The History of Emotion: Were feelings always felt this way?

If you hit your finger with a hammer, would you feel it the same way a medieval carpenter did, doing exactly the same thing?

Well, apparently not.

We think of our feelings as the most private and immediate things we own.

Hit your thumb, and YOU know pain when YOU feel it.

But historians of emotion say that's a modern conceit. Pain, grief, love, loneliness — none of them are fixed.

They're made, by religion, by culture and science, and most of all by the stories we tell each other about what a feeling is supposed to be.

Lets look into the history of feeling itself.

Were the emotions of the past even the same species of experience as ours?

GUESTS:

Professor Katie Barclay is a Future Fellow in the Department of History and Archaeology, and author of Loneliness in World History  and Caritas: Neighbourly Love & the Early Modern Self

Professor Stephanie Trigg, a Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Melbourne University. Among her near a dozen books is "Weeping Like a Beaten Child: Figurative Language and the Emotions in Chaucer and Malory."

A/Prof Rob Boddice a historian of science, medicine and the emotions, based at Freie Universitaet Berlin and McGill University, Montreal, is author of Knowing Pain: A History of Sensation, Emotion, and Experience, and Research Fellow at the Uni of Helsinki in Finland.