In 2025, Flocel Sabaté made a substantial contribution to the history of medieval emotion by bringing together three essay collections, all part of the Brill Later Medieval Europe series. The volume under review here is the first, followed by Defining and Perceiving Feelings in the Late Middle Ages and The Emotional Expression of Authority and Power in the Middle Ages. [1] These volumes represent the fruits of a research project called Expressiveness, Feelings, and Emotion in the Middle Ages (12th-15th Centuries) that was funded by Spanish ministry of research from 2016 to 2020. The focus of this review, Managing Emotions in the Middle Ages, contains sixteen essays, grouped into six sections. The preface distinguishes this essay collection from the others by explaining that the book’s focus is not on the expression of emotions, but on the management of emotions in the later Middle Ages. The essays themselves do not always adhere to this distinction--a number of them are more about emotional expression than about emotional management--but the collection nonetheless offers much to readers interested in the history of medieval emotion.
The first part, called “Historiographical Thoughts,” provides a theoretical backdrop for the rest of the book. Flocel Sabaté's “Human Beings as Emotional Subjects: The Study of Their Experiences in the Middle Ages,” surveys the various ways historiographers from the end of the 18th century onwards have made room for the emotions in their studies of the Middle Ages. Sabaté emphasizes through this meta-history that the story of the Middle Ages is a story of experiences, as people then as now experienced and managed emotions in political contexts. The next essay, “The Bodily Turn: New Directions in the History of Emotions,” by Barbara H. Rosenwein and Reccoardo Cristiani, sees the beginnings of the history of emotion in the “emotionology” of Peter and Carol Stearns. It briefly describes the theories of William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Gerd Althoff, theories which helped establish a groundwork for the history of emotion, and then it looks at more recent developments in the field, arguing that the field is now characterized by a focus on emotions as embodied in bodies that are “changeable, changing, and socially constructed” (29).
Part 2 “How to Deal with Emotions” begins with an essay by Carla Casagrande called “Feelings and the Saving of Souls: Penance and Prayer.” Drawing on theological and pastoral writings of the twelfth-fifteenth centuries, Casagrande looks at the challenges of medieval emotional management in two areas: penance and prayer. With penance, one major difficulty was knowing how much contrition one ought to feel, because some people seem to experience stronger contrition than others. One potential solution to this problem was to posit the existence of two different kinds of contrition, one a more spiritual pain involving the will and reason, the other a more sensible pain involving the body and crying. However, as Casagrande notes, this distinction did not provide a satisfactory answer to the problem, and so debates on this question continued in the later Middle Ages. Prayer, as defined by Augustine, is largely a matter of emotion, and Casagrande notes that numerous medieval writers tried to delineate the proper sequence of emotions in prayer. These writers also recommended that persons praying use their voice together with bodily gestures and motions, not to convince God of anything, but to manage and intensify their own emotional state. At the same time, however, persons praying would need to avoid too many gestures so as not to get caught up in base, everyday emotions; instead they should seek to transcend these bodily crutches and experience a wordless, gesture-less, spiritual prayer. The second article in the section, William Marx’s “Emotions and Orthodoxy in Medieval Latin Devotional Writing,” asserts the important place of the twelfth-century Quis dabit in the history of affective meditation. [2] This text is unique in that it tells the story of the passion from the first-person perspective of Mary, who is filled grief and sorrow because of Jesus’s crucifixion. The picture of Mary here departs from the traditional Benedictine view, which emphasized her heavenly qualities and her confidence in Jesus’s resurrection. Unlike the Benedictine Mary, the Cistercian Mary in this text experiences sorrow with such an emotional intensity that the Quis dabit could be said to push against the boundaries of theological orthodoxy. In the third article, “The Art of Courtly Love as an Art of Government of Self and Others,” Josep Maria Ruiz Simon examines the influence of the Platonic doctrine of the community of women on medieval courtly love. The Platonic teaching that, in an ideal republic, there would be a “community of marriages and offspring” (105) has given rise to a variety of conflicting interpretations. Simon traces a number of these interpretations and then argues that it is the symbolic interpretation developed by Abelard that influenced and helped to define courtly love in the twelfth century. According to Abelard, the Platonic teaching does not condone lustful passions, but instead teaches that in a just society, married and non-married alike must control their romantic passions, both for their own sakes and for the sake of the community. The courtly love taught by Andreas Capellanus and others in the twelfth century was thus a way of educating nobles in self-control and emotional management. Though it would be nice to see Simon interact a bit more fully with Andreas Capellanus’s The Art of Courtly Love and with C. S. Lewis’s claim that one of the central elements of courtly love was “adultery,” [3] Simon's article insightfully points to a neglected influence on the medieval courtly tradition.
