Abstract This afterword reflects on the growing centrality of emotions in historical inquiry amid contemporary instability. It argues for an understanding of emotions as relational, mobile and shaped by asymmetries of power, translation and circulation. Drawing on themes such as entanglement, exclusion and resentment, it highlights how emotional configurations emerge across cultural and spatial boundaries, particularly in contexts of displacement and inequality. The essay calls for a historically grounded yet reflexive approach to emotions, attentive to their role in structuring both past experiences and present global dynamics.
This essay challenges the assumption that emotional labour primarily benefits organisations, demonstrating how mandated emotional displays can damage corporate image in cross-cultural settings. Drawing on a longitudinal case study of Amway in 1990s Poland, the research proposes the Cultural-Historical Filters of Emotional Labour model to explain the reception of imported management styles. The analysis reveals how standardised technologies of enthusiasm were refracted through the Polish cultural script of sincerity (szczero & sacute;& cacute;) and a reactive post-socialist emotional regime. Triggered by critical media framing, this multidimensional dissonance led to a `spiral of silence' and severe reputational stigma. The study concludes that historical legacies and collective memory act as decisive structural filters in global emotion management.
Emotions play a central role in sociological accounts of social change, often rendering the past as coherent, the present as anxious, and the future as declining. Loneliness has become a prominent emotional frame, frequently mobilised as evidence of social breakdown. A sociology of personal life perspective highlights how such accounts rely on a diagnostic use of emotions to make sense of time. These diagnoses rarely remain abstract, instead settling into narratives about people and relationships, where particular groups become stigmatised or emblematic of perceived decline. A relational approach conceptualises emotions as emerging through social relations and circulating through narrative, foregrounding the complexity and ambivalence of everyday life.
The development of the history of emotions has been one of the most significant in historical practice over recent decades. This essay reflects on its future by asking about intersections with another significant field, that of the history of temporalities. The essay moves from the observation that temporalities and emotions are always implicated with one another, to consideration of the particular case of future-oriented emotions, drawing on examples from the histories of religion (including heresy and witchcraft) and literature. Guided by the methodological idea of a diversitas temporum (diversity of times), it finally suggests the importance of two concepts - scale and mixed feelings - for the future of the field, and foregrounds the differing ways that historians' own emotions are entangled with that future.
This article argues that much can be understood about the historicity, context-dependency and mutability of emotions throughout history by comparing how contemporary multilingual peoples, particularly immigrants, use their linguistic repertoires today. Beyond citational performances of fluency, for any meaningful integration to happen in a non-native language, then its emotional vocabulary must be internalised. I discuss how language is acquired through the body in the context of L1 children and L2+ language learners, and show how emotion forms a central part of that mechanism from the earliest stages. Moving between different languages is not simply a case of finding `best fit' translations for universal terms, but is inherently, often painfully emotional. Similarly, historical emotions are not variations on a theme, but rather specific, fully embodied physical feelings unique to that time.
The various architectures that have emerged throughout the historic past have always had the ability to inspire and affect the passions, emotions, or feelings of those who encounter them. The means by which these places and spaces gain the power to influence emotion is through the atmospheres, or ambiences, that they house. Discussing the importance of architectural atmospheres for developing our knowledge of the emotional landscapes of the past, this essay argues that an atmospheric approach to exploring the relationship between past architectures and emotions has the potential to enhance our understanding of the ways in which individual architectures and wider built-up environments were affected by, and helped shape, the passions, emotions, and feelings of the historic past.
Emotions: History, Culture, Society celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. This introduction to our anniversary forum `The Future of Emotions', reflects on the journal's beginnings and leadership over the last decade, and introduces a forum that reflects on our history and where the field is going next. Our future awaits.
An `age of anger', a `culture of fear' - that an era can cany a particular emotional resonance, and that it shapes how people navigate their emotional, social and political worlds, is a long-standing idea amongst emotions researchers. Theories that explain this phenomenon, however, vary across disciplinary cleavages, philosophical traditions and individual researchers. This essay explores what is meant when we attribute an emotion to a period of historical time, and asks whether similar characteristics might be found for the future. Acknowledging that the emotions of our age have recursive impacts on experience, it asks why positive emotions have struggled to perform as the `predominant' emotion of an age, and posits a research agenda for further research in this area.
This article attempts to summarize major emphases in Emotions: History, Culture, Society during its first decade. It notes the wide distribution of emotions covered, though work on anger holds the lead. Distribution also applies to chronological range, from the classical period onward. Geography however reflects greater imbalance, though there are important efforts to go beyond the West. The journal has been very open to intersections with literature, and there are striking individual articles connecting with other disciplines. The foundation of a journal of this sort is usually taken as a sign of maturation in a new subdiscipline, and the journal has lived up to this designation admirably.
