INTRODUCTION the History of Emotions Has Become a Complex

INTRODUCTION The history of emotions has become a complex field of research since Carol Stearns and Peter Stearns compellingly argued in 1985 that the study of emotional experience in the past needed to distinguish between the prescriptive guidelines provided in advice handbooks and actual experiences and expressions of emotion.1 William Reddy’s emphasis since 1997 on the performative value of emotional words and gestures (his notion of ‘emotives’) and his historical approach to emotional styles, together with Barbara Rosenwein’s introduction of the concept of co-existing ‘emotional communities’ which change over time, have helped to establish new paradigms for looking at a wide range of sources, beyond advice manuals and books of manners, to find evidence of prevailing sets of emotional norms in different social and cultural contexts from the past.2 As Reddy noted in a recent interview, the history of emotions has opened up new approaches to social, cultural and political history, rather than produc- ing a specialized field of research.3 This collection of essays takes a new look at prescriptive and descriptive discussions of emotions in the context of medical advice circulating in Europe between 1200 and 1700 (the gap between the periods studied by Rosenwein and Reddy), also considering some of the co-existing theological, religious and philosophical discursive representations of emotional experience, related to alternative explanatory models of health and well-being. The proposal made by Peter and Carol Stearns to separate between cultural paradigms and actual experience of emotion was at odds with 1 Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emo- tions and Emotional Standards,” American Historical Review 90 (1985): 813–36; Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in America’s History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986). See also Peter Stearns, Jealousy: The Evolution of an Emotion in American His- tory (New York: New York University Press, 1989); American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth- Century Emotional Style (New York: New York University Press, 1994). 2 William Reddy, The Invisible Code: Honor and Sentiment in Postrevolutionary France, 1815–1848 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997); The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900–1200 CE (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012); Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (New York: Cornell University Press, 2006). 3 See Jan Plamper, “The History of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns,” History and Theory 49 (2010): 237–65. 2 introduction the Foucauldian emphasis on the self as a discursive construct, and the increasingly audible voices in the 1980s of cultural anthropologists claim- ing that there is no experience of emotion outside of culture. Among the latter, Catherine Lutz raised serious concerns about the fact that emotions had been primarily conceived of “as pre-cultural facts, as features of our biological heritage that can be identified independently of our cultural heritage,” and urged scholars to expand the domains in which emotions should be studied, shifting away from “the supposedly more permanent structures of human existence—in spleens, souls, genes, human nature, and individual psychology” and looking instead at history, culture, ideol- ogy, and transient human goals.4 In assuming that the existing conceptu- alizations of emotion had emphasized their status as pre-cultural facts, Lutz did take a presentist approach. She did not take into consideration, for instance, the acute awareness of inherited explanatory paradigms of health and well-being shown in medieval and early modern Aristotelian and Galenic discussions of states such as anger, fear, joy, sadness or shame as being related both to transient goals (their cognitive component) and to changing bodily qualities (their physiological manifestation). As this volume will show, medieval and early modern Galenic authors saw physi- cal, emotional and spiritual health and well-being as being based less on innate physiological factors than on a balanced lifestyle. They consciously drew on authoritative texts to account for the ways in which people’s particular experiences of moderate and immoderate passions could both alter and be altered by their fluctuating physiological states. Since Lutz made her influential claims, a rapidly growing number of historical and cultural studies have recognized the historicity of emotion and have explored a wide range of historical sources in search of clues about the changing ways in which societies (or social groups) have shaped the experience, interpretation and expression of emotions, and about the kinds of emotional regimes they have promoted.5 It is perhaps time to 4 Catherine Lutz, “Emotion, Thought, and Estrangement: Emotion as a Cultural Cat- egory,” Cultural Anthropology 1 (1986): 287–309 (287, 297–98). See also the seminal collection of essays, Rom Harré, ed., The Social Construction of Emotions (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). 5 Among the most notable studies, see Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling; Penelope Gouk and Helen Hills, eds. Representing Emotions: New Connections in the Histories of Art, Music and Medicine (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Rosenwein, Emotional Communities; Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: the Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Fay Bound Alberti, ed., Medicine, Emotion and Disease, 1700–1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Susan Broomhall, ed., Emo- tions in the Household, 1200–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Piroska Nagy .

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