Pakistan Journal of Historical Studies, Vol. 5 • Summer & Winter 2020, pp. 1–10 Copyright © 2020 Khaldunia Centre for Historical Research. doi:10.2979/pjhs.5.1_2.01 Emotions and Mediaeval Monasticism : Introduction Barbara H. Rosenwein Loyola University Chicago Riccardo Cristiani independent scholar If the history of emotions itself is a fairly new project, its application to the topic of mediaeval Western monasticism is newer still. True, the devotional fervour involved in twelfth and thirteenth-century Cistercian monasticism (in particular) has been well explored.1 True, too, that each of the authors involved in this collection has studied various individual monasteries for their emotional tenor. Nevertheless, the present work is perhaps the first to place various monastic communities side by side for direct comparison and contrast. We expected this juxtaposition to reveal some of the myriad possibilities of emotional continuity and change from the sixth to the thirteenth century. Yet, while we may indeed find somepatterns,theyarefarlessstrikingthanthefrictionofdifferenthistoriographical approaches, each suited to a particular monastery and each largely dependent on the sources being investigated. In short, we think that the essays in this collection are useful above all because they provide a sampling of the sorts of methods that historians may use to tease out the emotions in extant documents and material objects. Along with the traditional modes of inquiry that historians normally apply to primary sources, historians of emotions must add many new questions, each aimed at a particular analytical issue. What constitutes an emotion for the writers (or creators) and their audience(s)? What attitudes do the sources have about particular emotions and how they are expressed? To whom are emotions attributed and why? Are 2 Pakistan Journal of Historical Studies, Vol. 5 • Summer & Winter 2020 the authors emotional in their self-presentation? What expectations do the authors have about the emotions and emotional reactions of others? How are emotions used to make moral judgments or impose behaviours and attitudes? Are emotions expressed or expected to be expressed differently by men and women? And, very importantly, historians should also ask themselves what sorts of emotional assumptions they, as professional researchers, bring to the sources and to what extent they are justified. The first question concerning what constitutes an emotion is perhaps the most problematic. The worst answer is to look for the words and practices that we today consider to be emotions or emotional and assume that they had the same significance in the past. By what criteria, then, may we identify an emotion? Methodologically speaking, the essays in this collection are grounded in the long tradition that connects the ancient Greek word pathos to the Latin passio. In the Middle Ages, the pathe were commonly termed passions (passiones), perturbations (perturbationes), affects or affections (affectus, affectiones). A fifth-century monk, John Cassian, repackaged many of the negative passions (e.g., anger, sadness, lust) as vices, starting a tradition that equated emotions with sinful thoughts and behaviour . Around the same time, Augustine of Hippo offered an even more comprehensive way to consider the emotions of the ancient world within a Christian world-view. For Augustine, emotions were movements of the soul that were put into action by the will. Mankind, fallen from Eden and mired in sin, habitually willed all the wrong things, all the vices. But with God’s help, men and women could turn their wills around and convert them and their wrong-headed emotions in the right direction toward God. Thus, anger on behalf of God, sadness at one’s sins, lust turned into the desire for God were good emotions. Much later, in the twelfth century, philosophers and theologians offered useful theories of the emotions, and in the next century, Thomas Aquinas wrote a comprehensive treatise on the topic. Today’s mediaevalists, therefore, have a fairly good idea of what people in the Middle Ages considered to be emotions and emotional. Rosenwein and Cristiani / Emotions and Mediaeval Monasticism 3 Monasteries were designed to separate monks and nuns from the families, towns, and courts whence they came and, accordingly, to shape their emotional repertoire so that it conformed to the standard mandated by the Rule they followed. But even one Rule, as in the case of the sixth...
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Jun 1, 2024
Andrés Jaime Valencia Pérez 
Open Access