Representing Emotions: New Connections in the Histories of Art, Music and Medicine

Abstract

This collection is the proceedings of a conference with the strengths and, to an extent, the weaknesses of the genre. The intention is to address the issues of understanding the representation of the emotions through history. It can be seen as a report on work in progress, as an exploration of what has been done, can be done and how it might be done. The volume is dominated by ten of the thirteen essays providing particular instances which fit into the broad sphere of studies of emotions. As might be expected for an emerging field, some of the lasting impressions are in the introductory section. The editors provide a useful piece outlining the issues involved and setting the agenda for the specifics. Peter Burke gives a map of the existing historiography, detailing a surprisingly established interest in emotion from Huizinga and Burckhardt through Elias and Febvre to Delumeau while recognising the limitations of the often too implicit models. (Elias reappears as a useful model for Otniel E. Dror's concluding essay.) Graham Richards draws attention to the epistemological difficulties with the discourse and insists on attention being paid to the relationship between subjective experience, verbalisation and discourse. Adding a substantial select bibliography at the end of the volume, this provides an excellent starting point. The particular essays which follow are divided into three sections concerning emotion and religious belief, the body, and discipline, with a general movement from the fourteenth to the twentieth centuries running over these divisions. It should be made clear that all but one of these essays relate to western Europe with the final study being on north American psychology and sport. References are made in later essays to western perceptions of music in alien ‘primitive’ societies. It comes across very clearly that ‘emotion’ is promiscuous in terms of the historical disciplines, with three from the visual arts, one on architecture and three with a focus on music. Common ground, with different emphases, is found in philosophy, psychology and praxis. At its best, this produces very thought-provoking essays such as Christine Battersby's engagement with philosophy, passion and sexual difference, muddying the waters of gendered philosophy in a conversation with David Hume and feminist philosophy. Similarly stimulating is Michael Heyd's account of shifting experience and accounts of original sin with a movement from an external, transcendent sense of sin to a specific, internal and individualised sin. Gouk's reading of John Gregory's understanding of music in encouraging civility suggests a useful broadening of the agenda of the Scottish Enlightenment (although there is a slight glitch in the identification of Aberdeen as part of lowland Scotland). Slightly less helpful essays in this context are ones which stick more tightly to established disciplinary boundaries, such as Michael Schwartz on Giotto and Piero, Marcia Pointon on Hogarth's Sigismunda and Charles Brotman on Spencer, Darwin and perceptions of rhythm in the ‘development’ of humanity. These, it might be noted, are also those closer to the ‘great men’ school of history. Overall, part of the problem is one of format: each of these essays amounts to about fifteen pages and that provides a space for a useful raising of questions or a less profitable focus with an almost wilful sense of closure. At this point, the best pieces leave the door open for a cross-disciplinary engagement for what has the potential to be a way into trans-cultural and trans-historical differences and similarities of ‘emotion’.

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