Emotional Experience and Microhistory explores the life and death of Magnús Hj. Magnússon through his diary, poetry and other writing, showing how best to use the methods of microhistory to address complicated historical situations. The book deals with the many faces of microhistory and applies it’s methodology to the life of the Icelandic destitute pauper poet Magnús Hj. Magnússon (1873–1916). Having left his foster home at the age of 19 in 1892, he lived a peripatetic existence in an unstinting struggle with poor health, together with a ceaseless quest for a space to pursue writing and scholarship in accord with his dreams. He produced and accumulated a huge quantity of sources (autobiography, diary, poems, reflections) which are termed by the author as ‘egodocuments’. The book demonstrates how these egodocuments can be applied systematically, revealing unexpected perspectives on his life and demonstrating how integration of diverse sources can open up new perspectives on complex and difficult subjects. In so doing, the author offers an understanding both of how Magnússon’s story has been told, and how it can give insight into such matters as gender relations and sexual life, and the history of emotions. Highlighting how the historiographical development of modern scholarship has shaped scholars’ ideas about egodocuments and microhistory around the world, the book is of great use and interest to scholars of microhistory, social and cultural modern history, literary theory, anthropology and ethnology.

Offering insights on the wide range of sources that are available from across the globe and throughout history for the study of the history of emotions, this book provides students with a handbook for beginning their own research within the field. Divided into three parts, Sources for the History of Emotions begins by giving key starting points into the ethical, methodological and theoretical issues in the field. Part II shows how emotions historians have proved imaginative in their discovering and use of varied materials, considering such sources as rituals, relics and religious rhetoric, prescriptive literature, medicine, science and psychology, and fiction, while Part III offers introductions to some of the big or emerging topics in the field, including embodied emotions, comparative emotions, and intersectionality and emotion. Written by key scholars of emotions history, the book shows readers the ways in which different sources can be used to extract information about the history of emotions, highlighting the kind of data available and how it can be used in a field for which there is no convenient archive of sources. The focused discussion of sources offered in this book, which not only builds on existing research, but encourages further efforts, makes it ideal reading and a key resource for all students of emotions history.

This book introduces students and professional historians to the main areas of concern in the history of emotions and its intersection with emotion research in other disciplines. It discusses how the emotions intersect with other lines of historical research relating to power, practice, society and morality. The revised and fully updated second edition of the book demonstrates the field’s centrality to historiographical practice, as well as the importance of this kind of historical work for general interdisciplinary understandings of the value and the meaning of human experience.

How do emotions change over time? When is hate honorable? What happens when "love" is translated into different languages? Such questions are now being addressed by historians who trace how emotions have been expressed and understood in different cultures throughout history. Doing Emotions History explores the history of feelings such as love, joy, grief, nostalgia as well as a wide range of others, bringing together the latest and most innovative scholarship on the history of the emotions. Spanning the globe from Asia and Europe to North America, the book provides a crucial overview of this emerging discipline. An international group of scholars reviews the field's current status and variations, addresses many of its central debates, provides models and methods, and proposes an array of possibilities for future research. Emphasizing the field's intersections with anthropology, psychology, sociology, neuroscience, data-mining, and popular culture, this groundbreaking volume demonstrates the affecting potential of doing emotions history. Contributors are John Corrigan, Pam Epstein, Nicole Eustace, Norman Kutcher, Brent Malin, Susan Matt, Darrin McMahon, Peter N. Stearns, and Mark Steinberg.

Power in the Village explores the formation of late-nineteenth-century Italian rural society in southern Brazil, through an examination of how Italian peasants in northern Italy and southern Brazil solved issues related to family honor. Looking specifically at social networks and justice practices to examine the kind of rationality that ruled individual and family behaviors, the book offers an understanding of the restoration of social balance in these communities, and explores the culture of immigrants, particularly in issues related to honor and morality. Taking as a case study the ambush and murder of a parish priest, Antonio Sorio, in January 1900 in Silveira Martins, a small town of Italian immigrants, Vendrame offers a reinterpretation of the society of Italian immigrants in southern Brazil. She argues that rather than being an idyllic picture of a homogeneous and harmonious society, the colonial settlements were places pervaded by tension, solidarity and self-interest, which guided individual and collective behavior. This book will be of great interest to scholars working in Italian history, Brazilian history, immigration history and the history of colonialism. It will also be of interest to scholars working on ethnographic and religious history, as well as to social anthropologists.

