Soft: A Brief History of Sentimentality

by Ferdinand Mount

'[An] erudite, immensely entertaining book...Mount makes for a delightful guide' -- Literary Review

From troubadours to a thousand years of feelings, fads and furious sentiment, from renowned essayist Ferdinand Mount.

Whatever we think we feel, you can be sure that the past has had a part to play in it. In Soft, Ferdinand Mount tells the millennium-long history of emotion through delightful snapshots, often mischievous storytelling and a masterly command of history.

Mount explores the shifting importance societies have placed on empathy for the misfortunes of others. Each seismic moment, Mount argues, from the French Revolution to Civil Rights, has had a corresponding sentimental revolution that has fuelled great political turning points and come to define human civilization.

But no one wants to be accused of being sentimental; its detractors call it soppy, effeminate and populist – the stuff of soap operas and pop songs. The Reformation tried to stamp out excessive emotion, the Victorians resolutely maintained their stiff upper lips and no one loathed sentimentality more than the modernists – and yet, today, Mount argues it is not the stoics who are ruling the we are living in an age of emotion.

From the Occitan poets of the 12th century to Paul McCartney' songs, and modern debates around woke, this is a witty insight into the story of emotions and the way they have swayed human history.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Audiobook

320 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 11, 2025

About the author

Ferdinand Mount was born in 1939. For many years he was a columnist at the Spectator and then the Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Times. In between, he was head of the Downing Street Policy Unit and then editor of the Times Literary Supplement. He is now a prize-winning novelist and author of, most recently, the bestselling memoir Cold Cream. He lives in London.

Reviews

[Sarah Cupitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think the hot take was “woke” culture is just the latest chapter in humanity’s long struggle with feeling (anyway i found the comparisons quite interesting)

