For most of the twentieth century, professional historians treated emotions as background noise—natural, universal, and therefore historically uninteresting. Fear was fear, grief was grief, whether in medieval France or industrial England. Emotions belonged to psychology, not history.

Then, beginning in the 1980s and accelerating through the 2000s, a cluster of historians began arguing something radical: that emotional experience itself has a history. How people felt, what they were permitted to feel, and how they expressed feeling all changed across time and culture. This was not merely studying attitudes about emotions. It was claiming that the emotions themselves were historically variable.

What emerged was a new subfield—the history of emotions—with its own theoretical frameworks, methodological debates, and competing schools. Examining these approaches reveals not just how historians study feelings, but how different historiographical traditions produce fundamentally different objects of inquiry from the same human phenomena.

Barbara Rosenwein's concept of emotional communities, developed most fully in her 2006 work Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages, offered one of the field's most influential theoretical frameworks. Rosenwein argued that different social groups—monastic orders, royal courts, urban guilds—developed distinct systems of emotional norms, valuations, and modes of expression. These weren't simply rules about what to feel. They were entire ecosystems that shaped emotional possibility itself.

The concept drew explicitly on the tradition of social history while pushing beyond it. Where social historians had long studied norms and institutions, Rosenwein insisted that emotional norms were just as constitutive of group identity as economic relations or political structures. A Benedictine monastery and a Carolingian court didn't just have different rules about anger; they inhabited different emotional worlds, with different thresholds of feeling, different vocabularies, and different consequences for transgression.

What makes Rosenwein's framework historiographically significant is how it challenged the dominant narrative of emotional progress. The sociologist Norbert Elias had argued in The Civilizing Process that European emotional life followed a grand arc from medieval impulsiveness to modern restraint. Rosenwein rejected this teleology. Emotional communities existed simultaneously and in competition, not along a single developmental timeline. Medieval people were not emotionally simpler than modern people—they were emotionally different, in specific and recoverable ways.

The strength of this approach lay in its sensitivity to plurality and coexistence. The limitation, as critics noted, was the difficulty of specifying how emotional communities related to one another and how individuals navigated between them. If a medieval merchant belonged to multiple emotional communities—his guild, his parish, his household—which shaped his experience most? Rosenwein opened the question without fully resolving it.

Takeaway

Emotions are not universal constants that societies merely regulate differently. They are shaped from the ground up by the communities in which people live, making emotional experience as historically specific as any political institution.

Peter and Carol Stearns took a deliberately different path. In their 1985 article coining the term emotionology, they proposed that historians should study not emotions themselves but the standards societies establish for emotional experience and expression. This was a methodological choice rooted in epistemological caution. Historians, the Stearns argued, cannot reliably access what people actually felt in the past. What they can access are prescriptive texts—advice manuals, sermons, etiquette books, medical treatises—that reveal what a society believed people should feel.

The approach proved enormously productive. Stearns' own work on the history of anger in America, jealousy, and fear demonstrated how emotional standards shifted in response to economic transformation, changing family structures, and new cultural ideals. The twentieth-century American turn against jealousy, for instance, could be traced through advice literature, workplace norms, and therapeutic culture—all accessible through conventional documentary evidence.

Historiographically, emotionology represented a social-scientific orientation within the history of emotions, emphasizing patterns, norms, and measurable change over time. It aligned with the broader tradition of American social history that prioritized systematic analysis of collective behavior. Where Rosenwein's framework was more anthropological—attentive to meaning, interpretation, and cultural specificity—the Stearns approach was more sociological, seeking generalizable claims about emotional change across large populations.

Critics, however, questioned whether emotionology's self-imposed limits were too restrictive. If historians study only emotional standards, they risk describing ideology rather than experience. The gap between what a culture prescribes and what individuals actually feel may be precisely where the most historically interesting dynamics occur. By bracketing lived experience, emotionology may have gained methodological rigor at the cost of explanatory power.

Takeaway

Sometimes the most honest scholarly move is to study what you can actually know. Emotionology reminds us that the gap between prescribed feeling and lived experience is not a problem to solve but a tension to hold.

Beneath the theoretical debates between Rosenwein, the Stearns, and others lies a fundamental methodological question that defines the field: can historians access past emotional experience at all, or only its representations? This is not merely an academic quibble. It determines what kind of history the history of emotions can be.

On one side stand scholars influenced by constructionist approaches in the humanities, who argue that emotions are constituted through language, ritual, and social practice. From this perspective, studying representations is studying emotion, because emotion has no existence independent of its cultural expression. A medieval love poem doesn't merely describe a feeling that exists elsewhere—it participates in producing the very emotional reality it names. This view draws on the linguistic turn in historiography and aligns with cultural history's emphasis on meaning-making.

On the other side stand historians and historically-minded scientists who insist on a biological substrate to emotion that persists across cultural variation. William Reddy's concept of emotives—utterances that simultaneously describe and alter emotional states—attempted to bridge this divide. For Reddy, emotional expression is neither purely representational nor purely performative. It is an act that changes the speaker even as it communicates to others. This framework tried to preserve both the cultural variability that historians observe and the embodied reality that neuroscience describes.

The evidence problem has not been resolved, and it may be irresolvable. But the debate itself has been productive, forcing historians to be explicit about their epistemological commitments in ways that other subfields often avoid. Every historian of emotions must declare, implicitly or explicitly, what they believe evidence of feeling actually is. That requirement has made the field unusually self-reflective—a quality that strengthens its historiographical contributions even when its empirical claims remain contested.

Takeaway

The most productive questions in any discipline are sometimes the ones that cannot be definitively answered. The history of emotions gains its intellectual vitality precisely from the unresolved tension between what people felt and what the archive preserves.

The history of emotions emerged by refusing a premise that most historians had accepted without argument: that feelings are ahistorical constants. By treating emotional experience as variable, recoverable, and methodologically challenging, the field opened a genuinely new domain of historical inquiry.

Yet the competing frameworks—Rosenwein's emotional communities, the Stearns' emotionology, Reddy's emotives—do not simply offer different tools for the same task. They define different objects of study. This is the historiographical lesson: theoretical choices do not just shape answers. They shape what counts as a question.

For historians in any subfield, the history of emotions serves as a vivid case study in how methodological self-awareness transforms the scope of what we believe the past can teach us.