After thirty to forty years of serious, informative work on emotions history, scholars have not clearly answered what would seem a vital and timely question: do emotions and emotional standards change when a society moves toward modernity? This essay seeks to explore the current status of the issue, to indicate promising lines for renewed attention, and to urge greater priority for analysis and discussion.

Current indecision (at best) or neglect results from three factors. First, modernity itself is a contested notion. Most would agree that industrial, urban societies differ from agricultural ones, but how widely this spills over onto areas...

From the very beginning, those who have studied the history of the emotions have realized the difficulties they faced. In 1941, Lucien Febvre, the first scholar to call for such investigations, wrote that the undertaking would be fraught with challenges. He observed, “Any attempt to reconstitute the emotional life of a given period is a task that is at one and the same time extremely attractive and frightfully difficult.”¹ Febvre suggested that emotions of other eras and societies were so very different from those of the present day that their recovery required the scholar to abandon preconceived ideas about the...

It would be impossible to begin a chapter on the history of emotions in China without at least making glancing reference to the stereotype of “the emotion-less Chinese.” This shibboleth is of uncomfortably long lineage. It began, most likely, with the coming of nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries to China, men and women who, shocked at the seeming impassivity of the Chinese they encountered, attributed their lack of affect to a kind of racial impermeability to pain and suffering. For these missionaries, it was not much of a leap to argue that once Chinese embraced Christ, among the most precious gifts they...

It would be unwise, even harmful, to approach a regional history of emotions looking for essential patterns of national or ethnic character. To be sure, many people have claimed defining emotional traits for their own culture. In the early 1900s, for example, it was common for Russians to speak of a “Russian soul” naturally inclined toward “brooding and melancholy.”¹ More deleterious have been claims about other cultures: Serbs are belligerent, Romanians are intensely emotional, “Gypsies” are impassioned but irresponsible, Germans desire order, Jews are avaricious. National and ethnic cultural stereotypes have histories and are worth studying as revealing constructions and...

Are historians of emotions a negative lot? Do they give greater weight to angst and animosity, sadness and fear than they do to the positive human emotions? Indeed, might the field of the history of emotions as a whole suffer from something of a “negative bias,” a tendency to accord greater prominence to the role played by negative emotions in constituting the human past? Consider the titles of a recent, semester-long speakers’ series at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of the History of Emotions in Berlin:¹ “Sorrow carved in stone: Expressions of grief and suffering in Ottoman Muslim...

In June 1864, a man signing himself “Bertram” printed a remarkable matrimonial advertisement. At forty-three lines long and three hundred and seventy-two words (but only three sentences), it took up nearly a quarter of a column in theNew York Times. Describing himself as a “young gentleman in all respects favorably situated in life,” with all the qualities a privileged man should have: “prepossessing appearance and manners . . . no ordinary capabilities and attainments, independent in thought and action, enlarged, liberal and charitable in views,” he nevertheless lamented that he was “still wanting the essential element of happiness,” a...

The practice of emotions history in the field of religious studies has developed apace with the flowering of scholarly interest in everyday practice, embodiment, locality, and the constructed self over the past several decades. Most previous religious history from the earlier twentieth century,¹ whether focused on western monotheisms or on Asian or indigenous religions, was inclined to illustrate its narratives about feeling with ideas collected from theological discourses, or, at the very least, with language sampled from Christian glossaries of belief and worship.² For much religious history, confessional perspectives supplied the basis for interpretation—including the preoccupation with meaning itself...

From Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, to Jürgen Habermas, social theorists have long argued that political transformations rest on a foundation of reasoned public critiques. Habermas contended that widespread public debate about—and criticism of—official government policies first developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through a process of rational disputation conducted via the press. For Habermas, emotion had no part to play in this idealized political process. Instead, he applauded “the critical judgment of the public making use of its reason.” From his contemporary eighteenth-century vantage point, Bolingbroke too saw little efficacy in emotion. He famously urged readers...

Communication media inevitably raise questions about emotion. In Plato’sPhaedrus, Socrates worries about the emotional effects of writing—the new medium of his time. Talking with Phaedrus, a young man who brings a written speech to him, Socrates expresses concern for the “frenzied enthusiasm” he believes it is likely to produce in those who read it. Among the faults that Socrates finds with writing is that it “doesn’t know how to address the right people, and not to address the wrong.”¹ Because a written script, unlike a live speech, does not require a person to deliver it, it cannot make...