Histories of both emotion and sexuality explore the ways that bodies and embodied practices are shaped by time, culture, and location. This chapter uses the theoretical and methodological insights from the History of Emotions to consider the emotions associated with sexuality and how these have taken cultural form at different moments. It first considers the emotions related to sexual function and desire, noting how different biological models informed what emotions were expected and experienced. It then turns to love as the predominant emotion connected with sexual practices, considering the boundaries of who and what should be incorporated within such feeling. The chapter then turns to an exploration of the emotions, particularly intimacy, of reproductive labour, acknowledging sexual practices, including those are contractual and exploitative, that sometimes sit uneasily within a framework of love. Finally, the chapter highlights some of the emotions produced by the management and policing of sexuality, such as shame and loneliness, recognising that sexuality has been a contested moral domain for many groups. Using diverse examples across time and space, this chapter seeks to denaturalise the emotions of sexuality and to provide a framework upon which further research can build.

In 1791, Michael Welsh provided the Scottish Justiciary Court with a statement into the events that led to the death of his ‘wife’ Mary McDonald. Welsh was thirty-four years old, from County Kerry in Ireland, and had worked since he was fifteen as a travelling merchant. He had come to Scotland around four years earlier, chiefly to sell his wares across the Scottish Highlands and central belt. His goods included clothing and accessories, like buckles, watches and pins. He met Mary McDonald whilst visiting Dumfries in the southwest of Scotland in December 1790. She was the daughter of a ‘residenter’ there and the wife of Hugh Finnan. The couple agreed to travel together, McDonald going as Welsh's mistress or wife, as he called her. She brought some lint (unspun cotton) to the marriage that she had received from a factory to spin (part of the ‘putting out’ system), and which she resold. She also had clothes and credit with various other people. As they headed north through Glasgow, McDonald was attacked by Welsh's lawful wife, Nelly Sullivan, who gathered such a crowd the couple were forced to quickly move on. On another occasion, a passing man admired McDonald and Welsh asked him what price he would pay for her, something he later claimed was just banter between men. Travelling through the country by foot, the couple did business with several people en route; at some places they left their goods in storage, knowing they would not sell in other regions.

TO THE MODERN READER, begging appears an unmanly act. The association of modern manliness, and indeed the modern individual, with independence, self-sufficiency, ‘breadwinning’ or ‘provision’, and equality and fraternity locates the dependency of the beggar in unmasculine, even feminine, territory. Relying on another, the beggar is placed as unable to help himself, affirming his ‘lack’ and his subordinate place in the social hierarchy. Such a positioning of the self is challenging for modern historians who, as individuals, resist dependency, seeing it as a threat to autonomous selfhood. While feminist and postmodernist scholars challenge such discourses of autonomy, celebrating the benefits of embracing the other to our sense of identity and to understanding historical selves, we still find it difficult to apply such analysis to deeply hierarchical relationships, where one self appears so vulnerable, so reliant on the benevolence – the exercise of power – of the powerful. As feminists, we resist the implication that dependency (so closely tied to femininity) is ‘negative’, that reliance on the other makes us less; yet we seem drawn to place more emphasis on agency, on resistance, on negotiation, than on the ways in which dependency shapes the self.

Reflecting this, the history of beggars has not viewed them as entirely helpless. Begging has been located amongst a range of strategies that men and women used to make ends meet, to survive in times of economic downturn, or to further their families’ social mobility. As Tim Hitchcock notes, begging in the eighteenth century was an acknowledged social practice that located beggars within the community and endowed them with particular rights. In this framework, begging was less a form of debasement of the self than a method of negotiation within particular power structures.

Understanding begging as a social practice is useful for a study of early modern and modernising Britain, where social and political equality was far from the idealised social structure.

The broad legal framework for Scottish inheritance practice had been in place for several centuries by the time John Chancellor wrote this bond of provision for his children in 1720. Within it, following both common custom amongst much of the Scottish landed classes and inheritance law, he arranged for part of his property to be placed in the hands of trustees to be sold for the benefit of his children. From the proceeds, he allocated 10,000 merks to each of his younger children and the remainder, if any, to his eldest son Alexander, who also inherited the family estate. As he noted within his bond, his choice to provide for his children was motivated by duty – he was ‘bound to provide’ – but a duty that originated in his ‘natural love and affection’ for his children.

The duty of love that parents owed children was a recurring motif across the early modern period, expounded as a ‘natural’ duty in sermons and conduct books, and placed alongside expectations that parents provide for, educate, and protect them. During the seventeenth century, the growing popularity of natural law theories amongst lawyers and philosophers across Europe reinforced the importance of natural affection within the family. Most argued that this emotional bond between parent and child was a biological or innate response designed to ensure the continuation of the population. As John Tillotson, a seventeenth-century archbishop of Canterbury whose works were reprinted in Scotland across the eighteenth century, noted with regard to the ‘affection and tenderness’ due to children: ‘there cannot be a greater reproach to Creatures that are endued with Reason, than to neglect a duty to which Nature directs even Brute Creatures by a blind and unthinking Instinct’.

Despite Tillotson's confidence, the origins of this instinct and the implications for the emotional relationship between parent and children were topics of considerable debate.