What
Emotions shape the stories that shape politics: understanding how they do illuminates the relationship between individuals and the social realm, the boundaries between private and public life, and about the media's role and responsibilities.
Why
We now know that emotions have a history, but we have not thought much about the emotions of history itself. This project explores how medieval history-writers expressed/suppressed their own emotions, and how those emotions shaped the histories they wrote.
How
The project involves identifying and closely reading a corpus of history-writing that explicitly invokes (or renounces) emotion in response to traumatic events, and putting that corpus into dialogue with medieval and modern theories of the emotions.