"The long shadow of the emperor: fear and British press during the Napoleonic Wars (1795 –1815)” was a master thesis that combined the history of emotions with the use of quantitative computational techniques. The main objectives of the project were to detect and analyse the fear around the figure of Napoleon Bonaparte in the British press, between 1795 and 1815, and to check the feasibility of the proposed quantitative techniques for the history of emotions. The methodology consisted of the bibliographic collection of terms, web scrapping techniques, the creation of a database of mentions, and the emotional analysis of the subsequent information. The results showed how the emotion of fear was experienced in the British press, and the great explanatory potential of the methodology proposed by the study. The findings have revealed valuable information about international politics, public opinion, and erroneous assumptions in our current understandings of the Napoleonic Wars.

In this thesis, we sought to understand the use of emotions as a political tool within the context of Spanish History in the 15th century.  Using the theoretical and methodological approach of Emotional History, heavily influenced by Barbara Rosenwein, Piroska Nagy, and Damien Boquet; we go through the royal chronicles written by Diego de Valera and Alonso de Palencia, analyzing the uses of emotions as a way of controlling the narrative of the kingdom.  We see that emotions not only had a complex range of meanings and symbolism attached, but also that these were used to paint the image of monarchs in a brighter or darker light.

Danse, performance, cinéma, écrits théoriques et poétiques : dans la multiplicité de sa création artistique et intellectuelle, Yvonne Rainer s’impose comme une artiste cardinale dans l’histoire de l’art. Instigatrice du changement de paradigme postmoderne en danse, elle arrache le geste ordinaire à la vie quotidienne pour le placer au cœur de la création chorégraphique, en radicale juxtaposition avec des textes, des images et des objets. À partir des années 1970, elle émerge parmi les figures centrales du cinéma expérimental et indépendant en dialogue avec les théories et les luttes politiques féministes, queer et postcoloniales. Cette thèse explore la place de la subjectivité et de l’émotion dans la danse et le cinéma de Rainer. En effet celle-ci a impulsé un renouvellement radical du matériau affectif dans la pratique artistique en l’envisageant comme un fait, une réalité objective. Dans un contexte où l’ennui agit comme un style affectif dominant au sein de l’avant-garde artistique américaine après 1945, l’artiste propose une expérience matérielle sensible, générant une conscience décuplée du temps et plaçant son public dans cette disposition affective à la fois pesante, froide et ordinaire. Puis, en résonance avec le cinéma des femmes, elle investit l’ennui à la fois comme une dynamique de subjectivation et comme une stratégie de subversion. En naviguant entre les dimensions individuelles et collectives de l’émotion, la thèse explore les enjeux esthétiques, politiques et subjectifs de l’ennui dans l’œuvre de Rainer. / The multiplicity of Yvonne Rainer’s art and intellectual works - in dance, performance, film, theoretic and poetic writings - makes her one of the essential artists in the history of art. As instigator of the post-modern paradigm shift in the dance scene, she pulled out movements from everyday life and put them at the core of her choreographic work, creating a radical juxtaposition to texts, pictures and objects. In the seventies, she became one of the main figures of experimental and independent cinema. Her polyphonic and reflexive cinematographic works entered in a dialogue with feminist, queer and postcolonial theories and struggles. The present thesis explores the notion of subjectivity and emotion in the film and dance of Rainer. Indeed, she has given the impulse for a radical renewal of the use of emotional material, which she considered as a given fact and an objective reality, in the artistic practice. In a context where boredom imposed itself as the dominant emotional style in the American artistic avant-garde after 1945, the artist offered a sensitive material experience. In particular, she created an acute conscience of time and put her audience in a specific emotional disposition, boredom, that can be described as tedious, cold and ordinary altogether. Then, in echo with women’s cinema, she explored boredom both as a process of subjectivation and as a strategy of subversion. Navigating between individual and collective dimensions, this research explores the aesthetic, political and personal stakes around the expression of boredom in Yvonne Rainer’s work.

