This article focuses on the emotional dimensions of
academic historical work within the early twentieth-century Finnish community
of historians. Its starting point is the inextricable intertwining of reason
and emotion – a premise that is today accepted across disciplines. As the
cognitive and the affective are interdependent in the production of knowledge,
the formation of judgements and the making of meaning, emotions lie at the core
of historians’ scholarly practices and the construction of the scholarly self. By
discovering four main types of feeling-thinking processes that are common in
historical work, the article argues that emotions not only make history
personal, but also make it meaningful in the first place. On the theoretical
level, the analysis leans on the insights of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, makes use
of readings of Mark Johnson’s and James M. Jasper’s work and exploits the
concept of the relational self of the historians Mary Fulbrook and Ulinka
Rublack.