“What are emotions?” This seemingly simple question generated a lot of discussion in the field of emotion studies. 1 Darwin and, later, Freud regarded emotions as internal drives that produce outbursts of feelings and sensations that need to be tamed or channeled. 2 Starting in the 1960s and 1970s, neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists demonstrated the shortcomings of such models. The neurobiologist Antonio Damasio asserts in Descartes’ Error that emotions are far from being simple, uncontrolled impulses, but are instead wired in the human body. 3 Emotions, per this narrative, have a strong cognitive aspect. Anthropologists 4 and historians, 5 in contrast, argue that emotions are neither sensorial nor cognitive, but are constituents of social and cultural practices. Philosophers like Martha Nussbaum acknowledge the quintessential role that emotions have in evaluating such practices. For Nussbaum, emotions have a strong cognitive dimension because they allow subjects to reflect on external events: “they (emotions) are our way of registering how things are with respects to the external (i.e., uncontrolled) that we view salient for our well-being.” 6 In other words, events are uncontrollable, but emotions represent a map that facilitates further reflection on normative ways of constructing forms of existing and being in the world in a particular society. 7
In their endeavor to coin a theory of emotions pertinent to medieval sources, medievalists retained Nussbaum’s understanding of emotions as a map providing evaluative narratives. Such is the case of Barbara Rosenwein , one of the first medievalists to read early medieval texts through the lenses of contemporary theories of emotions. She argues that emotions are evaluative in the sense that they are social barometers through which different socio-cultural groups form their own identity. 8 Building on poststructuralist terms of “discourse” and “habitus ” but also on contemporary historical notions of “emotional regime” 9 and “textual community,” 10 Rosenwein defines the term “emotional communities” as:
An emotional community is a group in which people have a common stake, interests, values, and goals. [They] are in some ways what Foucault called a common “discourse:” shared vocabularies and ways of thinking that have a controlling, disciplining function. [They] are similar as well to Bourdieu’s notion of “habitus :” internalized norms that determine how we think and act and that might be different in different groups. 11
If we follow Rosenwein’s perspective, emotions seem to be rather static discursive practices of hegemonic character. Subjects, on the other hand, have a certain mobility in appropriating such normative practices dependent on their own stakes and goals. However, despite Rosenwein’s accommodating definition of emotions as discourse, one wonders if such a model does justice to the dynamics of discourse formation following its poststructuralist lineage. From Michel Foucault’s Archeology of Knowledge, we know that a discourse does not reflect the unity of what a subject—individual, group, or institution—thinks. 12 In fact, for Foucault the idea of unity is not epistemologically conceivable. Contrary to that, discourses lack teleology and synthesis but encompass dispersed, disjunctive interventions. 13 In this light, emotional norms that fabricate individual and group subjectivities are not already pre-established, as Rosenwein argued, but are impacted by different discursive ruptures, negotiations, and practices. It was in this sense that Piroska Nagy, while recognizing the heuristic value for the study of emotions as dynamic discursive conglomerates, 14 questioned the very teleology and exact demarcation of “emotional communities.” 15 Nevertheless, Reddy’s notion of “emotional regime,” together with Rosenwein’s “emotional community ,” paved the way for what medievalists like Nagy and Boquet labeled as “émotionologie”: the domain of acculturated emotion that is captured within a web of discursive norms and practices. 16
Sociality of Emotions
A majority of papers in this volume engage with the analysis of emotions precisely in this perspective of an acculturated ensemble of multilayered norms , interventions, and hybrid practices. In this sense, one main direction of our project is to explore how given emotional norms and regimes are dislocated, and how individual discursive strategies are used in fashioning emotional narratives. Historians such as Michel de Certeau provide a useful heuristic framework to capture the dynamics of how norms can be constituted, reshaped, and, ultimately, contested by those subjects and socio-economic groups that are not necessarily in a position of power to create them. 17 In the Practices of Everyday Life, de Certeau distinguishes between “strategies” and “tactics.” 18 The former designates “the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships that becomes possible as soon as a subject with will and power (a business, an army, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated.” 19 Consequently, the strategy represents the visible language through which panoptic types of institutions fabricate their technologies of power. Tactics, on the other hand, refer to the “calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus.” 20 They do not stem from the hegemonic concerns of institutions endowed with power but, as de Certeau argues, are situated on the axis of the consumer who operates within the logic of assemblage rather than that of clear Cartesian choices. 21 Similarly, we argue that certain normative emotional discourses are the result of the more or less conscious efforts of particular religious and secular institutions to shape their own emotional style. Such emotional strategies produce alternative emotional tactics that communities or even individuals use in constructing their own identities. Some of the papers in the volume investigate how these binomial emotional strategies-tactics organized the emotional lives of medieval and early modern subjects. Among the questions they ask are: how do hegemonic emotions get assembled to become coherent strategies? How do disparate groups that are not necessarily in a position of power fabricate multilayered, hybrid regimes that can be placed under the umbrella of emotional tactics?
Affective Encounters
The second direction that this volume follows concerns the somatization and the embodiment of emotions. While we acknowledge the tremendous heuristic practicality of considering emotions as discourses, we believe that in assessing any type of emotional behavior, one cannot efface the role of the body. From the work of neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists, we learn that emotions are wired within our bodies either in the form of universal facial expressions, as psychologists like Paul Ekman suggest, 22 or as “somatic markers,” as Antonio Damasio points out in Descartes’ Error. 23 More recently, the newly established field of Affect Studies, under the influence of neurosciences, also brings biology within the domain of social sciences and the humanities. Theorists like Brian Massumi 24 consider that subjectivities are not exclusively the result of hegemonic discourses that place bodies on a grid defined according to gender, racial, or socio-economic criteria. 25 Contrary to that, for Massumi and other theorists of Affect Studies, 26 bodily experiences are neither exclusively social nor pre-s...