This is a study of Samuel Pepys diary where the focal point is emotions in his professional life, emotions are understood through Barbara H. Rosenweins theory of Emotional Communities. The main part is made up of two chronological chapters following through the ten years Pepys kept a diary. The point is to illuminate Pepys professional life in the British Royal Navy through the perspective of emotions. We follow Pepys’s professional development, where emotions is discussed in relation to concepts such as personal interest and social status. From the first years of the diary to latter perspectives of him turning into the great naval administrator he became known as. Pepys in his professional sphere strictly controlled his emotions and soared above his competitors. He was a man who was puritan raised, highly emotional, educated and curious - on the fringes of the power epicentre in restoration-era England.

This thesis heeds W. Andrew Achenbaum’s call for historians of ageing to analyse the inner lives of their subjects. Building on and problematizing existing studies of health and welfare policies for the old, it explores the ways that mid-century public and private life shaped how individuals felt about old age. Both public discussions and private narratives of ageing are used to consider how older people understood and expressed their emotional experiences during a challenging period of the life cycle. I argue that old age in general, and its emotional dimensions in particular, are missing from British historiography. Yet both were vital to social life in the mid-century, when the ageing population was an important political issue and a large number of experts hoped to manage the emotional and psychological aspects of this ‘problem’. This thesis begins by setting out this national context for old age, showing that heightened interest in ageing and emotion were significant influences over the expansion of the welfare state. However, contrary to the expectations of mid-century researchers and policy-makers, my subsequent chapters show that older people frequently maintained their social roles and relationships through informal means. This thesis explores how ageing men and women engaged with work, retirement, ill health, marriage, bereavement, fashion, beauty culture, and autobiography as opportunities to find meaning in late life. Together, these varied perspectives on old age make a series of interventions in its history. I argue that historians could do much more to detail the significance of the life cycle for their subjects, whether they write political, social, or cultural history. As this thesis shows, such studies should approach ageing as a lifelong and personal process, which has been shaped by reminiscence and story-telling. I suggest that historians of emotion are best-equipped to write scholarship that is sensitive to the passing of time and personal biography in this way.

La présente recherche porte sur l’histoire des émotions positives et de leurs représentations en Grèce archaïque. L’histoire des émotions, qui a pu bénéficier d’un changement de paradigme ayant mis en évidence le lien entre émotions et cognition, se fonde sur l’hypothèse que le sens des scénarios affectifs varie selon les contextes historiques et culturels. L’objectif était ainsi de dégager le sens prêté aux émotions positives, d’Homère à Hérodote, à partir des témoignages disponibles. Le type d’analyse mis en œuvre est à la fois sémantique et historique, mais il s’appuie également sur les ressources de l’anthropologie et de la psychologie. Trois dossiers principaux jalonnent cette exploration : l’épopée homérique, la poésie archaïque à l’époque de l’émergence des cités et les nouvelles formes de la sagesse, religieuse et philosophique. Comment les émotions positives se définissent-elles dans ce cadre ? Leur forme et leurs fonctions se transforment-elles ? Quel usage en fait-on et quel rôle leur prête-t-on dans la cité ou, plus précisément, au banquet ? Quel discours suscitent-elles, du point de vue éthique, politique ou philosophique ? À partir d’une distinction sémantique fondamentale, qui paraît structurer le champ lexical du plaisir et de la joie, les nouvelles représentations des émotions positives sont envisagées en lien avec les bouleversements sociaux, politiques et religieux ayant affecté l’époque archaïque. / The present research regards the history of positive emotions and their representations in archaic Greece. The history of emotions, benefiting from a new trend, which underlined the relations between emotions and cognition, is based on the hypothesis that the sense of the affective episodes depends on the historical and cultural contexts. Consequently, the aim was to unveil the positive emotions’ meaning, from Homer to Herodotus, using the available evidence. The type of analysis that was used is at the same time semantic and historical, but it rests, as well, upon anthropology and psychology. Three main fields have been looked through for this study: the Homeric epic, the archaic poetry from the time of the first poleis and the new forms of wisdom, religious or philosophical. How these positive emotions have been defined? Were their form and functions subject to change? Which role is given to them in the polis or at the banquet? Which type of discourse have they provoked, at the ethical, political or philosophical levels? Beginning with a semantic dichotomy, that seems important in the lexical field, the new representations of the positive emotions are considered in close relationship with the social, political and religious changes of the archaic period.

