Foreword

Barbara H. Rosenwein

What were the emotional consequences of the Christianization of Europe? In Medieval Sensibilities, Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy bring to the English-speaking audience the fruits of their long reflection on this question. They show how, far from being a stagnant ‘Middle Age’ standing between the learned ancient world and discontented modernity, the period was in constant affective ferment. Social and economic changes in themselves brought new sensibilities and needs. These new milieus, drawing on and filtering, but also adding to, the many intellectual traditions increasingly available to an expanding clerical elite, transformed their thoughts about Christ's Passion. In turn, these new understandings, taught in the schools, proclaimed in the churches, preached on the streets, and acted out by rulers, transformed the feelings and behaviours of Europeans in general.

Theologies of the Passion were thus put into practice. As Boquet and Nagy show, the emotions implied by new understandings of Christ's human nature and passion came to shape the very ways in which medieval people lived their lives. Initially, this was not the case; the affective implications of the Christian God were at first largely the monopoly of one man (Augustine). But they soon became the focus of an ever-expanding religious elite, taken up first by men and women in hermitages and monasteries and then, eventually, becoming the concern of people in every walk of life.

This book is itself the fruit of a different sort of progressive inclusion. The authors began their careers working separately. Boquet's dissertation, which became his first book, was on the affective life and thought of Aelred of Rievaulx, a twelfth-century monk and abbot who wrote extensively on the meaning of love and friendship. Nagy's early work was on the ‘gift of tears’: she unravelled the tangled threads involved in the idea that crying could have salvific meaning. When they began to work together, they founded a website, emma.hypotheses.org, dedicated to ‘the study of medieval emotions in tandem with the scholarship of the humanities and social sciences’. They organized conferences to which they invited speakers to consider medieval sensibilities from every point of view. Together the two scholars edited and published the results of these conferences in books ranging in topic from the political uses and meanings of emotions to the role of the body to intellectual history.

Medieval Sensibilities reflects that prior work – and goes beyond it. Its emphasis on the suffering Christ as the starting point for medieval sensibilities draws on the authors’ interest in the role of the body in experience and expression. In taking up theologians like Augustine, Anselm of Canterbury, and Thomas Aquinas, they distil the fruits of long rumination on medieval theories of the passions. When considering the ‘politics of princely emotions’, they exploit their own and others’ work on performativity. Above all they weave together these and other topics in a coherent narrative covering the entire medieval period.

The story really gets underway with the missionizing work of the Irish monk Columbanus. Charismatic and fiercely determined, he brought the monastic ideals of affective restraint first to the Frankish royal court and thence to the elites. A still more thorough diffusion of Christian values occurred under Charlemagne (d. 814) and his early successors, as churchmen incorporated Christianized notions of the passions into masses for monks and books for the laity. Learned clerics turned the idea of Christian love, caritas, into an ideal of worldly love as well, as if the Christian community could come together through the bonds of charity.

Secular society did not live up to these expectations, except in its cultivation of vernacular literature, which expressed the ideals of measure and restraint, put emphasis on joy, and celebrated longing. But in the monastery the accent on love became something of an obsession. Eleventh- and twelfth-century monks were in their era what neuroscientists are in our own: recognized experts on emotions. Above all, the monks considered themselves – and were seen as – the go-to authorities on love. Hermits, ascetics, Cistercians, even some secular clerics parsed the various forms of love, explored their causes and effects, elaborated ways to show affection, tenderness, and compassion, and taught themselves and others how to practise the right – that is, Christianized – emotions. They elaborated on new forms of meditation, dwelling on and participating in the life, feelings, and travails of Christ. Just as significantly, they unabashedly celebrated love among friends, so that what had hitherto been seen as the ‘secular’ institution of friendship became as holy as love of God and neighbour.

Once worldly love was valorised, the question of sex was not far behind. In a brilliant chapter, Boquet and Nagy illustrate the tensions that came in the wake of this development: between clerical models of chaste love and the sexualized intimacies praised by the troubadours; between sexual consummation regardless of matrimony and sex within marriages alone; between heterosexual love and same-sex love. Churchmen harnessed the energies behind these tensions, turning marriage into a sacrament: an efficacious conduit of God's grace.

