devoid of an analysis of its historical emotional context. Taken together, the history of emotions is, therefore, putting emotions at the centre of historiographical practice. Emotions cannot be sidelined as another (soft) category of historical analysis, peripheral to the weighty subjects of identity, race, class, gender, globalism and politics. The history of emotions enhances our understanding of all these things.

With the proliferation of works in this field, it has been difficult for the newcomer to know where to begin, though in the years since the first edition of this book a number of useful introductory texts have been published.² While there is much scope for future innovation, the sense of incoherency and confusion that greeted the newcomer in the 2010s should be greatly reduced in the 2020s. When Jan Plamper wrote in 2012 that the history of emotions is a rocket ship taking off, I doubt even he realised the altitude it would reach in a decade.³ His own ‘Introduction’ to the field necessarily concentrated not on what historians have done with emotions, but on what anthropologists and psychologists did with them, and the way in which the field opened up to historians in the twenty-first century. Now, more than ten years later, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of works identified explicitly as contributions to the literature on the history of emotions; a small army of scholars are actively practising this maturing discipline. This makes it more difficult than ever to take the temperature of the field as a whole as it now stands, but the newcomer should at least be able to find their bearings.

While general appraisals of what is at stake in the history of emotions continue to proliferate, and while the how of the history of emotions has been addressed in what might be considered the core texts of the field, confusion and repetition do remain⁴ Despite the progress of the field, basic questions of theory and method are still repetitively raised as if they have not been fully and squarely addressed already, going over old ground where it is not necessary, struggling with conceptual innovations that might already be well developed and reigniting debates that could be considered settled. With the first edition of this book, I aimed to cut short this kind of unnecessary labour and instead give the field a point from which to move forward and develop. I am convinced that this need still exists, and indeed has become increasingly acute. It is vital that students and professional historians alike can turn to a comprehensive resource that grounds them in the basics of the field, partly to avoid repetition and partly to avoid needless mistakes and misunderstandings. But this is a fast-moving field, and I grew concerned that my original text was quickly falling out of date, in large part because of strengthening bonds with other disciplines that tend to move more rapidly than historians do. The revised edition of this book therefore addresses, in one place, the kinds of questions that otherwise remain buried in an extensive and in many ways inchoate bibliography. How does one do the history of emotions? What are its internal debates, challenges and weaknesses? What are its principal theories and assumptions? In short, what does one read first? For many, the first edition of this book became one of the first ports of call, not only for students who were new to the history of emotions but also for established historians of all ranks who wished to find out what the history of emotions could do for them. In updating the work, I hope to keep it that way. More importantly still, it has become clear to me that the book reached beyond the discipline of history and has been received and engaged with by psychologists, neuroscientists, psychiatrists and anthropologists, as well as by practitioners of other disciplines. In due course, I am optimistic that the field will see meaningful and substantial engagement and collaboration across disciplinary lines.

There is a budding multidisciplinary convergence, about which I will say more throughout this book. It is encouraging. Emotions scholarship had, for generations, been fractured along disciplinary lines.⁵ To some extent, the fractures remain. It is not an unfair characterisation to say that the emotions in philosophical works are not the same emotions as in psychological works, though they may share some first principles.⁶ These are problems of semantics, but also of fundamental incommensurabilities of purpose. History has long been an interdisciplinary bridge builder, happily borrowing insights and methods from a variety of other fields to suit its own purposes. It is true, however, that the direction of interdisciplinary flow has tended only to be inward. Historiography has projected few of its own ideas back into those disciplines from which it freely borrows. This is partly because historians themselves have seen no need to make such contributions, but also because other disciplines have never really seen a substantial value in history for the purposes of their own scholarship and research. In the case of emotions, many historians have developed forceful arguments that this can no longer be the case. Historical understanding of what emotions are (and have been), how they work and what they mean, cannot be fenced off from other disciplines in which emotions are thought to be something else, to work otherwise and to mean different things. Siloed production of emotion knowledge is no longer a tenable proposition.

Since there are deep convictions among historians of emotions that their findings are far from fanciful, that they are based on strong evidence about emotional experience, expression and practice, it has become imperative to find a way to bring other disciplines to a point of engagement. Historical appraisals of emotional experiences in the past can serve as direct challenges to contemporary scholarship in other disciplines that would narrowly and transhistorically define what emotion is. Happily, there is now evidence of the potential for convergence between some social neuroscientists and social psychologists, with history as the outward-looking bridge.⁷ Few people yet recognise the importance of this coming together, but this book’s presentation of the potential harmony of constructivist, historicist, genetic and neuroscientific approaches suggests an exciting future, both in terms of research contexts and for an understanding of what makes people tearful, what makes them timorous or amorous and what makes them tick.