The thesis investigates anxieties about urban life in late Victorian and Edwardian culture, and examines emotional responses to urbanisation, industrialisation and modernity at this high point of urban growth and rural-urban migration: one that marked Britain’s decisive breakthrough to a largely and permanently urbanised society. During the period, earlier nineteenth-century tropes of the ‘shock’ of the city, and anxieties surrounding rapid early urbanisation and industrialisation, began to recede. But from the 1880s onwards, as life in industrial cities came to be regarded as the norm, new anxieties came to the fore: concerns that related to the very pervasiveness and inescapability of urban life. I argue that the historically unprecedented growth in the size of cities placed enormous strain upon conceptions of the individual in modern society: the impulse to conceive of mass urban society in the abstract was in constant tension with a new, modernistic awareness of the essential humanity of each individual. The research utilises insights from the recent ‘emotional turn’ within the humanities, which is more sensitive to psychological factors in cultural practices and social processes; and brings this historiographical turn to bear on attitudes towards the city. An emotional approach enables both a deeper and subtler exploration of high cultural responses, and the extension of the range of sources and actors beyond ‘ideas’ and ‘intellectuals’. The thesis integrates a wide range of sources: literature, art, the writings of urban planners and social commentators, medical writings, working-class autobiographical writing, and oral history transcripts. Such an approach reveals the common emotional impulses and shared structures of feeling behind a diverse range of responses to the urban environment, and provides a deeper understanding of contemporary emotional life. It thus illuminates the ways in which individuals, societies and culture react to the complexities of modernity, and provides insights into the relationship between social transformation and emotional experience.

L’objectif de cette étude est de déterminer comment la pensée et l’imaginaire de la colère se façonnent en France au XVIIe siècle à partir d’un corpus large de littérature morale, comprenant des traités de médecine, de théologie, de philosophie, de morale et de civilité. La colère compte alors parmi les passions et se définit, conformément à la proposition aristotélicienne, comme un désir de vengeance qui fait suite à une marque de mépris et qui se manifeste dans le corps par un bouillonnement de sang autour du cœur. Elle est également une des quatre humeurs du système médical hippocratico-galénique : la bile jaune (cholè) menace les colériques de fièvres et autres inflammations. Associée à une folie et à un vice chez Sénèque, l’Ire figure enfin dans le septenaire des péchés capitaux, aux côtés de l’Orgueil et de l’Envie. Mais l’anthropologie chrétienne lui reconnaît également de bons usages, et tout l’effort des moralistes, médecins et théologiens de l’époque moderne est de déterminer comment concilier la dimension naturelle et physiologique de la passion avec l’aspiration à la vertu dans l’usage du monde. Ces auteurs encouragent au gouvernement des passions, à la fois dans une démarche charitable, et afin de favoriser leur usage rhétorique dans la mise en scène de soi sur la scène mondaine. Notre étude contribue à l’histoire des émotions de l’époque moderne par l’analyse des discours qui ont forgé les représentations et l’imaginaire de la colère. En déployant le modèle topique de la colère à partir de la littérature morale, considérée comme une formation discursive composée des différents champs du savoir, elle participe à l’anthropologie historique de l’affectivité. / This study aims to determine how the representations of anger were built in France in the 17th century from a broad collection of moral literature, including treatises on medicine, theology, philosophy, morals and civility. Anger was counted among the passions and defined, according to the Aristotelian proposal, as a desire for revenge caused by a perception of contempt, which manifests itself in the body with blood boiling around the heart. Anger (colère) was then correlated with choler, which is one of the four humors of the Hippocratic and galenic medicine (cholè): yellow bile causes fever and other kinds of inflammation. Considered as a form of madness and a vice by Seneca, the Ire finally appeared in the septenary scheme of the deadly sins, alongside Pride and Envy. But Christian anthropology also acknowledged its good uses, and the whole effort of the moralists, doctors and theologians of the early modern period was to determine how to reconcile the natural and physiological dimension of passion with the aspiration to virtue for the use of world. These authors encouraged the government of passions, both in a charitable perspective, and to promote their rhetorical use for self-staging in society.Our study contributes to the history of emotions in early modern France by analyzing the discourses that built the representations and the imagination of anger. By deploying the topical model of anger from a collection of moral literature considered as a discursive formation composed of different fields of knowledge, it participates in developing the historical anthropology of affectivity.

