Emotions in Historiography

This article focuses on the emotional dimensions of academic historical work within the early twentieth-century Finnish community of historians. Its starting point is the inextricable intertwining of reason and emotion – a premise that is today accepted across disciplines. As the cognitive and the affective are interdependent in the production of knowledge, the formation of judgements and the making of meaning, emotions lie at the core of historians’ scholarly practices and the construction of the scholarly self. By discovering four main types of feeling-thinking processes that are common in historical work, the article argues that emotions not only make history personal, but also make it meaningful in the first place. On the theoretical level, the analysis leans on the insights of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, makes use of readings of Mark Johnson’s and James M. Jasper’s work and exploits the concept of the relational self of the historians Mary Fulbrook and Ulinka Rublack.