The Routledge History of Emotions in Europe

1100-1700

Susan Broomhall, Andrew Lynch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351750097
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

The Routledge History of Emotions in Europe: 1100–1700 presents the state of the field of pre-modern emotions during this period, placing particular emphasis on theoretical and methodological aspects of current research.

This book serves as a reference to existing research practices in emotions history and advances studies in the field across a range of scholarly approaches. It brings together the work of recognized experts and new voices, and represents a wide range of international and interdisciplinary perspectives from different schools of research practice, including art history, literature and culture, philosophy, linguistics, archaeology and music. Throughout the book, central and recurrent themes in emotional culture within medieval and early modern Europe are highlighted from different angles, and each chapter pays specialist attention to illustrative examples showing theory and method in application.

Exploring topics such as love, war, sex and sexuality, death, time, the body and the family in the context of emotional culture, The Routledge History of Emotions in Europe: 1100–1700 reflects the sharp rise in scholarship relating to the history of emotions in recent years and is an essential resource for students and researchers of the history of pre-modern emotions.

PART 1
TIME AND SPACE

1

PERIODIZATION? AN ANSWER FROM THE HISTORY OF EMOTIONS

Barbara H. Rosenwein

The theory of ‘basic emotions’ postulates that emotions do not change over time. Tied to particular, posed facial expressions, those emotions – anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise – were long ago proposed by Paul Ekman and are now widely used in experiments by psychologists. The proposition that those six emotions are ‘hard-wired’, universal and constant is thus generally accepted.¹ If this theory is true, there can be no history of emotions, and the topic of this chapter is moot.

Nevertheless, some scientists argue that emotions are variable, depending – for both their conceptualization and subjective experience – on culture, individual upbringing and even the particular contexts in which an emotion is felt at any given time.² This makes emotions historically contingent. However, few of these scientists think much about how emotions may change.³

Historians of emotion are thus challenged by a contemporary science of emotion that, if not wedded to the notion of universality, is at least comfortable with a theory of constantly reproduced emotions. Unlike scientists, however, historians think that emotions change over time. But they differ profoundly regarding what sorts of changes are involved. In his classic American Cool, Peter Stearns took emotions one by one and investigated how attitudes about them changed.⁴ He did not problematize whether, for example, ‘anger’ was indeed always ‘an emotion’ in the past, but he did note that anger was evaluated and expressed differently before c. 1920 than it was thereafter. Before 1920, anger at home was condemned, but anger in the workplace was seen as manly; afterward, as the ‘cool’ attitude took hold, anger was condemned in every venue. These observations grew out of Stearns’s study of ‘emotionology’: ‘the attitudes or standards that a society, or a definable group within a society, maintains toward basic emotions and their appropriate expressions’.⁵ Note here the acceptance of the idea of ‘basic emotions’, although (as we see in American Cool) Stearns went far beyond the Ekmanian six to include, for example, jealousy and love.

At the other end of the universality scale is historian Ute Frevert, whose book on emotions ‘lost and found’ offers an image of flux, with emotions both coming to the fore and dying away.⁶ Thus, for example, ‘honour’ lost its purchase after the nineteenth century, while ‘compassion’ was ‘found’ around the same time.

Even more extreme is the view, largely inspired by Norbert Elias’s notion of the ‘civilizing process’, that sees whole societies as either ‘emotional’ or not.⁷ According to adherents to this thesis, the late Middle Ages was highly emotional, while the early modern period introduced new controls over behaviour, institutions and emotions. Extended further, Elias’s schema makes ‘modernity’ the catchword for everything not medieval.⁸

All of these theories have one point in common: they deal with each emotion in isolation or with a single ‘off or on’ sort of ‘emotionality’. This is clearest, to be sure, with Ekmanian facial expressions, each of which is tied to one emotion. But it is also true of Stearns, who takes up each emotion in turn, and of Frevert, who considers emotions one by one. These theories do not take into account the fact that feelings often change not just over historical time but often hour by hour. Lived emotions do not come in singletons. When I learned that my friend was divorcing her husband, I felt sad at the news, hopeful for her future, angry at him for causing the rift. These emotions work together, forming a sort of script that may be described sequentially.

