Ruling emotions

This chapter explores how the emerging scholarship of the history of emotions might usefully inform the study of monarchy in the early modern period. Historical analysis regarding power and rule in early modern Europe has fruitfully explored and extended anthropological and sociological frameworks for analysing rituals, material culture and space as cultural and gendered forms of power. ¹ More recent work has begun to consider how emotions too define the nature of power in individual expressions and collective formations. After all, authority to rule over another is a social and cultural practice that involves people as individuals and groups in relationships of domination and subordination. Various scholars have offered consideration of the ways emotions channel and become in themselves forms of power. Joanna Bourke, for example, reflects that ‘emotions align people with others within social groups, subjecting them to power relations’, and Sara Ahmed has explored community alignment and marginalization as the cultural politics of emotion, while Judith Butler has proposed a notion of the ‘psychic life of power’. ² This chapter likewise considers emotions as a critical aspect of the social acts and behaviour that create capacity for domination and subordination, while also recognizing that they are themselves shaped by specific cultural contexts and local understandings of race, faith and gender politics, among other considerations. ³ Furthermore, it proposes that feeling practices not only reflect modes of domination and subordination but that particular kinds of emotional expression can themselves be understood as forms and performances of power (as well as a disruption of these). ⁴ As such, this chapter asks what emotional expressions and practices could do for those who ruled in the early modern period, as representatives of a system and as individuals.