Porscha Fermanis's Romantic Pasts provides a nuanced, thoughtful, and much-needed reevaluation of the often-maligned and dismissed Romantic-era historiography. Fermanis counters the conventional narrative that histories written in the Romantic era were hobbled by sentimentality and added little to the establishment of the contemporary discipline of professional history. Building on Raymond Williams's conception of "structures of feeling," Fermanis adds in more recent work in affect studies such as "Lauren Berlant, Carolyn Dinshaw, Brian Massumi, and others [who] focus on the political and ideological implications of embodied experience and action" (10). Fermanis accordingly demonstrates that Romantic-era historians hold complex and subtle conceptions about the relationship between feeling and rationality, which raise questions that are fundamental to historiography. Rather than being merely "anomalous, alternative, or transitional" (178), Romantic-era histories are foundational for two reasons. First, Romantic historiography's sustained engagement with archival and first-person accounts laid the groundwork for nineteenth-century historiography, proving "integral to the rise of empirical history through its incorporation of antiquarianism, its emphasis on documentary and material research, and its inauguration of inductive and hermeneutic methodologies" (178). Second, in the wake of the linguistic turn that undermined the persistent valorization of post-Romantic historians as Romanticism's "more scientific successors" (178), the idiosyncratic techniques of Romantic historiography have become especially relevant: they provide "a diverse set of historiographical alternatives to empirical and positivist history based on investments in certain types of feeling, sympathetic, or sentimental history" (178).

The first chapter contrasts the characterizations of sentiment in Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France and in Wollstonecraft's Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution and two Vindications. Burke and Wollstonecraft both address how sentiment in individuals operates collectively in social movements. Fermanis points out that, for Burke, sentiment is negatively valued: "any collective agential force involves the disintegration of the integrity of the national body and the chaotic aggregation of atomistic, individual, and primarily negative passions" (56). Wollstonecraft's more nuanced view of social history "rests on a participatory understanding of the large-scale solidarity and collective engagement of agential beings, who have the political capacity to act and make changes" (56). Wollstonecraft's value, for Fermanis, is twofold: she rejects the conservative notion that revolutionary sentiment coalescing in a population is "essentially theatrical, spectatorial, and ahistorical," and therefore inauthentic and dangerous (57); and she articulates a conception of history in which social movements are constituted by reason and sentiment working together, over time, toward "the people's pedagogic transformation into active political consciousness" (57). Thus, both Burke and Wollstonecraft treat the relationship between an individual's sentiments and reason as a synecdoche for the relationship between a society's democratic impulses and its autocratic institutions. Wollstonecraft's "open and dynamic conception of experience as something severed from the lawful violences of tradition" (57), however, is the more useful.

Chapter Two brings the influence of novel-writing on Romantic-era historiography to the fore by comparing William Godwin and Thomas Carlyle's characterizations of Oliver Cromwell. Fermanis posits a "shift within written history from the 1820s onwards...towards a behavioralist study of the historical self as an internalized subject-in-formation" (60). Godwin's History of the Commonwealth and Carlyle's Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches focalize the contradictions and contingencies of history through the psychological vicissitudes of a decisive historical figure, with techniques "that partly emerged from their use of eyewitness sources and partly from the example of the novel, particularly the epistolary novel with its techniques of instantaneous description and reflection" (82). As in the first chapter, the distinction between the two historians can be found in the role reason plays in decision-making. Godwin, like Wollstonecraft, sees "internal rhetoric as a conscious form of ethical self-deliberation" (83) and emphasizes "that historical individuals are socially conditioned beings" (72). Carlyle, like Burke, on the other hand, emphasizes "non-deliberative, unconscious, and artless moments, illuminating the 'pervasive, unconscious primary rhetoric' that shapes the evolving self" (82-3).

Methodologically, Godwin "is more committed to the narrative possibilities offered by eyewitness accounts than he is to philosophic methods of causation" (68) and eschews putative impartiality, writing, "If to treat good and evil as things having no essential difference, be impartiality, such impartiality I disavow" (qtd. 68). Carlyle is more conflicted. His goal "of disappearing behind his subject" is overwhelmed "by his interventions, comments, annotations, and fictions," leaving him to conclude that "the processes of loss and decay...make historical reconstruction difficult and even impossible" (81). As Fermanis writes: "Carlyle's famous vision of a 'shoreless chaos' of 'mouldering' documents...shows us a period of history so lost, so obscured by 'the wreck and dead ashes of some six unbelieving generations,' that it reveals nothing but death and darkness" (81).

