Loading field map
How can a historian know what people felt in the past? The difficulty is not merely that feelings leave few direct traces. It is that the very categories we use to describe emotion—anger, love, fear, grief—carry modern cultural assumptions. A sixteenth-century peasant who wept at a public execution may not have experienced what we call 'grief,' and a Victorian woman who swooned at a shocking remark may have been performing a socially scripted response rather than expressing an inner state. The history of emotions emerged as a subfield of cultural history precisely to confront this problem: how to study past emotional life without projecting present-day feeling backward. Over the past six decades, historians have developed five distinct frameworks for doing so, each reworking the relationship between feeling, culture, and power.
The earliest sustained effort to historicize emotion came from within the Annales School of French social history. In the 1960s, historians such as Lucien Febvre and Robert Mandrou began writing about collective 'sensibilities'—the shared affective climates that characterized entire epochs. Febvre's 1941 essay on 'sensitivity and history' had already argued that emotions were not timeless biological facts but were shaped by the mental structures of an age. By the 1960s and 1970s, this approach produced studies of medieval fear, Renaissance joy, and early modern attitudes toward death. The method was largely impressionistic: historians drew on literary texts, religious iconography, and legal records to infer the emotional tone of a period. The strength of sensibilities history was its insistence that feelings had a history at all. Its weakness was vagueness. Critics noted that 'sensibilities' could mean almost anything—a mood, a moral outlook, a style of piety—and that the evidence was often cherry-picked to support broad claims about entire civilizations. By the 1980s, the framework had run into a dead end: it could describe emotional atmospheres but could not explain how they changed or why they varied within the same society.
Emotionology was a direct attempt to correct the vagueness of sensibilities history. In a landmark 1985 article, the historians Peter and Carol Stearns proposed a new method: instead of trying to capture what people actually felt, historians should study the 'emotional standards' that societies prescribed. These standards could be found in advice manuals, sermons, school curricula, and medical texts—sources that told people how they ought to feel in given situations. By analyzing such prescriptive literature, emotionologists could trace shifts in the norms governing anger, grief, love, and jealousy across time. The approach was deliberately top-down. It privileged explicit rules over lived experience, and it treated emotions as socially constructed scripts rather than spontaneous inner states. Emotionology gave the field a rigorous, replicable method and a clear object of study. But it also attracted criticism for ignoring the gap between norms and practice. A Victorian marriage manual might prescribe companionate love, but that tells us little about what husbands and wives actually felt. Moreover, emotionology's focus on printed advice literature tended to reproduce the perspectives of the literate middle class, leaving aside the emotional lives of peasants, workers, and colonized peoples. By the late 1990s, historians were looking for a way to study emotional experience without abandoning the rigor that emotionology had introduced.
Barbara Rosenwein's concept of 'emotional communities' offered a middle path between the sweeping generalizations of sensibilities history and the top-down rigidity of emotionology. In her 1998 study of early medieval Europe, Rosenwein argued that societies are not unified by a single emotional regime. Instead, they contain multiple overlapping communities—monasteries, noble households, urban guilds, peasant villages—each with its own norms for feeling and expressing emotion. These communities could be identified by analyzing the vocabulary of emotion in their texts, the gestures they valued, and the situations they considered emotionally significant. The method was still source-based, but it shifted attention from prescriptive norms to the actual emotional language used within specific groups. Emotional communities could be small (a single convent) or large (a courtly society), and they could change over time as groups interacted. This framework preserved emotionology's interest in social rules while recovering the diversity and agency that the earlier approach had flattened. It also opened the door to studying emotions from below—the feelings of ordinary people as recorded in letters, diaries, and legal depositions. Today, emotional communities remains one of the most widely used frameworks in the field, especially among medievalists and early modernists who work with dense textual archives.
At the turn of the millennium, a very different challenge to both emotionology and emotional communities emerged from outside history altogether. Affect theory, drawing on the work of philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and Brian Massumi, and on neuroscientific research into bodily response, argued that historians had been too focused on conscious, culturally coded 'emotions' and had neglected the pre-cognitive, bodily intensities that Massumi called 'affect.' Affect, in this framework, is the raw, autonomic response of the body—a racing heart, a flinch, a flush—that precedes any cultural labeling. Emotion, by contrast, is the socially shaped interpretation of that bodily state. For affect theorists, the historian's task is not only to trace emotional vocabularies but also to recover the embodied experiences that escape language. This framework introduced new kinds of evidence: medical descriptions of bodily symptoms, records of collective rituals that produced physiological responses, and material culture that shaped sensory experience. Affect theory has been especially influential among historians of the early modern period, where sources on the body are abundant, and among scholars interested in the intersection of emotion and religion. It has also provoked sharp debate. Critics argue that affect theory risks biologizing emotion, importing universalist assumptions about the body that the history of emotions had worked hard to historicize. Others contend that the distinction between affect and emotion is itself a cultural product, not a natural fact. The framework thus remains a site of productive disagreement rather than settled consensus.
The most recent major framework has emerged from the recognition that all the earlier approaches—sensibilities, emotionology, emotional communities, affect theory—were developed primarily from European sources and assumed European categories. Postcolonial and global perspectives, gaining momentum after 2005, ask how the history of emotions changes when we take seriously the emotional regimes of non-European societies and the role of colonialism in reshaping emotional life worldwide. Scholars working in this vein have shown that colonial administrators often imposed European emotional norms—for example, the ideal of romantic love or the suppression of public grief—as part of their civilizing mission. They have also recovered indigenous emotional vocabularies that do not map neatly onto Western categories, such as the Japanese concept of amae (dependency love) or the Inuit notion of ilira (fear mixed with awe). This framework does not simply add new case studies to an existing method. It challenges the universalism implicit in emotionology's norms and affect theory's body, arguing that both frameworks assumed a Western subject. Postcolonial perspectives also insist on the power dimension of emotional life: who gets to define what counts as a proper emotion, and whose feelings are dismissed as irrational or uncivilized? This approach has pushed the field toward comparative and entangled histories, examining how emotional cultures interacted, clashed, and transformed under conditions of empire and globalization.
Today, the history of emotions is a methodologically plural field. Emotional communities remains the dominant framework for scholars working with textual archives, especially in premodern Europe. Affect theory has carved out a strong niche among early modernists and historians of religion, who find its attention to bodily experience productive. Postcolonial and global perspectives are reshaping the field's geographical scope and its theoretical assumptions, forcing a rethinking of categories that were once taken for granted. Emotionology, while no longer a leading research program, survives as a tool for studying prescriptive norms in contexts where other sources are scarce. The frameworks coexist not because historians cannot agree but because each answers a different question: emotional communities explains group-level variation, affect theory captures embodied intensity, and postcolonial perspectives foreground power and difference. There are real disagreements beneath this pluralism. The most persistent is the status of the body: affect theorists argue that bodily response is a universal substrate of emotion, while postcolonial and emotional-communities scholars insist that even the body is culturally shaped. A second disagreement concerns scale: emotional communities works best at the micro level, while global perspectives demand comparisons across vast spaces and times. A third debate revolves around agency: how much room do individuals have to resist or reshape the emotional norms that surround them? These disagreements are not signs of weakness. They are the productive tensions that keep the field alive, forcing historians to refine their methods and question their assumptions. The history of emotions has moved from vague sensibilities to rigorous norms to embodied intensities to global power relations—and it continues to evolve.