In recent years, historians of emotion have founded new research centres, conferences and book series. For Rob Boddice, key claims underlie what may well be an ‘emotional turn’: that emotions change over time and cause events, and that they are key to understanding histories of the biocultural human, morality, virtue and ethics. Intervening as this exciting and dynamic field develops, Boddice’s book provides a rich and thorough summary and analysis of the history of emotions, useful for students and scholars alike.
A broad range of themes are addressed in this book, demonstrating the vibrancy of the field. The first chapter surveys how the history of emotions emerged, and the use of emotions in historical writing. The second argues against using emotion as a singular and assumed ‘master category’, and instead for the analysis of connections between ‘words and feelings; concepts and experiences; bodies and minds’ (p.58). The third chapter considers, critiques and ultimately combines the pioneering work of William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein and Peter Stearns in conceptualising ‘emotional regimes’, ‘emotional communities’ and ‘emotional styles’ or ‘emotionologies’. In doing so, the chapter shows how these visions of emotion have been applied to the study of strikes, riots, marches, families, neighbourhoods and monasteries, to name but a few. The issues of power and politics are further explored in Chapter 4 which demonstrates, furthermore, that histories of emotion break down dichotomies between ‘reason’ and ‘emotion’.
Moving towards analysis of embodied emotions, Chapters 5 and 6 consider the politics of expression and how interactions between histories of emotions and the senses may illuminate thinking about experience, and about how ‘culture writes to nature’ (p.143). The seventh chapter describes how emotional expectations have been shaped by different public spaces—prisons, playgrounds, schools—and by human relationships to different objects—the father’s chair, the surgeon’s tool. This chapter also addresses how the rise of global history has reshaped the history of emotions, while the eighth discusses the historiographical and historical links between emotion and morality. Finally, the book’s conclusion offers a series of bold visions relevant to all academic work, arguing that researchers must reflect on, and seek to overcome, linguistic divisions, and reflecting on how to train students across disciplines and as researchers (pp.214–18).
This dynamic and detailed book thus addresses many topics that underlie broader social histories of medicine. Notably, the book adds new thinking to the vexed and ubiquitous questions of disciplinary working and interdisciplinarity. From the mid-1980s, Boddice explains, the earliest histories of emotion drew heavily on sociology and anthropology, but also had disciplinary tensions, for example with psychologists who perceived emotion as universal. The history of emotion—like the history of medicine—emerged in part out of discontent with how experience and expertise were interrogated by clinical professionals and looking to critique, but also to change, medical practice.
While historicising such tensions, Boddice’s book makes a firm and persuasive case for productive partnership across disciplines. Indeed, it is aimed at readers from history, anthropology, philosophy, psychology and neuroscience, and Boddice argues that these disciplines may work together to ‘disrupt’ a ‘lansdcape of crude essentialism and emotional reductionism’ (p.34). In particular, Boddice argues that historians ‘ignore the neurosciences at our peril’ (p.34), as these sciences open up new opportunities to consider how and when society shapes brain development. Taking this interesting and provocative line of argument further, Boddice questions whether from looking to modern neuroscience, and at what happens to human neurotransmitters when we use the internet, we may ‘extrapolate new significance in the invention of moveable type in the fifteenth century, or the mass distribution of cheap literature and prints in the eighteenth century’ (p.39). Ambitiously, this proposed dialogue goes two ways, and Chapter 6 in particular makes the case that neuroscientists should also listen to historians—who are crucial in terms of, for example, elucidating the cultural and contextual factors why a carpenter who has ‘hammered his thumb a thousand times’ may experience a different pain to someone ‘wielding a hammer for the first time’ (pp.144–5).
This book therefore does not only provide a highly useful and detailed guide to the history of emotions, but also offers insights into international working, practices of teaching, and to thinking further about the dynamics of power and knowledge in interdisciplinary work. It will be fascinating to see more about how neuroscientists and geneticists engage with this book, and with the history of emotions, in future years. From a historian’s perspective, the book certainly demonstrates that the history of emotion can contribute significantly to questions which underlie all historical scholarship—of power, gender, class and ethnicity, and about the relationships between human ‘nature’ and society.