Journal of Interdisciplinary History, LI:1 (Summer, 2020), 121–129. Joanna Lewis Emotional Rescue: The Emotional Turn in the Study of History The History of Emotions. By Rob Boddice (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2018) 248 pp. $120.00 cloth $31.95 paper Medieval Sensibilities: A History of Emotions in the Middle Ages.By Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy (trans. Robert Shaw) (Medford, Mass., Polity Press, 2018; orig. pub. in French as Sensible Moyen Âge: Une histoire des émotions dans l’Occident medieval [Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 2015]) 350 pp. $69.95 cloth $28.95 paper As the Rolling Stones sang in the title song of their 1980 album “Emotional Rescue,”“I’ll be your savior, steadfast and true/I’ll come to your emotional rescue.”1 This is not to suggest that the au- thors of the books under review bear any resemblance to Mick Jagger or Keith Richards. However, both books ought to enter the hall of fame of historical writing, for different reasons. They offer rich and exciting new scholarship about the history of emo- tions that will help a generation better research this complex subject. “Emotions and feelings are guests who were invited late to the banquet of history.”2 It is a paradox that human feeling in all its guises, arguably the driver of human behavior whether acti- vated or repressed, has been one of the most elusive subjects in historical research.3 For as long as the study of history was the Joanna Lewis is Associate Professor of International History, London School of Economics and Political Science. She is the author of Empire of Sentiment (New York, 2018); “‘Whiteman in a Woodpile’: Race and the Limits of Macmillan’s Wind of Change,” in Lawrence J. Butler and Sarah Stockwell (eds.), The Wind of Change: Harold Macmillan and British Decolonsiation (New York, 2013), 70–95. © 2020 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc., https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_a_01522 1 The Rolling Stones, “Emotional Rescue,” released June 1980, on Atlantic Records. 2 Nagy and Bouquet (trans. Greg Robinson), “Historical Emotions, Historians’ Emotion,” 15, available at https://emma.hypotheses.org/1213, orig. pub. as “Emotions historiques, emo- tions historiennes,” Ecrire l’historie, 2 (2008), 15–26. 3 For a quirky illustration of how terms and feelings have been taken for granted and/or left out of analysis, see Ben Cohen, “S’chadenfreude Is in the Zeitgeist, but Is There an Opposite Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jinh_a_01522 by guest on 01 October 2021 122 | JOANNA LEWIS preserve of elite men, the history of the emotions—like social and cultural history, the study of women, or the study of non-white people—had to wait in line. Emotions were considered suspect, irrational, something that stood in the way of proper scientific- based historical enquiry, not hard-fact based, even embarrassing. Intellectual history might concede that rhetorical devices could in- clude emotional levers, but generally emotion was for the down- trodden masses and not worth serious study. Because rulers, the upper-classes, and decision makers kept their emotions in check, or so was the belief, the understanding of important changes and events did not require the emotions; in fact, the need for so called “objectivity” rendered emotion a dangerous subject of inquiry. In fairness, there was a long tail to the distrust of feelings hard- wired into Western thinking from the earliest philosophizing to the master narrative of the civilizing mission. Reason and emotion were in opposition; taming the latter was the mark of progress. It took a long time to square the circle contained in the judgment of Antoine de Rivarol, French journalist, commentator, epigramma- tist, and aristocratic defender of the Ancien Régime: “Reason is the historian, but passions are the actors.” During the last twenty years, however, an “emotional turn” in the study of history has been unfolding. It has been a slow burn, and it took a significant amount of prodding from outside the sub- ject. Neuroscientists started arguing fifty years ago that brain activ- ity showed that reason and emotion were linked. Meanwhile, psychology revealed the power and universalism of emotional drivers; psychologists were early pioneers in the field of the study of emotions.4 Then the social sciences started to take notice. Non- historians responded first, but eventually so did historians. A pos- itive aspect to these developments is that the study of the emotions remains the most interdisciplinary of subjects, as journals such as the Emotion Review attest.5 Term? Word Used for Taking Pain in Anotherʼs Pleasure Is ‘Gluckschmerz,’ or Is It?” Wall Street Journal, 13 June 2015, available at https://search-proquest-com.gate3.library.lse.ac.uk/ docview/1687802410?accountid=9630. 4 Emotion is one of several psychology journals published by the pioneering American Psychological Association. Launched in 2001, it went from a quarterly publication to a bi-monthly one in 2008. 