Emotions and Violence in Early Modern War operates across two axes: technology and discipline, while converging on emotions. Over the past fifteen years, early modern scholars have begun to turn their attention to battlefields, war and violence, and theories of empire as objects of study. Although the character of war evokes a range of emotions, military historians have focused on fortifications, strategies, and pay to trace changes in warfare, thereby largely overlooking its emotional dimensions. Battlefields, as some historians of emotions have highlighted, are as much ideas as they are spaces for the conduct of warfare, and for the maintenance of violence. Implicated in military actions are the instrumentalization of emotions invoked to facilitate military triumph; these we call affective authority. This panel aims to bring together early modern scholars interested in the study of emotions, including anger, grief, joy, fear, and hate, in relation to war, violence, military discipline, or governance. 

Moreover, emerging scholarship suggests that emotions carry an affective authority. How this authority was exercised is crucial for investigating early modern cultures clashing in war. The battlefield, as a space, brought together exchanges of literary discourses, the circulation of texts, and ideas that influenced the modes of emotional expression and presentation. While technological advances and a lack of adequate training often meant quantifiable victory or defeat in most cases during a campaign, affective authority, penned in literary genres including art-of-war treatises, dialogues, chronicles, histories, and philosophical treatises that treated emotions categorically, was implicitly transforming and corroborating the war’s two axes. 

We invite proposals that address questions such as: what sources or methodologies change the meaning of a particular emotion? To what extent were emotions intertwined with political and military strategies? What, if anything, was distinctive about early modern emotions? What were some emotional dimensions of conduct and sociability? 

Submission Guidelines and Deadlines

- Abstract submission deadline: September 22

Proposals should include:

- A title (max. 15 words);

- An abstract (max. 200 words);

- A brief CV.

Please send your proposals to Moises Machuca ([email protected])