Online-Lecture: From rage to happiness, from sadness to joy: the visualization of embodied emotions of children and parents in early modern Europe

In this lecture we will discuss a variety of emotions of children and parents in early modern Europe by using drawings and paintings as sources (cf. my Children’s Emotions in Europe, 1500–1900: A Visual History (2024). So we look through the eye and the gaze of artists to bodily manifested emotions in the past. This approach raises some conceptual questions, such as the impact of the artist’s gaze on the distance between source and reality, the risk of anachronism in using ‘emotion’ as an overarching historical category for a period in which not ‘emotion’ but ‘passion’ and ‘affect’ dominate the discourse (cf. Descartes’ Les passions de l’âme), and the discussion about the genesis of parental commitment to children’s happiness started by Peter Stearns.
We will discuss a variety of emotions, from rage to happiness and from sadness to joy. In that context we will also look at images about the death of a child. Those images, about children on their deathbed in individual portraits and as seemingly still living member of the family in family portraits, can give us more insight into the parental emotional responses on the death of their child, and so contribute to the debate on the parent-child relationship in early modern Europe that arose following the publication of  L’Enfant et la Vie Familiale sous l’ Ancien Régime by Philippe Ariès.

Date: 7 November 2024, 18.00 h via ZOOM

Click here for more information about Prof. Dr. J. J. H. (Jeroen) Dekker, University of Groningen (Nederlands)

Click here for more information about the lecture.

Please sign up for the lecture until 5 November, by sending an email to Daniela Praust. You will then receive the Zoom link by email.