Studying the repertoire of emotions in the Middle Ages, two historians show the importance of emotional life in the construction of the subject and social relations. A dive into the intimacy of medieval people.
Following the work of Johan Huizinga and Norbert Elias, historians have long believed that men and women in pre-Hispanic eras XVIIe–XVIIIe centuries were violent, cruel, infantile, instinctive and, therefore, incapable of controlling their emotions. The manifestation of these would have been a “natural” phenomenon and it would have been necessary to wait for the process of “civilization of morals” to move from instinctive emotions to reason and self-control.
Fortunately, over the last twenty years, rich studies have come to put an end to this vision, across the Atlantic, with the pioneering works of Barbara H. Rosenwein and William M. Reddy, and with the authors of this present work, who have become today the two most eminent French-speaking specialists on the subject. Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy, after having defended two theses, respectively on the religious affectivity of XIIe century and on tears at the end of the Middle Ages, have embarked on a long-term enterprise by creating and co-directing the research project EMMA and producing several collective works.
“Wherever you go, my love goes with you”
This book offers a synthesis of the history of emotions throughout the medieval period. Using varied documentation, the authors scrutinize in detail, in monasteries, schools, universities, families or the street, in aristocratic and princely circles, among mystics or in popular circles, a whole range of emotions expressed and felt (love, hate, anger, shame, melancholy, humiliation, love, friendship, joy, pain or suffering) by men and women of the Middle Ages. They thus offer us a deep dive into the intimacy of medieval people, to demonstrate the importance of emotional life in the conception of the medieval subject and within social relations.
The authors describe how, between the IIIe and the Ve centuries, affects have been Christianized to deliver a new and original conception of emotions. The Bible is saturated with emotions. It depicts a sensitive Father who is angry with his people, but who also knows how to be merciful. Above all, it offers an incarnate Son charged with virtuous emotions: love, passion and suffering. The Fathers of the Church were very interested in passions, as Augustine does in The City of God (books IX And XIV). Like other theologians of his time, at the end of passionthe bishop of Hippo prefers that ofaffect which better accounts for the entire emotional phenomenon, from the initial emotional shock to the lasting establishment of the feeling.
The gradual establishment of the doctrine of original sin reminds Christians that man has experienced negative emotions linked to the “carnal will” (carnalis voluntas) and lust, but that, at almost the same moment, he experienced shame (pudor Or shameful) of having sinned, a disorder which allows him to distinguish good from evil and which becomes one of the conditions of his redemption. With Christianity, affect therefore enters the rational soul. The opposition between passion And ratio ancient philosophers gives way to the integration of affect within human nature.
The authors are particularly interested in a specific emotional community that constitutes, in their eyes, throughout the medieval period, the main laboratory and matrix of emotions in the West: the monastery. The monks, whose emotions are all turned towards God and salvation, proceed to a “vertical reorientation of affectivity” (p. 66). They seek first to control their affects, but deploy more varied emotions, because cenobitism replaces extreme solitude and friendship becomes a cardinal value producing positive emotions.
To XIe And XIIe centuries, we witness the blossoming of a new sensitivity in the intimacy of the cloister, which places the expression of emotions in the spotlight. Between the brothers, a powerful spiritual intimacy develops, conveyed by numerous gestures of affection. Let us listen, for example, to an extract from a letter that Anselm of Canterbury addresses to Gondulf in the early 1070s:
All that I feel about you is sweet and pleasing to my heart: all that I desire for you is the best that my mind can conceive. Indeed, I have seen you as I have loved you, as you know; I hear that you are as I have desired you, as God knows. Therefore, wherever you go, my love accompanies you, and wherever I dwell, my desire embraces you. (p. 121)
The authors warn us against the danger of reading in these signs of intense spiritual affection the expression of a homosexual subculture, as proposed by John Boswell and his followers. They only translate the way in which the brothers manifest spiritual friendship by using the weapons of epistolary rhetoric. In these monastic circles, we also witness, from the XIe century, to a growing appreciation of positive emotions (joy, desire, enjoyment) linked to the rise of the theme of the Incarnation, a new sensitivity found within secular society.
