感情とは自然発生的な反応であると同時に文化的に学習されたパフォーマンスです。今日私たちが「感情」とひとくくりにしているのは、言語、文化、信仰、生活様式における長く多様な歴史的変化の産物であり、感情の歴史とは主観の歴史と社会的・文化的歴史が出会う場所であるということができます。そうした目で過去を振り返り、歴史家たちがそれぞれに過去について何を語ってきたかに注目することで、現在の私たちの感情に新たな光を当てます。感情の歴史家たちが心理学や精神医学と対話しながら発展させてきた重要な考え方を、特に基本的感情、心理的構築、感情理論に注目しながら解説します。
   

       
Emotions are complex mental states that resist reduction. They are visceral reactions but also beliefs about the world. They are spontaneous outbursts but also culturally learned performances. They are intimate and private and yet gain their substance and significance only from interpersonal and social frameworks. And just as our emotions in any given moment display this complex structure, so their history is plural rather than singular. The history of emotions is where the history of ideas meets the history of the body, and where the history of subjectivity meets social and cultural history.
    
In this Very Short Introduction, Thomas Dixon traces the historical ancestries of feelings ranging from sorrow, melancholy, rage, and terror to cheerfulness, enthusiasm, sympathy, and love. The picture that emerges is a complex one, showing how the states we group together today as "the emotions" are the product of long and varied historical changes in language, culture, beliefs, and ways of life. The grief-stricken rage of Achilles in the Iliad, the happiness inscribed in America's Declaration of Independence, the love of humanity that fired crusades and revolutions through the ages, and the righteous rage of modern protest movements all look different when seen through this lens.
     
With examples from ancient, medieval, and modern cultures, including forgotten feelings and the creation of modern emotional regimes, this Very Short Introduction sheds new light on our emotions in the present, by looking at what historians can tell us about their past. Dixon explains the key ideas of historians of emotions as they have developed in conversation with psychology and psychiatry, with attention paid especially to ideas about basic emotions, psychological construction, and affect theory.