| Kommentar |
This course will examine histories of emotions, gender and selfhood through the lens of criminal legal cultures. As Martha Nussbaum has shown, law without appeals to the emotions is ‘virtually unthinkable’. Understandings of the kind of emotions that are ‘reasonable’ or not in a given context respond to existing social and moral norms. By examining case studies of criminal trials and legal contexts from the medieval period to present day, this course will interrogate how ideas about gender, emotions, the self, morality and legal responsibility changed (or did not change) over time. Criminal records – depositions, court testimonies, and media reporting – afford the historian a unique access to both normative understandings of categories such as emotions, gender and selfhood, but also to practices: how was gender, the body, and the self experienced and given meaning in the courtroom? Moreover, legal records are particularly rich sources since they give voice to people otherwise lost to the historical record: women as well as men, poor as well as rich. Enduring historiographical chronologies posit that people have becoming increasingly ‘civilized’, that they have become better at ‘restraining’ their emotions, and that violence was slowly replaced by the law. This course will trace – and challenge – these larger chronologies of change, examining how historians (can) think about categories of emotions, gender and selfhood through the legal sphere |
| Literatur |
Ute Frevert, Emotions in History: Lost and Found, Central European University Press, 2011• Ruth Harris, “Melodrama, hysteria and feminine crimes of passion in the fin-de-siècle”, History Workshop Journal, 25, 1, 1988 • Martha Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity. Disgust, shame and the law. Princeton University Press, 2004 • Jan Plamper, “The History of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns”, History and Theory, 49, 2010) • Joan Scott, 'Gender: a useful category of historical analysis', The American Historical Review, 91, 1986 • Daniel Lord Smail, “Hatred as a Social Institution in Late-Medieval Society”, Speculum,76, 1, 2001 • Pieter Spierenburg, “Violence and the civilizing process: does it work?”, Crime, Histoire & Sociétés /Crime, History & Societies, 5, 2, 2001 • Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self. Yale University Press, 2004. |
