Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages

"This is a landmark book, not only for the early middle ages but also for the emerging field of the history of emotions. Barbara H. Rosenwein evaluates with superb intelligence the strengths and weaknesses of the various methods that have been applied in this field, and fashions an approach of her own that will serve as a useful model for many other researchers. Using this carefully constructed method, she is able to bring to life for us, as no other scholar has, the emotional communities whose existence is implied in the scattered texts and epigraphs of the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries. A real tour de force." -- William M. Reddy, William T. Laprade Professor of History and Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University
"Thoroughly discrediting the view of many scholars that medieval people, in contrast to modern ones, were 'emotionally childish, impulsive, and unrestrained,' Barbara H. Rosenwein ably develops and deploys the concept of 'emotional communities' to investigate several groups in early Medieval Europe whose members adhered to 'the same norms of emotional expression and valued—or devalued—the same or related emotions.'." -- Stephen D. White, Candler Professor of Medieval History, Emory University
"What did people 1400 years ago mean when they told a woman that they 'were moved by her tears,' or found an event 'hell raising'? Historians have always been puzzled by medieval descriptions of emotions. They interpreted them in simplistic terms, or at best explained displays of emotion as ritual performances quite unconnected to what people really felt. Barbara H. Rosenwein, using recent psychological theory, opens doors to a completely new understanding of past emotions. Instead of a general and necessarily blurred picture of a 'typical' medieval set of emotions, she subtly reconstructs feelings and attitudes,'emotives' and passions shared by specific 'emotional communities.' Various languages of emotion connected stereotypes and metaphors with inner feelings. The book opens fascinating new ways of access to a 'dark age,' and should be read not only by medieval historians but also by anyone interested in the study of emotions past or present." -- Walter Pohl, Professor of Medieval History, University of Vienna, and Director, Institute for Medieval Research, Austrian Academy of Sciences
"With her original book, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages, Barbara H. Rosenwein opens new perspectives on the history of emotions. This includes a persuasive critique of Norbert Elias's influential notion of the civilizing process. Proposing that people lived (and live) in emotional communities, each having its own particular norms and emotional expressions, Rosenwein has written a groundbreaking book that is highly important to historians as well as to social scientists working on the history of emotions." -- Ingrid Kasten, Freie Universitët Berlin
"With this book Barbara Rosenwein has made the emotions an essential component of our approach to the changing social history." -- Jacques Le Goff