Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages

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...