This is an intriguing book, not entirely what one might have expected given the preliminary essays written and edited by the author. [1] Those writings tended to be framed by two models: first, a social constructionist model, according to which there are no universal human emotions; rather different societies construct significantly different emotions, value emotions differently, and develop quite different strategies around their expression; second, a "practice" approach, in which the ontology of emotions is denied or bracketed in order to concentrate on the goals and strategies governing their display. To be sure, both models have their place in Emotional Communities. But Rosenwein borrows far more from William Reddy, who has strongly criticized the assumptions of social constructionist accounts of emotions, rejecting their tendency to uphold "the absolute plasticity of the individual," their concentration on the social and collective to the exclusion of the individual, and their refusal to acknowledge an ontology to emotions, which he sees as "the real world-anchor of signs." [2] In making such criticisms, Reddy is trying to point out and correct a real flaw in constructionism--its inability to bridge the gap opened up by its theory and practice between the subjective and the social. To Reddy, emotions are important to people--and should be important to social scientists and philosophers--precisely because they are the most fraught zone of conflict and negotiation between individual and society, self and other. We can never express the essence of our own emotions; we can never "get at" another person's emotional reality. Yet we keep trying to do both. Reddy therefore coined the term "emotives" (by analogy with linguistic performatives): attempts by an individual to articulate (to self and other) pre-verbal feelings--that is, to make sense of feelings in ways that are socially resonant, with the result that over time individuals come to channel feelings into a restricted range of socially accepted categories. Rosenwein has explicitly taken over Reddy's notion of "emotives." Not quite as explicitly but far more pervasively and importantly, she also seems to share, more than has been evident in her past work, his sense that even if expressions of emotions are never the emotions themselves but always socially inflected judgments and valuations about situations and actions, they are still important because they reveal important and profound values of the individuals we study. Rosenwein still knows when to see strategies at work in displays of emotions, while social constructionism informs her very idea of "emotional communities." Nevertheless, one is more struck by the extent to which she uses "emotion words" to reveal the values individuals believed in. As a result, individual and collectivity are brought into balance, so that even in a book on communities one cannot help but hear something like the voices of individuals, whose expressions of grief and sorrow are not allowed to be dismissed as mere convention or strategy: "Here is buried a woman of senatorial rank, who merited, by the mercy of God, not to know about the death of her daughter . . ." (68).
Rosenwein's introduction offers a brief overview of the ways historians and social scientists have regarded emotions, beginning with the tendency, epitomized by Johan Huizinga and Norbert Elias, to regard the middle ages as a period of unrestrained emotionality waiting to be civilized by modernity. A brief discussion of recent theory and experimental psychology helps justify her contention that emotions have a history that deserves to be written and sets up her own model of "emotional communities": "groups in which people adhere to the same norms of emotional expression and value--or devalue--the same or related emotions" (2). She emphasizes, however, that there is not just a single emotional community for any given society, but rather sets of contrasting, competing, or overlapping emotional communities, or sub-communities within a larger community. Chapter 1 examines a number of ancient and early Christian authors and schools, from Plato to the Desert Fathers, in order to document the vast potential vocabulary of emotions to which the early middle ages was heir. Comparing these early lists of emotions with those compiled by modern scholars and scientists, she also notes, slyly and accurately, how varied modern lists still are and how little agreement there is even now on what is or is not an emotion.
