Rob Boddice Books

Focusing on the theories and methodologies in the study of emotions, this comprehensive guide highlights the significance of historical inquiry in understanding human experiences. It explores the intersections of emotions with various disciplines, providing an updated perspective on the field. The revisions enhance its relevance, making it a crucial resource for anyone interested in the complexities of emotional history and its implications for broader human understanding.

A call for historians of emotions and the senses to converge on a new history of experience. Unpicking some assumptions about affective and sensory experience, the human being is re-imagined as both biocultural and historical, reclaiming the analysis of human experience from biology and psychology and seeking new collaborative efforts.

In his Descent of Man, Charles Darwin placed sympathy at the crux of morality in a civilized human society. His idea buttressed the belief that white, upper-class, educated men deserved their sense of superiority by virtue of good breeding. It also implied that societal progress could be steered by envisioning a new blueprint for sympathy that redefined moral actions carried out in sympathy's name. Rob Boddice joins a daring intellectual history of sympathy to a portrait of how the first Darwinists defined and employed it. As Boddice shows, their interpretations of Darwin's ideas sparked a cacophonous discourse intent on displacing previous notions of sympathy. Scientific and medical progress demanded that "cruel" practices like vivisection and compulsory vaccination be seen as moral for their ultimate goal of alleviating suffering. Some even saw the so-called unfit--natural targets of sympathy--as a danger to society and encouraged procreation by the "fit" alone. Right or wrong, these early Darwinists formed a moral economy that acted on a new system of ethics, reconceptualized obligations, and executed new duties. Boddice persuasively argues that the bizarre, even dangerous formulations of sympathy they invented influence society and civilization in the present day.

A concise history of one of the most important figures in history: the father of modern medicine and inventor of vaccines

enlightening, easy to read ... This book is a must read for anyone who thinks they have accessed everything they need to on the topic of pain. Ibadete Fetahu, Nursing Times

What does it mean to feel something? What stimulates our desires, aspirations, and dreams? Did our ancestors feel in the same way as we do? In a wave of new research over the past decade, historians have tried to answer these questions, seeking  to make sense of our feelings, passions, moods, emotions, and sentiments. For the first time, however, Rob Boddice brings together the latest findings to trace the complex history of feelings from antiquity to the present.A History of Feelings is a compelling account of the unsaid—the gestural, affective, and experiential. Arguing that how we feel is the dynamic product of the existence of our minds and bodies in moments of time and space, Boddice uses a progressive approach that integrates biological, anthropological, and social and cultural factors, describing the transformation of emotional encounters and individual experiences across the globe. The work of one of the world’s leading scholars of the history of emotions, this epic exploration of our affective life will fascinate, enthrall, and move all of us interested in our own well-being—anyone with feeling.

Fully revised and updated, The history of emotions is the most up-to-date and comprehensive guide to the theories, methods, achievements, and problems in this field of historical inquiry and its intersections with other disciplines.It emphasises the importance of this kind of historical work for general understandings of the meaning of human experience.