notes:
- When ancient Greek and Roman writers told stories of love, they treated it as a dangerous affliction sent by capricious gods – something that destroyed heroes rather than ennobled them.Warriors sought glory in combat and loyalty among comrades.Romance? barely worth mentioning
- Then, around 1100 AD in southern France, a group of wandering poets called troubadours came up with a revolutionary idea that seems completely natural to us today: that falling in love could be the most meaningful thing a person ever experiences.
- When Lancelot receives a comb still tangled with the queen’s hair, he repeatedly presses each strand to different parts of his face in an act of near-worship, then tucks them inside his clothing directly over his chest.This kind of obsessive physical devotion to a lover’s remnants would have baffled earlier generations.
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Soft
History is made of facts, not feelings – or so we’re told.But what if our sentimentality is more than soppy nonsense? This eye-opening Blink reveals how feelings have been the hidden force behind every major political revolution, from the abolition of slavery to civil rights movements.Spanning a thousand years of Western culture, it takes you from medieval troubadours all the way through to Twitter outrage, showing how each era’s emotional conventions have profoundly influenced everything from art and literature to law and social reform.
You’ll discover how troubadours invented love, how tear-jerking novels actually changed legislation, and why today’s “woke” culture is just the latest chapter in humanity’s long struggle with feeling.Love is love, we say today.But was it always love?
It turns out that our modern conception of love is actually a fairly new invention. When ancient Greek and Roman writers told stories of love, they treated it as a dangerous affliction sent by capricious gods – something that destroyed heroes rather than ennobled them.Warriors sought glory in combat and loyalty among comrades.Romance?
That was barely worth mentioning. Then, around 1100 AD in southern France, a group of wandering poets called troubadours came up with a revolutionary idea that seems completely natural to us today: that falling in love could be the most meaningful thing a person ever experiences.These poets created an entirely new literary vocabulary.Their songs portrayed love as an all-consuming force that gave life its purpose.Author C.S.
Lewis called this “one of the real changes in human sentiment” in recorded history. Take the medieval tale of Lancelot and Guinevere.When Lancelot receives a comb still tangled with the queen’s hair, he repeatedly presses each strand to different parts of his face in an act of near-worship, then tucks them inside his clothing directly over his chest.This kind of obsessive physical devotion to a lover’s remnants would have baffled earlier generations.The emotional transformation extended also into religious life.Crucifixes from earlier centuries showed Jesus standing upright with open eyes, radiating divine power.
By the 13th century, artists depicted his suffering in unflinching detail – twisted limbs, visible wounds, faces contorted in agony.Europeans wept freely at masses, processions, and public events.Displaying intense emotion became a sign of spiritual depth rather than weakness.Perhaps most surprisingly, this sentimental turn produced tangible political benefits.King Henry III of England exemplified the new sensibility.While military leaders derided him as ineffectual, he personally cared for lepers, funded hospitals nationwide, and maintained a daily welfare program feeding hundreds.
While critics expected disaster, his compassion-driven approach achieved stability that eluded more aggressive rulers.His peaceful diplomacy secured lasting treaties, the nation’s economy flourished dramatically, and early forms of representative government emerged. The troubadours catalyzed a fundamental shift in how Western culture understood emotion – showing that openness and empathy could be sources of strength rather than vulnerability.
After the discovery of modern love, open sentimentality had a long run – but it couldn’t last forever.Under King Henry VIII of England, the Reformation era ushered in a new anti-emotional culture that condemned tears and compassion. Henry VIII’s administrative reform of monasteries involved brutal executions, property seizures, and systematic destruction of sacred sites that had stood for centuries.
-
Soft
History is made of facts, not feelings – or so we’re told.But what if our sentimentality is more than soppy nonsense? This eye-opening Blink reveals how feelings have been the hidden force behind every major political revolution, from the abolition of slavery to civil rights movements.Spanning a thousand years of Western culture, it takes you from medieval troubadours all the way through to Twitter outrage, showing how each era’s emotional conventions have profoundly influenced everything from art and literature to law and social reform.
You’ll discover how troubadours invented love, how tear-jerking novels actually changed legislation, and why today’s “woke” culture is just the latest chapter in humanity’s long struggle with feeling.Love is love, we say today.But was it always love?
It turns out that our modern conception of love is actually a fairly new invention. When ancient Greek and Roman writers told stories of love, they treated it as a dangerous affliction sent by capricious gods – something that destroyed heroes rather than ennobled them.Warriors sought glory in combat and loyalty among comrades.Romance?
That was barely worth mentioning. Then, around 1100 AD in southern France, a group of wandering poets called troubadours came up with a revolutionary idea that seems completely natural to us today: that falling in love could be the most meaningful thing a person ever experiences.These poets created an entirely new literary vocabulary.Their songs portrayed love as an all-consuming force that gave life its purpose.Author C.S.
Lewis called this “one of the real changes in human sentiment” in recorded history. Take the medieval tale of Lancelot and Guinevere.When Lancelot receives a comb still tangled with the queen’s hair, he repeatedly presses each strand to different parts of his face in an act of near-worship, then tucks them inside his clothing directly over his chest.This kind of obsessive physical devotion to a lover’s remnants would have baffled earlier generations.The emotional transformation extended also into religious life.Crucifixes from earlier centuries showed Jesus standing upright with open eyes, radiating divine power.
