Childhood, Pain and Emotion: A British Modern Medical History demonstrates that the history of childhood pain involves three complex problems: the conceptualisation of pain, the lack of scientific unity and the ‘politics of pain’. Manuscript sources, such as hospital records, case notes and medical texts, along with printed sources and non-textual materials like photography, have been mobilised to investigate a subject that has never before been the exclusive focus of historical analysis. The book reveals how diverse professional rivalries and cultural contexts shaped the treatment and understanding of children’s pain. It emphasises the need to reassess historical and contemporary perspectives on childhood pain and its broader social implications.

The Introduction provides an overview of the central questions raised in the book, the arguments presented, and the methodology employed. It frames key questions about the shifting meanings of childhood pain and its implications for the construction of adult worlds. Additionally, it highlights the interplay between the child as an object of clinical observation and as a symbolic figure within cultural and scientific narratives. Through this lens, it contributes to broader debates on the intersections of science, emotion, and society. The methodology used is one of interdisciplinary history, drawn largely from the history of medicine and cultural history, which assesses visual as well as written material.

This chapter summarizes recent trends and future possibilities in Ottoman cultural history with two main foci. First, we underline the potential of cultural history to go beyond formal categories (such as occupation, ethnicity, or religion), specifically through the concept of emotional communities. Second, we highlight performance studies as a fruitful venue of study that challenges the reduction of culture to written texts, with a particular emphasis on the aural dimensions of history. Together, these two approaches challenge presuppositions about a monolithic, single Ottoman culture. While highlighting methodological insights from the broader subfields of performance studies, sound studies, and the history of emotions, we simultaneously underline the specific challenges of applying these methods in Ottoman history.

On Saturday, February 28, 1626, the Mansfeld Regiment’s second-in-command Theodoro de Camargo stabbed his wife Victoria Guarde twelve times for sleeping with other men and plotting to kill him. This chapter uses this incident as an entry into a discussion of sex, gender, and family life in seventeenth-century European armies. Before the Industrial Revolution, women and families traveled with armies in large numbers. Armies were sites of male violence against women as well as against other men; these intersected in Camargo’s attempts to assert his authority within a regiment that may not have respected him. Since Guarde described her own actions as attempts to be happy, this chapter also briefly discusses the history of happiness. Although Camargo was acquitted in a rigged trial, the regimental secretary Mattheus Steiner may have disapproved of Guarde’s murder. If so, he said nothing, but he intervened the next time Camargo tried to abuse one of his subordinates.

The establishment of an objectivist, anti-Romantic tradition in early twentieth-century aesthetics was no purely philosophical breakthrough, nor (as some have argued) a resigned response to the disasters of twentieth-century history, but in significant part an expression of elitism, fascism, and contempt for the masses, one already prominent before 1914. Writers from Schenker to Adorno insisted aggressively on the immanent structural virtues of master-composers’ scores and the irrelevance, or danger, of listeners’ own feelings. The same music-analytical prejudices still vitiate many contemporary attempts within the so-called ‘affective turn’ to theorize emotions and their history in music, not just in musicology but also in psychology. The very end of the book turns toward popular music and cultural studies as more productive embodiments of affective relationality, showing the resonances and continuities these possess with the sentimental-Romantic traditions explored in the book’s chapters.

The Introduction critiques the dominant critical-musicological picture of Romanticism as a nineteenth-century aesthetic paradigm emphasizing artistic autonomy and escape from the social, and posits an alternative. Romantic ideas of sociality in art and music differed from modern materialist accounts in highlighting the mediatory role of emotion or feeling alongside further ‘ideal’ or imaginative factors in listeners’ experience. Such ideas converge with recent contributions in sociology, music studies, anthropology and philosophy which frame affect in social, holistic terms as atmosphere, Stimmung (mood or “attunement”) and correspondence. These are summarized in the term ‘affective relationality’. In both musicology after Carl Dahlhaus and the recent history of emotions, a watershed c.1800 has separated the Romantic paradigm from its eighteenth-century predecessors, instead of paying attention to the continuity between eighteenth-century sentimentality and Romanticism. This ‘sentimental-Romantic’ continuum is exemplified by Mme de Staël, whose writings’ resonances with the book’s chapters are explored.

