Table Of ContentD O I
N G E
M O T I
Edited by
O N S
SUSAN J. MATT
and PETER N.
STEARNS
H I S
T O R Y
DOING
EMOTIONS
HISTORY
HISTORY OF
EMOTIONS
Editors
Susan J. Matt
Peter N. Stearns
D O I N G
E M O T I O N S
H I S T O R Y
Edited by
SUSAN J. MATT
and PETER N.
STEARNS
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield
© 2014 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 c p 5 4 3 2 1
∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Doing emotions history / edited by
Susan J. Matt and Peter N. Stearns.
pages cm. — (The history of emotions)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-252-03805-1 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-252-07955-9 (paper)
ISBN 978-0-252-09532-0 (ebook)
1. Emotions—Sociological aspects.
2. Emotions—Social aspects—History.
3. Ethnopsychology.
I. Matt, Susan J. (Susan Jipson), 1967–
II. Stearns, Peter N.
HM1033.D65 2014
152.4—dc23 2013024439
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Susan J. Matt and Peter N. Stearns
PART I: BASIC ISSUES: ASSESSING CHANGE
Chapter 1. Modern Patterns in Emotions History 17
Peter N. Stearns
Chapter 2. Recovering the Invisible:
Methods for the Historical Study of the Emotions 41
Susan J. Matt
PART II: REGIONAL ANALYSIS
Chapter 3. The Skein of Chinese Emotions History 57
Norman Kutcher
Chapter 4. Emotions History in Eastern Europe 74
Mark D. Steinberg
PART III: PROBING SPECIFIC EMOTIONS
Chapter 5. Finding Joy in the History of Emotions 103
Darrin M. McMahon
Chapter 6. Advertising for Love:
Matrimonial Advertisements and Public Courtship 120
Pamela Epstein
PART IV: EMOTIONS IN SOCIETY
Chapter 7. Religion and Emotions 143
John Corrigan
Chapter 8. Emotion and Political Change 163
Nicole Eustace
Chapter 9. Media, Messages, and Emotions 184
Brenton J. Malin
Afterword 205
Susan J. Matt and Peter N. Stearns
Contributors 209
Index 211
INTRODUCTION
SUSAN J. MATT AND
PETER N. STEARNS
Why did early modern Europeans believe the world to be a vale of tears? In con-
trast, how and when did Americans come to be so cheerful? Why did homicidal
husbands in the eighteenth century kill their wives out of anger, while husbands
in the nineteenth were more likely to claim they murdered out of jealousy?
How did Americans learn to manage their anger to increase productivity and
profits?1 These questions, and others like them, are topics that historians of
the emotions have been raising for the last several decades. While concerned
with the most personal of subjects—human feelings—their investigations have
demonstrated that emotions have larger social and political implications and
can shape public realities.
Rather than examining merely the external behaviors of individuals—the
traditional subject of history—scholars of the emotions explore the anger, the
envy, the love, and the greed that prompted such behaviors. They strive to know
how history felt to those who lived through it.2 This represents a fundamentally
new direction in history, for as one scholar of the emotions has noted, “history
began as the servant of political developments. Despite a generation’s worth
of social and cultural history, the discipline has never quite lost its attraction
to hard, rational things. Emotions have seemed tangential (if not fundamen-
tally opposed) to the historical enterprise.”3 That the history of emotions has
overcome such traditions and prejudices and become a flourishing and rapidly
SUSAN J. MATT AND PETER N. STEARNS
expanding field shows just how worthwhile an approach it has proved to be.
By studying feelings, historians are uncovering the worldviews and the most
fundamental assumptions about life, culture, and personality that people in
the past carried in their heads.
These investigations have shifted the discourse of history—away from the
construct of the rational actor, whose behavior supposedly reflected only cal-
culating self-interest. Self-interest was always a catch phrase, always vaguely
defined, but was presumed to be a mental category devoid of “irrational,” emo-
tional content.4 In questioning such concepts, and bringing emotions back into
the story, historians have enriched what were fairly impoverished explanations
of human motivation and offered more nuanced discussions of why men and
women in other eras did what they did. As a result of such labors, they have
demonstrated not only that emotions shaped history but that emotions them-
selves have a history.
