Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions through History

Feeling Things 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 Feeling Things is pre-modern Europe, a period before mass production, when limited literacy often prioritised material modes of communication. What happens when we consider objects from European history as material manifestations of emotion in the past? As the subject of materiality gains interest in historical inquiry, the time is ripe to explore how the fields of the history of emotions and material culture can be brought into dialogue.