By the 13th century, artists depicted his suffering in unflinching detail – twisted limbs, visible wounds, faces contorted in agony.Europeans wept freely at masses, processions, and public events.Displaying intense emotion became a sign of spiritual depth rather than weakness.Perhaps most surprisingly, this sentimental turn produced tangible political benefits.King Henry III of England exemplified the new sensibility.While military leaders derided him as ineffectual, he personally cared for lepers, funded hospitals nationwide, and maintained a daily welfare program feeding hundreds.
While critics expected disaster, his compassion-driven approach achieved stability that eluded more aggressive rulers.His peaceful diplomacy secured lasting treaties, the nation’s economy flourished dramatically, and early forms of representative government emerged. The troubadours catalyzed a fundamental shift in how Western culture understood emotion – showing that openness and empathy could be sources of strength rather than vulnerability.
After the discovery of modern love, open sentimentality had a long run – but it couldn’t last forever.Under King Henry VIII of England, the Reformation era ushered in a new anti-emotional culture that condemned tears and compassion. Henry VIII’s administrative reform of monasteries involved brutal executions, property seizures, and systematic destruction of sacred sites that had stood for centuries.When his commissioners arrived at Walsingham Abbey in the 1530s, they executed the dissenting Sub-prior as a public warning and auctioned off the property for a mere ninety pounds.
Within months, a private mansion occupied the site.Reformers like Archbishop Matthew Parker insisted that grieving the departed was disgraceful, “womanish” and “beastly.” During this era, the word “maudlin” emerged as a contemptuous term for emotional excess – ironically drawn from Mary Magdalene’s weeping at Christ’s tomb in the Gospels.Funeral practices transformed accordingly: crying at burials became evidence of insufficient faith in resurrection. This severity permeated economic policy as well.Hundreds of monastic infirmaries disappeared practically overnight, abandoning vulnerable populations who had depended on them for shelter and medical care.
Authorities began treating destitution as moral failure rather than a circumstance worthy of assistance.Without proof of forty days’ residence in a parish, the poor received nothing, condemning families to endless displacement as they searched for survival. William Dowsing embodied this destructive zeal most vividly.Appointed as official Commissioner for the Destruction of Monuments, he kept detailed records of obliterating artwork and symbols across 250 churches during a fifteen-month rampage.His journal entries catalog the carnage: scores of demolished paintings in one location, dozens of shattered glass angels in another.He destroyed memorial inscriptions requesting prayers and even dug through burial grounds where founders had rested for centuries.
This Protestant austerity resonated unexpectedly with Renaissance artistic philosophy emerging simultaneously in Italy.Michelangelo scorned Flemish painting specifically for provoking tears in viewers, celebrating instead Italian art’s emotional restraint and noble simplicity.These parallel movements – one religious, one aesthetic – both turned away from medieval intimacy and emotional richness toward something more austere, controlled, and fundamentally detached from messy human feeling.
- When Samuel Richardson published his novel Pamela in 1740, readers across Europe wept.They were sympathizing with the trials of a servant girl defending her dignity against a predatory aristocrat.Critics mocked this new “cult of feeling” as dangerous nonsense. Richardson’s epistolary technique – characters writing letters in real time, emotions raw and immediate – created unprecedented psychological intimacy.Alongside Richardson, philosophers like David Hume and Adam Smith were developing a parallel insight: human morality springs from feeling, not pure reason.We connect through sympathy and imagination, picturing ourselves in another’s situation.
- philanthropist John Howard revolutionized prisons through systematic inspections that treated even convicted felons as human beings deserving care.Even Quakers and evangelicals mobilized public sympathy through petitions, sermons, and pamphlets until Parliament finally abolished the slave trade in 1807.
- English philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft’s dramatic shift captures this transformation perfectly.In 1788, she celebrated sensibility as the soul’s most exquisite feeling.Four years later, she’d completely reversed course, dismissing softness as mere weakness in her revolutionary work on women’s rights.
- (new age of manliness) Keep a stiff upper lip.Never show weakness.These credos became imperial policy.British colonial administrators deliberately used them to distance themselves from the people they subjugated.When Indian rulers wept during negotiations over losing their kingdoms, British officers felt nothing but scorn.
- mid-1800s.Critics no longer dismissed sentimental fiction as merely weepy and self-indulgent.Now they feared it was dangerously effective
- when the First World War started, the 19th-century ideal of manliness seemed to reach its ultimate test.Young men like Oscar Wilde’s son Cyril, desperate to prove themselves as men, were killed by the hundreds of thousands.The trenches exposed just how hollow and costly this ideal had become.The gripes critics had with Charles Dickens marked the birth of a cultural divide that still exists today – between art that moves hearts to inspire action, and art that prizes formal perfection above all else.
- The irony cuts deep when you learn that many great modern artists like Vincent van Gogh treasured sentimentalists like Luke Fildes. Van Gogh kept a woodcut of Fildes drawing for a decade, so moved by its poignant emotion that it inspired his own iconic “Yellow Chair.”
- Virginia Woolf and her circle believed that popularity with ordinary readers automatically signaled inferior work.This worship of emotional coldness had dark political consequences, too.The same intellectuals celebrating art’s coldness often embraced fascism, eugenics, and contempt for democracy.Italian poet’s Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto glorified war as “the world’s only hygiene” and revealed where the rejection of human feeling ultimately led: toward violence, hardness, and a dangerous contempt for ordinary human life.In pushing away sentiment, the modernist project pushed away humanity itself.

