Feeling rules are norms surrounding emotions, particularly emotional expressions in social contexts, and are a well-known aspect of human societies in both the past and present. As a subdiscipline, the history of emotions has found great profit in tracking changing feeling rules over time to better understand social formations. Emotional norms are culturally, geographically, and socially specific, providing coherence to communities or serving as instruments of distinction within them. Yet some historians have found a sole focus on the normative insufficient for grasping, in their entirety, the historical aspects of emotions and their specific functions. This special issue suggests some new ways to think about escaping the dualism of emotional norms and emotional experiences – or, put more broadly, of structure and subjectivity – without privileging either as the determining factor in shaping social relations. To show the interrelations between rules and experiences, we draw from sociological work on taste and social distinction, arguing that emotions become socially potent and drivers of historical change by being both means and objects of value judgments. This introduction provides an overview of feelings rules and emotional norms in the history of emotions, connects these to work in the sociology of taste, and introduces the case studies in the special issue.

Amidst the post-war “economic miracle” (Wirtschaftswunder) in Germany, the government tapped into foreign labor resources, including Turkish “guest workers.” Over the years, Turkish immigrants and their descendants have remained central to societal discussions, particularly since Recep Tayyip Erdoğan rose to leadership in Turkey, garnering a devoted voter base among this demographic. Drawing on the concepts of emotional community, feeling rules, and emotion work, I trace how the affinity towards Erdoğan is, in part, fueled by conflicts arising from broader tensions between the German majority and the Turkish-origin community. For many, the allure of “Erdoğanism” lies in its provision of ethno-nationalist solidarity, offering a coping mechanism for enduring societal challenges, even after decades in Germany. Employing narrative analysis, this article delves into how the embrace of “Erdoğanism” appears to serve as a means to suppress feelings of national humiliation and evoke a hubristic sense of national pride.

Many early modern Italian nobles were obsessed with duelling. Despite bans from secular authorities and the Council of Trent, the violent honor complex was veiled in part under the title of the scienza cavalleresca, the knightly science, which provided rules for the conduct of conflicts between aristocrats and those with noble aspirations. Such rules were both concerned with emotions and the object of emotions. Using the tools of the history and sociology of emotions, this article contributes to the emotional history of the scienza cavalleresca through examining the rules proposed both as feeling rules in themselves and as objects of emotional judgment. Toward the turn of the eighteenth century, more aristocrats began rejecting such codes with explicit objections to the scienza cavalleresca and its ethical basis. One such noble was Paolo Mattia Doria (1667–1746), a notorious duellist in the closing years of the Spanish regime, who renounced the vendetta and expressed disgust with its practitioners. A zealous convert against the noble vengeance system, he will serve as an example to explore the wider struggle over emotional values in early modern Italy and, more generally, in societies with high levels of violence. The article traces the role of emotions in the scienza cavalleresca, the taste for dispute through one genre (letters of challenge or cartelli di sfida), then explores the case of Doria. From these three stages, the article argues for the significance of adopting approaches from the sociology of emotions to analyze elite cultures of violence.

This article focuses on the discussions around female athletes and their emotions in the German and Austrian press of the 1920s. In the course of the sports boom of the interwar years, more and more women participated in public sports competitions and demanded their right to be taken seriously as sportswomen. Their public appearance aroused mixed feelings and heated social debates about how much and what kind of sport was appropriate for women, which were reflected in discussions and narratives around the figure of the “sportsgirl.” Sportsgirls were imbued with a novel emotional style to which ambition and audacity – ways of feeling that were cultivated during competitive sports and that contrasted with traditional bourgeois female feeling rules – were key. Sportsgirls and their emotional style were the subject of many stories, reports, pictures, and articles that were published in the growing sports press of the time – and they were judged and evaluated for the emotional style they embodied. The press was a potent platform and site of the formation of feeling rules; as such, discussions around sportsgirls point to the (embodied) experiences of the athletes and indicate how the emotional style that derived from them was turned into a tool to reshape social conventions and feeling rules for women beyond the sports arena.

This article examines how Dutch citizens with long-term care needs have used existing legal opportunities to respond to cuts in publicly financed care. Unexpectedly, most did not make use of their right to appeal the reduction or elimination of their previous entitlements, even when this led to marked problems in daily life. Thirty interviews with disabled and elderly persons and their care-givers revealed that specific social norms on how to feel about the cuts inhibited the lodging of appeals. Given the new policy's stated intention of preserving care for the most needy, many affected clients felt they had no right to be angry. Despite their (often objectively warranted) grievances, they did not appeal as breaking with the new moral code would trigger feelings of shame – of not being autonomous, of demanding too much when others are worse off, and of appearing ungrateful.