The psychology of emotion and study of the medieval period

Abstract

‘What I am after is not hard and testable in the narrow empirical ways of a certain style of social science’ warns the legal historian W.I. Miller, a pioneer in the field of the history of emotion. 1 Miller is, in places, dismissive of psychology and the insights it has to offer, yet the psychology of emotion is a growing field and discoveries made in it can be illuminating for medievalists. What follows is an outline of three particular aspects of psychology of emotion and some suggestion of how these might be productive for thinking about emotions in texts of the medieval period. Current psychological theories of emotion fall broadly into two groups: universalist theories or theories of basic emotion, and componential theories. Theories of basic emotion ultimately derive from Darwin. 2 Essentially they argue that the ‘basic emotions’ are common to all members of the human species across different cultures and times and are genetically transmitted. 3 Advocates of componential theories maintain that emotion can be reduced to bundles of different elements. These elements belong to three distinct systems: the physiological or bodily, e.g. turning pale; the cognitive (in effect, thinking and reasoning), e.g. recognising an insult; and the expressive or behavioural, e.g. making a verbal challenge. The ways in which these elements combine to produce recognisable emotions are determined both by social context and by language, and are highly variable. 4 In the 1980s this social constructionist position became dominant, and, in a weak version, remains so in anthropological and historical thinking about emotion. 5