How universal are such scripts? To explore how emotions change over time, I propose to consider them not individually but rather in their sequential contexts.⁹ Since most Western historians agree on a periodization that separates the medieval from the early modern period, I ask what the study of emotional sequences may contribute to ratifying or challenging that paradigm. I suggest that they offer a fruitful way to rethink the topic.

Since many historians have claimed that religious emotions, in particular, changed dramatically from extravagant expression in late medieval devotion to their near obliteration in Protestant worship, I take as my case study two religious emotional communities across the medieval/early modern divide.¹⁰ My cases are both from England, and both employ the vernacular of their eras. This allows me to anchor my discussion in one language, although I am aware that the Middle English of the late Middle Ages often differed in meaning from the English of the seventeenth century.¹¹

I find these two communities in two specific texts. For the late medieval era, I use the fifteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe as evidence of some characteristic emotional sequences of affective devotion. The text attesting to the Protestant community is a publication entitled Spirituall Experiences, which offers testimonials by members of a gathered (Puritan) church in London in the 1650s.

Margery Kempe

Expressions of religious feeling became newly passionate in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and still more intense in the late Middle Ages. That has led medievalists to speak of ‘affective piety’ as the ‘dominant note in the religious writing of the period’.¹² God became above all identified with the Christ who took human form. The Beguine Marie d’Oignies (d. 1213) spoke of holding the Christ child ‘close to her so that He nestled between her breasts like a baby’.¹³ The Dominican mystic Henry Suso (d. 1366) ‘had a heart filled with love’ for the eternal Wisdom of Christ.¹⁴ After carving the name of Jesus on his chest, he not only spoke with God but also attempted, by ‘conforming himself to Christ’, to feel ‘sympathy for everything his Lord and God, Christ, had suffered before him’.¹⁵ The Pseudo-Bonaventuran lives of Christ, extremely popular in England, offered ‘a corpus of writings where English audiences . . . [were] invited to imagine themselves emotionally present at the Gospel events described’.¹⁶

In the fifteenth century, Margery Kempe (d. 1439) illustrates the importance of affective piety in the life of a well-to-do layperson. A townswoman from Bishop’s Lynn (later King’s Lynn, in Norfolk, England), she married John Kempe, had many children, and never became a nun or a recluse.¹⁷ In the course of her life, she dictated a treatise – today called her Book – about how God ‘moved and stirred’ her ‘unto his love’.¹⁸ The single extant manuscript is the hybrid product of at least three fifteenth-century scribes.¹⁹ Scholars continue to debate the role of Margery Kempe and her scribes in the production of the text that we have.²⁰ I here assume that the work is more or less the product of the Lynn matron named Margery Kempe.

The Book presents Margery (as I will call her here) as the object of much vilification and ridicule by most of the people who came into contact with her. What it does not say explicitly, but is nevertheless attested to by the text itself, is that she also had many supporters. It is from this internal evidence that I derive her emotional community. By ‘emotional community’, I mean the group of people who shared her norms of emotional expression and valuation. For example, in Rome she found a priest who could not understand English, but ‘desiring to please God’, he prayed to understand her, enlisting the prayers of others as well.²¹ In the end he understood her English (but only hers), and she revealed to him all her secrets. ‘Then this priest received her full meekly and reverently, like his mother and his sister, and said he would support her against her enemies’.²² He was reviled for standing by her; he even forsook his priestly office in order to ‘support her in her sobbing and in her crying’.²³ When she was ready to leave Rome for England, the two said their goodbyes in tears. Then ‘she, falling on her knees, received the favor of his blessing, and so parted asunder those whom charity joined both in one’.²⁴

By Margery’s own telling, this priest and other like-minded people constituted a small and marginal group, disliked by many.²⁵ There is no question that very different emotional communities existed at the same time. The Paston family, who lived not far from Margery at about the same time, are a good example: they did not practise anything like affective piety. They hardly expressed religious emotions and, indeed, rarely expressed any emotions at all.²⁶ The Lollards are no doubt another example, practising their own brand of emotional expression.²⁷

If Margery belonged to an emotional community – one that was, in fact, quite supportive – nevertheless, she presented herself as continually persecuted and vilified by others. She did so, it seems, b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• Emotions in Europe, 1100–1700: conversations across methodologies
• Part 1 Time and space
• Part 2 Spirit and intellect
• Part 3 Bodies
• Part 4 Communities
• Part 5 Encounters and excursions
• Part 6 Cultural expressions
• Index