The study of emotions in the Middle Ages has earned a prominent place in the historiography in recent decades. This book, Managing Emotions in the Middle Ages, benefits from this prior journey and focusses on the question that gives it its title: how emotions were managed in the Middle Ages. We do not ask about which emotions were expressed, or how these were expressed. We take it for granted that people in the Late Middle Ages felt and expressed emotions. However, it is also clear that men and women always convey their emotions in line with the values that bind the society in which they live. Thus, the question of the management of emotions is very pertinent, and it is necessary to develop this by concentrating on the different clefts that late-medieval society offers us in order to analyse it through specific cases as studied by prominent researchers.
Precisely because we assume the route followed by previous historiography, we believe it appropriate to dedicate a first part (“Historiographical thoughts”) to exploring new paths for research into emotions in the Middle Ages. Flocel Sabaté, and Barbara Rosenwein and Riccardo Cristiani present their respective propositions. Flocel Sabaté begins by asserting that the emotions of late-medieval men and women have actually been present in the works that have studied medieval society from different perspectives since the eighteenth century. It could not be otherwise given that, in reality, all human behaviour is guided by emotions. In this sense, Sabaté goes on to claim that the study of emotions links to other vectors that, similarly to emotions, have attracted the attention of the historiography in recent decades and that are really intrinsically and inextricably grafted onto the (emotional) behaviour of the inhabitants of the epoch studied. These vectors are, above all, memory and life experience.
Then, Barbara H. Rosenwein and Riccardo Cristiani begin by retracing the specific studies into emotions. These were based on the universalist vision established by Darwin in the nineteenth century until the cognitivist theories provided a new vision in the 1960s. In turn, these were contested in the 1980s through social constructionism. On top of these theoretical bases, various historians have outlined interesting perspectives of analysis around emotions. Attention can be drawn to William Reddy, who tried to combine the three previous hermeneutics (universalist, cognitive and social constructionist), Barbara Rosenwein, who emphasised the varieties of emotional communities
After the historiographic reflection, the book dedicates a second part (“How to deal with emotions”) to analysing a medieval society faced with the challenge of deciding how to deal with emotions. That is why we begin with the chapter by Carla Casagrande, which reconstructs how the emotional education of men and women was established in the Middle Ages. This is a question of paramount importance, because the training and orientation received conditions the attitude with which humans respond to different stimuli and challenges. Christianity, which provided the ideological framework with which to interpret and govern European medieval society, placed its starting point, in this aspect, in Augustine of Hippo and his influential Civitas Dei. This work states that, before the original sin, there were no bad emotions, precisely no desire, no sadness, fear, pain, melancholy or need for audacity, hope or compassion. Before, love was the only feeling. All negative emotions derived from the original sin and expulsion from Paradise. Humanity’s salvation came thanks Christ’s sacrifice, an event surrounded by feelings of sorrow and, at the same time, leading to salvation. These facts framed the sentimental education of medieval men and women, who had to learn to manage their emotions in order to distinguish between the good and the bad. This model spread in the Late Middle Ages because behaving according to this model was the only way to ensure eternal salvation, a belief which obviously had great psychological resonance. The model emphasised the role of penance, in accordance with the sacrament regulated in the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Penance was conditioned by contrition, which forced the sinner to feel pain, a rational and voluntary pain. From here came a gradation of the pain felt according to the degree of the sin committed. The other key element was prayer, with which emotions were explicitly involved, encouraging some emotions (love, admiration, joy) and fighting other emotions (indignation, zeal and audacity). In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, preachers and theologians, such as Jean Gerson, focused on the management of the emotions felt by laypeople, so that they practiced daily prayer, which should be accompanied by such feelings as joy, pain, fear, hope and compassion, or piety. At the same time, the involvement of the body was demanded in order to pray with gestures, attitudes and tears to show the sincerity of the emotions felt. Thus, the management of one’s own
The model of social behaviour was thus based on the dictates of a religion shared as an emotional community, in which the population had to focus their beliefs and behaviour on the management of emotions through the guidance offered by the Church. An essential relationship between clergy and laity derives from this, one that was reflected in the Late Middle Ages by, among others, the adaptation for lay people of the books of piety that emerged from the ecclesiastical environment. That is why, in the second text of this second part, William Marx analyses the Liber de passione Christi et doloribus et planctibus Matrius eius, a work of Cistercian spirituality that was adapted for dissemination among the laity. This work focuses on the Passion and Resurrection of Christ from a very singular perspective. It is located inside the Virgin Mary, who is very human, that is to say, emotional. Through her own words, she expresses very painful feelings, highlighting her anxiety, grief, sorrow and even despair. It is a way to encourage the reader to share Mary’s anguish, suffering with her to culminate the emotional journey to compassion. If you consider that angels do not experience grief, you quickly understand that human beings must necessarily suffer on the path to eternal salvation through prayer. This is how the theology of redemption was transmitted to the population. By comparing this spiritual love with the more physical love contained in such late-medieval non-religious books as the Roman de la Rose, it can be seen that there was no contradiction, because both combine well as parts of the same formative model of Christian human emotions.
