Words in History of Emotion Research: Some (Slight) Limitations of the Lexical Approach

With good reason, there is widespread consensus that words are at the heart of emotion history research: historians of emotion spend an enormous amount of time on lexical analysis, reconstructing and delineating the affective vocabularies of the past. While readily acknowledging the essentialness of our scholarly commitment to words, this commentary offers a friendly reminder that, in some cases, an overly rigid lexical approach risks distorting how emotion is actually understood in the sources we explore. It uses Nicolas Coeffeteau’s A Table of Humane Passions (1621) as a case study to illustrate how some of our common scholarly assumptions about emotion words can in fact be confounded by a historical source – the lexical approach, in other words, can occasionally be limiting, and I argue that we should keep this slight caution in mind when analyzing the emotional language of the past.