A sweeping exploration of the ways in which emotions shaped the course of human history, and how our experience and understanding of emotions have evolved along with us. "Eye-opening and thought-provoking!” (Gina Rippon, author of The Gendered Brain) We humans like to think of ourselves as rational creatures, who, as a species, have relied on calculation and intellect to survive. But many of the most important moments in our history had little to do with cold, hard facts and a lot to do with feelings. Events ranging from the origins of philosophy to the birth of the world’s major religions, the fall of Rome, the Scientific Revolution, and some of the bloodiest wars that humanity has ever experienced can’t be properly understood without understanding emotions. Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, art, and religious history, Richard Firth-Godbehere takes readers on a fascinating and wide ranging tour of the central and often under-appreciated role emotions have played in human societies around the world and throughout history—from Ancient Greece to Gambia, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, the United States, and beyond. A Human History of Emotion vividly illustrates how our understanding and experience of emotions has changed over time, and how our beliefs about feelings—and our feelings themselves—profoundly shaped us and the world we inhabit.

Emotions lie at our very core as human beings. How we process and grapple with our emotions, how and what we emote, and how we respond to the emotions of others, constitute the essence of our social universe. In a very real sense, we exist only through the prism of our emotions. And yet the profound effect of human emotion on history, politics, religion, and culture, remains underexamined. While the influence of emotion in such realms as American foreign policy has been well-documented, other emotional aspects of American history have escaped notice. What role, for instance, does emotion have in the practice of African American religion? How do shame and self- hatred influence American conceptions of identity? How does our emotional life change as we age? To what degree is American consumerism driven by basic human emotion? With this landmark anthology, historians Peter N. Stearns and Jan Lewis provide a road map of the American emotional landscape. From the emotional world of working-class Massachusetts to the prayers of evangelical and pentecostal women and the gendered nature of black rage, these essays provide a multicultural snapshot of the unique nature, and evolution, of American emotions.

The Exorcist of Sombor examines the life course, practice and mentality of an eighteenth-century Franciscan friar, based on his own letters and documentation, creating a frame around the tightly packed history of events that took place between 1766-1769, and analysing the series of exorcism scandals that erupted in the Hungarian town of Sombor, from the perspectives of social history and cultural history. The author employs a method which reflects historical anthropology, the history of ideas and the influence of Italian microhistory. Based on the activity of an exorcist priest in the early modern period, the documents of the ecclesiastical courts and a considerable body of autograph correspondence are thoroughly examined. Analysing these letters gives the reader a chance to come into close proximity with the way of thinking of a person from the eighteenth century. The research questions in connection to the documentation aim to identify the causes for the conflict. How was it possible to have "correct" and "wrong" methods of exorcism within the practice of one and the same church? What sort of criteria were used when certain previously accepted practices were dubbed superstitious in the second half of the eighteenth century? What were the changes that took place in the attitude of priests and friars within the ecclesiastical society of the period? How can a conflict be focussed on a practice (healing by exorcism) which has roots going back thousands of years? How many different variants of demonology existed in the clerical thinking of the age? As a highly accomplished source analysis within microhistory, The Exorcist of Sombor will be of great interest to early modern historians, anthropologists and culture researchers interested in microhistory and themes such as religion, magic, occultism and witchcraft.

Emotion, Sense, Experience calls on historians of emotions and the senses to come together in serious and sustained dialogue. The Element outlines the deep if largely unacknowledged genealogy of historical writing insisting on a braided history of emotions and the senses; explains why recent historical treatments have sometimes profitably but nonetheless unhelpfully segregated the emotions from the senses; and makes a compelling case for the heuristic and interpretive dividends of bringing emotions and sensory history into conversation. Ultimately, we envisage a new way of understanding historical lived experience generally, as a mutable product of a situated world-brain-body dynamic. Such a project necessarily points us towards new interdisciplinary engagement and collaboration, especially with social neuroscience. Unpicking some commonly held assumptions about affective and sensory experience, we re-imagine the human being as both biocultural and historical, reclaiming the analysis of human experience from biology and psychology and seeking new collaborative efforts.

Using the Icelandic context, Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon examines egodocuments as distinct and fascinating manifestations of microhistory, reflecting on their nature, the circumstances in which they originated, and their strengths and weaknesses for scholarly research. Autobiographical Traditions in Egodocuments successfully makes the case for egodocuments being an intriguing part of the material culture of their time, with ample consideration given to the role of the book within individual households and the impact a source such as autobiography has had on people's daily lives. Magnússon also provides an insightful historiographical account of how the egodocument has been used in historical works both in Iceland and elsewhere in the world since the 19th century.