Despite the strong pressure that the models of social behaviour imposed on the men and women of that time, there were openings through which alternative visions could be formulated. This is what Josep Maria Ruiz Simon studies in the third chapter of this second part. He focusses on the debate that flourished in the twelfth century about whether sexual relations could be acceptable outside marriage, a controversy which became really marked although it has received little historiographical attention. Certainly, an intense discussion around the so-called “community of women” broke out. It was based around the passages from Plato’s ‘Timaeus’ on sexual and reproductive behaviour through the quotes from Boethius and the translation of the Timaeus into Latin by Calcidius, as well as references in some Fathers of the Church, like Tertullian and Lactantius. Intellectuals, poets, jurists and also learned people argued about free sexual relations, the legitimacy of sexual contacts outside marriage and the legal relationships between ‘potestas’, ‘ius utendi’ and ‘ius fruendi’. As early
Beyond the emotional model, what was the real behaviour of men and women of the Middle Ages? One way to find out is to delve into the interior of some of these people, as if trying to obtain “Emotional portraits”. This is the aim of the third part of the book, which deliberately penetrates inside three specific characters. Alberto Velasco analyses Blanche of Aragon and Anjou, daughter and sister of kings, who has been characterised as emotionally unstable, sometimes debauched and usually shifting abruptly from joy and happiness to grief and depression, and whose health was always poor. Born around 1302, she lived from the age of five in the monastery of Sigena in rural Aragon, of which she was elected prioress in 1321. She felt absolutely attached to her sister Mary, who always went everywhere with her. She also felt such genuine veneration for their brother John of Aragon, Archbishop of Tarragona, to the extent that, when he died in 1335, she, absolutely flustered, ordered him exhumed and stole the cadaver to keep it beside her. This plunged her into deep despair, and obliged the immediate intervention of their brother King Alfonso to stop the scandal and sacrilege. Immediately afterwards, she attributed her illness and depression to Sigena’s unhealthiness, explaining her fear of death, and consulted physicians in Valencia and Barcelona in search of a cure. She died in 1348 from the Black Death. Her will, written shortly before and unknown until now, is at the core of present chapter because it shows the emotive intensity with which she experienced piety, devotion and contrition.
Then Eduard Juncosa penetrates inside Violant of Bar, wife of John i of Aragon and thus queen, between 1387 and 1396, and later dowager until her death in 1431. Emotionality surrounded the various stages of her life, beginning with her training in the royal court of Charles V of France and the expectations of her marriage to the king of Aragon. Subsequently, the abundant epistolary correspondence with her husband highlights the conjugal model, which, like her balance in decision-making, was praised by such contemporary writers as
The effort to adapt personal emotions to the religious model that gave meaning to late-medieval society conditioned these individual portraits. However, it could be that, in some cases, rather than adapting to the model, these emotions sought a hiding place behind the words and apparent forms. That is what Karen Stöber explores in the case of Guto’r Glyn in the fifteenth century. One of the great Welsh poets, he lived under the protection of two abbots in the Cistercian monastery of Strata Florida or Valle Crucis, in Wales. Indeed, he maintained a special affective relationship with Abbot Rhys. The abbot was patron and benefactor to the young poet at the beginning of his career, and the latter dedicated a small group of fascinating poems to him. The two men came to have close personal ties, which the bard articulated in his work and which went beyond mere convention. In this emotional work, Guto expresses thoughts and feelings and lays bare his joys and fears in relation to Abbot Rhys. Bound by strict poetic convention and complex metre, at first glance, the kind of praise poetry composed by Guto for his patron meets the expectations of a regulated patron-poet relationship. Look more closely at the texts, however, and considering the particular circumstances of each of the poems, a different picture emerges, one which reveals, so this chapter argues, the genuine emotions felt by the young poet towards his aged patron.