Chapter Three examines Walter Scott's History of Scotland, Thomas Moore's History of Ireland, and Robert Southey's History of Brazil in order to represent an emerging genre in the nineteenth century: the history of the-nation state, focused on the "ethnonationalist politics of identity formation" (88). Fermanis tackles two methodological questions. The first focuses on the "epistemological value of antiquarianism": how might "folklore, oral culture, myths, and other vernacular sources...be endowed with historical legitimacy" (88)? Second, how could historians use those antiquarian sources to represent "feelings of national belonging and other collective emotional phenomena" (88)? As Fermanis shows, "the rise of historicism was deeply connected to the emergence of a volkish culture in which the experiences of the nation's people were considered the true source of political legitimacy" (92). Scott's ambivalent celebration of Scotland in his novels, valorizing Scottish folk culture while simultaneously portraying it as a relic of a superseded moment, similarly governs his History of Scotland. Although he "champions the legitimacy of Scottish defensive warfare right up until the Union, the ongoing tensions between assimilation and resistance in his rendition of Scotland's national past are ultimately resolved within a Burkean model of prescription and established loyalty" (97). Scott sees Britain's imperial union as a necessary and beneficial step in the modernization of Scotland, and Britishness as something to which a modern citizen must aspire. Moore, however, "rejects both the assumption of English civility and the presumed normality of English national sovereignty, cataloguing instead a long history of English anti-Catholicism and racial prejudice" (107). Moore describes England's centuries-long role in Ireland as predatory and disruptive, calling its history "from the twelfth century onwards" a period "that involves the traumatic loss of land, language, and culture: 'a large proportion of the wretched people... were forced to fight for a spot to exist upon, even in their own land'" (104).

The chapter then examines, via Southey, "expansionist paradigms of nationhood" and "the imbrication of racial assimilation and feelings of belonging in imperial narratives of national consolidation" (88). Like Moore, Southey is "explicit about the communal nature of European guilt in his anti-slavery critique, noting that '[t]here is an ineffaceable stigma upon the Europeans in their intercourse with those whom they treat as inferior races'" (110). Like Scott's vision of Scotland, Southey's vision of Brazil is "as a model for the productive cohabitation of races--an emerging mestizo culture.... Southey detaches nationhood from racial purity while simultaneously making it heavily contingent on a merged or fused ethnicity" (114).

The fourth chapter contrasts T. B. Macaulay's "uniform, polished, and to an extent Johnsonian" style of historical writing in History of England with Thomas Carlyle's synthesis of "the competing traditions of Anglo-Saxon Gothicism and Celtic or Gaelic emotionalism" in his French Revolution: A History (119). Macaulay's appreciation of the "data-driven quality" of Henry's Hallam's Constitutional History led him to develop an inductive, "vernacular history drawn from popular print culture, folklore, ephemeral pamphlets, broadsheets, and other sources that antiquarian publishing societies like Scott's Bannatyne Club had done so much to promote and endorse" (125). Carlyle, on the other hand, represents himself as toiling at an impossible task, writing his works as "palimpsests that block any transparent access to the past" (132). He "radically breaks with the protocols of historical style established in the reviewing culture of the period in order to resituate the springs of human nature in deep irrational passions" (135-6). As in his work on Cromwell, such idiosyncrasies portray a nation's democratic and egalitarian impulses as those of "irrational actors who forfeit both mind and feelings...in a way that recalls... mesmerism and other spiritualist practices" (137).

What the two historians share is a methodology that contributes to the development of social history. Macaulay attempts "to produce an ethnography of the nation state (and to build historical knowledge from the ground up rather than from the top down)" (129). Carlyle similarly tries to explain history as the product of a broad social field; his core insight is "that historical writing should capture and express the dynamical processes of emerging structures of feeling" (136). While these two early attempts at social history have been generally dismissed--Macaulay for being "Whiggish, naively progressivist, and novelistic" and Carlyle for "his hero worship and authoritarianism, and his irregular, illogical, or queer style" (142)--Fermanis argues that "they were central, rather than incidental" (146) to the formation of historical discourse as a specialized field.

The last chapter turns to how periodicals were instrumental in defining the norms that would subsequently guide professional historians. Fermanis argues that the specialization of historiography was not a "deepening and narrowing of the scope of knowledge," but "an alteration in the relationship between theory and practice, and increasingly between philosophical and empirical impulses in history-writing" (148). Generally, this meant coming to favor the empirical: "the historian should work gradually by accretion" and engage in practical "questions of source criticism," rather than become bogged down in questions about how and why history unfolds the way it does (163). This methodological consolidation associated serious historians with "impartiality" (168). It tended to sideline women writers, who favored "hybrid genres...such as a travelogues and memoirs" (158), and to dismiss their "polemical or emotional style" as "outside of the conventions or norms for written history" (172).

Fermanis tells two intertwined stories. The first story, that Romantic historiography played a foundational role in setting the professional standards that would come to characterize the discipline, is rigorously documented and full of specific insights. The second story, about how the irregularities and idiosyncrasies of Romantic histories might reveal the relationship between affect and historical agency, strikes me as less clearly elaborated, though perhaps more complex and richer in significance. The structure of Romantic Pasts reproduces the historiographical shift that it describes, with questions about the professionalization of history-writing as a discipline eclipsing any solution to earlier theoretical questions. What the idiosyncrasies of Romantic-era historiography might contribute to the present is left to Fermanis's "Epilogue," a broad survey of how contemporary intellectual history attempts to use affect at scale to understand core questions: What constitutes our access to the past? How do societies cohere or not cohere through historical action? How should postmodern critiques of subjectivity be applied to larger social structures--institutional, national, racial, ethnic, religious, political, economic, and so on? Fermanis concludes, quite sensibly, with a yes/and approach: "The dialogical nature of the relationship between past, present, and future in many of the histories discussed in this book--variously dismissed by later historians as unscientific, anachronistic, prophetic, or presentist--may be the period's greatest contribution to western philosophies of history, simultaneously historicizing and calling attention to the limits of historicizing; objectifying feeling and critiquing the objectivist desire to hide or purge the historian's own intentionality; illuminating the otherness of the past only to provide a greater sense of its persistent relationship to the present and future" (189).

