How Can We Write the History of Emotions?
We know that people in the past felt, but not what, how, or why. Is emotional history recoverable?
‘The belief that emotions are universal is the great barrier’
Barbara H. Rosenwein is Professor Emerita of History at Loyola University Chicago
The belief that emotions are universal, fixed in number, and stable is the great barrier to studying the emotions of the past properly. Once we get over that, we can start to write a history of emotions. Equally, of course, we must not imagine that the feelings of the past were so utterly different from our own that there are no similarities. All human beings have affective reactions; while they are not necessarily the same as those we feel ourselves, we can study them.
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