Emotions are, one way or another, shared in society. That is why we can talk about emotions as collective experiences. The fourth part of the book explicitly aims to explore the expressive tools put in place in Middle Ages with the purpose of generating collective emotions. First of all, there is music,
The second text of this fourth part analyses the intention to generate collective emotions through the visual experience of contemplating epigraphic pieces, as Vincent Debiais analyses. The purpose of epigraphic texts engraved or painted in visual works of art during the Middle Ages was for these to become artefacts that established a relation between an acting object and a feeling subject. The inclusion of epigraphic texts in the decoration of the temples always aimed at generating aesthetic experiences, invariably linked, ultimately, to experiences of faith and devotion. Texts and images show the path to follow by triggering prayer, devotion, fear and admiration, with a very direct appeal to the body, both for the mortification to which it should be subjected and for the punishments of torture that could await one in Hell. Precisely, the epigraphic texts often highlight the dialogue between living and dead bodies typical of funerary decoration, always through an intense emotional experience (empathy, sadness, affliction, fear, anguish, anger). The theological connection between beauty and good, as established by Thomas Aquinas, emphasises the value of the aesthetic emotion inherent in religious images, starting with Christ on the Cross, while contributing to forming a specific memory of the path to salvation, always fuelled by the emotions induced by the visual. The texts included on the walls of the temples combined with the images with the same objective, because what was intended was to stir physiologically and psychologically, in order to transmit specific individual and collective behaviour to the men and women of that society, always taught through the language of sensitivity to history.
Emotions were also shared collectively through the decoration of books, as Anna Caiozzo analyses in the literature of the Near East in the Late Middle Ages. Entering the thirteenth century, the rising interest of the bourgeoisie for the arts of the book spread book illustrations that portray the language of the
There are always certain moments suitable for outbursts of emotions. Sometime these are in a surprising way and others, in a more predictable manner. For the first of these situations, we have placed the focus, very intentionally on judicial action, which occupies the fifth part of the book. The people who, as the subject of an accusation, are put under pressure by the magistrates and officials in charge of applying justice and can suffer serious consequences in the event of a conviction, experience an emotional tension, and in some cases, can glimpse a way out through expressiveness. In the first chapter of this fifth part, after presenting a good overview of the history of emotions, Iñaki Bazán analyses those attributed to adulterous women in legal sources and judicial documentation from late-medieval Castile, as well as the emotional reactions of their husbands. Adultery was considered exceedingly serious, because the woman inflicted enormous harm on her husband, the whole lineage and society itself. This means that adultery provoked an extremely emotional social reaction, as reflected in legal sources. On the one hand, the sources present women characterised as dominated by a loving passion that does not justify their behaviour, but on the contrary, emphasises their sinful image and, therefore, that they were driven by bad passions. Above all, the husband was always perceived as a victim, so the normal reaction expected from him was anger, to the point that it was popularly accepted that he would, if possible, kill his wife and her lover, perhaps humiliating the latter with specific aggressions to the
In the second chapter of this fourth part, Jonas Holst and Miguel Ángel Motis analyse the emotions expressed by Jewish women converted to Christianity who were accused of Crypto-Judaism before the Inquisitorial trial in Aragon between 1484 and 1492. Taking into account the anthropology of emotions and gesturality, the polysemy of the emotions, the disquisition between contrition and persuasion, and the relation between suffering, tribulation and mourning, can be grasped. At the decisive moments of their interrogation, confession and abjuration, the women expressed emotions through words or through non-verbal gestures, either weeping (lacrimali) or the planctus motivated by the death of a loved one. All this took place within the context of the patriarchal discourse of the inquisitors, built upon stereotypical codes of conduct and a fictional language, with which the women affected and treated as ‘daughters of Eve’ tried to align themselves to obtain the desired benevolentia and misericordia from their judges. Pain and repentance are linked to expressions of emotions that can actually have very different meanings depending on how they are interpreted by the accused women or the ecclesiastical judges. The most serious thing is that the expression and interpretation of the emotions led to vital consequences in the sentencing or pardoning of the accused women.