På senare tid har det funnits ett ökat fokus på att studera känslornas historia, även om detta inte alltid har varit fallet för historiker. Idén till uppsatsen formades under arbetet som kommunal arkivarie när jag stötte på en sällsynt upptäckt i arkiven - en samling av omkring två hundra kärleksbrev som utväxlats mellan Artur och Margit, ett ungt par, före och under andra världskriget. I sina brev uttryckte paret sina känslor för varandra, inklusive kärlek, svartsjuka och oro, samt deras aspirationer för framtiden och drömmar om att bygga ett liv tillsammans. Genom att använda kärleksbrev som en historisk resurs kan vi få värdefulla insikter i hur människor upplevde känslor under olika historiska perioder. Brev, speciellt de som skrivits mellan romantiska partners, ger ett unikt perspektiv på hur individer uttryckte sina känslor. Dessutom ger studiet av kärleksbrev en djupare förståelse för det känslomässiga landskapet i det förflutna och hur det påverkade relationer mellan människor. / In recent times, there has been an increased focus on studying the history of emotions, although this has not always been the case for historians. The idea for this essay was formed during my work as a municipal archivist when I stumbled upon a rare find in the archives - a collection of approximately two hundred love letters exchanged between Artur and Margit, a young couple, before and during World War II. In their letters, the couple expressed their feelings towards each other, including love, jealousy, and worry, as well as their aspirations for the future and their dreams of building a life together. By utilizing love letters as a historical resource, we can gain valuable insight into how people experienced emotions during various historical periods. These letters, specifically those written between romantic partners, offer a unique perspective on how individuals expressed their emotions. Moreover, studying love letters provides a deeper understanding of the emotional landscape of the past and how it impacted relationships between people.

This thesis addresses needlework between 1920 and 1970 as a window into women's broader experiences, and also asserts it as a valid topic of historical analysis in its own right. Needlecraft was a ubiquitous part of women's lives which has until recently been largely neglected by historians. The growing historiography of needlework has relied heavily on fashion and design history perspectives, focusing on the products of needlework and examples of creative needlewomen. Moving beyond this model, this thesis establishes the importance of process as well as product in studying needlework, revealing the meanings women found in, attached to, and created through the ephemeral moment of making. Searching for the ordinary and typical, it eschews previous preoccupations with creation, affirming re-creation and recreation as more central to amateur needlework. Drawing upon diverse sources including oral history research, objects, Mass Observation archives, and specialist needlework magazines, this thesis examines five key aspects of women's engagement with needlework: definitions of ‘leisure' and ‘work'; motivations of thrift in peacetime and war; emotions; the modern and the traditional and finally, the gendering of needlework. It explores needlework through three central themes of identity, obligation and pleasure. Whilst asserting the validity and importance of needlework as a subject of research in its own right, it also contributes to larger debates within women's history. It sheds light on the chronology and significance of domestic thrift, the meanings of feminised activities, the emotional context of home front life, women's engagement with modern design and concepts of ‘leisure' and ‘work' within women's history.