the history of emotions. It began in 1995, when fellow medievalist Sharon Farmer asked me to chair a session at a meeting of the American Historical Association on “The Social Construction of Anger.” As I listened to the papers and the discussion that ensued, it dawned on me that the history of emotions could be a way into that as yet unexplored material behind the “manifest content.”
Certainly, the field was wide open for new research. The main paradigm for the history of emotions at that time was the “civilizing process” of sociologist Norbert Elias, who characterized the Middle Ages as an era of impulse, violence, and childish lack of socialization, ending only with the rise of the early modern absolutist state and its emphasis on impulse control and emotional restraint. I knew that he was wrong about the Middle Ages, and I suspected that he was wrong about the later periods. But I was not sure how to find my own approach.
So, I read – historical sources, theories of emotion, newly emerging paradigms of emotions’ history. I was struck by the sheer variety of emotional norms and values practiced by different groups in the Middle Ages and beyond, and eventually I arrived at a way to think about these groups. They were (as I dubbed them) “emotional communities” – groups (often living at the same time, often equivalent to social communities) in which people share the same or similar valuations of particular emotions, goals, and norms of emotional expression. These communities sometimes overlap and borrow from one another, and they also may – generally do – change over time. Even so, they have enough in common to allow the researcher to study them as a coherent group.
I still wasn’t particularly interested in love, except to note how each emotional community dealt with it – what or whom they loved; the value they placed on love; the ways in which they expressed it. But those questions were the same as the ones I asked of all the emotions: how they were expressed, celebrated, and devalued in any given emotional community. What I wanted to do, above all, was to track co-existing emotional communities during one particular slice of time and to see how new ones came to the fore and others receded in the ensuing eras.
So I wasn’t much interested in individual emotions, although I did edit a collection of articles on anger in the Middle Ages, an outcome of the AHA panel on social construction.1 And I did see the need for and interest in such studies. Even as I was writing about emotional communities in the Early Middle Ages, Joanna Bourke published a book on the history of fear and Darrin M. McMahon on happiness.2 But those researchers were not interested in emotional communities. Bourke treated modern history and the ways in which our (primarily Anglophone) cultures use and abuse fear; McMahon was interested in Western ideas about happiness, not in Western emotions.
Eventually I found a way. First, I needed to expand my purview and write about a long span of time. That I accomplished in a book on emotional communities from 600 to 1700.3 Only then could I write a book covering the story of one emotion over the long haul. I chose the topic of anger because it was both a virtue and a vice and thus more interesting to me than, say, joy. I organized the book by attitudes: some emotional communities abhorred anger; others considered it a vice but also (in limited ways) a virtue; still others argued that anger was “natural” and thus not fundamentally a moral issue; finally (and more recently) some celebrated anger and its energizing and violent possibilities.4
Only then did I turn to love. It, too, was an emotion about which almost no one agreed. I found it even more difficult and conflicted than anger. Consider these many contradictory truths, myths, memes and sayings about it:
Love is good.
Love is painful.
Love hits like a thunderbolt.
Love takes time and patience.
Love is natural and artless.
Love is morally uplifting and the foundation of society.
Love is socially disruptive and must be tamed.
Love is forever.
Love is variety.
Love is consummated in sex.
Love is best when it is not sexual.
Love transcends the world.
Love demands everything.
Love demands nothing.
All of these thoughts, reflections, and attitudes are seductive. All demand to be heard. No wonder that, at first, I had no idea how to write a history of love. Not only does (and did) it mean so many different things, but it also involves so many other emotions – joy, pain, wonder, confusion, pride, humility, shame, tranquility, anger. Then, too, it has a multitude of motives – wishes to control, to be dominated, to seduce, to be desired, to nurture, to be suckled. It may be used to justify actions – even conquest and war – that initially seem inimical to it.
As I read, however, I began to see some of the memes coalesce. They were fantasies, stories that recurred over and over, although in different guises and contexts. And, as I looked around me, I saw that they persisted even now, in modern stories – on TV, in novels, in movies – and in the lives of my friends and family. And I began to see, too, how these enduring fantasies of love had informed – and continued to influence – my own expectations of myself towards those I love and of them towards me.
Moreover, the purposes of these fantasies began to dawn on me. They were (and are) narratives that organize, justify, and make sense of experiences, desires, and feelings that are otherwise incoherent and bewildering. My family’s revered authority, Dr. Freud, had long ago hinted at that same idea when he said that the symptoms of adult neurotics were the expressions of long-repressed infantile fantasies – complexes of feelings such as the one Freud called Oedipal and that he likened to the Greek myth.
But I need hardly appeal to Freud to understand that storytelling is a way to explain, organize, and master what people are feeling. Paradigmatic narratives are not just for children to try on, create, and then (possibly) act out. We can see their importance for adults, for example, in the work of sociologist Arlie Hochschild, though she was not talking about love. When Hochschild studied adherents of the American political right, she did not fully accept their manifest explanations of their political discontents, such as those that her affable informant Mike Schaff gave her: “I’m pro-life, progun, pro-freedom to live our own lives as we see fit.” She sought, rather, what she called the “deep story,” the “feels-as-if story – it’s the story feelings tell, in the language of symbols.”5 Mike and his compatriots’ deep story went something like this: they were standing – had long been standing – in a line consisting mainly of white men like themselves, patiently waiting to arrive at the “American Dream,” a dream of progress, economic betterment, and greater opportunities. They had suffered and worked long and hard to stand in that line. But interlopers – black, brown, immigrant – were cutting in front of them. Feelings of anger, shame, resentment, and pride all came together and made sense in this deep story. This is what I call a fantasy.
Such underlying fantasies are what L. E. Angus and L. S. Greenberg are thinking about, too, when they advocate psychotherapy that intervenes and changes the narratives that people use to understand their feelings and identities. They are the reasons why Iiro P. Jääskeläinen and his colleagues use neuroimaging to unravel “how narratives influence the human brain, thus shaping perception, cognition, emotions, and decision-making.” They explain Joan Didion’s striking essay opener: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”6
The fact that the Western imagination – only one among many imaginations – has produced some