It may be worthwhile to mention another implication of Romantic Pasts: Romantic-era historians developed the metaphor, which has remained largely intact, of society as a collective individual. It is not abundantly clear that this metaphor holds. Why should we assume that the psychological factors involved in individual decision-making adequately account for the sociological forces at play in history, especially when the social does not seem to resolve neatly into a single body? One way to answer this question would be to invoke Michel Foucault, who credits the French historian Henri de Boulainvilliers with developing the conceptual "grid of intelligibility" for history (Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-9176, trans. David Macey, Picador, 2003, 163). Boulainvilliers, argues Foucault, conceptualized history as a "calculation of forces" (161), a measure of the unfolding struggles among groups within the state. In Foucault's grid, intelligibility means reading all social elements as facets of warfare: "A history that takes as its starting point the fact of war itself and makes its analysis in terms of war can relate all these things--war, religion, politics, manners, and characters--and can therefore act as a principle that allows us to understand history" (163). What Fermanis's book demonstrates is that Romantic-era historiography develops an alternative to Boulainvilliers's conception of social relations as warfare. Romantic historians represented social forces as if they were the interaction of the body's mental and physical stimuli. Of course, these two dominant metaphors (society as generalized warfare and society as somatic communication) can be combined, as whenever someone asserts that a society's more rational elements must putatively control its irrational impulses, or characterizes certain ideas or people as pathogens that must be eradicated.

So even though the Romantic metaphor of the social--as a complex of the rational and irrational, reason and emotion, sense and sensibility--remains a metaphor, it is a valuable one. It not only provides a plausible basis for understanding the reciprocal action between sociohistorical and individual constitutions; it also, unlike the Foucault/Boulainvilliers model, offers an alternative to the assertion that one can only understand society as constituted by relations of internal antagonism. It does not institutionalize the putatively rational condition in which peace is merely a rest period in the "general economy of weapons" (Foucault 160), and a continuation by other means of the ceaseless conflict between social groups. We have reached a moment in which the ideology that the Romantics developed via this metaphor has been shown to be always partial, recursively constitutive, unevenly developed, produced with both blindness and insight, present only as traces, synthesized simultaneously at the level of individual action and at the level of narrative. That we have done so has only, as Romantic Pasts shows, made the metaphor more necessary.

Jonathan Crimmins is Associate Professor of English at The University of Virginia's College at Wise.

Porscha Fermanis responds to Jonathan Crimmins (2025-05-16):

I would like to thank Jonathan Crimmins for a thoughtful and beautifully written review of Romantic Pasts. I confess that I did not fully register--and therefore do not myself explicitly foreground--a thread that Crimmins usefully identifies in some of the book's chapters: namely, that the relationship between individual feeling and reason is a "synecdoche for the relationship between a society's democratic impulses and its autocratic institutions." Nor do I always overtly frame my arguments via what Crimmins calls the "Romantic metaphor of the social" (i.e. the idea of "society as a collective individual" and/or the idea that somatic communication can stand as a metaphor for the social/collective body). Nevertheless, these are very elegant ways of explicating some of the book's primary arguments and I am grateful to Crimmins for illuminating them.

Crimmins identifies "two intertwined stories" in Romantic Pasts. The first is that "Romantic historiography played a foundational role in setting the professional standards that would come to characterize the discipline." The second examines "how the irregularities and idiosyncrasies of Romantic histories might reveal the relationship between affect and historical agency." The second story is clearly the more difficult proposition and I agree with Crimmins that the book is on firmer ground in relation to the first story. I understand my own intended purpose in relation to the second story a little differently: my concern is primarily with when and how feelings are themselves objectified and/or reified into a historically contingent object of study, with its own history and process of development. Whichever way the second story is understood, Crimmins generously acknowledges the complexity of the task, even if he sees it as "less clearly elaborated" than the first story.

I now come to Crimmins's gently worded criticism that Romantic Pasts tends to sideline theoretical questions to the epilogue in favor of more empirical questions about the formation of historical discourse as a specialized field. In this sense, there is indeed a measure of irony in the way the book's structure replicates the historiographical story it outlines. While I address theoretical and/or philosophical questions in short concluding codas at the end of each chapter (experiential history in Chapter 1, the historical-archival in Chapter 2, etc.), my engagement with these questions is relatively muted in the main body of the book--a deficit I attempt to mitigate in the epilogue, which explicitly engages with the role of affect in contemporary philosophies of history. I therefore accept Crimmins's point in the manner in which it was intended: constructively and with an eye to furthering conversations about Romantic-era intellectual history.