For all its emphasis on love, however, Medieval Sensibilities is in many ways a history of pain. Unlike today, when most of us anaesthetize ourselves to avoid even the slightest agony, medieval Christians increasingly sought to experience suffering. The age of martyrdom was long over, and gradually the age of ascetic monasticism came to an end as well. But physical torment based on the model of Christ's torments was ever more valued. St Francis suffered the stigmata, the very wounds of the crucified God; Henry Suso carved the initials of Jesus on his chest over his heart; flagellants walked the streets of medieval towns, beating themselves until their blood ran. Mental pains were also privileged, as penitence – along with the sad, fearful, embarrassed feelings that accompanied it – was ever more stressed in the course of the Middle Ages. These phenomena were connected with the growth of medieval mystical movements, so often associated with women. But, as Boquet and Nagy point out, the narratives of female mystics were generally written by men, who controlled the evidence for their own purposes.

The Middle Ages of Medieval Sensibilities is complex, nuanced, and in constant flux. It is a period in which ancient ideas are endlessly transformed and new ones tirelessly elaborated as men and women grapple with the legacy of a passionate and afflicted God. Boquet and Nagy are learned and eloquent guides to the many ways in which Christ's model was both imitated and pushed to limits never before imagined.

Introduction

The history of the emotions: that great silence!¹

What remains of the joys and pains of the men and women of the Middle Ages? Their laughter, their moans, and their cries built no monuments, and yet their echoes live on within them. Reading texts and studying images from across the long thousand years of the Middle Ages, a historian would have to possess a heart of stone not to be moved by the life behind them. That life was not solely one of hierarchies, means of production, and taxes. It was also full of desires, tensions, sudden gasps, and endless sighs.

It is impossible to understand any human society without exploring its emotional rhythms, from the most dramatic to the most subtle. For too long, historians have ignored this simple truth. At times, they have perhaps been myopic; but above all, they have been too tied to their own times. The discipline of history that took root in the nineteenth century had trouble taking emotions seriously, and even more in admitting that they were not merely intimate expressions, but also an essential part of cultural and social systems.² Yet in the Middle Ages, emotions were everywhere. They could be found not only deep within the heart but far beyond it: they were present in the churches, in the palaces, in the shacks, in the markets, and on the battlefields. Saint Louis (d. 1270), on return from Egypt in 1254, was inconsolable at the loss of the crusade: ‘Fixing his eyes to the earth with a profound sadness and sighing deeply, he lingered on his captivity and the general confusion of Christianity wrought through it.’³ The princes grieved for the misfortunes of their realms and were loved for doing so. Yet they did not hesitate to unleash their wrath, the terrible ira regis, which struck rebels like divine lightning. While Louis the Pious (d. 840) was known for his wisdom, he still blinded his own nephew, Bernard of Italy (d. 818), king of the Lombards, for daring to defy his authority.

All manner of emotions – hate, laughter, jealousy, and so on – could serve to enliven the theatre of politics and engender social harmony. Through them one negotiated, through them one governed. In the celebrated fresco painted in 1337 by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (d. 1348) that adorns the walls of the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena, a winged figure personifying ‘Security’, who protects the gates of the city, assures that ‘without fear, let every man may walk safely’.⁴ She seems to add that, while the inhabitants should not fear chaos, they should still tremble before justice – in her hand she brandishes a gibbet, from which a corpse hangs. The fear brought to life in this image was encouraged by others elsewhere, such as the innumerable depictions of the Last Judgement that adorned church walls by the end of the Middle Ages. Here, it was no longer the marks of good and bad government that were portrayed, but rather those of a virtuous life and one abandoned to sin. In the mid-thirteenth century, the Dominican Humbert of Romans (d. 1277), author of a preaching manual, On the Gift of Fear, encouraged priests to go ever further in reminding their congregations of the horrible demonic figures who visited every sort of torture on the damned. The faithful were to fear the torturers of hell on account of their ceaseless cruelty. They were to tremble before the anger of God – for if he was roused by the people of Israel, he would surely be merciless with inveterate sinners at the moment of judgement. Already horrified at the thought of demons, they would only be more aghast when they learned that the anger of God would ‘be so great that it will attack them like a furious madman’.⁵ Worse still, God would compound their pain with humiliation, heightening the suffering of the damned by mocking them: ‘I also will laugh in your destruction, and will mock when that shall come to you which you feared’ (Prov 1: 26).⁶

In societies where the imperatives of honour were profoundly important, shame was often even more dreaded than physical suffering. One can thus understand the way in which the Church came to challenge the faithful: it maintained that there was nothing better for delivering man from sin than shame, a shame which had to be deeply felt, and at times even acted out in public. By the eleventh century, a time when honour was defined less by material wealth or office than by a collection of values and sentiments synonymous with good repute (bona fama), the reparation of faults was no longer enough to complete the penitential journey: one was also expected to make a sincere, moving expression of moral suffering and repentance. Emotions went to the very heart of man's social and symbolic bonds: there was nothing secondary or incidental about them.