I think we're up to the 3rd sentimental resolution now?
- In 1967, three remarkable shifts happened within months: England decriminalized homosexuality, legalized abortion, and abolished capital punishment.Add divorce liberalization two years later, and you have perhaps the most dramatic moral transformation in British history.
- .Support for decriminalization climbed from 18 percent in 1957 to 65 percent by the early 1990s as people saw the human cost of these laws.This pattern repeated across issues.Capital punishment ended when wrongful executions like Timothy Evans’s made injustice undeniable.Divorce reform passed when people recognized friends trapped in loveless marriages.
- over thirty years, homicide rates fell sharply.Burglary, robbery, and violent crime declined.The prophesied moral collapse never materialized.When Princess Diana died in 1997, her funeral exposed the ideological fault line: millions wept openly in what they saw as natural grief, while others recoiled at what they called a “carnival of sentiment.
- The nation split between those who believed public emotion showed humanity and those who saw it as a dangerous weakness.That same divide prevails today. The author interprets the “anti-woke” movement as coming about as a reaction to what it perceives as excessive sensitivity – the renaming of offensive terms, accommodation of transgender rights, trigger warnings and safe spaces.Critics champion the classical virtues of toughness, discipline, and stoicism over what they see as coddling and weakness.

[Jung]

CHOCOLATE DAY 🍫

In "Soft: A History of Sentimentality", Ferdinand Mount challenges the long-standing belief that emotions are distractions from serious history rather than forces that actively shape it. We are often taught that political change, legal reform, and cultural progress arise from logic, power struggles, or economic necessity, while feelings are dismissed as private, irrational, or indulgent. Mount turns this assumption on its head by tracing how sentimentality - our capacity to feel deeply, to empathize, to cry, and to care - has repeatedly altered the course of Western history. Moving across nearly a thousand years, from medieval Europe to contemporary social debates, the book argues that emotions have not weakened societies but have instead been central to moral expansion and social reform.

Mount begins by showing that what we now consider 'romantic love' is not timeless at all. In the ancient Greek and Roman world, love was often portrayed as a dangerous illness inflicted by the gods, something that distracted men from honor, duty, and warfare. Emotional attachment was viewed with suspicion, and devotion to a lover was rarely treated as noble or life-defining. This attitude changed dramatically in medieval southern France, where troubadours introduced a radically new idea: that falling in love could be the most meaningful experience of a person’s life. Through poetry and song, they created a language of longing, devotion, and emotional surrender that reshaped how people understood relationships. Love became central to identity, not a weakness to be avoided.

This emotional shift did not remain confined to romance. It spread into religious life, art, and politics. Medieval Christianity gradually embraced intense emotional expression, particularly in depictions of Christ’s suffering. Where earlier images emphasized divine power and calm authority, later works focused on pain, vulnerability, and physical torment. Public displays of grief and compassion became signs of spiritual seriousness rather than shame. This growing comfort with emotion also influenced leadership. Mount points to figures such as England’s Henry III, whose compassion-driven rule emphasized charity, welfare, and peaceful diplomacy. Although criticized by contemporaries for lacking martial toughness, his reign brought stability and prosperity, suggesting that emotional sensitivity could support effective governance rather than undermine it.