Another scenario linked to the experience of emotions, although of a more leisurely and pleasant nature, is the journey. As Eric J. Leed has remarked, the journey occupied a central point in the assumption of the values, especially religious, with which medieval society was articulated as well as in the discovery of new knowledge in the Renaissance,1 something which always implied experiencing emotions. That is why we have dedicated a sixth and final part to emotional travellers. This naturally moves from the end of the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century, with the clear intention of approaching the evolution of the emotions expressed. In this part, in first place, Maravillas Aguiar compares the Riḥla (‘travel account’) of two travellers from Granada: the mathematician Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī al-Qalaṣādī (d. 891/1486), a scholar from late Naṣrid al-Andalus who gave a detailed account of his travels (1436–1451) to several cities where he took lessons in mathematics; and the Morisco Aḥmad ibn Qāsim
In the second text of this sixth part, Alexandra Velissariou2 retraces the steps of Jacques Le Saige, a silk merchant from Northern Burgundy, who undertook a pilgrimage to the Holy Land around 1520 with a notebook in which he wrote down his impressions, with the intention of later writing a book. Reading the notes taken during the trip allows us to appreciate the emotions felt by a member of the bourgeoisie, who was also interested in collecting these in writing. As he travelled, he felt motivated not only to note down the curiosities and peculiarities he encountered but also to register his own emotions on paper. The notebooks portray the behaviour of a person who travelled and they express pleasant emotions about the landscapes he saw, or feelings of melancholy for not being able to share these pleasant experiences with loved ones now far away. This personal and conscious perception of emotions includes all sorts of specific feelings, such as surprise, fear or empathy linked to the situations he had to deal with. His writing gathered not only experiences, such as seeing someone being sentenced to death, or other specific events, but also his own feelings. In this sense, he expressed pleasant emotions in details from daily life, such as tasting food and drinks. He clearly distinguished his own feelings from those of the group, given that he did not travel alone, sharing the companions’ laughter or fear, for example. Thus, the development of personal awareness meant a specific perception of one’s own emotiveness fitting with the vital context.
Through the six-part structure of the book, we aim to show how emotion was managed in the Middle Ages. The collection of sixteen texts with which to delve deeper in these parts aims to ensure a geographical depth and breadth that enriches the overview of the whole. The coherence of the question and of the answer we give with this book aim to take a leap forward in the knowledge of how medieval society managed the emotions of its men and women. It is an axial question with which to contribute to research into emotionality in the Middle Ages. We have actually asked ourselves three axial questions, because in two other books we have tried to answer “the emotional expression of authority and power in the Middle Ages” and “defining and perceiving feelings in the Middle Ages”. This effort has been made possible thanks to the support of the Spanish ministry of research, which financed the research project Expressiveness, Feelings and Emotion in the Middle Ages (12th–15th centuries) (har2016-75028-P) between 2016 and 2020. This framework fostered an environment for research work that included reflection between international researchers through various scientific meetings and congresses. The meeting held in Lleida in 2018 directly addressed the theme of how emotions were managed in the Middle Ages, giving rise to the texts gathered here. Then the scientific acumen of the Brill publishing house instilled confidence in this project and subjected it to its rigorous review. We sincerely thank the Publisher for submitting the works to anonymous peer-reviewers to whom we express our appreciation for their comments that have significantly enriched this book.
Eric J. Leed, The Mind of the traveller. From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism (New York, 1991), pp. 174–208.
Between the submission of the text and its publication, the author passed away very prematurely, so when publishing the text that the author had carefully corrected, we pay sincere homage to her memory.