In the last decade, the History of Emotions has become one of the most exciting and innovative fields of research worldwide.
Central
to this research is the idea that emotions are not a fixed human experience, the same for
everyone in all times and places. Once, it was assumed that emotions were constant through
history: that while the scenery changed, the people on stage were always the same. Instead,
we now say that emotions are a product of history: the way we feel, and the way we express
our feelings, depends on who we are, and when, and where. What one culture or community
thinks of as a natural, irresistible emotion (like piety, or patriotism) might seem
unnatural to another. What one century condemns as 'greed', another century praises as
'ambition'. Our emotions are as much a product of our upbringing and surroundings as how we
style our hair.
In this sense, there is no such thing as (for example) a standard, uniform thing called
'love', an inherent emotion felt the same way by everyone. There is only a range of feelings
and experiences that humans have called 'love' across the centuries, but which have differed
from each other enormously. Instead of searching for historical examples of people
experiencing an identical thing called 'love', we might look at what 'love' was like for our
ancestors in different times and places. Was it a bond of duty to others? A deep passion
causing dangerous instability-to be avoided, or hoped for? Was it important, or irrelevant?
Were young people taught to 'fall in love' with certain qualities that served society as a
whole-and did those qualities change as society changed? What was allowed? What was
forbidden? Asking these questions, we can build up a picture of the history of love, in its
many and changing forms, just as we might trace the history of hairstyles.
A second key point is that just as history makes emotions, emotions make history. For too
long historians have attempted to explain historical change without explicit reference to
emotions-and yet historical events are human events, rich in emotional complexity. Major
events like revolutions were shaped and driven by emotion. Slow shifts, such as changes in
the status of women, were just as surely the result of actions by feeling human beings. The
History of Emotions seeks to discover the specific ways that emotions have been a force for
historical change.
Finally, the History of Emotions forms part of a larger project in the humanities and the
medical sciences, of adjusting our understanding of what emotion is. Scholars of other
centuries have seen emotion as the opposite and enemy of reason. More nuanced work tells us
that emotions are in fact highly rational, and that our reasoning process draws deeply on
our emotional selves. Emotion and reason can then be seen as two overlapping terms for the
kind of perceptive judgement that we bring to our encounters with the world around
us.
Developed through a partnership with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of
Emotions, the Queen Mary University of London and digital media studio Monkeystack, The Vault brings these ideas to an audience in the
form of a game. The game is currently in an 'Alpha' state; core concepts and functionality
are in place, but it has not yet been completed to a state releasable to the public. This
'Alpha' version of the game is downloadable for review through this website.
The Vault game is a journey into history, an
immersion into the experiences and emotions of those whose lives were very different from
our own. There, we discover unfamiliar feelings, uncanny characters who are like us and yet
unlike.
It is also a journey into the human condition, into a metaphoric space in which being truly,
richly human is the only way to survive-provoking us to consider not only our past but our
future.
"I have been working in the area of history of emotions
and thinking about public engagement for the last ten years, and this is by far the most
exciting, original, and high-quality project I have encountered for the dissemination of
the results of history of emotions research to a wide and diverse global
audience."
Professor Thomas Dixon,
Director of the Living With Feeling Project, Queen Mary University of London.