AUSTRALIAN RESEARCH INTO EMOTIONAL CONTROL IN POLITICAL LIFE GOES TO THE US
The analysis of Australian researcher Diana Barnes into the politics of emotion and stoicism in the writings of William Temple has won her the 2013 James M. Osborne Fellowship in Literature and History at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Barnes, a Research Associate at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Europe 1100-1800 (CHE), has been developing this project while working with CHE Chief Investigator Susan Broomhall this year.
“In the early 1650s Dorothy Osborne wrote to her future husband William Temple admitting ‘I finde that my passion would quickly bee my Master again if I give it any liberty’. In another letter she stressed the dangers of Love: ‘tis a fault in anyone to be mastered by a passion, and of all passions love is perhaps the least pardonable in a woman’.”
Dr Barnes explained: “She describes herself and women in general here but reading across her extant correspondence it is clear that the self-restraint she describes is not a private feminine behaviour she models for her future husband’s eyes only, but loyalism, that is, a mode of political behaviour suited to royalists, male and female, in the period following the English Civil war.”
“During the early years of the Republic when Parliament was ascendant and Cromwell on the rise, royalists had to stoically restrain their display of the passions fuelling their commitment to what looked like a futile political cause,” Dr Barnes continued.
“Temple’s letters of reply have not survived, but the Beinecke holds materials that throw light on his response: a commonplace book containing short tragic romances that he wrote for Osborne during their courtship, his letters to his sister written 1667-76, political correspondence from 1677-9 documenting his activities as an ambassador brokering Protestant union in Europe between the Anglo Dutch wars, and his writings on history, politics brought to press by his secretary Jonathan Swift.”
Dr Barnes will investigate Temple’s expression and stoic control of emotion as a means of managing an active public political life in a rapidly changing and unpredictable political climate. “The shape of Temple's career as a diplomat after the Restoration provides evidence that he followed Osborne’s advice closely. Whereas Temple’s father was a royalist prepared to work for Parliamentarians during the Interregnum, Temple approached political adversity stoically. Temple was an advocate of a European protestant union between the Netherlands, Sweden and England and when that idea was in favour (three times over his career) he actively served the crown as an ambassador, but when it was not, he retreated to his estate and developed his gardens and wrote essays (including famously "Upon the Gardens of Epicurus: or, Of Gardening in the year 1685").” The materials held at the Beinecke promise not only to illuminate the political persona Temple constructed, but to open up wider questions about the role of emotion in early-modern political discourse and behaviour, the relationship between classical literary ideals of proper emotion and early modern political subjectivity, and how the particular historical and political emotional experience of the English civil war shaped the literary and political culture of the following century.
While she has been a Research Associate with CHE this year, Barnes has been focussed on emotions in communities formed through cross-cultural European encounter in the seventeenth century, particularly in literary and non-literary forms. She participated alongside project team members, Broomhall, Senior Research Fellow Jacqueline Van Gent and Research Associate Dr Alicia Marchant at the Feeling Things symposium in Melbourne on emotional debris in early modern Letters, and has been selected with Broomhall and Van Gent to present on Brilliana Harley a reluctant political agent at the Gender and Political Culture, 1400-1800 conference in Plymouth in August. She will also present in September on how classical heritage shapes the expression of emotion in early-modern literary and non-literary texts at the CHE Affective Heritage collaboratory she is organising with Broomhall and Marchant in Hobart.
Barnes continues her connection to CHE when, in October, she joins the Queensland node, as a UQ Postdoctoral Research Fellow, working with CI Peter Holbrook. In that role she will explore early-modern discourses of civility and community, further developing the research she conducted in New York this year under the auspices of the University of Melbourne’s S. Ernest Sprott Fellowship.
Media contact:
Dr Diana Barnes
diana.barnes@uwa.edu.au