Emotional Lexicons is the result of the History of Emotions joint research project led by historian Ute Frevert at the Berlin Max Planck Institute for Human Development. It was first published as Gefühlswissen in German in 2011, with the English edition following in 2014. The idea for this project, however, had already emerged in 2005, one year before Thomas Anz advocated an ‘emotional turn’ in cultural studies. Since then, studies on emotions have flourished, with historians focusing on the eighteenth-century ‘era of sensibility’, nineteenth-century Romanticism, and the study of individual feelings such as pain and shame. Frevert and her team of eight authors – Monique Scheer, Anne Schmidt, Pascal Eitler, Bettina Hitzer, Nina Verheyen, Benno Gammerl, Christian Bailey and Margrit Pernau – deliver a longue durée study of the vocabulary of feeling in German, English and French lexica between 1700 and 2000. Hence Emotional Lexicons represents foundational research into the changing social reflections and semantics of emotions over three centuries.

As Frevert points out, the aim of the volume is to provide neither a history of the psychology and philosophy of emotions nor a study of individual feelings and the politics of emotions, but rather to ‘determine the place that emotions commanded in European societies in the modern world’ (p. 3). Contrary to Norbert Elias's claim of modernity's course towards rationality, the volume argues that since the eighteenth century the modern Western world has developed a comprehensive understanding of emotions that is highly ambivalent. The common approach linking the diverse contributions is the location of emotions within a wide range of academic disciplines and ideas, and the attempt to ascertain whether, despite all differences, patterns of how emotions have been recognized over the centuries can be discerned.

The first two contributions, by Frevert and Scheer, discuss the range of intellectual influences that nurtured definitions of emotions in encyclopedias from 1700 onwards. Once encyclopedias began to target the educated bourgeois middle classes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the educational imperative of producing valid, standardized knowledge arose. Encyclopedias highlighted interpersonal emotional feelings as positive characteristics of a middle-class identity. In their self-understanding, bourgeois people were capable of love and friendship, in contrast to aristocrats who came to be seen as unsympathetic and incapable of true feelings. Mapping out the relevance of emotions in the tending of the bourgeois soul and mind, Scheer takes us on a journey through the intellectual history of emotions. She locates the role emotions played in many academic disciplines from 1700 onwards. Similarly, Hitzer pursues an intellectual history of emotions, exploring how entries on emotions conveyed medical ideas of healing. Both contributions clearly demonstrate that emotions were continuously present in intellectual concepts, but were constantly being relocated. A consideration as to whether and how understandings of emotions had repercussions in political thought and social organization, however, is missing from these essays.

This gap is closed in the following chapters. Verheyen analyses the relationship between age and emotions. She concludes that the long-standing invocation of happiness in old age needs to be read as a normative caution in present discourses, suggesting that those who do not manage to be happy when elderly are likely to be considered sick. Schmidt and Eitler take encyclopedias only as a starting point, and expand the scope of their inquiries to cover the underlying debates that generated the often contradictory perceptions of emotions as portrayed in encyclopedias. Debates about the identification of emotional expression, as Schmidt shows, moved away from eighteenth-century philosophical–religious and artistic explanations to biological discourses in the nineteenth century. By this time, emotional expressions became universal features, while environment, education and class were dismissed as formative influences. Eitler examines the debates underlying entries in encyclopedias to demonstrate the changing and often biased perceptions of the extent to which emotions served as features to distinguish between humans and animals.

The somewhat neglected comparison between French, German and English encyclopedias – given that the majority of articles focus on German ones – is acknowledged in the contributions by Bailey, Pernau and Gammerl. A comparison of emotional concepts proves particularly insightful when examining questions of how ideas of feeling informed the understanding of social and political orders. Reading emotional vocabulary as expressions of governance, Bailey points to the different roles emotions played in community-building processes. Eighteenth-century British encyclopedias stated that only a stable government could act as a facilitator of social emotions. Neither family nor friends, but only political engagement in communities, could fully satisfy the expansive nature in man. By contrast, German encyclopedias of the same time hardly offered any theories of the relationship between state or empire and communities. Focusing on the question of how emotions were thought to establish national identities, Pernau is interested in the contribution of emotions to processes of differentiation and hierarchization. Examining the attribution of emotions to concepts of civility, and extending her focus to a global level, Pernau investigates how English and French societies ideologized colonial rulership.

Gammerl's approach is best described as a history of the philosophy of emotions. He asks how the significance of closeness and distance has changed in the course of three centuries. Gammerl concludes that the modern history of emotions is not a linear process towards either distanced modes of experience or intensification of the private sphere. It is, rather, subject to constant shifts in conception that only can be sufficiently explained if put in historical context.

All in all, Emotional Lexicons is an innovate collection, the strength of which lies in the many angles from which it approaches a lexical study of the history of emotions in modernity. The aim to locate emotions as part of a social and cultural history is, however, only partially fulfilled. Indeed, some contributions allude to the fact that emotions were integral parts of normative perceptions of political, social and cultural orders, yet these essays still stick to a history of ideas. The relationship between prescriptive ideas and social practice, as a social-history approach would require, will need further exploration. Moreover, repetition across the contributions makes, in places, for laborious reading; this could have been avoided by a more stringent and focused editorial approach. Otherwise, this is a rich study, which applies diverse and innovative approaches towards a history of emotions. I recommend it to anyone interested in the history of emotions and ideas.