Difficult though it is to believe, for the last twenty years the history of the emotions has been seen as essential.⁷ Without doubt, that is a testament to the tenacity of a certain set of historians, both in France and further afield. Their work nevertheless stands on the shoulders of some notable pioneers: Johan Huizinga, Lucien Febvre, Robert Mandrou, Georges Duby, and Jacques Le Goff. This recent development is a sign of the times and especially of changing attitudes towards the emotions within Western societies. Prior to the mid-twentieth century, emotion had a bad reputation, mistrusted at best, especially when it appeared outside of the cathartic enclosure of the arts or the private sphere. Today, however, it appears to be a central component of social life. This new emphasis can be attributed to various factors. For one, the collapse of globalist ideologies and the crisis of liberal democracy has brought the individual and the inner life to the fore.⁸ Other factors include the rise of many new disciplines (neuroscience, cognitive psychology) that have highlighted the rationality of emotions;⁹ the reaction against an all-powerful economy that has rendered man an object of management;¹⁰ and the multifaceted achievements of therapeutic culture.¹¹ The effects of this transformation are palpable. They have challenged the dichotomy of reason and emotion, which for so long had structured the Western conception of man, and in turn revealed its strangeness.¹² Integrating emotion into how we understand society – as it is today and as it was in days gone by – has consequently become essential. Past and present here go hand in hand.¹³

In 1941, Lucien Febvre published an article in Annales that would become the manifesto for a history of the emotions.¹⁴ Here, he called for a ‘vast collective study of the fundamental sentiments of humanity and their forms’. The project was prompted by one conviction: emotions, contagious by nature, reveal the most profound cultural phenomena, which language and social codes are unable to embrace. At the same time, and like his contemporaries, Febvre saw them as irrational and spontaneous, an expression of unconscious trends. How then are historians to understand the medieval period, a period characterized by exactly this sort of emotional enthusiasm? The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga made this question the foundation of his masterwork, The Autumn of the Middle Ages. First published in 1919 and translated into English in 1924, this book has fascinated generations of historians. For Huizinga, affectivity, aesthetics, and the life of the senses were at the heart of the mindset of medieval civilization. He stressed the ‘extravagance and emotivity’ of the men and women of the Middle Ages: they seemed to pass in a split-second from laughter to tears, from sweetness to cruelty. Incapable of controlling the emotions that overpowered them, medieval people were ‘like giants with the heads of children’. Behind the flamboyant scene that Huizinga painted lay a grand historical narrative founded on the emotions: the Middle Ages heralded the Modern Age, characterized by self-mastery and reflective distance. The vitality of the Middle Ages resided in its raw and violent emotional dynamism. Its decline resulted from an exhaustion that led to formalism. Incapable of regeneration, medieval civilization fell into a kind of fin de siècle depression according to Huizinga: ‘Here above all, if men were not to fall into crude barbarism, there was a need to frame emotions within fixed forms.’¹⁵

Michelet had already said something similar when he compared the Middle Ages to a tormented child that had to die ‘in heartfelt anguish’ so that modernity and its triumphant herald, the rational spirit, could arrive.¹⁶ Historians have long sought to trace the development of this civilizing march of reason. They thus enthusiastically took up the idea of ‘the civilizing process’, a model first elaborated by Norbert Elias in 1939, but which only became widely influential in the 1970s.¹⁷ Elias established a truly bold parallel between the advent of monarchical states and the developmental psychology of individuals: he bound the two together under a governing principle of rationality. As orderly political regimes expanded in Europe, individuals became better able to master their emotions and to transcend them within the social theatre. The power of Elias’ model came from its capacity to theoretically unify the individual and society, the political and the unconscious. But this grand theory – influenced by Freud as much as Huizinga – only perpetuated the view that the Middle Ages had an infantile character: ‘Because emotions were here expressed in a manner that in our own world is generally observed only in children, we call these expressions and forms of behaviour “childish”.’¹⁸

Today we see just how distorting such conceptions can be: the emotions of the Middle Ages were no less codified and rational than our own.¹⁹ But in the 1930s, for humanist intellectuals witnessing the collapse of Enlightenment civilization, the cradle of their education, the matter was existential. How could they understand this historic defeat of reason and respond to the perceived decline of the West, if the past was not also interrogated in a new way? At that very moment, Marc Bloch took aim at the present and came up with a similar diagnosis:

