sehepunkte 25 (2025), Nr. 10

Flocel Sabaté (ed.): Managing Emotions in the Middle Ages

Managing Emotions in the Middle Ages, edited by Flocel Sabaté (Professor of Medieval History at the University of Lleida and specialist of the Crown of Aragon), gathers sixteen essays that contribute to the thriving field of the history of emotions. This book is not the first to examine how medieval emotions were managed in recent historiography: one may compare it to Managing Emotion in Byzantium: Passions, Affects and Imaginings (2022). [1] That Byzantine collection highlights cognition, communication, and the transfer of emotions across linguistic and political boundaries; it asks what Byzantines thought emotions were and how theory shaped their appraisal of reality. In other words, it maps emotion as practice as well as doctrine. In the same vein, the present volume, focused on Western Europe and the Arabic-Islamicate world, does not ask which emotions were expressed or how they were expressed, but rather how they were regulated in line with the values of late medieval society. In those stories, people's life experiences are made meaningful through emotion. Taken together, the papers suggest studying the management of emotions helps us read the codes of value and behaviour that structured that world.

This book is a great addition to a flourishing historiography, as it offers a great synthesis along with various case studies on how emotions were managed. Since the "affective turn", the field has gained real institutional depth. Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns coined "emotionology" [2], William M. Reddy theorised "emotional regimes" [3], Robert A. Kaster articulated "emotional scripts" [4], and Monique Scheer advanced a practice-centred model. [5] For medievalists specifically, Barbara H. Rosenwein's Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages [6] set much of the agenda; Sarah McNamer's Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion [7] refined script-based readings; Piroska Nagy brings "collective emotions" to the fore [8]; while Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy's Medieval Sensibilities consolidated two decades of scholarship. [9] Read against this canon, Managing Emotions in the Middle Ages positions itself clearly on the side of management and regulation, showing how norms, bodies, and scripts governed feeling in later medieval societies.

The editor gathered the contributions from the International Medieval Meeting held at the University of Lleida in June 2018, entitled "Emotions in the Middle Ages: A Historiographical Appraisal". The volume includes an index of places and persons, brief notes on contributors, and 26 figures across five chapters. The case studies range across Spain, France, England, and Germany, and include comparative forays into Arabic and Persianate materials. The contributors work across history, art history, law, music, and philosophy, which gives the collection genuine interdisciplinarity. This variety allows the book to test "management" across institutions and social arenas, drawing on a broad documentary base.

The volume does not open with a full introduction but with a short Preface by Flocel Sabaté. He presents the aim crisply: to study how emotions were managed, assuming their expression as a given. Two historiographical chapters then set the scene. Part I offers Sabaté's programmatic essay on emotions as tied to memory and life experience, and a chapter by field leaders [10] Barbara H. Rosenwein and Riccardo Cristiani which charts a "bodily turn," with pain, practice, embodiment, and gender as key axes. The architecture that follows is clear - five parts and fourteen chapters - with Parts 2 to 4 addressing content-driven questions and Parts 5 and 6 organized by source type. The essays underscore two complementary approaches to medieval emotions. Close case studies retrieve situated repertoires and embodied practices, while corpus-based analyses, such as those in the final two parts, bring out recurrent patterns, institutional scripts, and diachronic change across genres, regions, and centuries.

The first contributions focus on case studies to analyse the challenges involved in managing emotions in medieval society, such as emotional education to distinguish good from bad through penance and prayer (Casagrande), key moments in the life of Christ such as the Passion and the Resurrection (Marx), and the art of courtly love (Ruiz Simon) (Part 2). The next part conducts a finer-grained analysis of individual emotions, attending to those of Blanche of Aragon (Velasco), Violant of Bar (Bonet), and the Welsh poet Guto'r Glyn (Stöber) (Part 3). Contributors also examine collective emotions, following Rosenwein's framework, by studying the media through which emotions were expressed: Carolingian monastic music, with the songs of Gottschalk of Orbais (Molina), the relationship between texts and images (Debiais), and literatures of the Near East (Caiozzo) (Part 4). The final contributions interrogate the persistence or universality of certain emotions by treating several kinds of documentation, or by following a single type across multiple centuries and regions. The sources include Castilian judicial records (Diaz) and inquisitorial trials in Aragon (Holst and Motis) (Part 5), as well as travel narratives, whether the travel account by two travellers from Granada (Aguilar), the notebook of a Burgundian silk merchant (Velissariou), or marriage negotiations between Ireland and Spain (Knox) (Part 6).

A few points warrant attention, however. Chapter titles are quite general and do not always signal region or chronology, which is unfortunate in a field that has repeatedly shown how crucial context is to interpreting emotions. Moreover, the series frame ("Later Medieval Europe") keeps the focus largely on the thirteenth to early sixteenth centuries, even if some chapters glance earlier when appropriate, thereby highlighting the need for a comparable volume devoted to the early medieval centuries. Finally, the "Notes on Contributors" section include minor editorial slips (pronouns, misspelled names such as "Riccado" for "Riccardo," and occasional citation inconsistencies), which distract from otherwise careful scholarship. Aside from these points of details, the volume thus sits squarely within the latest wave of scholarship and offers a substantive, coherent contribution: its collective and interdisciplinary design advances a genuinely social history of emotions by showing how norms, bodies, and scripts governed emotional responses.

Notes:

[1] Margaret Mullett / Susan Ashbrook Harvey (eds.): Managing Emotion in Byzantium. Passions, Affects and Imaginings, London 2022.

[2] Carol Z. Stearns / Peter N. Stearns: The Struggle for Emotional Control in America's History, Chicago 1986.

[3] William M. Reddy: The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions, Cambridge 2004.

[4] Robert Kaster: Emotion, Restraint, and Community in Ancient Rome, Oxford / New York 2005.

[5] Monique Scheer: 'Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuan Approach to Understanding Emotion', in: History and Theory 51-2 (2012), 193-220

[6] Barbara H. Rosenwein: Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages, New York 2006.

[7] Sarah McNamer: Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion, Philadelphia 2010.

[8] Piroska Nagy : 'Histoire des émotions collectives Éléments pour la trajectoire d'un phénomène et d'un concept', in: Damien Boquet / Piroska Nagy / Lidia Zanetti Domingues (éds.) : Histoire des émotions collectives. Épistémologie, émergences, expériences, Paris 2022, 9-64.

[9] Damien Boquet / Piroska Nagy: Medieval Sensibilities. A History of Emotions in the Middle Ages, Cambridge 2018, 6-7.

[10] Barbara H. Rosenwein / Riccardo Cristiani: What Is the History of Emotions?, Medford 2018.