The book is organised in such a way as to represent the diversity of research being undertaken in the history of emotions. It is at once a review of the field and an appraisal of its varied methods and theories. I supplied one potential grand narrative, or an actual history of the emotions, in another book.⁸ There have been other attempts.⁹ This book is nonetheless coloured and exemplified by histories of emotion across time and from around the world. There are no special instructions for reading this text. It is designed precisely to be an introduction to the field, and therefore is best begun at the beginning. The opening chapter takes a broad overview, looking at the place of emotions in historical writing that pre-dates the formulation of a history-of-emotions project per se. It also looks at the presence of emotional historicism in other fields, tracing the reasons why the emotions failed to be addressed by historians until relatively recently. A brief review of some of the key innovators in the history of emotions is offered at this point, though in-depth analysis will run throughout the book. This, in turn, requires an analysis of the failed (yet tenacious) psychohistory movement that attempted to apply psychoanalytical methods to the practice of history, as well as relations with the psychological sciences more generally. This leads to an introductory appraisal of the social neurosciences and the possibilities for the history of emotions in this context.

Chapter 2 looks at the long and important history of emotion language, what language can tell us about the concept of types of emotion and, more importantly still, about the historical experience of emotions. The overarching observation here is that a sensitivity to language in a historical context has to be matched with a sensitivity to contemporary language used in historical practice. Historians are in engaged in a history of the ‘emotions’. Is that a satisfactory label for what they do? What does it reveal and what does it obscure? In sum, this chapter suggests that the risks of employing ‘emotion’ as a master category for our research outweigh the potential rewards; conversely, remaining open to the mutability of language and concepts does not make comparison impossible, or analysis redundant, but enriches them both.

Chapter 3 deals with some of the most important theoretical and methodological innovations in the history of emotions for working out the social dynamics of emotions in the past, putting together emotional regimes, emotional communities and emotional styles (or emotionologies) in order to compare and contrast their merits. Broadly speaking, these are, respectively, the work of William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein and Peter Stearns. The influence of each is measured, with suggestions for ways in which the weaknesses of each might be shored up and their respective strengths united for a common purpose. Here I address a problem concerning the specific focus of the history of emotions. Historians tend towards analysis of humans in groups (hence communities and regimes) yet, paradoxically, the overwhelming emphasis in the history of emotions has been on the subject. Even when social emotions are the nominal focus, the collective has generally been both under-theorised and accessed through the simple aggregation of subjectivity. I conclude this chapter by seeking to extend the possibilities for social analysis by gesturing at the ways in which emotional experience happens dynamically, supplying some of the historiographical departures concerning collective emotional experiences.¹⁰

The theme is continued in Chapter 4. Emotion research in all fields is concerned with the way emotional experiences are part of social interactions and the dynamics of power. This chapter looks at the ways in which emotional prescription is expressed, enforced and reinforced, examining what happens when emotions do not accord with expected norms. It examines the affective politics of inclusion and exclusion, which prompts a critical focus on the historical categories of human and non-human, and on the intersecting categories of race, gender and animality. There is a great deal to say here about expression and emotional practice, and therefore there is a good deal of overlap with Chapter 5.

There will, however, be a much greater focus in Chapter 5 on what people go through (or have gone through) in order to emote in different kinds of context. This fills out the picture of dynamic emotional relations, but also re-emphasises the possibilities for a history of the biological individual as a mutable biocultural being. It unites the history of emotions with the history of biology, the history of the body and some key interdisciplinary insights on ‘empathy’. At this point I have come to see the necessity of underscoring some practical and ethical points about the positionality of the historian and of the power dynamics that inhere in the exercise of empathy. It has become imperative to disrupt the place of empathy in emotions history and point to its own conceptual instability and political heft.

Focus on the body and on biology leads naturally to a consideration of the senses. Generally speaking, the history of the senses has developed separately to the history of the emotions, and it has its own established historiography. Yet their common origins and reasons for putting the two together have become clear, especially when one considers the languages of ‘feeling’ and of ‘sensibility’