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Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions through History
This interdisciplinary essay collection investigates the various interactions of people, feelings, and things throughout premodern Europe. It focuses on the period before mass production, when limited literacy often prioritised material methods of communication. The subject of materiality has been of increasing significance in recent historical inquiry, alongside growing emphasis on the relationships between objects, emotions, and affect in archaeological and sociological research. The historical intersections between materiality and emotions, however, have remained under-theorised, particularly with respect to artefacts that have continuing resonance over extended periods of time or across cultural and geographical space. Feeling Things addresses the need to develop an appropriate cross-disciplinary theoretical framework for the analysis of objects and emotions in European history, with special attention to the need to track the shifting emotional valencies of objects from the past to the present, and from one place and cultural context to another.
The collection draws together an international group of historians, art historians, curators, and literary scholars working on a variety of cultural, literary, visual, and material sources. Objects considered include books, letters, prosthetics, religious relics, shoes, stone, and textiles. Many of these have been preserved in international galleries, museums, and archives, while others have remained in their original locations, even as their contexts have changed over time. The chapters consider the ways in which emotions such as despair, fear, grief, hope, love, and wonder become inscribed in and ascribed to these items, producing 'emotional objects' of significance and agency. Such objects can be harnessed to create, affirm, or express individual relationships, as, for example, in religious devotion and practice, or in the construction of cultural, communal, and national identities.
The collection draws together an international group of historians, art historians, curators, and literary scholars working on a variety of cultural, literary, visual, and material sources. Objects considered include books, letters, prosthetics, religious relics, shoes, stone, and textiles. Many of these have been preserved in international galleries, museums, and archives, while others have remained in their original locations, even as their contexts have changed over time. The chapters consider the ways in which emotions such as despair, fear, grief, hope, love, and wonder become inscribed in and ascribed to these items, producing 'emotional objects' of significance and agency. Such objects can be harnessed to create, affirm, or express individual relationships, as, for example, in religious devotion and practice, or in the construction of cultural, communal, and national identities.
270 pages, Hardcover
First published January 13, 2018
30 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 15, 2024
Really thoughtful and accessible collection on emotional objects in history :)
It's such an interesting approach and one that I hope will become more mainstream. Holloway and Begatio's passages were the best. I also think incredibly relevant to migration studies, where you may only be able to take so much with you. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown called this the 'exile's survival kit', including passages of the Quran in Arabic and English, job references, her mother's rosary... For migrants swimming to safety, crossing on boats or other crowded modes... the choice may say as much as anything. I was struck by a woman I spoke to saying that her belongings were entirely practical and then revealing that she had a little pillow that her mum had sewn for her when she was just seven years old. I think especially for people navigating cultural dislocation - or perhaps any kind of similar change - this has great meaning.
More generally, the little marks we leave... V.S Naipaul talks about rows of trees showing the mark of a dead man's hopes. The letters I've kept for years or the note you find in the front of a book written with love 50 years ago.
My proudest legacy is the no ball games sign that's still on the street where I grew up because of me and my brother playing football all the time there.
It's such an interesting approach and one that I hope will become more mainstream. Holloway and Begatio's passages were the best. I also think incredibly relevant to migration studies, where you may only be able to take so much with you. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown called this the 'exile's survival kit', including passages of the Quran in Arabic and English, job references, her mother's rosary... For migrants swimming to safety, crossing on boats or other crowded modes... the choice may say as much as anything. I was struck by a woman I spoke to saying that her belongings were entirely practical and then revealing that she had a little pillow that her mum had sewn for her when she was just seven years old. I think especially for people navigating cultural dislocation - or perhaps any kind of similar change - this has great meaning.
More generally, the little marks we leave... V.S Naipaul talks about rows of trees showing the mark of a dead man's hopes. The letters I've kept for years or the note you find in the front of a book written with love 50 years ago.
My proudest legacy is the no ball games sign that's still on the street where I grew up because of me and my brother playing football all the time there.
June 30, 2022
"Feeling Things" is an excellent piece of scholarship.
It was a pleasure to read and I know I'll be delving into this book again when I'm tackling my dissertation!
LOVED the discussions about the physicality of emotional matter embedded within an object. Or, how a physical representation of emotion inside an object can add or exemplify said emotion better (i.e. blood, tears, etc.)
Though I haven't read the work of William M. Reddy yet, this piece discusses and echos that of Reddy's "The Navigation of Feeling" and Barbara Rosenwein's "Emotional Communities" and "Generations of Emotions."
It was a pleasure to read and I know I'll be delving into this book again when I'm tackling my dissertation!
LOVED the discussions about the physicality of emotional matter embedded within an object. Or, how a physical representation of emotion inside an object can add or exemplify said emotion better (i.e. blood, tears, etc.)
Though I haven't read the work of William M. Reddy yet, this piece discusses and echos that of Reddy's "The Navigation of Feeling" and Barbara Rosenwein's "Emotional Communities" and "Generations of Emotions."
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews