Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages

by Barbara H. Rosenwein

"With this book Barbara Rosenwein has made the emotions an essential component of our approach to the changing social history."
― Jacques Le Goff Proposing that people lived (and live) in "emotional communities"—each having its own particular norms of emotional valuation and expression—Barbara H. Rosenwein here discusses some instances from the Early Middle Ages. Drawing on extensive microhistorical research, as well as cognitive and social constructionist theories of the emotions, Rosenwein shows that different emotional communities coexisted, that some were dominant at times, and that religious beliefs affected emotional styles even as those styles helped shape religious expression. This highly original book is both a study of emotional discourse in the Early Middle Ages and a contribution to the debates among historians and social scientists about the nature of human emotions. Rosenwein explores the character of emotional communities as discovered in several case the funerary inscriptions of three different Gallic cities; the writings of Pope Gregory the Great; the affective world of two friends, Gregory of Tours and Venantius Fortunatus; the Neustrian court of Clothar II and his heirs; and finally the tumultuous period of the late seventh century. In this essay, the author presents a new way to consider the history of emotions, inviting others to continue and advance the inquiry. For medievalists, early modernists, and historians of the modern world, the book will be of interest for its persuasive critique of Norbert Elias's highly influential notion of the "civilizing process." Rosenwein's notion of emotional communities is one with which all historians and social scientists working on the emotions will need to contend.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Medieval, Academic, Medieval History, Emotion

248 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Prof. Barbara Rosenwein was the Humanitas Visiting Professor in Historiography at the University of Oxford for the year 2014-2015.

Barbara H. Rosenwein (Ph.D. (1974), B.A. (1966), University of Chicago) is a professor at Loyola University Chicago. An internationally renowned historian, she has been a guest professor at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France; the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France; the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, and most recently at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Since 2009, Rosenwein has been an affiliated research scholar at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University in London. She was a scholar in residence at the American Academy in Rome in 2001-2002 and was elected Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America in 2003.

Reviews

[Davis Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this for an upper-division Medieval History course. I certainly can't rate a book like this anything less than four stars, because the methodology used was so dedicated and vigorous—Rosenwein was quite literally peering at faded seventh-century tombstones and counting the number of recurring words. The scholarship is certainly impressive, and casts a welcome and fascinating light on an almost completely neglected era; even as Rosenwein's thesis is strained a bit too much with the lack of sweeping evidence and the typically postmodern fervor to apply the influence of manipulative power structures to absolutely everything. Perhaps predictably for an academic at a Jesuit university, she favors Counter-Reformation-type extremes of expression over Augustinianism. Still, the basic concept of an "emotional community" is a good one, methinks, with lots of potential to enhance our understanding of many things, even if it needs some tweaking from the model offered here and a bit more clarity to narrow the scope of what an "emotion" really is. I actually found the introduction and conclusion, in which she discusses the broader ramifications of her work for our understanding of how emotions function, to be more interesting than the body of the book.

[Valérie]

Super interesting and fascinating study to read about emotional communities in the early Middle Ages.

[Eyan]

read for use in my MA thesis

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rosenwein's Law: "For any given academic work the clarity of the hypothesis is in reverse proportion to the number of secondary sources cited in the Introduction."

[Jason Johnson]

The introductory chapters treat the observation that different bodily reactions are recognised and named as emotions by different cultures, lending priority to certain emotions over others. Moves on to examine the classical underpinnings of late antique discussions of emotions, or rather, the classical underpinnings of several groups who shared common emotional language -- and thus perception.