Synopses & Reviews
In the past few years, interest has grown in the way human emotions have been experienced, stimulated, and expressed in languages throughout history. Cultivating the Heart studies the language of emotions in religious texts in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, focusing on sermons, saintsandrsquo; lives, guidebooks for religious recluses, meditations, and lyrical poetry. It offers, as well, substantial commentary on church wall paintings, providing readers with a nuanced understanding of the ways in which the affective strategies of visual resources can be mapped onto texts. This is the first book-length study of affective language in the High Middle Ages, a period which has been previously neglected in work on the history of emotions.
Synopsis
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 studies: 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.
Synopsis
"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 studies: 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.
About the Author
A. S. Lazikani is a stipendiary lecturer in Old and Middle English literature at the University of Oxford.
Table of Contents
Series Editorsandrsquo; Preface
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Note on Editions and Translations
Introduction: Feeling in the High Middle Ages
1 Upon a Spiritual Cross: Feeling in the Lambeth and Trinity Homilies
2 The Gnawed Hand: Presence and Absence of Feeling in the Early South
English Legendaries
3 Co-feeling: Compassion in Ancrene Wisse and the Wooing Group
4 Call Me Bitter: Feeling and Sensing in Passion Lyrics
Conclusion
Notes
Select Bibliography