The establishment of an objectivist, anti-Romantic tradition in early twentieth-century aesthetics was no purely philosophical breakthrough, nor (as some have argued) a resigned response to the disasters of twentieth-century history, but in significant part an expression of elitism, fascism, and contempt for the masses, one already prominent before 1914. Writers from Schenker to Adorno insisted aggressively on the immanent structural virtues of master-composers’ scores and the irrelevance, or danger, of listeners’ own feelings. The same music-analytical prejudices still vitiate many contemporary attempts within the so-called ‘affective turn’ to theorize emotions and their history in music, not just in musicology but also in psychology. The very end of the book turns toward popular music and cultural studies as more productive embodiments of affective relationality, showing the resonances and continuities these possess with the sentimental-Romantic traditions explored in the book’s chapters.

The Introduction critiques the dominant critical-musicological picture of Romanticism as a nineteenth-century aesthetic paradigm emphasizing artistic autonomy and escape from the social, and posits an alternative. Romantic ideas of sociality in art and music differed from modern materialist accounts in highlighting the mediatory role of emotion or feeling alongside further ‘ideal’ or imaginative factors in listeners’ experience. Such ideas converge with recent contributions in sociology, music studies, anthropology and philosophy which frame affect in social, holistic terms as atmosphere, Stimmung (mood or “attunement”) and correspondence. These are summarized in the term ‘affective relationality’. In both musicology after Carl Dahlhaus and the recent history of emotions, a watershed c.1800 has separated the Romantic paradigm from its eighteenth-century predecessors, instead of paying attention to the continuity between eighteenth-century sentimentality and Romanticism. This ‘sentimental-Romantic’ continuum is exemplified by Mme de Staël, whose writings’ resonances with the book’s chapters are explored.

Histories of both emotion and sexuality explore the ways that bodies and embodied practices are shaped by time, culture, and location. This chapter uses the theoretical and methodological insights from the History of Emotions to consider the emotions associated with sexuality and how these have taken cultural form at different moments. It first considers the emotions related to sexual function and desire, noting how different biological models informed what emotions were expected and experienced. It then turns to love as the predominant emotion connected with sexual practices, considering the boundaries of who and what should be incorporated within such feeling. The chapter then turns to an exploration of the emotions, particularly intimacy, of reproductive labour, acknowledging sexual practices, including those are contractual and exploitative, that sometimes sit uneasily within a framework of love. Finally, the chapter highlights some of the emotions produced by the management and policing of sexuality, such as shame and loneliness, recognising that sexuality has been a contested moral domain for many groups. Using diverse examples across time and space, this chapter seeks to denaturalise the emotions of sexuality and to provide a framework upon which further research can build.

This chapter takes a snapshot of the field of Neo-Latin with a view to opening it up to curious classical Latinists. What sorts of texts do neo-Latinists study? How do their concerns and approaches differ from those of mainstream classicists and modern linguists? What is the disciplinary position of Neo-Latin across Europe, the United Kingdom and the Americas? Is it forever condemned to be the handmaiden of intellectual history, the history of scholarship, religion, rhetoric, science and medicine, or do neo-Latin authors and texts merit attention for their Latinity? This chapter describes the rise and fall of the neo-Latin idiom from the Italian Renaissance through to the present, with attention to questions of authority, alterity, plurilingualism, genre hybridity and the distinctive modalities of neo-Latin intertextuality. It confronts the bugbear of neo-Latin poetry’s supposed lack of authenticity from a history of emotions perspective. Finally, the problem of a Neo-Latin ‘canon’ is raised in the context of indicating authors suitable for teaching to Classics undergraduates, as well as prospects for the future digital dissemination of neo-Latin editions and commentaries.

This essay details the foundational place of affect for medical treatments of body and soul in the late Middle Ages. Because the medieval soul was fully embodied, affects of love, joy, fear, and anger played a practical part in diagnosing or treating a patient’s health. In late medieval medical manuals, along with forms of living and confessional forms, care for bodies and souls draws on a common affective vocabulary. Rather than seeing one form of affective discourse as spiritual and the other as practical, this chapter concludes by briefly turning to the Book of Margery Kempe to take seriously her claim that Christ heals via an affective intensity that transforms her body and soul. The therapeutic domain of affect unites body and soul, spiritual and practical, in late medieval medical writings.

This chapter explores the form and practice of correspondence between Britain and India, uncovering the social and affective worlds of British non-elite families. Many of these correspondents had low levels of literacy and did not write for private audiences, but relied on others to read and transcribe their correspondence. Intimate details of private lives became public knowledge. Letters transported information about India back to Britain and spread it throughout communities of origin, far beyond the reach of a single letter. Correspondents based in India maintained ties to their communities at home as they consumed everything from family gossip to political news. Correspondence was central to maintaining the economic health of a family. But the same mechanisms that sustained families and communities could disrupt them as well. Scorned spouses shared their grievances with neighbors. Mothers relied on daughters to convey their intimate feelings to their husbands. The form of correspondence and the practicalities of writing across long distances determined how relationships were sustained or disrupted, how information about the empire was disseminated, and how the empire shaped family life.

