Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis - Volume 126, Issue 4, 2013

it describes have a history? Because they are intuitively recognizable and anchored in the body, emotions can appear as a universal human feature, present throughout the ages. Recent research into their history, however, shows that emotions and their expression have changed considerably over time. Not only the norms and expectations regarding emotive language have changed, but also the corporeal performance and experience of emotions. We ‘feel’ differently now. Moreover, emotive language and practice have been differentiated along different lines: men and women, adults and children, soldiers and civilians have shaped their identities according to changing emotional repertoires, and the associated corporeal actions. This special issue focuses on the links and tensions between emotions and the body, and how both were experienced and performed from the Middle Ages into the nineteenth century.

This paper investigates religious women of the tenth and early eleventh centuries who relied on bodily expression to criticize the conduct of their fellow sisters. Relying on a habitus that referred to the centrality of the body in early medieval rules, these individuals appear to have relied on a gender-neutral mode of reformist agency that nonetheless provided affirmative arguments for male prejudices about women’s moral and corporeal inferiority, and provided supportive arguments for ecclesiastical and lay lords seeking to curtail the freedom of religious women, both as individuals and collectively. In some cases at least, female reformers’ behavior arguably contributed to a decrease in the quality of life and the societal position of nuns and canonesses.

The Devotio Moderna was one of the most important movements of religious reform in the late Middle Ages, especially in the Low Countries and the northern parts of the Rhineland. The new devout attached particular importance to the daily process of spiritual progress through good deeds, meditations, spiritual exercises, and continuous building of the self via self-examination and mutual correction. In accordance with their belief in the importance of self-fashioning, devouts also developed a remarkable interest in the emotional life of the individual. They aimed at detaching themselves completely from their own natural and intuitive emotions in order to lead a truly virtuous life. In this article we focus on the conditioning of the emotional life in three houses of devout women belonging to the Devotio Moderna through the lens of so-called sister books written in these communities. These sources allow us to deal with the emotional vocabulary deployed by the sisters, with how different emotions were assessed in specific situations, and with their physical expression. Finally, we analyse the narrative power of the many anecdotes recounted in the sister books. These stories not only conveyed to the younger sisters models for exemplary emotional behaviour, but must also have functioned as spiritually sound emotional triggers among the ones who read or heard them.

This article studies emotions and the bodily expression of emotions present in the martyr stories in Tasso’s contemporary history (1583). Tasso was a member of the observant Franciscans and drew on several sources for his compilation of stories of the martyrdom of his fellow brothers in the Netherlands, France, and the British isles. This article studies the observant Franciscans as an ‘emotional community’ (Barbara Rosenwein). This concept allows us to understand in a wider context the emotional vocabulary used in the martyr stories. The importance of martyrdom and emotions in the Franciscan tradition suggests that this tradition had a profound influence on the martyr stories in Tasso’s history.

This article examines physical representation of pain on the early modern stage, taking as its starting point the genre of martyr tragedy. It considers one tragedy, La Macchabée (1596) by Jean de Virey. Analysis of its dramaturgical structures and the modalities of representation of this specific genre suggest a double hypothesis: (1) martyr tragedy cannot be understood without taking into account its links with the medieval tradition of mystery plays and its broader cultural imagination, and (2) emotions and their bodily representations are historically defined categories functioning within a specific performative regime. By means of their spectacular simulation of embodied emotions plays such as La Macchabée mobilized an emotional repertoire both for actor and spectator.

This article investigates the connections between theatre and politics during the Patriotic and Batavian revolutions from the perspective of the history of emotions. In order to understand differences and shifts in emotional styles among the Dutch revolutionaries, it explores the semantic field of two closely interlinked concepts crucial to their emotional culture: passion (drift) and political enthusiasm (geestdrift). Late eighteenth-century plays and parliamentary proceedings from 1796 reveal a spectacular change in the emotional meaning of these concepts, not just from an abstract intellectual point of view, but also on the level of physical embodiment. Passion appears as a central theme in many plays. It is often depicted as a source of negativity for impulsive hotheads. Ultimately, however, from the 1790s on, passion appears as essential to a new spirit necessary for political renewal and reform. On stage but also in parliament a new distinctive emotional strategy was promoted, a type of behavior which could be described as a demonstrative display of ‘enthusiasmus’, a totally new political concept stripped of its original connotations of religious fanaticism. This new positive meaning describes the force animating the revolutionary drive to end all economic, social, and political injustice.

the six authors – all students or recent graduates – had made a walking tour of several weeks through the German countries. Their search for the beauties of nature explains their preference for the walking stick over the horse carriage. The travel report offers an emotional description of nature and landscape. Following historians of the ‘emotional turn’ in the belief that emotions are – at least in part – social and cultural constructions, I reconstruct the ‘cultural requirements’ of this intense and often physical experience of nature. I argue that emotional depictions in the travel report are closely connected to the contemporary ideal of Bildung, of which ‘emotional refinement’ was an important component. Knowledge of contemporary poetry, literature, painting, and aesthetics was an absolute precondition for the proper emotional experience of nature, at least for the elitist ‘emotional community’ to which the travelling students belonged.

My book on Dutch popular opinion towards the persecution of the Jews makes three points: first, that Gentiles were not indifferent, but indignant about it; second, that Jews and Gentiles realized the Germans were intent on exterminating the Jews, but could not imagine the speed with which this would happen; and third, that this is relevant because it was imaginable that, the Germans being on the verge of defeat, deportation would be less dangerous than going into hiding, which helps explain Jews’ and Gentiles’ compliance. In their extensive polemic against the book Evelien Gans and Remco Ensel fail to disprove (or even seriously discuss) any of these conclusions, because they concentrate on exposing a subtext (supposedly ‘equalizing’ victims and bystanders), which takes up so much space that objections are posited without proof. Unsatisfactory as this is, Gans’s and Ensel’s habit of misquoting and misrepresenting the text is even more worrying.