Quite deliberately – as one can see by reading Mein Kampf or the records of Rauschning's conversations – Hitler kept the truth from his servile masses. Instead of intellectual persuasion he gave them emotional suggestion. For us there is but one set of alternatives. Either, like the Germans, we must turn our people into a keyboard on which a few leaders can play at will (but who are those leaders? The playing of those at present on the stage is curiously lacking in resonance); or we can so train them that they may be able to collaborate to the full with the representatives in whose hands they have placed the reins of government. At the present stage of civilization this dilemma admits of no middle term … The masses no longer obey. They follow, either because they have been hypnotized or because they know.²⁰

The urgency was palpable. Despite these expectations, however, the appeal for a history of the emotional life was barely followed up in the postwar decades.²¹ The history of mentalities and sensibilities that took off in the 1970s certainly made space for what was ‘felt’, sometimes even placing one emotion or another at the heart of a study. But it did so without truly questioning the historicity of the emotions and, above all, without reconsidering how enduring their definitions were.²² The real goal is not simply to recognize that the emotions have a role within history, but to acknowledge that they themselves have a history, a history as complex and diverse as the social and cultural environments in which they are expressed.

Studying medieval emotions and grasping their capacity to shape a vision of humanity and its world enables us to better understand our own social outlooks and customs by way of a historical ‘detour’. We can understand more clearly how we apprehend and shape our emotional lives, and why we sometimes no longer know how or no longer dare to cultivate this aspect of our humanity.²³ Conversely, this critique of emotional modernity allows us to take stock of the biases through which we consider the past and which feed our complacency: in our transitory position of superiority, we must not become drunk on hindsight. To make the emotional culture of the Middle Ages the object of study is thus to dispute the validity of the ‘civilizing process’ thesis inherited from Norbert Elias, which is also a history of Western rationalization. An infantilized vision of the men and women of the Middle Ages has wormed its way into our imaginations, a result of how emotions were publicly and often very demonstratively expressed. Mobs yelled out their hatred in public places. Princes failed to temper their anger or, worse still, their sobbing. The devout wailed their love for Christ in the churches. Surely, such displays could only derive from a culture of immature people still on the path towards civilization …

It is this dialogue – the epistemological foundations of which have evolved significantly from the 1930s – that we continue here. Since the 1980s, numerous researchers across Europe and North America have begun to explore the history of emotions, responding to what some have already christened the ‘emotional turn’.²⁴ The success of this new field has fostered a flourishing body of research. It has presented new tools of investigation and inquiry, many of them referenced in this work: notions of ‘emotional community’ (Barbara H. Rosenwein),²⁵ of ‘emotional regimes’, ‘emotives’, and ‘emotional navigation’ (William M. Reddy),²⁶ and of ‘ennobling love’ (Stephen Jaeger).²⁷ Such approaches help us to conceive and guide a truly mature history of the emotions, disentangled from theories concerning the historical progress of reason.

Today's historians face a two-pronged challenge. Firstly, to propose an alternative to the grand theory of the ‘civilizing process’ without eschewing a long-term history of the emotions. Secondly, to write that history in a manner true to its strict cultural context in an age where thought on affectivity seems more than ever to be dominated by scientists.²⁸ Building on their epistemological and institutional foundations, the human and life sciences each propose their own definition of emotion, distinguish it meticulously from feeling, mood, and affect, and define some emotions as positive, others as negative. How can historians find their feet in this environment, especially when discussing an era where emotional anthropology and terminology were so radically different from our own?²⁹ To follow a discrete, closed definition of emotion, to pay blind faith to the scientific categories of our times, themselves rather confused, would not only be a purely practical illusion, but the mark of a ruinous ‘scientism’ projected onto a malleable human reality.³⁰

Neither universal nor timeless, emotions are whatever the men and women of each era, of each society, of each group make of them. How do they conceive of the nebula of affections and the mysteries of feeling, and what role do they accord to them? As historians tackle these issues, they must, by necessity, cast their nets wide. If the focus needs to tighten, the frameworks should not be those of psychology or neuroscience, but the outlooks of medieval men and women themselves. They too named, considered, and experienced ‘affective matters’, and did so according to their own codes, motivations, and aims. The use of the term ‘emotion’ to terminologically encompass the various affective categories also merits explanation.³¹ It is absent from medieval vocabulary: it first appeared in French during the fifteenth century within descriptions of uprisings and popular revolts.³² The most obvious justification stems from the very emergence of the historiographical current which focuses on it: in the last twenty years, this terminology has become increasingly common in almost every Western language, paralleling the rise of the ‘sciences of emotion’.