This sentimental culture, however, provoked a backlash during the Protestant Reformation. Under Henry VIII and his successors, emotional expression was increasingly treated as dangerous, unmanly, and morally suspect. Compassion, particularly for the poor and the dead, was reframed as indulgent weakness. Monasteries that had provided medical care and shelter were dismantled, leaving vulnerable populations exposed. Mourning rituals were stripped of tears, and poverty came to be seen as a personal failing rather than a social responsibility. The destruction of religious art and symbols reflected a broader rejection of emotional intimacy in public life. This austerity was echoed in Renaissance artistic ideals that favored restraint and clarity over emotional engagement, reinforcing the notion that seriousness required distance from feeling.

The pendulum swung again in the eighteenth century with what Mount describes as a second sentimental revolution. Novels like Samuel Richardson’s 'Pamela' invited readers to emotionally inhabit the lives of ordinary people, particularly women and the poor. Through intimate forms such as letters, readers were encouraged to feel sympathy rather than judgment. Philosophers including David Hume and Adam Smith argued that morality itself was rooted in emotional identification, not cold reasoning. To understand right and wrong, people imagined themselves in another’s position, relying on sympathy as a moral guide.

This renewed emphasis on feeling had concrete effects. Religious movements such as Methodism embraced emotional worship, bringing spirituality to working-class communities in ways that felt personal and immediate. At the same time, emotional engagement fueled major social reforms. Campaigns to improve prisons, establish hospitals for abandoned children, and abolish the slave trade relied heavily on stirring public compassion. While change was often slow, the direction was clear: once people learned to feel the suffering of others as their own, injustice became harder to justify.

By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, sentimentality once again came under attack. The violence of the French Revolution convinced many British thinkers that emotion, left unchecked, led to chaos and bloodshed. A new ideal of masculinity emerged, centered on stoicism, discipline, and emotional control. This 'stiff upper lip' mentality became especially influential during the expansion of the British Empire, where emotional detachment was used to justify domination. Colonial subjects’ displays of grief or vulnerability were interpreted as signs of inferiority, reinforcing imperial authority.

At the same time, sentimental literature became politically threatening. Writers like Charles Dickens and Harriet Beecher Stowe were accused of manipulating emotions to inspire social unrest. Their stories moved readers to question poverty, exploitation, and slavery, alarming those invested in preserving the status quo. The criticism they faced revealed a growing fear that emotion, when widely shared, could become a powerful engine of reform.

In the twentieth century, this suspicion of sentiment hardened into an artistic doctrine. Modernist critics insisted that true art should reject emotional appeal altogether, focusing instead on form, abstraction, and intellectual distance. Works that aimed to evoke compassion were dismissed as vulgar or naïve. This rejection of feeling often carried class prejudice, equating popularity with inferiority. Mount highlights the irony that many celebrated modern artists privately admired the very sentimental works critics scorned. More troublingly, the glorification of emotional hardness sometimes aligned with political movements that celebrated violence, hierarchy, and contempt for ordinary human life.

The final major shift Mount traces occurs in the mid-twentieth century, when sentimentality once again reshaped law and morality. In Britain, reforms related to homosexuality, abortion, divorce, and capital punishment were driven less by abstract principles than by growing public empathy for those harmed by existing laws. Personal stories of injustice changed opinions more effectively than philosophical debate. As society learned to extend sympathy beyond traditional boundaries, predicted moral collapse failed to materialize. Crime declined, social stability improved, and more people were treated as deserving dignity.

Mount connects this history to contemporary debates over 'wokeness' and political correctness, framing them as the latest expression of an old conflict. Critics who value toughness and emotional restraint see modern sensitivity as weakness, while defenders view it as moral progress. The historical record, Mount argues, suggests that societies willing to feel more deeply do not decay; they broaden their sense of who counts.

In conclusion, "Soft: A History of Sentimentality" presents emotion not as a distraction from serious history but as one of its primary drivers. Across centuries, Western culture has repeatedly swung between embracing feeling and rejecting it, with each return to sentimentality expanding compassion, rights, and social responsibility. Ferdinand Mount’s central claim is that empathy has been essential to human progress, even when it has been mocked, feared, or dismissed. Far from making societies fragile, the capacity to feel for others has allowed them to grow more just, humane, and inclusive.