Introduction to Volume III: revolutions

The eighteenth century was a significant period of change in the ideas and practices of emotions for Europeans across the globe. Historians of eighteenth-century emotion, like those of other periods, seek to locate the experience, understanding and practice of emotions within their social, economic and political contexts. The cultural significance of love ensured that even if many of the ideas associated with the culture of sensibility were restricted to a social elite, emotion and especially sociable action remained critical to social and political relationships for all groups. Emotions can be encountered in contexts where less-emotive language is used. Court records and descriptions of the poor, for example, often used a less effusive emotional vocabulary but nonetheless captured the operation of emotion in everyday life. A focus on emotion words relies on the historian’s capacity to identify them, and so perhaps disguises emotions that are less familiar to the modern reader.