Departing from this consensus, we prefer to speak of what, in French, we call the sensible – a term dear to Lucien Febvre and the Annalist historians³³ – when approaching this vast field. The meaning intended here is neither that of ‘sensoriality’, nor of ‘sensitivity’, but of ‘sensibility’: the title of this English translation indeed derives from the latter. We speak often of feelings, of passions, of affects, and of impulses. But affectivity also includes more stable aspects: atmospheres, moods, and lasting dispositions. Wherever we have found emotions, we have tried to draw together the sparse traces of emotional feeling – pleasures, pains, joys, and sorrows – as much as possible. As historians, we seek to analyse norms, rhetoric, games of interaction and of power, and cultural products and performances: we thus try to avoid any distinction between felt emotion and expressed emotion, any frontier between the authentic and the uncertain. The emotions that were voiced, expressed by an action, or displayed by the body possessed their own cultural and social efficacies. They are, in any case, the only emotions to which we have access. As Marcel Mauss understood so well, the ritualization of an emotion and its expression in a pre-defined scenario do not necessarily mean that it is not sincerely felt.³⁴

This book proposes a cultural history of affectivity for the medieval West. It aims to prove the essential importance of emotions in history – and a fortiori in the Middle Ages – and also to offer an emotional journey through this thousand-year epoch. This history is a cultural history, since emotion was expressed in images and texts, the works of medieval culture. Our approach takes account of the Christian religious dynamic of the Passion and the passions, a dynamic which had so much structural importance on an anthropological as well as an institutional level. In fact, this is truly our thesis: we are convinced that emotion was at the heart of the anthropology of the Western Middle Ages. Thus, our aim has been to produce a history of medieval sensibilities, albeit not the only one that could be written or that demands to be studied. This history, tied to other cognitive processes (imagination, memory, reasoning, etc.), is founded on a history of experience – that total psychological fact – but also pertains to social history. To take an interest in the history of the emotions is in no way to promote an atomized history, one centred on the individual and microscopic level. Rather it is an anthropological history: a history of humankind, of the human being as a whole, and of shared singularities.

We have of course made choices, followed some paths, and departed from others. Christian anthropology was founded on the centrality of the emotions, above all love and suffering (Chapter 1): God sent his Son who suffered, through love, in order to save humanity. Augustine (d. 430) made the sensitivity of the soul a consequence of original sin. From then on, humanity was passionate and life on earth was anything but impassive. Nevertheless, the emotions could be turned towards God or away from him, since they pertained to the system of vices and virtues. The education of monks, that elite of an ideal Christian society, was founded on this idea: it was present even within the earliest desert monasticism. To ‘convert’ the soul towards God meant to turn the emotions towards salvation by adopting a way of life and an interior disposition that promoted this spiritual movement (Chapter 2).

Rooted in the experiences of the Desert Fathers and the doctrinal formulas of the Church Fathers, medieval sensibilities were continuously evolving. During the early Middle Ages (fifth to tenth centuries), normative and moral texts written by monks and clerics charted a course for the conversion of the emotions. These were initially intended for monastic circles, but soon turned their gaze on lay society (Chapter 3). In the age of Charlemagne and again, with fresh force, during the Gregorian reforms of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a new project for society took shape atop that key pedestal of Christian social relationships: the love present in charity and true friendship.

Within this Christian context, a slew of new processes began to direct the emotional culture of societies from the eleventh century onwards. Reformed monasticism nurtured the possibility of direct contact with God, attainable through the sincere expression of emotions (Chapter 4). Courtly literature, written in the vernacular, displayed a complex and refined emotional culture, an expression of the values and tensions that cut across aristocratic and bourgeois settings. It was directly related to the religious re-purposing of desire and the clerical offensive to spiritualize conjugal love and supervise the interior life; at the same time, it also frequently came into conflict with them (Chapter 5). From the end of the eleventh century, in the learned circles of the monasteries and urban schools, the rise of a naturalistic spirit led to the integration of the emotions within human nature (Chapter 6). Such varied discussions spurred and spread a positive re-evaluation of the emotions at the end of the Middle Ages: their religious and social uses became richer and more diverse than ever before. This can be sensed in political theory and the practices of princely government, which gave star-billing to the emotions (Chapter 7). On another level, the extraordinary promotion of the Incarnation and Passion of Christ from the high Middle Ages onwards further reinforced the religious efficacy of the emotions. They became the foundations of affective mysticism in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a current which enjoyed an ambiguous relationship with the institutional Church (Chapter 8). Finally, the more numerous and diverse sources from the last centuries of the Middle Ages open a window onto the emotions of those who were previously anonymous, especially in the towns. They demonstrate not only the diversity of emotional cultures that existed at that time, but above all the importance of emotional levers within social relationships (Chapter 9).

Dedication

Copyright page

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Notes