Everyone knows from experience that emotions are powerful. They motivate us, colour our relationships and views, determine what is important for us and what is not. But it is less clear how they affect history beyond individual lives and interpersonal relationships: how do they make history, and how are they themselves shaped by history? The introduction contextualizes these questions and presents a theoretical and methodological framework.

This chapter argues that emotions are a way of practicing community, that feeling rules delineate the boundaries of what is acceptable and who can be part of the communities imagined within medieval romance. Attentiveness to the diction of emotions offers a new and potentially rich avenue of inquiry into how courtly readers imagined connection. Emotion words function like a contract between people: they negotiate, enact, and destroy relationships. And in romance, these utterances most frequently misfire, sowing confusion, misunderstanding, and, most of all, despair among the lovers and knights who are propelled to repair the damage of these misperformances to their relationships. Emotional misfirings – the moments where love fails, or where shame, anger, and grief take over – are the very building blocks through which romance negotiates and narrates elite communities.

The Coda reflects upon the central arguments of the book as a whole, via an exploration of Edward Reynolds’s A treatise of the passions and faculties of the soule of man (1640). The elaborate metaphors used in Reynolds’s treatise have been used by some critics to suggest that, as Gail Kern Paster puts it, the passions ‘act within the body just as the forces of wind and waves act in the natural world’. By contrast, I consider Reynolds’s treatise in relation to his printed sermons, and argue that his conception of sympathy and the passions was spiritual, intellectual, and rhetorical. The fact that Reynolds draws upon variety of classical texts – including works by Homer, Virgil, Horace, and Seneca – as well as scientific and religious concepts, reminds us of the plurality and complexity of early modern emotional experience. This final case study thus demonstrates how my revised history of sympathy speaks to wider critical and methodological debates about early modern passions – and the history of emotions more generally.

Recent scholarship in the history of emotions encourages us to think about the ways war-time Americans managed their feelings. Separation of families fostered loneliness, for example, the tedium of camp life brought on boredom, the delays of news from home or from camp occasioned anxiety, and the uncertainty of the war’s outcome eroded confidence. Reading, this chapter argues, became a deliberate strategy to mitigate these corrosive effects of warfare. By looking at Civil War–era reading practices we can see how readers engaged imaginative literature and other genres popular in the mid-nineteenth century to maintain the ties that bind. Epistolary conversations about books allowed those separated by war to approximate shared reading, a common practice in antebellum America. And they allowed readers to express emotions by proxy, using fictional characters and imagined scenarios to voice their thoughts and invite reassurance. Fundamentally, reading reminded readers they were not alone.

This chapter looks at the cultural turn in historical writing since the 1980s and how it changed the established traditions of cultural history writing which had existed since the beginnings of professional history writing. The strong influence of poststructuralist theories led to a growing attention to questions of representations and constructions as well as to hidden meanings. It also traces the increasing desire to embed discourses in social practices. The chapter argues that an emphasis on the situational and relational processes in which humans acted remained often linked to an emancipatory agenda. A concern for human agency united with an interest in forms of creolisation and hybridity. Theories of alterity and studies of cultural transfer moved to the fore in many sub-fields of history, e.g. in LGBT history. The chapter explores in particular a range of promising new avenues in the new cultural history: the history of the senses, the history of emotions, the history of the body, the history of violence, nationalism studies. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the new cultural history contributed to greater self-reflexivity about the role of historical writing in collective identity formation. In particular Stuart Hall’s theory of ‘identification’ is used to describe the way in which a commitment to an engaged history writing can be squared with reflexivity about identity formation through historical writing.

In the early modern period, the feeling and practice of compassion were recalibrated in a pressure cooker of social, religious and political changes.The rich philosophical heritage of classical ideas about the role of pity in virtuous citizenship and prudent statesmanship and the embodied practices of late-medieval affective meditation on compassion with the suffering of Christ jostled against new contexts of civil war, colonisation and capitalism. Notions of neighbourliness, charity and compassion became elastic as communities changed shape. Much of today’s critical impatience with compassion is predicated on its failure to follow through on its rhetoric, its incapacity to practice as it preaches. Yet early modern compassion was not merely an erudite textual tradition: it was also a set of practices that took on differing importance in different social and religious groups. These practices were impacted by and in turn shaped textual representations of compassion. The chapters in this volume analyse a broad range of sources to access the interplay between texts and practice in the early modern period.