This idea—that emotions have a history—was once controversial. It has
been gaining ground over the last several decades, as historians, anthropolo-
gists, sociologists, psychologists, and at least some cognitive scientists have
come to recognize the role that culture has in shaping feeling. Few in these
disciplines would argue that emotions are constant across space and time. In-
stead, there is an emerging consensus that emotions have both biological and
cultural components and that societies influence the expression, repression,
and meaning of feelings by giving them names and assigning values to some
and not others. For instance, marital love, which many once regarded as a fairly
constant emotion in human history, actually shows great variability in different
contexts. Some classicists contend that in ancient Greece, there was no roman-
tic jealousy between partners, for the ideal of a love-based marriage did not
yet exist. Love, however, could be found in friendships. The ideal of romantic,
love-based marriages emerged haltingly, evident in some places in the Western
world by the seventeenth century, spreading rapidly in the eighteenth, and be-
coming deeply rooted in the nineteenth. So for instance, while many colonial
New England couples loved each other, they tried not to do so excessively, lest
they put earthly joys ahead of their love of God. Nineteenth-century Americans
shed such worries and came to idealize the love-based marriage, seeing it as an
instantiation of the sacred. Twentieth-century Americans celebrated it as well,
but discovered gaps between the ideal of romantic love and the often more
prosaic forms of actual relationships. In fact, love became such a powerful ideal
that it supplanted all other rationales for marriage; its absence in a marriage
justified the dissolution of the partnership, leading one historian to conclude
that in the late twentieth century, love had essentially killed marriage.5
2
Introduction
Scholars have come to recognize that such transformations in emotional
standards shape not only family relationships but also work life, class relations
and identity, religious devotion, and political expression. As the significance of
the field has become apparent, interest in it has grown, so much so that in 2010,
a scholar announced that the field of history had taken an “emotional turn.”6
Once a small subfield, the history of the emotions is suddenly quite popular.
From studies of the emotions in ancient Rome to explorations of sentiment
in modern China, feelings seem to be everywhere. Even more significantly,
historians of many stripes who did not think of themselves as students of the
emotions are nevertheless beginning to incorporate them into their analysis
of more traditional topics. As a result, the history of business, politics, science,
and religion are being examined from the standpoint of feelings.
This volume obviously reflects many of the achievements of this new and
important field. But Doing Emotions History ventures beyond a sampling and
a celebration. The intent is to focus on some leading issues and opportunities
in the field, to spur further discussion, and advance what is already exciting
scholarship to even greater heights.
ORIGINS
Although the field has gained momentum only relatively recently, it is based
on almost a century of exploration. Among early scholars to broach the sub-
ject were Johan Huizinga, who in his 1919 book, The Waning of the Middle Ages,
examined the emotional climate of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and
Norbert Elias, whose classic 1939 work, The Civilizing Process, took up the sub-
ject of emotional control. The scholar most credited for first launching the
field, however, was Lucien Febvre, who, in a series of essays first published
in the 1930s and 1940s, called on historians to see human psychology not as
universal and constant but as fluid and historically contingent. He told histo-
rians that their goal should be “to establish a detailed inventory of the mental
equipment of the men of the time.” From there, “by dint of great learning, but
also of imagination,” they would be able to “reconstitute the whole physical,
intellectual and moral universe of each preceding generation.”7
Febvre was part of the Annales School, which emphasized the longue durée,
the slow rhythms of change that altered daily life and social structure. Begin-
ning in the 1940s, and continuing to this day, Annales historians, including
Marc Bloch and Fernand Braudel, Philippe Ariès, and, more recently, Roger
Chartier, have studied the history of daily activity, private life, and the mentalités
of earlier generations. They pioneered the historical investigation of emotions.
3
