In this blog post, Dr Eloise Grey (University of Aberdeen) and Jenny Lelkes-Rarugal (editor of BBIH) discuss how the Bibliography of British and Irish History (BBIH) can be used to research and teach the History of Emotions.

BBIH and the History of Emotions

BBIH is one of the most accurate and comprehensive resources available for studying, teaching, and researching the domestic and global histories of Britain and Ireland, from 55 BCE to the present day. 

An academic partnership between the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) and Brepols, it provides up-to-date information on over 670,000 history books, articles, chapters, edited collections (mainly published from the early 20th century to present), and history theses (submitted since the late 1990s). BBIH is updated three times a year, with c.10,000 new records annually.

Due to its name and geographical focus, BBIH’s potential for studying, teaching, and researching interdisciplinary and emerging areas within history is not always obvious or intuitive to historians. To address this, Dr Eloise Grey has made a tutorial video about how BBIH can be used for studying, teaching, and researching the History of Emotions. Eloise’s tutorial video can be watched on the IHR’s website and YouTube channel.

Eloise’s tutorial video is supported by our free online reading list Researching the History of Emotions (521 items). When used together, historians have powerful ways of finding reliable, accurate, and trusted resources about emotions using BBIH.

Approaching emotions in BBIH: Eloise’s process

I often get a quizzical look from people when I say that I am a historian of emotions. One of the issues with the History of Emotions is that it seems common sense that emotions are somehow intrinsic to us as individuals, and that they either need to come out or be controlled in some way, and that we have them in response to things that happen to us.

In fact, in my work, I look at how families teach their members emotions and how they are learned. I also look at them in the context of colonialism: they are used by historical actors to show civilisational difference and become implicated in the process of racialisation. My approach is based on the work of historians who have pioneered the field, such as Ute Frevert, Katie Barclay and William Reddy, who have shown that people had different feelings over the centuries and these changes reflected historical change. Not only that—historical change, it is argued, was enacted through emotional change in society. Some feelings emerged or mutated, and others declined, and these play a role in societal and political change.

Writing this video tutorial, I wanted to show how researchers and students can use BBIH to find sources that work with the History of Emotions. I felt that we could use it, as some historians do, to bring the History of Emotions into other histories. In this way, we’re using emotions history as a methodology. In my own work, I use the History of Emotions as a methodology to study whiteness: how Scottish society came to see itself as white and ‘naturally’ different. I argue that Scots did this in several ways: they showed feelings that signified civilisation; they made strong affectionate bonds with the ‘right’ people, and they excluded racialised people from their communities of feeling. They used emotions for their own purposes—as critiques of slavery became mainstream, they made a point of showing empathy towards enslaved people. This was an emergent ‘civilised’ emotion. The enslaved people nevertheless still remain enslaved.

When making the video, I applied this methodological approach to examples of Irish history. Whilst BBIH contains many resources related to political history, the marginalisation of Irish people over time came with its own set of emotional behaviours that could be researched in the same way. Other questions you could use BBIH to ask include: what emotions were used in the Irish Republican movement? Or, you could use emotions to study Irish Gender History, or the Irish diaspora.

Another approach I wanted to take in the video was to look at particular emotions and examine how they have changed over time and in different geographies. This is more directly engaging with the History of Emotions as a field. Love is a subject of extensive research due to its seeming ubiquity and perception as a universal emotion. Therefore, it is useful to search for it in the Bibliography as it returns such a huge volume of results. Simply having a browse at some of the results is a good way to show that love has a history: it has had a range of meanings and has served varied social functions. For example, Claire Langhamer’s book, The English in Love, The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution (2013), is a great study of the changing meanings of love in relation to political and social forces in England in the 20th century.

In this way, whilst embarking on making the video threw up the same challenge that I experience when talking about the History of Emotions to those outside the field, BBIH is a useful tool to surface examples. It has many sources that show how the History of Emotions can be used as a methodology. Equally, the volume of books, chapters, and journal articles in BBIH means that you can use it for working with the History of Emotions as a field of study.

Dr Eloise Grey is an Early Career Historian and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen. Her work on 18th and 19th century families uses methodologies from the History of Emotions to show how African-descended and Asian people were marginalised while British families came to embody whiteness in service to the colonial project.

Jenny Lelkes-Rarugal joined the IHR in 2021 and is responsible for the BBIH.

The post Researching the History of Emotions in the Bibliography of British and Irish History appeared first on On History.