Emotions in History – Lost and Found

Preface and acknowledgments

1 Preface and Acknowledgments When Gábor Klaniczay invited me to give the Natalie Zemon Davis annual lecture in 2009, I had four reasons to immediately accept the invitation. First, I felt honoured to be connected to Natalie, whom I admire so much for many things that are mentioned in this book, and for more that are not. Second, I was thrilled to visit the Central European University and meet with its famous faculty and brilliant students. Third, I was excited at the prospect of seeing Budapest again, a city I had last visited in 1992, and experiencing first hand how it had changed. Fourth, the invitation forced me to clarify my ideas on a topic that has concerned me for some time: how to think about emotions in modern history, about their shape, influence , and dynamics. My thanks go thus to Gábor and his colleagues, students and staff at CEU for giving me the opportunity to accomplish four tasks at once. They were 2 generous hosts and offered me a warm and inspiring welcome. Their comments on the lectures were enormously helpful, and so was the criticism I received from my colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. The final manuscript owes a tremendous lot to our discussions and debates at the Institute’s Centre for the History of Emotions. Uli Schreiterer gave my text a relentlessly critical reading and improved it in many ways. Kerstin Singer, Christina Becher and Kate Davison deserve my special gratitude for taking care of footnotes, illustrations and index as well as for polishing my rusty English. ...