Francois Soyer (University of Southampton): “The Affective Politics of Fear in Early Modern Spain: The Recycling of an Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theory into an anti-Muslim one.”

Date: 12 August, 2016
Time: 12:00pm
Venue: Philippa Maddern Seminar Room 1.33, The University of Western Australia
More info: http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/events/the-affective-politics-of-fear-in-early-modern-spain-the-recycling-of-an-anti-semitic-conspiracy-theory-into-an-anti-muslim-one/

This work examines how the study of emotions can help us understand the appeal of conspiracy theories and how they are exploited by governments and elite institutions to provoke fear and forge collective identities. It focuses on a particular conspiracy theory in early modern Spain: that of a vengeful Muslim doctor known as el vengador who systemically murdered Christian patients. It argues that the myth was in fact a clumsy recycling of a well-established anti-Semitic myth and that it also built upon existing anxieties about medical treatment. Sara Ahmed’s research on modern British society has demonstrated the role played by hate and fear in the creation of collective identities by creating boundaries with ‘others’ who are constituted as a ‘threat’ to the existence. Likewise, the libel of medical murder was part of an ‘affective politics of fear’ in which the discourse of hate was instrumentalised by sections of the ruling hierarchy and polemicists to mobilize early modern Iberians against certain groups designated as a threat. Jews and Muslims became negative reference groups, equal objects of fear and anxiety whose role was interchangeable in order to formulate a normative collective identity.

Francois Soyer is an Associate Professor in Late Medieval and Early Modern History at the University of Southampton, UK, and a Partner Investigator of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Europe 1100-1800. His research focuses on anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim propaganda produced between 1450 and 1750.

Dr Sarah Goldmsith (York University), “We have both of us suffered a good deal’: Nostalgia, Melancholy and Death on the Eighteenth-Century Grand Tour.”

Date: 16 August, 2016
Time: 1:00pm
Venue: Philippa Maddern Seminar Room 1.33 (first floor, Arts Building), The University of Western Australia
More info: http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/events/we-have-both-of-us-suffered-a-good-deal-nostalgia-and-melancholy-on-the-eighteenth-century-grand-tour/

The emotional dimension of the eighteenth-century Grand Tour has rarely been considered, yet the letters, diaries and publications of travellers and their correspondents offer a rich insight into eighteenth-century emotional culture and expectations, ranging from expressions of love, jealousy, grief and mirth. This paper will explore the emotional strains and states caused by travel, separation and distance through probing the complex narrations surrounding nostalgia, melancholy and death. While tracing how numerous travel discourses engaged with contemporary theoretical understandings, my paper will also consider the influences of age, social status and gender in created differing standards of emotional expression.

Sarah Goldsmith completed her AHRC-funded PhD, ‘Danger, Risk-taking and Masculinity on the British Grand Tour to the European Continent, c.1730-1780’ at the University of York in November 2015. She has since spent a year as an Associate Tutor with the History Department at York, and will be starting a three-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship with the University of Leicester in October 2016. This will involve a new project, ‘Embodying the Aristocrat: A History of the Eighteenth-Century Elite Male Body’.

Dr Miranda Stanyon (King’s College, London), “Educating Edmund Burke: Music and the Incorrigibility of Eros in ‘Samson’s Feast’.”

Date: 6 September, 2016
Time: 1:00pm
Venue: Philippa Maddern Seminar Room 1.33 (first floor, Arts Building), The University of Western Australia
More info: http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/events/educating-edmund-burke-music-and-the-incorrigibility-of-eros-in-samson-s-feast/

As a student at Trinity College Dublin, the young Edmund Burke had a passion for extracurricular learning, training himself as a rhetorician and theorist of the passions in an ‘Academy of Belles-Letters’ that was a space of both male sociability and self-education. This paper uses the idea of ludic poetry – educative, playful, exploratory, performative – to examine a little-studied ode from this period attributed to Burke, ‘To Dr H——n’ (1748). Thought to be addressed to the philosopher Francis Hutcheson, the poem is largely and curiously a meditation on love and a retelling of the story of Samson and Delilah. The biblical story had been famously reimagined in Milton’s closet-drama Samson Agonistes, and in 1748 Dublin audiences had recently seen it adapted for the stage in Handel’s oratorio Samson. Burke may well have known and responded to these performances. Most prominently, though, his ode is a parody of Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast; or the Power of Music (1697). It is thus an implicit engagement with the music ode tradition and its discourse on the passions. Central to the passions of the poem are questions of sound, stoicism, and seduction which preoccupied the young Burke, and which resonate with his later life as a theorist of the sublime, statesman, and orator.

Dr Miranda Stanyon studied music and arts at The University of Melbourne before coming to London in 2010 to undertake a doctorate in English literature at Queen Mary University of London. After spending two years as a Junior Research Fellow at Christ’s College, Cambridge, she joined King’s College London in September 2015.

Dr Matthew Champion (University of Cambridge), “Liturgical Narrative and Emotion in Fifteenth-Century Ghent.”

Date: 6 September, 2016
Time: 2:15pm
Venue: Philippa Maddern Seminar Room 1.33 (first floor, Arts Building), The University of Western Australia
More info: http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/events/liturgical-narrative-and-emotion-in-fifteenth-century-ghent/

On Saint George’s Day, Sunday April 23, 1458, the Duke of Burgundy Philip le Bon entered Ghent for the first time since the city’s crushing defeat by Burgundian forces at Gavere on July 23, 1453. The Duke’s long absence from the city was transformed into triumphal presence in an elaborately constructed entry ritual. Crucial to this ritual were the emotional transformations evoked by the deployment of sacred narrative on the city’s streets. Writing an emotional history of the Ghent entry, this paper will examine the ways in which this ritual transformation was mediated in chronicle reports of the entry, and the ways in which the emotional structures of the liturgy provided a framework for negotiating change in fifteenth-century Ghent.

Dr Matthew Champion is currently the Jeremy Haworth Research Fellow in History at St Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge. His research spans the history of liturgy and emotions, early witchcraft theory, calendars and chronology, civic ritual, and relationships between time and visual and musical cultures in the Burgundian Low Countries. His current project on the sounds of time interprets the advent and spread of musical clocks in Europe and beyond from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries.