Abstract
This article explores a feminist, embodied approach to architectural historiography through a re-enactment of Emilie von Berlepsch’s (1755–1830) travels to Scotland in 1799-800. In 2023, I retraced part of her route and reread selected passages aloud on site, treating both her historical encounter and my contemporary one as architectural evidence. Focusing on St. Martin’s Abbey near Perth, where Berlepsch stayed for a period, the article weaves historical analysis with personal, creative writing, which I call affective anecdotes. These anecdotes register frictions, breakdowns, and failed attempts to ‘follow her footsteps that shaped my encounters with sites and archives. They function as protocols of effects that conventional, rigorous academic writing cannot accommodate, and, in doing so, they call into question the conditions under which architectural knowledge is produced. I argue that Berlepsch’s travel writing offers a situated architectural critique grounded in routine, movement, and use, evaluating domestic space through the daily routes it demands and through the gendered and classed spatial organization. By placing Berlepsch’s eighteenth-century critique alongside my own embodied encounters, the article interrogates the persistent assumption of the disembodied researcher in architectural historiography. Discomfort functions as an analytic and methodological lens across both temporalities, not to collapse them, but to make visible the asymmetries of access, expectation, and epistemic authority and to rethink how architectural histories are written
- Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer phenomenology: Orientations, objects, others. Duke University Press.
- Alcoff, L. M. (1999). On judging epistemic credibility: Is social identity relevant? Philosophic Exchange, 29(1).
- Bär, G. (2013). Ossian fürs Frauenzimmer'? Lengefeld, Günderrode, and the Portuguese translations of "Alcipe" and Adelaide Prata. Translation and Literature, 22(3), 343–360.
- Berlepsch, E. von. (1802a). Caledonia: Von der Verfasserin der Sommerstunden (Vol. 1). B. G. Hoffman.
- Berlepsch, E. von. (1802b). Caledonia: Zweiter Theil (Vol. 2). Vieweg.
- Berlepsch, E. von. (1803). Caledonia: Dritter Theil (Vol. 3). Hoffmann.
- Berlepsch, E. von. (1804). Caledonia: Vierter Theil (Vol. 4). Hoffmann.
- Campe, J. H. (1813). Wörterbuch zur Erklärung und Verdeutschung der unserer Sprache aufgedrungenen fremden Ausdrücke: Ein Ergänzungsband zu Adelung's und Campe's Wörterbüchern. Schulbuchhandlung.
- Carr, M. (2025). Moments of discomfort: Rethinking reflexivity and researcher subjectivities through affect and poststructuralism. Gender, Work & Organization, gwao.70057. https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.70057
- Chadwick, R. (2021). On the politics of discomfort. Feminist Theory, 22(4), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1464700120987379
- Cheatle, E. (2017). Between landscape and confinement: Situating the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft. In H. Frichot, C. Gabrielsson, & H. Runting (Eds.), Architecture and feminisms: Ecologies, economies, technologies (pp. 66–78). Routledge.
- Chee, L. (2023). Architecture and affect: Precarious spaces. Taylor & Francis.
- Collins, P. H. (2002). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. Routledge.
- Crowley, J. E. (2001). The invention of comfort: Sensibilities & design in early modern Britain & early America. Johns Hopkins University Press.
- Ellingson, L. L. (2006). Embodied knowledge: Writing researchers' bodies into qualitative health research. Qualitative Health Research, 16(2), 298–310. https://doi.org/10.1177/1049732305281944
- Fullagar, S., & Bozalek, V. (2021). Affectivity. In K. Murris (Ed.), A glossary for doing postqualitative, new materialist and critical posthumanist research across disciplines (1st ed., pp. 26–27). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/ 9781003041153-14
- Gallaher, C., Dahlman, C., Gilmartin, M., & Mountz, A. (2009). Key concepts in political geography. SAGE Publications. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446279496
- Garland-Thomson, R. (2002). Integrating disability, transforming feminist theory. NWSA Journal, 14(3), 1–32.
- Gifford, J. (2007). Perth and Kinross: The buildings of Scotland. Yale University Press.
- Girouard, M. (1978). Life in the English country house: A social and architectural history. Yale University Press.
- Goodman, R. T. (2019). The Bloomsbury handbook of 21st-century feminist theory (Reprinted). Bloomsbury Academic.
- Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism. Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd.
- Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599.
- Harrison, D. L. (2021). Belly of the beast: The politics of anti-fatness as anti-blackness. North Atlantic Books.
- Kafer, A. (2013). Feminist, queer, crip. Indiana University Press.
- Lorde, A. (2019). Poetry is not a luxury. In Sister outsider (pp. 25–28). Penguin Books.
- Maurer, M. (2006). What German travellers communicated: The experience of Scotland, Wales and England and the concept of Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In A. Bauerkämper & C. Eisenberg (Eds.), Britain as a model of modern society? German views (pp. 40–60). Wissner-Verlag.
- Mohr, E., Jamie, K., & Hockin-Boyers, H. (2025). Fatphobia as a form of gender-based violence: Fat women, public space and body belonging work. Fat Studies, 14(1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/21604851.2025. 2469357
- Ossian. (1762). Fingal: An ancient epic poem, in six books: Together with several other poems. T. Becket and P. A. De Hondt.
- Samuels, E. (2017). Six ways of looking at crip time. Disability Studies Quarterly, 37(3), Article 3. https://doi.org/ 10.18061/dsq.v37i3.5824
- Scheitler, I. (1999). Gattung und Geschlecht: Reisebeschreibungen deutscher Frauen 1780–1850. Niemeyer.
- Schmidt, F. C. (1790). Der bürgerliche Baumeister, oder Versuch eines Unterrichts für Baulustige: Welcher sie durch eine große Anzahl ganz verschiedener Plane in den Stand setzt, die Einrichtung ihrer Wohngebäude selbst zu entwerfen, und ihnen alles lehrt, was sie vor, während und nach einem Bau zu wissen nöthig haben. Reyher.
- Schmidt, W. G. (2003). "Homer des Nordens" und "Mutter der Romantik": James Macphersons Ossian und seine Rezeption in der deutschsprachigen Literatur. Walter de Gruyter.
- Scott, A. (1911). St. Martins and Cambusmichael: A parochial retrospect.
- Sharpe, C. (2016). In the wake: On blackness and being. Duke University Press.
- Shields, J. (2010). Sentimental literature and Anglo-Scottish identity, 1745–1820. Cambridge University Press.
- Stephens, E. (2015). Bad feelings: An affective genealogy of feminism. Australian Feminist Studies, 30(85), 273–282. https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2015.1113907
- Stobart, J. (2022). Comfort in the eighteenth-century country house. Routledge.
- Strings, S. (2019). Fearing the black body: The racial origins of fat phobia. NYU Press.
- Suckow, L. J. D. (1781). Erste Gründe der Bürgerlichen Baukunst. https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.1697
- Thompson, C. (2011). Travel writing (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203816240
- Upton, D. (2002). Architecture in everyday life. New Literary History, 33(4), 707–723. https://doi.org/10.1353/ nlh.2002.0046
- Wurst, K. A. (2023). Imaginaries of domesticity and women's work in Germany around 1800: Feeling at home. Camden House.
- Young, I. M. (2005). On female body experience: Throwing like a girl and other essays. Oxford University Press.
APA 7th edition
In-text citation: (Rieger, 2026)
Reference: Rieger, E. (2026). Encounters, ‘affective anecdotes’, and the archive: Traveling with Emilie von Berlepsch to Scotland.
Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, 10(2), Article 25.
https://doi.org/10.20897/femenc/19073
AMA 10th edition
In-text citation: (1), (2), (3), etc.
Reference: Rieger E. Encounters, ‘affective anecdotes’, and the archive: Traveling with Emilie von Berlepsch to Scotland.
Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics. 2026;10(2), 25.
https://doi.org/10.20897/femenc/19073
Chicago
In-text citation: (Rieger, 2026)
Reference: Rieger, Elena. "Encounters, ‘affective anecdotes’, and the archive: Traveling with Emilie von Berlepsch to Scotland".
Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics 2026 10 no. 2 (2026): 25.
https://doi.org/10.20897/femenc/19073
Harvard
In-text citation: (Rieger, 2026)
Reference: Rieger, E. (2026). Encounters, ‘affective anecdotes’, and the archive: Traveling with Emilie von Berlepsch to Scotland.
Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, 10(2), 25.
https://doi.org/10.20897/femenc/19073
MLA
In-text citation: (Rieger, 2026)
Reference: Rieger, Elena "Encounters, ‘affective anecdotes’, and the archive: Traveling with Emilie von Berlepsch to Scotland".
Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, vol. 10, no. 2, 2026, 25.
https://doi.org/10.20897/femenc/19073
Vancouver
In-text citation: (1), (2), (3), etc.
Reference: Rieger E. Encounters, ‘affective anecdotes’, and the archive: Traveling with Emilie von Berlepsch to Scotland. Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics. 2026;10(2):25.
https://doi.org/10.20897/femenc/19073