Histories of both emotion and sexuality explore the ways that bodies and embodied practices are shaped by time, culture, and location. This chapter uses the theoretical and methodological insights from the History of Emotions to consider the emotions associated with sexuality and how these have taken cultural form at different moments. It first considers the emotions related to sexual function and desire, noting how different biological models informed what emotions were expected and experienced. It then turns to love as the predominant emotion connected with sexual practices, considering the boundaries of who and what should be incorporated within such feeling. The chapter then turns to an exploration of the emotions, particularly intimacy, of reproductive labour, acknowledging sexual practices, including those are contractual and exploitative, that sometimes sit uneasily within a framework of love. Finally, the chapter highlights some of the emotions produced by the management and policing of sexuality, such as shame and loneliness, recognising that sexuality has been a contested moral domain for many groups. Using diverse examples across time and space, this chapter seeks to denaturalise the emotions of sexuality and to provide a framework upon which further research can build.

This chapter takes a snapshot of the field of Neo-Latin with a view to opening it up to curious classical Latinists. What sorts of texts do neo-Latinists study? How do their concerns and approaches differ from those of mainstream classicists and modern linguists? What is the disciplinary position of Neo-Latin across Europe, the United Kingdom and the Americas? Is it forever condemned to be the handmaiden of intellectual history, the history of scholarship, religion, rhetoric, science and medicine, or do neo-Latin authors and texts merit attention for their Latinity? This chapter describes the rise and fall of the neo-Latin idiom from the Italian Renaissance through to the present, with attention to questions of authority, alterity, plurilingualism, genre hybridity and the distinctive modalities of neo-Latin intertextuality. It confronts the bugbear of neo-Latin poetry’s supposed lack of authenticity from a history of emotions perspective. Finally, the problem of a Neo-Latin ‘canon’ is raised in the context of indicating authors suitable for teaching to Classics undergraduates, as well as prospects for the future digital dissemination of neo-Latin editions and commentaries.

This essay details the foundational place of affect for medical treatments of body and soul in the late Middle Ages. Because the medieval soul was fully embodied, affects of love, joy, fear, and anger played a practical part in diagnosing or treating a patient’s health. In late medieval medical manuals, along with forms of living and confessional forms, care for bodies and souls draws on a common affective vocabulary. Rather than seeing one form of affective discourse as spiritual and the other as practical, this chapter concludes by briefly turning to the Book of Margery Kempe to take seriously her claim that Christ heals via an affective intensity that transforms her body and soul. The therapeutic domain of affect unites body and soul, spiritual and practical, in late medieval medical writings.

This chapter explores the form and practice of correspondence between Britain and India, uncovering the social and affective worlds of British non-elite families. Many of these correspondents had low levels of literacy and did not write for private audiences, but relied on others to read and transcribe their correspondence. Intimate details of private lives became public knowledge. Letters transported information about India back to Britain and spread it throughout communities of origin, far beyond the reach of a single letter. Correspondents based in India maintained ties to their communities at home as they consumed everything from family gossip to political news. Correspondence was central to maintaining the economic health of a family. But the same mechanisms that sustained families and communities could disrupt them as well. Scorned spouses shared their grievances with neighbors. Mothers relied on daughters to convey their intimate feelings to their husbands. The form of correspondence and the practicalities of writing across long distances determined how relationships were sustained or disrupted, how information about the empire was disseminated, and how the empire shaped family life.

Everyone knows from experience that emotions are powerful. They motivate us, colour our relationships and views, determine what is important for us and what is not. But it is less clear how they affect history beyond individual lives and interpersonal relationships: how do they make history, and how are they themselves shaped by history? The introduction contextualizes these questions and presents a theoretical and methodological framework.

This chapter argues that emotions are a way of practicing community, that feeling rules delineate the boundaries of what is acceptable and who can be part of the communities imagined within medieval romance. Attentiveness to the diction of emotions offers a new and potentially rich avenue of inquiry into how courtly readers imagined connection. Emotion words function like a contract between people: they negotiate, enact, and destroy relationships. And in romance, these utterances most frequently misfire, sowing confusion, misunderstanding, and, most of all, despair among the lovers and knights who are propelled to repair the damage of these misperformances to their relationships. Emotional misfirings – the moments where love fails, or where shame, anger, and grief take over – are the very building blocks through which romance negotiates and narrates elite communities.