A new emotional code
This is why the authors explore aristocratic emotions during the central Middle Ages. They first analyze the emotions expressed by the aristocrats of Francia of the Ve-Xe centuries, among which often circulate the caritas and thefriendshipalliance producers, or theenmity which leads to hatred, anger and violence. Chivalric literature offers a profusion of very diverse emotions and a new emotional code, expressed through “courtly love” which glorifies adultery at the very moment when the Church establishes rigorous matrimonial principles within the framework of the so-called Gregorian reform, within which the fides and the marital debt play a crucial role.
This ethic can also be seen as a reconciliation (against the previous purely clerical position) of love (delicacy) and carnal pleasure; because the vassal’s desire for the lady is also sexual. This is why, in a particularly convincing section, the authors identify two distinct love models in XIIe–XIIIe centuries: the first, homosexual masculine, inherited from the monastic matrix, exalts the values of friendship (“true love”) and (feudal) fidelity where sexual desire is excluded; the second, heterosexual, very present in courtly love, where friendship and carnal desire go hand in hand. These two love models use the same emotional registers, but the different place of sexual desire prevents them from overlapping.
From the XIIe century, we are witnessing a “disjunction between the two models” (p. 178). On the one hand, the brotherly love-friendship between two men begins to be discredited and leads to “the impossible infamy same-sex lovers” (p. 177). On the other hand, we are witnessing a strong valorization of a model of heterosexual loving couple. In a context of increased reflection on what is natural and what is “against nature”, one of the consequences of this evolution is the beginning of a “sodomite problem” (which will take on, as we know, a very large scale in the last two medieval centuries), of a condemnation of homo-affectivity, which was nevertheless so highly valued before the XIIe century.
It seems to me that this disjunction is essential to understanding our present because it blocks, and for a long time, within homosexual practices or orientations, the taking into account of the nobility of love (love, friendship), making two beings of the same sex who love each other strongly sexualized transgressive beings.
Emotional codes and rituals
Emotions also support the rationality of government strategies, and the authors do not fail to consider the emotional dimension of the art of governing. The young prince must learn very early to master a code of emotions that is taught to him through the Mirrors to Princes. The king must know how to express anger and sadness. The wrath of the King of England Henry II verbally expressed towards Thomas Becket (“But who will rid me of this presumptuous cleric!”) is tantamount to a death sentence. It would then be necessary, from 1170 to the penance of Avranches in July 1174, for him to express, on the contrary, profound sadness and sincere repentance in order to obtain forgiveness. In the political domain, women seem to benefit from a much smaller range of political emotions than men.
Emotions also have their rituals in the religious domain: praying together, going on processions, attending sermons, going on pilgrimages or crusades, flagellating oneself to atone for one’s faults or those of all Christians, etc. These expressions, which may seem excessive to us, have nothing hysterical or uncontrolled about them. On the contrary, they are expressed within rituals that aim to channel them. The mystical saints were undoubtedly those who pushed these emotional outbursts the furthest, linked to a new devotion to the humanity of Christ. They have visions and spasms, cry, fast or seek to satisfy themselves with God in a bulimic way, enter into ecstasy, experience levitations, and experience a loving fusion with God.
As the authors point out, we must avoid attributing a “gender identity” to this affective feminine spirituality, because it was developed in male monastic circles and it was men who wrote texts granting women these very bodily emotional spiritual experiences. Compared to their vita Written by men (sometimes their confessor), the writings of the mystics themselves (few in number) appear much less emotional and psychosomatic. The hagiographers insist on intense physical suffering, while the female mystics report more their union with the divine lover. The idea that the body would have been the privileged place of feminine devotion was undoubtedly amplified by male hagiographic sources.
Finally, reading this book, we can affirm that medieval emotions are no less codified and rational than those observed today. It is Western societies that have gradually established an opposition between reason and emotion that had no reason to exist in the Middle Ages. Each individual has an emotional repertoire and activates part of it according to their mood and the people they are with, creating a highly controlled emotional communication link.
The history of emotions practiced by Piroska Nagy and Damien Boquet reconnects with the initial questions of historians of private life and allows us to penetrate a little better into the bodily and mental intimacy of the people who came before us.