History

Abstract

The history of emotions is a field that explores how emotions take cultural and temporal form. Excavating this information from the traces of the past that survive today raises distinctive challenges that have required new techniques, methods, and theories, and that in turn have produced novel conceptualizations of the relationship between bodies, feelings, and culture. Important among these is the relationship between how emotion is represented and the experience of emotion in the body. Historical research more broadly is also adapting through the introduction of emotions analysis; notably, ideas of chronology and causality are being newly interrogated. This introduction to the ‘History’ section of a volume on affectivism introduces some of the fundamental principles behind historical emotions research, contextualizes the other contributions to this section of the volume, and offers an overview of the current shape of the academic literature in this area.