ABSTRACT
The history of emotions is a flourishing field that seeks to understand how emotions, and things that resemble them in historic societies, are defined and categorised in different times and places, and what difference that makes to human experience. This chapter offers a brief overview of what the history of emotions is, the way scholarship has developed in the field. Compared to other historical methodologies, the history of emotions is a relatively recent development. In the first half of the twentieth century, a number of eminent scholars pointed to the significance of emotions as drivers of historical change. The practice or performance of emotion for most historians is understood as socially-constituted and so therefore informed by the culture and society in which it is experienced. Emotion is also an experience that mediates the relationship within the group.
