Going back to Annales School and Febvre’s Histoire des Sensibilités and beyond, historians have long held that how emotions were expressed in the past as well as what caused certain emotions in the past differed from how they are expressed and their causes today.

More recently however and also inspired by Febvre, several historians have started to consider emotions themselves as subject to historical change and historically learned behavior. The common assumption would be that when people in the past were scared on Halloween, that feeling might express itself differently than it would today and they might be scared of other things than today but the essential underlying feeling is the same as today. This has been called into question. What if emotions were not anthropological constants but in themselves subject to historical context and change? Can emotions be viewed as socially constructed?

Keeping in line with today's date, one frequently used example in the study of this subject is the difference in feeling spiritual elation between Lutherans and Catholics. Broadly speaking while Catholics equate the feeling of spiritual elation with the display of God's grace and power through splendor such as large churches, golden altars, elaborate frescoes, music, incense, a Lutheran will reject these displays and equate spiritual elation with pretty much the opposite of that; spartan and solemn contemplation done by the individual in communion with God. Yet, both of them describe said emotion in similar terms, terms we tend to equate with happiness. Are those historic Lutherans and Catholics experiencing the same feelings – happiness, spiritual elation – or are they fundamentally different emotions learned via the social context?

Another example comes from Barbara Rosenwein – more on her a bit later –, who in her article Worrying about Emotions she discusses a passage from Gregory of Tours Histories in which he imagines a tearful scene between a just married couple in which the woman during her wedding night breaks down and cries because she wanted to remain chaste for Christ. They talk until the wee hours of morning until arriving at the conclusion that they would have a chaste marriage. She discusses what this scene says about Greogry's approach to emotions, what kind of social expectations were associated in Gregory's Gaul with certain emotions and finally, asks the questions if such passions can be expected in our century? Can we even feel this passion to remain pure for Christ and is it comparable with contemporary passions?

The list could go on to include Weltschmerz, the intense feelings of Goethe's Werther or the emotional world Stendhal builds for his main character in Le Rouge et le Noir as well as many others.

Such attempts however are not without controversy in that there are those who hold that emotions are indeed universal and anthropologically constant vs. those who hold that all emotions are social constructs. What distinguishes recent emotional history are the attempts to go beyond this dichotomy and establish new ways to explore emotions in history.

In Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions it is again Barbara Rosenwein who discusses emotional communities as a concept to challenge the above laid out dichotomy. Rosenzweig writes:

Emotional communities are largely the same as social communities—families, neighborhoods, syndicates, academic institutions, monasteries, factories, platoons, princely courts. But the researcher looking at them seeks above all to uncover systems of feeling, to establish what these communities (and the individuals within them) define and assess as valuable or harmful to them (for it is about such things that people express emotions); the emotions that they value, devalue, or ignore; the nature of the affective bonds between people that they recognize; and the modes of emotional expression that they expect, encourage, tolerate, and deplore.

What she means by that is for example how the Russian military in WWI would not only cultivate a culture that elevated what was considered fearlessness among its soldiers but also affective bonds between soldiers promoted this culture. Your love for your comrades in arms could drive you to act in a manner that fit right in a culture of fearlessness by e.g. charging a machine gun and so forth.

So basically, when looking at what people in past found scary, remember that they might not have felt what you feel today.

Happy Halloween!

Further Reading:

• Barbara Rosenwein: Worrying about Emotions.

• Barbara Rosenwein: Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions

• Forum: History of Emotions in German History 28.

• Jan Plamper: The History of Emotion: An intrdocution Review

I was just wondering if there is any documented texts or scholarly research that provides an unbiased look at Muhammad? Specifically in regards to his treatment of women per HuffPost - https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/5a7jzg/muhammad_was_a_feminist_huffington_post/ - (I don't trust it as an outlet, but it got me thinking). I've read before in college that he was violent but convincing (through violence), but we only talked about the Quran as a whole for about two weeks. Can anyone shed more light?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highwayman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge#Place_in_the_United_Nations

Why did the west push so hard to support a genocidal government over a non-genocidal government?