This chapter gives an overview of the state of cross-disciplinary research into objects and emotions. It considers major intellectual works from the fields of archaeology, anthropology, art and design history, history, literary studies, philosophy, and psychology from the perspective of the history of emotions, in order to assess which current major directions in these fields may be most useful for those seeking to write affective histories of the material world. By investigating the critical history of objects and emotions and reflecting on the state of the field today, the authors offer an interdisciplinary frame for the essays that follow, outlining various methodologies and their implications for emotions research in the humanities in general.

Courtship in Georgian England was a decisive moment in the life cycle, imagined as a tactical game, an invigorating sport, and perilous journey across a turbulent sea. This book brings to life the emotional experience of courtship using the words and objects selected by men and women to navigate this potentially fraught process. It provides new insights into the making and breaking of relationships, beginning with the formation of courtships using the language of love, the development of intimacy through the exchange of love letters, and sensory engagement with love tokens such as flowers, portrait miniatures, and locks of hair. It also charts the increasing modernization of romantic customs over the Georgian era—most notably with the arrival of the printed valentine card—revealing how love developed into a commercial industry. The book concludes with the rituals of disintegration when engagements went awry, and pursuit of damages for breach of promise in the civil courts. The Game of Love in Georgian England brings together love letters, diaries, valentines, and proposals of marriage from sixty courtships sourced from thirty archives and museum collections, alongside an extensive range of sources including ballads, conduct literature, court cases, material objects, newspaper reports, novels, periodicals, philosophical discourses, plays, poems, and prints, in order to create a vivid social and cultural history of romantic emotions. The book demonstrates the importance of courtship to studies of marriage, relationships, and emotions in history, and how we write histories of emotions using objects. Love emerges from this study as something that we do in practice, enacted by couples through particular socially and historically determined rituals.

This chapter analyses the legal consequences of broken relationships using ninety breach of promise cases under the common law. It unpicks the nature of the suit including the verdicts, gender balance, damages awarded, age, occupation, and social status of plaintiffs and defendants. The chapter reveals that while women brought 80 per cent of cases, they were also more likely to win. It show how the action changed in response to the emotional shifts outlined in Chapter 5, as by the 1790s, romantic hurt was presented in court as a uniquely female grievance. Cases increasingly came to rely upon demonstrating the hurt feelings of spurned lovers, where a man was not thought to suffer as equally as a woman. Finally, the chapter reveals how objects such as love letters, wedding licences, wedding clothes, and furniture for the marital home were crucial in providing material evidence of proximity to marriage.

This article interrogates the court's reputation as ‘the residence of dullness’ to reveal a multivalent emotional space with a practised grammar of emotional concealment and display. The performance of emotions by the royal family and courtiers in the State Apartments acted as a powerful draw to court events, as the display of joy or cheer acquired national significance. Under such scrutiny the king and his courtiers routinely limited displays of grief or pain to more restricted spaces such as the closet. The article analyses the court as a unique micro‐community in order to recreate the emotional character of London's palaces.

This book is about the ways in which humans have been bound affectively to the material world in and over time; how they have made, commissioned, and used objects to facilitate their emotional lives; how they felt about their things; and the ways certain things from the past continue to make people feel today. The temporal and geographical focus of ...