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The history of emotions is a subfield of cultural history that studies how human feelings—their experience, expression, naming, and regulation—have changed across time and vary across societies. It rests on a central premise that challenges a common intuition: emotions are not simply universal biological reflexes that different cultures merely label differently. Rather, the ways people feel, what they feel, what they call those feelings, and what they do about them are substantially shaped by the cultural worlds they inhabit. The field therefore treats emotions not as timeless data but as historical objects in their own right.
The history of emotions asks a cluster of interconnected questions. What did people in a given time and place actually feel, and how can we know? What emotional norms existed—what did a society expect its members to feel in specific situations, and what happened to those who deviated? How were emotions taught, performed, and policed through religion, law, literature, etiquette, medicine, and the family? And how did emotional regimes change: why did the stiff upper lip become a masculine ideal in some periods, or romantic love become the expected basis for marriage in others?
The stakes of these questions extend beyond curiosity about the past. If emotions are historically variable, then many modern assumptions about human nature come into question. The field challenges the idea that contemporary emotional experience—say, the Western notion of deep, authentic inner feeling—is the natural baseline for all humanity. It also complicates the relationship between emotion and reason: rather than seeing feelings as irrational intrusions into a rational world, historians of emotion show that emotional styles have often been deliberately cultivated by institutions and states, and that what counts as "reasonable" behavior is itself emotionally inflected. In this way, the subfield connects to broader debates about the body, the self, power, and social change.
People have long reflected on the emotional differences between eras and cultures. Eighteenth-century philosophers and travel writers speculated about the "sensibility" of their own age versus the supposed rudeness of earlier ones. Nineteenth-century historians of manners, such as Jacob Burckhardt, described the emotional intensity of Renaissance Italy as a distinctive cultural achievement. Early twentieth-century sociologists and anthropologists, notably Norbert Elias and Marcel Mauss, argued that emotional expression was governed by social codes that changed over time. Elias's The Civilizing Process (1939) traced how European court society gradually imposed stricter controls on bodily and emotional display, a thesis that remains influential even where its details are disputed.
These works were precursors rather than members of the modern subfield. They did not yet treat emotions as a central analytical category with its own methods and debates. The modern history of emotions took shape in the 1980s and 1990s, drawing on several converging currents. The rise of cultural history, with its attention to symbols, practices, and meaning-making, provided a natural home. The influence of Michel Foucault's work on power and the construction of subjectivity encouraged historians to ask how emotional life was shaped by discourse and institutions. At the same time, feminist history and gender history brought new attention to the emotional division of labor between men and women, and to the ways emotional norms sustained gender hierarchies. The field also responded to developments in anthropology, particularly the work of scholars who argued that emotions are culturally constructed rather than merely expressed through culture.
The subfield is not organized around a single method or theory. Instead, several distinct approaches have developed, each addressing different problems and making different assumptions about what emotions are and how they can be studied.
The earliest and most influential approach treats emotions as socially constructed. Drawing on anthropology and sociology, this view holds that emotions are not pre-existing inner states that cultures merely name, but are constituted by the very language, concepts, and practices through which people experience them. A person in a society without a concept of "depression" does not simply have the same feeling under a different name; the feeling itself is shaped by what their culture makes available for feeling.
This approach has been particularly productive in studying emotional communities—groups that share common emotional values, vocabularies, and practices. The medievalist Barbara Rosenwein coined this term to describe how different social groups within a single society could maintain distinct emotional norms. A monastery, a royal court, and a merchant household in the same city might each have its own emotional style, and individuals moved between these communities as they moved through life. The social constructionist approach excels at reading texts for the emotional scripts they offer: sermons, conduct books, letters, and novels all prescribe how people should feel and express themselves.
Its limitation is that it can overstate the plasticity of emotion. If emotions are entirely constructed, it becomes difficult to explain why certain feelings—grief at the loss of a child, fear of immediate physical danger—appear so consistently across cultures. Critics have also noted that the approach sometimes conflates the representation of emotion in texts with the actual experience of historical people, who may have followed, resisted, or failed to meet the scripts they inherited.
A related but distinct line of work focuses on the relationship between emotion and power. The historian William Reddy introduced the concept of an "emotional regime" to describe the dominant emotional norms enforced by a political or social order. In his study of the French Revolution, he argued that revolutionary France constituted a new emotional regime that demanded specific feelings—enthusiasm for the nation, suspicion of aristocratic sentiment—and punished those who failed to display them. Reddy also proposed the idea of "emotional navigation," the constant work individuals do to manage the gap between their actual feelings and the regime's demands.
This approach emphasizes the political stakes of emotion. It asks how states, churches, and other institutions have sought to shape the emotional lives of their subjects, and how individuals have resisted or accommodated those demands. It connects the history of emotions to the history of power and governance, showing that emotional control is not merely a matter of personal discipline but of public order.
A related concept, "emotional style," has been used by scholars such as Peter Stearns to describe the dominant emotional conventions of a particular society or period. Stearns's work on the United States traced how emotional styles shifted—for example, the rise of "emotional restraint" in the early twentieth century, which discouraged intense feeling in favor of self-control, particularly in middle-class family life. The style approach tends to be more diffuse than the regime approach, describing broad cultural tendencies rather than institutional enforcement.
A third approach locates emotions within the broader history of the self. Rather than asking how emotions changed, it asks how the very experience of having an inner emotional life has a history. This line of work, influenced by Charles Taylor's philosophy and by Foucault's later writings on the care of the self, examines how people in different periods understood the relationship between their inner feelings and their outward behavior.
In medieval Christianity, for example, emotions were often understood as movements of the soul that could be trained and redirected toward God. The goal was not to express authentic inner feeling but to cultivate the right dispositions through prayer, meditation, and ritual. By contrast, the modern Western ideal of authenticity—the notion that one should discover and express one's true feelings—is a relatively recent development, emerging gradually through the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility and the Romantic movement. This approach shows that the very category of "emotion" as a distinct inner realm is historically specific, and that earlier periods might have organized experience differently—for example, through the concept of the passions, which included both what we now call emotions and other appetites and drives.
This approach has been criticized for relying on a small canon of philosophical and literary texts, and for assuming that elite ideas about the self trickled down to ordinary people. It also risks a teleological narrative in which the modern self is the endpoint of a long development.
A more recent development has been the engagement with the natural sciences, particularly neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. Some historians have drawn on research suggesting that certain basic emotions—fear, anger, disgust, sadness, joy—are universal and biologically grounded, with recognizable facial expressions across cultures. On this view, the historian's task is not to explain the existence of these emotions but to trace how different cultures have elaborated, suppressed, and interpreted them.
This approach has been controversial within the field. Proponents argue that it grounds the history of emotions in a realistic account of human biology and prevents the field from drifting into pure relativism. Critics respond that the neuroscience is often oversimplified, that the evidence for universal basic emotions is disputed, and that importing scientific categories can obscure the very historical variation the field seeks to explain. The debate remains unresolved, but it has pushed historians to be more explicit about their assumptions regarding the relationship between biology and culture.
These approaches are not mutually exclusive, and many historians combine them. A study of Victorian mourning might draw on the social constructionist approach to analyze the elaborate rituals and language of grief, use the emotional regime concept to show how those rituals were enforced by social pressure and religious teaching, and attend to the history of the self to understand how Victorians experienced mourning as a deeply personal inner state. The approaches differ in emphasis rather than in kind: they ask different questions, privilege different sources, and make different assumptions about the balance between cultural and biological factors.
There is also a chronological dimension to the field's development. The social constructionist approach dominated the early decades and remains central, but it has been qualified by the neuroscience turn and by a growing interest in the body and material culture. The field has also expanded geographically, moving beyond its initial focus on Western Europe and North America to include studies of emotion in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. This expansion has complicated earlier generalizations, showing that emotional modernity did not follow a single path.
The history of emotions is now an established and vibrant subfield, with dedicated journals, research centers, and graduate programs. It has produced substantial bodies of work on topics ranging from medieval religious devotion to early modern honor cultures, from Victorian sentimentality to twentieth-century therapeutic culture. The field has also influenced neighboring disciplines, including literary studies, art history, and the history of science, where scholars increasingly attend to the emotional dimensions of their subjects.
Several ongoing debates characterize the present landscape. The relationship between biology and culture remains contested, with some historians calling for a more robust engagement with the sciences and others insisting on the irreducibility of cultural construction. The question of sources also continues to provoke discussion: how can historians access the emotional experience of people who left few written records, such as the poor, the illiterate, or the enslaved? Some scholars have turned to material culture, visual images, and the built environment as evidence of emotional life, while others have developed methods for reading against the grain of prescriptive texts.
A further debate concerns the relationship between the history of emotions and the present. Some historians see their work as offering resources for understanding contemporary emotional life, whether by showing that current emotional norms are not inevitable or by recovering alternative ways of feeling. Others are more cautious, insisting that the past is genuinely foreign and that the historian's task is to explain difference rather than to mine the past for present-day lessons.
What unites the field is a commitment to the idea that emotions have a history. That commitment does not require denying the reality of bodily feeling or the shared aspects of human experience. It requires recognizing that what we feel, how we understand what we feel, and what we do about it are all shaped by the particular worlds we inhabit—and that those worlds have changed, and will continue to change, in ways that are neither random nor predetermined.