ABSTRACT
Taking cues from the field of ‘body studies’, historians of the emotions have challenged simplistic assumptions about the universality of feeling and behaviour, instead highlighting the ways in which social and cultural difference affects the embodied experience of emotion. Recent methodological advances in emotions history, particularly Monique Scheer’s concept of ‘emotional practices’, offer tools for identifying diverse processes of embodiment from historical sources. How historical actors conceptualised emotion, and their efforts to shape the feeling body, can be captured from documentary evidence and material and visual sources. Moreover, depictions of moved or affected bodies in historical texts can reveal the influence of social and spatial variables on both the performance of emotion, and the creation of communal bonds.
