Chapter 40 - Susan Broomhall
Ruling Emotions Affective and Emotional Strategies of Power and Authority among Early Modern European Monarchies
This chapter explores how the emerging scholarship of the history of emotions might usefully inform the study of monarchy in the early modern period. Feeling practices not only reflect modes of domination and subordination, but particular kinds of emotion expression can themselves be understood as forms and performances of power (as well as a disruption of these). Ideas about feelings defined the nature of the bond between ruler and subject. For rulers, emotional rhetoric and affective display were integral components of the construction of power for both male and female monarchs, who operated within culturally and gender-specific practices of both feeling and rule. Power and authority were expressed through controlled emotional labour and deliberate feeling displays of the body, captured in eyewitness reports, portraits, ceremony, entries and ritual practices and carefully constructed emotional rhetoric underpinned the notion of rule in edicts, letters, and other textual forms. Through particular, often practised and sometimes unexpected, emotional displays, monarchs could assert their authority over subordinates and exert wide influence. They could do so as individuals, and also as representatives of a system of rule.
By Susan Broomhall
Susan Broomhall
Susan Broomhall is Professor of Early Modern History at The University of Western Australia. She researches women and gender, power, emotions, material culture, and knowledge practices from late medieval to nineteenth-century Europe, although the particular focus of her work is early modern France and the Low Countries. Her edited collection, Women and Power at the French Court, 1483-1563, was published by Amsterdam University Press in 2018. Researcher Page
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