5 Emotion Review (published in association with the International Society for Research on Emotion) can boast a gargantuan interdisciplinary reach, legitimately advertising itself as being “open to publishing work in anthropology, biology, computer science, economics, history, Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jinh_a_01522 by guest on 01 October 2021 THE EMOTIONAL TURN IN THE STUDY OF HISTORY | 123 Consequently, mainstream, orthodox histories and events have recently been getting an emotional makeover.6 Imperial and global histories are the most familiar ones, at least to this re- viewer, but urban history and gender studies also show the influ- ence of that new orientation.7 Political movements, modern populism, and electoral outcomes are now enlivened with the awareness of emotion.8 Newspapers, media, and print offer rich sources.9 In 2017, a journal entitled Emotions: History, Culture, So- 10 ciety (EHCS) was launched to focus solely on emotions in history. All of those who study emotion have benefited from the suc- cess of interdisciplinary collaboration, which has toned down the humanities, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, physiology, political science, psychiatry, psychology, sociology, and in other areas where emotion research is active.” 6 Bruno Cabanes, “Negotiating Intimacy in the Shadow of War (France, 1914–1920s): New Perspectives in the Cultural History of World War I,” French Politics, Culture & Society, XXXI (2013), 1–23; Karin Priem, “Seeing, Hearing, Reading, Writing, Speaking and Things: On Silences, Senses and Emotions during the ‘Zero Hour’ in Germany,” Paedagogica Historica, LII (2016), 286–299; Kathryn D. Temple, “Mixed Emotions: Love, Resentment and the Decla- ration of Independence,” Emotions: History, Culture and Society, II (2018), available at doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/2208522X-02010002. 7 For global/imperial history, see Ayyaz Gul, Nyla Umar Mubarik, and Ghulam Mustafa, “Emotions, History, and History of Emotions in Punjab: A Historiographical Survey,” Journal of the Research Society of Pakistan, 54, no. 2 (2017), 53–65; Daniela Hacke and Paul Musselwhite (eds.), Empire of the Senses: Sensory Practices of Colonialism in Early America (Boston, 2017); for urban history, Joseph Ben Presetel, Emotional Cities: Debates on Urban Change in Berlin and Cairo, 1860–1910 (New York, 2017); for gender studies, Sigurdur Magnússon, “The Love Game as Expressed in Ego-Documents: A Culture of Emotions in Late Nineteenth Century Iceland,” Journal of Social History, L (2016), 102–119. 8 See, for example, Saeid Golkar, “Manipulated Society: Paralysing the Masses in Post- Revolutionary Iran,” International Journal of Politics, Culture & Society, 29, no. 2 (2016) 135–155. 9 See, for example, Monika Freier, “Cultivating Emotions: The Gita Press and Its Agenda of Social and Spiritual Reform,” South Asian History, 3, no. 7 (2012), 397–413. 10 According to its mission statement, EHCS is dedicated to understanding the emotions as culturally and temporally situated phenomena and to exploring the role of emotion in shaping human experience and the actions of individuals, groups, societies, and cultures. I have been part of this new movement, more by accident (or osmosis, if one is being generous) than by design. For a number of years, I began undergraduate lectures about the end of apartheid, through histories of pain and suffering, with a video showing a stadium of emotional supporters of the African National Congress singing their freedom anthem in the 1980s. Anticolonial nationalism in Africa was only understandable to me as a highly emotional “ism,” infused with the hurt of racism. Alongside, I was writing a monograph about an un- fashionable but famous figure in British imperial history, which led to a theory about emotions and sentimentality running through relations between Africa and Britain to the present day— Lewis, Empire of Sentiment: The Death of Livingstone and the Myth of Victorian Imperialism (New York, 2018)[for a review of this book by Robert I. Rotberg, see Journal of Interdisciplinary History, L (2019) 127-129]. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jinh_a_01522 by guest on 01 October 2021 124 | JOANNA LEWIS voices of the skeptics and taken the history of emotions into its more recent phase of a “rocket-ship taking off” (Boddice, 2, fn. 3).11 A number of highly respected academic institutions have been steadfastly generating in-depth research throughout the world—Queen Mary, University of London; Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin; a pan-Australian research group; the Spanish Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales del CSIC, based in Madrid; and the collaborative project between the Uni- versité de Aix-Marseille and the Université du Québec à Montréal about emotions in the modern age (more below). Many of us were inspired by books outside our narrow fields, such as Solomon’s philosophical work, In Defence of Sentimentality and Dixon’s history of a blubbing Britannia.12 Furthermore, an increasing number of universities in Europe and North America are offering courses in the history of emotions or including attention to emotion within the “bread and butter” curriculum.