The core of the book are five chapters that discuss different emotional communities of the early middle ages, generally by expounding on related sets of written sources that Rosenwein argues reveal distinct ones. Rosenwein's preliminary technique in these chapters is usually to count up "emotion words" in her different sources (e.g., dilectio, amor, dulcedo, caritas, ira, odium, and variants, along with references to tears, groans, sighs, and the like), noting how often and what kinds of words recur, then analyzing the more expansive and illustrative examples. Put this way, the technique sounds simplistic, but in practice it largely works, perhaps because its consistent application allows Rosenwein to document that regardless of genre, different constellations of words really do appear in different patterns in different periods and places. Thus, in the analysis of funerary epitaphs from Trier, Vienne, and Clermont (c. 350-750) in Chapter 2, Rosenwein is able to show that when epitaphs from Trier use emotion words at all, they most often speak of dulcedo, as when "out of love" (pro caritatem) a father recorded the death of his infans dulcissima and filii dulcissimi erected an epitaph for their mother (67). Granted, "sweetness" is not really an emotion. On the other hand, the mere use of the word does indicate a willingness to express affection publicly for close family members, and this is all Rosenwein requires to make her point when it can be contrasted with quite different patterns of usage. The next chapter, for example, documents Gregory the Great's ambivalence towards the expression of emotions. On the one hand, influenced by Stoicism and the Desert Fathers, Gregory prized "inward quiet" and sought to avoid "the fruitless tumults of emotions" (vanis cogitationum tumultibus) (91). On the other hand, affect remained supremely important to him. Throughout his life he cultivated a circle of childhood friends, whom he called his "anchored cable," all of them bound together by "brotherly affection" (98). And though the virtue of spiritual tranquility required one not to be "sea-tossed" by passions (98), this did not mean one should not feel. On the contrary, the mark of humanity was to feel; not to feel sorrow at the death of a child would have been inhuman. The mark of sanctity and the means to true happiness was not to deny such feelings but to not be controlled by them. Rosenwein also shows that for Gregory--strangely, rather like Reddy--emotions were important as the point of contact between individuals. One even senses through her analysis that Gregory's understanding of emotions was central to his ecclesiology. Thus, he repeatedly favors words that point to the way emotions lead to sharing humanity--which might almost be to say, the way they lead to "love." He therefore prefers words like concordare, congruens, conpatitur, conpunctus: whether friend or holy man, one consoles troubled brethren by "becoming emotionally like the one you are comforting" (81). Through such compassion (compassio), a pastor is able to "draw" another to himself (trahat) in order to advance their spiritual progress, sometimes by expressing sympathy for their plight, sometimes by coldly rejecting them (in what Rosenwein identifies as an unanticipated parallel to modern "shock therapy" (88)). But always the basis of friendship and pastoral care alike is sympathy through the recognition of another's emotions.
Turning to Fortunatus and Gregory of Tours (Chapter 4), Rosenwein finds commonalities in two writers who, despite their differences, were friends sharing an "easy familiarity" (109). But as necessary as friendship was, it was also fragile, attenuated by time and distance. This was one reason both men not only accepted written expressions of affection but actively prized them. True, Fortunatus tended to use words like dulcedo preciously but straightforwardly, whereas Gregory tended to ironize them, calling attention to public displays of affection as "pure pretense" (125). But the one could ironize dulcedo, the other manipulate it in literary conceits, only because within their community affection really was an important value, found most purely and emblematically in relations between family members, especially between mothers and children. In a fruitful insight, Rosenwein suggests that one reason the two men could accept emotions was because of their "easygoing assumption about the closeness of the heavenly and earthly kingdoms," as shown by the way Fortunatus was able to imagine Christ responding in the same emotional palette as the abbess of Holy Cross who loved him (127-8).
Chapter 5 discusses Columbanus and his circle of disciples, though it is important to point out that Rosenwein sees Columbanus himself as having a significantly more affective emotionality than his disciples. For these latter, the real-world connection that gave existence to a community was the court of Dagobert I and his sons where so many of them served as young men. Again she finds real friendship and affection, signalled by steady recourse to love-words (amor, caritas, dilectio) in their writings, and she has wonderful things to say about how and why letters meant so much to them, the way the artifacts themselves and the acts of writing and reading them became tokens of friendships maintained despite separation. In the same vein, she suggests that they used monastic reform to recreate the love of the early Christian community and to transform "the old court relationship into a mutual prayer society that will persist in heaven" (143). Yet even while prizing love and affection, these men were "wary of effusive emotional expression" (135). This was not Gregory the Great's relict stoicism but something else, an emotional reserve which Rosenwein believes was shaped by the values and etiquette of the royal court. Hence, their "emotion words" emphasize deference, hierarchy, and reverence, and "fear" becomes a desirable characteristic of love. As part of the same pattern, commendation becomes a recurring motif in their letters, along with the "grace" one attributes to a friend from whom a favor is sought. Finally, this is a very male community, women being seen as having a heightened emotionality that was not at all appropriate for men, and which men were supposed to resist.
