The History of Emotions

HTY 2002 / PSY 2076

What are emotions? How have they shaped history? And how have they changed over time? This course will introduce students to the History of Emotions, an academic discipline which argues that the emotions we experience are shaped by the societies we live in. Emotions can and do change over time. People living in Medieval Japan felt emotions differently to we who live in Europe in 2026. How did people in the past feel? What historical consequences did their different emotions have? And, most importantly, how can historians reconstruct the feelings of someone who died hundreds of years ago? In our quest to answer these questions, we will learn how studying emotion can shed light on historical phenomena from slavery to capital punishment, eighteenth century revolutions to twentieth century fascism, medieval art to modern illnesses. This will be a hands-on, practical course. We will spend a lot of time reading and interpreting historical documents, individually and as a group, to learn how historians of emotions come to conclusions. All students will practise interpreting primary evidence and making arguments about how people experienced emotion in the past. Students will be expected to find and study individual sources, and share findings with their classmates. We will have two classes a week, and each week will follow a similar pattern. In the first class, we will discuss a practical “problem” for historians of emotion, either a historical document that we will try to interpret together, or a piece of scholarship that tries to deal with past emotions. In the second class, we will discuss a more “theoretical” piece of scholarship, discussing how historians ought to think about emotions.