Understanding Emotions in Early Europe eds. by Michael Champion and Lynch Andrew

Abstract

Reviewed by: Understanding Emotions in Early Europe eds. by Michael Champion and Lynch Andrew Ivan Cañadas Champion, Michael, and Andrew Lynch, eds, Understanding Emotions in Early Europe (Early European Research, 8), Turnhout, Brepols, 2015; hardback; pp. xxxiv, 357; R.R.P. €90.00; ISBN 9782503552644. This volume engages with the challenges of identifying and interpreting human emotional experience from a position of cultural and temporal remoteness. It does so while acknowledging the fluid nature both of language and of [End Page 203] intellectual and cultural conventions, including social customs and rituals, philosophical or theological frameworks, and literary conventions. The book's fourteen wide-ranging chapters and the editors' lucid Introduction, thus, recognise that, even accepting some human constants, understanding emotion in any period remains a matter for historical inquiry. Though subdivided into three parts – 'Intellectual Traditions', 'Literature', and 'Social History and Material Culture' – the collection's strength lies in the connections between essays, even those in different sections, providing remarkable coherence. An early statement regarding culturally embedded social 'narratives or scripts', for instance, resonates among essays dealing with diverse subject matter and different periods. The first section traces intersections between Classical philosophy and early Christianity, where the conception and discourse of emotions are concerned, and, hence, leads into further consideration of the influence and transformation of these in medieval and early modern Europe. David Konstan's essay on the shift from 'regret to remorse' in late Antiquity argues that pre-Christian 'regret … a primarily intellectual phenomenon', took over two centuries after Christ's death to yield ground to 'remorse', internalised, by contrast, and involving empathy, rather than mere consideration of negative external consequences to oneself (pp. 6–7). Konstan attributes this delayed adoption to the fact that Greco-Roman culture did not see 'human beings as essentially sinful and in need of repentance' (p. 12), and, moreover, that emotionality was distrusted or condemned as contrary to the ideal of rational equanimity (p. 14). Consequently, additions 'had to be made' in late Antiquity, 'specific to Christian Latin': the terms compunctio and contritio (p. 22). Like Jennifer Carpenter's essay on the praise of 'positive emotion' and the furthering emotional community, in the hagiographic work of a Cistercian cantor, Goswin of Bossut, Michael Champion's discussion of Byzantine orator, Michael Psellos, who validated both sincere affection and grief regarding one's loved ones, reflects on the legacy of early Christianity outlined in Konstan's opening essay, illustrating connections among essays. Similarly, there is common ground between Juanita Feros Ruys's discussion of the medieval theological debate about the 'emotional capacity' of demons, on the one hand, and Antonina Harbus's reading of 'embodied emotion' in the representation of Grendel's mother's grief in Beowulf. While Ruys outlines the growing range of emotions attributed to demons, imagined as rejoicing and raging, by turns, medieval theologians cautioned against humanising those fallen beings with 'sadness', a risk notably taken only centuries later when Milton attributed 'sadness' to Satan, potentially associating the devil with 'the divine humanity of Jesus' (pp. 52–53). Harbus, in turn, considers the representation of Grendel's mother's grief, as 'a brief humanizing quality', controlled enough not to make the figure sympathetic, but rather, to establish [End Page 204] that her revenge is 'calculated and evil' and not 'merely instinctive and bestial'(p. 143). Also among the literary essays is Andrew Lynch's discussion of Chrétien de Troyes's Guinevere, a figure defined by her gender and by her status as queen, but presented from a different perspective in the Lancelot romance, which reinterprets Guinevere through attention to her 'emotional life … separated from its former community' (p. 167). Part III, 'Social History and Material Culture', includes Dianne Hall's revealing account of the gendered discourse of fear in early modern, Irish anti-Catholic narratives, and Robert Shoemaker's discussion of the orchestration of fear in eighteenth-century London print, and of its limited affective appeal, as indicated by responses in contemporary diaries. This section also includes a divergent piece, Sandra Bowdler and Jane Balme's anthropological consideration of prehistoric burial customs and what they suggest about our species' emotional engagement with our dead, which they bring into dialogue...