The last substantive chapter discusses the Merovingian courts in the second half of the seventh century. Her texts here include charters (in which she finds an affective language usually overlooked), but she concentrates on the hagiographies that have become well known to historians of the period (among them, the lives and passions of Leudegar, Praejectus, Balthild, and Gertrude of Nivelles). Only in these writings does one begin to find something like the unrestrained emotionality which Huizinga thought characterized the middle ages, and also the strategic displays of emotions of the kind analyzed by Gerd Althoff and others. The most glaringly obvious novelty is a sudden profusion of references to hatred and fury, with envy and jealousy not being far behind. But all sorts of emotions seem to be on open display. Thus, according to the Life of Germanus of Grandval, when Arnulf of Metz first saw the young monk, "rejoicing in his heart, he gave thanks to the Creator of all [and] received him happily and merrily [hilaris]" (176). According to Rosenwein, in the late seventh-century Frankish kingdoms, elites "expected people--both men and women--to be passionate: to love, hate, exult in joy, and break down in tears" (171). Along with more overt displays of passion came a tendency to associate emotions with discrete external events, giving rise to treatments of emotions that were not subtly flavored or overwritten by internal struggle. As part of the same tendency, one finds the Devil being represented as the external cause of emotional turmoil. Interestingly, one result was that the Devil himself became a very complex emotional being, as if the unalloyed purity of human emotions was created by making the Devil complicated.
Though Emotional Communities makes many generalizations, Rosenwein strengthens them with telling contrasts, as when the male dispassion valued by Desiderius of Cahors is compared with the effusive language of a letter by his mother Herchenefreda. (In an observation that will repay investigation, Rosenwein also points out how strikingly Herchenefreda seems to anticipate Dhuoda.) However, when she discusses the Columbanians' rejection of what they regarded as women's passion, I wonder if Rosenwein has not been too ready to interpret their gendered distinction too absolutely, for her account still leaves open the possibility that they saw the emotivity of mothers as a good thing, just not a good thing for men. Readers may also find themselves thinking that Rosenwein occasionally posits distinct emotional communities on the basis of very slim evidence (though they might also conclude she is right not to dismiss even slim evidence). My only wish is that the book had been longer, for if it benefits from having a strong focus, there are nevertheless costs. In order to understand why the literature on emotions is so contentious and important, readers could have used a more thorough discussion of its issues, especially in psychology and anthropology. When discussing epitaphs, Rosenwein regards dulcissimus as a sign of affectivity; but in Fortunatus the same word appears more like a formula of honor (rather like the epithets that distinguished grades in the social hierarchy): would this interpretation affect our understanding of Fortunatus' use of emotion words? It seems likely from her account of classical and early Christian authors that emotions were often theorized within carefully thought out psychological systems which were themselves developed to justify assertions about the relationship between human and divine; no doubt the same was true of some of her early medieval writers. Such psychologies and implicit theologies need to be probed. [3] Most important, given that Rosenwein criticizes tendencies to explain modern shifts in emotionalities in terms of early modern royal courts and nineteenth-century state formation, it is curious that her own explanations so often center on relationships and tones established in royal families and courts. Gregory of Tours' and Fortunatus' attitudes towards emotions might have less to do with early Merovingian family politics than with the values of the late Roman senatorial elite. Similarly, when Rosenwein illustrates the more restrained emotionality associated with Columbanus by his statement that "it is not right for a brave soldier to weep in battle," it seems logical to consider his disciples' rejection of a senatorial aristocracy's celebration of refined emotions as a byproduct of the growing importance of military values. [4] Despite these criticisms, Rosenwein has established beyond dispute that the emotional life of the early middle ages was far richer and more complicated than we had guessed, and also more deeply integrated into ideals and actions in both religion and politics. Perhaps the best tribute to her book is that if she has not written anything like a history of emotions, she has written a set of studies that will change the way we write histories of religion and politics.
Notes:
[1] For example, Barbara H. Rosenwein, "Worrying about Emotions in History," American Historical Review 107 (2002): 921-45; eadem, "Pouvoir et passion: Communauts motionnelles en France au VIIe sicle," Annales HSS 58 (2003): 1271-92; Anger's Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages, ed. Barbara H. Rosenwein (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).
[2] William H. Reddy, "Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions," Current Anthropology 38 (1997): 327- 51; idem, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Surprisingly, Rosenwein does not cite an important philosophical discussion whose criticisms and conclusions are quite close to Reddy's: Michael Stocker and Elizabeth Hegeman, Valuing Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
[3] See Jay Rubenstein, Guibert of Nogent: Portrait of a Medieval Mind (New York: Routledge, 2002).
[4] Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 174-8, 200-3; Guy Halsall, Warfare and Society in the Barbarian West, 450-900 (London and New York: Routledge, 2003); Franz Theuws and Monica Alkemade, "A kind of mirror for men: sword depositions in Late Antique northern Gaul," in Rituals of Power from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages, ed. Frans Theuws and Janet Nelson (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 401-76.