As objects of numerous contacts, the friendship albums (alba amicorum) played an integral role in building interpersonal relations. They had become a sort of social media equivalent. In them, emotions, as the diverse factor that brought people together, reflected close friendships between Polish students and their colleagues, as well as professors. By entries to the friendship albums, they had begun to live in a common `emotional community'; and in this way, they entered a group that was loyal to certain values and ways of expressing feelings and emotions. The aim of the present essay is to investigate this emotional community-intellectual and emotional relations that were formed by the Polish students in Basel. By analysing the entries made by the Poles, we will see how they expressed their feelings and what linguistic forms and means they used to communicate their emotions.
The wave of repression that afflicted France's Huguenot population in the 1680s, incarnated by Louis XIV's Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, saw 150,000-160,000 Protestants abandon their homeland and resettle abroad. This essay explores the messy psychological aftermath of this mass migration, contending that focusing scholarly attention on the underlying affective experience of writing about oneself, particularly accompanying mental processes of emplotment, offers an invaluable window into refugees' idiosyncratic coping strategies. Considering instances of familial dislocation, incarceration and internal displacement, it highlights diverse and sometimes surprising considerations and dynamics that informed Huguenots' attempts to interpret and navigate their lived experience of persecution over the course of their lives.
This ethnographic study explores the concept of romantic love within the Las Pajas batey of the Dominican Republic, a community primarily composed of Haitian and Haitian-descendant families on company-owned sugar cane plantations. Through detailed fieldwork, it examines how local women perceive and express romantic love in a socio-economic context marked by both historical and ongoing exploitation. The women of Las Pajas prioritise economic necessity and practical considerations over emotional or idealised romantic attachments. What emerges from their narratives is not a lack of love, but rather its contextual re-signification, a shifting of meanings grounded in constraint, expectation and the desire for recognition. From this perspective, the study of love must go beyond generalising definitions and instead attend to the situated meanings that shape how people experience and question their intimate attachments.
The global pandemic disrupted youth mobility and led to renewed nostalgia in music, sports, and leisure. For ageing punks and BMX riders, this period provided opportunities to sustain their identities while remaining physically active. It is Ride After 30 a Jakarta-based BMX-punk community formed in 2020, that exemplifies how collective participation fosters both physical and social well-being. This essay examines Ride After 30 members who, despite no longer being young adults, continue their engagement in BMX and punk culture. Using participant observation and interviews, I explore how temporal capital and nostalgia shape their identities and reveal how memory and intergenerational connections reinforce their sense of belonging. By investigating ageing within the punk and BMX subcultures, this essay challenges the notion of youth exclusivity movement and provides insights into how the transition into fatherhood evolves subcultural identities and redefines the boundaries of youth culture.
With good reason, there is widespread consensus that words are at the heart of emotion history research: historians of emotion spend an enormous amount of time on lexical analysis, reconstructing and delineating the affective vocabularies of the past. While readily acknowledging the essentialness of our scholarly commitment to words, this commentary offers a friendly reminder that, in some cases, an overly rigid lexical approach risks distorting how emotion is actually understood in the sources we explore. It uses Nicolas Coeffeteau's A Table of Humane Passions (1621) as a case study to illustrate how some of our common scholarly assumptions about emotion words can in fact be confounded by a historical source - the lexical approach, in other words, can occasionally be limiting, and I argue that we should keep this slight caution in mind when analyzing the emotional language of the past.
Latin manuals of casuistry (summae confessorum) for priests hearing confession from the turn of the fourteenth century to the turn of the sixteenth century offer sources for the history of ethical teachings about emotions such as anger in medieval Europe. These summas are casuistic in the sense of offering practical moral reasoning about anger and forgiveness based on the study of cases from Church law and theology. Whereas more public religious exhortations in sermons and treatises on the vices denounced anger and demanded forgiveness with little qualification, the summae confessorum provided a method to gauge the relative morality of anger confessed by penitents and admitted that Christian forgiveness is conditional. This study examines how the discussion of anger developed along with the genre as compilers synthesised and reorganised material from more academic sources, especially that of Thomas Aquinas, to make it more accessible to priests hearing confessions in medieval Catholic Europe.
This essay builds upon a developing transdisciplinary movement which incorporates emotional experience into theories regarding the causes of voluntary human migration. Using a historical case study of the post-war migration of Caribbean persons to Britain, it extracts from first-hand source material the emotional drivers and motivations of its participants and divides them into three categories. The first section emphasises the affective and emotional dimensions of identity, showing how feelings of belonging and Britishness spurred migration and elucidating the emotional prescriptions contained within imperial discourse. The second focuses on negatively valanced emotional drivers, arguing that it is human emotional evaluation of economic contexts that produces migration, not economic contexts in themselves. The final section looks at positively valanced emotional drivers, such as hope and ambition, and teases out the relationships to their negatively valanced counterparts.