The third part, “Emotional Portraits,” begins with a portrait of Blanche of Aragon and Anjou (ca. 1302-1348), a prioress who has been characterized as overly emotional, depressive, and somewhat manic and so incapable of managing her priory. In “Emotions, Spirituality and Artistic Promotion of a King's Daughter,” Alberto Velasco seeks to counter this caricature with a detailed examination of Blanche’s material conditions and financial dealings, including a careful look at Blanche’s will, which is included in full in an appendix to the essay. The next portrait is of Queen Violant of Bar (c. 1365-1431), a woman who is often seen as aggressively dominating the political sphere of her husband, John of Aragon (1350-1396). In “An Emotional Portrait of Queen Violant of Bar through Her Letters,” Edward Juncosa Bonet argues that Queen Violant did not hesitate to deal firmly with political challenges, but her relationship with her husband was not hierarchical nor manipulative; it was rather characterized by mutual respect, affection, and love. The last study in this section is “The Abbot and the Poet: Emotions in a Medieval Welsh Monastery” by Karen Stöber. Stöber looks at five poems written by the Welsh poet Guto’r Glyn (fl. c. 1431-1490) for his patron, Abbot Rhys (fl. c. 1428-1440/41). Despite being in a formal poet-patron relationship, and despite writing in formal, highly technical genres, Guto’r Glyn expressed his love and longing for his friend, and later his grief over Rhys’s death. The conventions and stylized figures of speech became instruments to express the sincerity of the poet’s affections for his friend. A full translation of one of the poems is helpfully provided in an appendix.
The next section is called “Emotional Collective Experiences.” The first study in this section, “O cur iubes canere? Composition, Performance, and the Projection of Emotions in a Medieval Latin Song” by Mauricio Molina, is a detailed study in early medieval affective rhetoric. Molina analyzes the first stanza of Ut quid iubes pusiole by Gottschalk of Orbais (800-868), looking especially at the number of syllables and placement of accents in each line as well as the litterae significativae, lowercase letters written above the main text to indicate “rhetorical, melodic and rhythmic nuances” of the song (240). The rhythm and special notations of the work were carefully designed to have specific emotional effects on the audience, in this case evoking the sadness of a monk in exile. The section continues with “Experience and Its Emotional Relation to the Visual: An Epigraphic View,” in which Vincent Debiais studies tituli and other texts that accompany medieval artistic images or that describe aesthetic encounters with such images. Whether the texts describe the riches decorating a church, a body lying in a grave, or the crucifixion of Christ, they invite observers to become spectators, and in doing so evoke emotions, increase wonder, and confront the observers with their own corporeality. Debiais sums up the dynamic nicely when he says, “Seeing is feeling and feeling in one’s own flesh” (264). Artifacts mentioned in the article are accompanied by color photographs. The final article in this section, Anna Caiozzo’s “The Portrayal of Emotions in the Medieval Orient: From Adab to Oriental Epic and Historical Narrative from the Thirteenth to the Fifteenth Centuries” surveys the physical postures, gestures, and expressions in miniatures found in medieval Islamic literature. Caiozzo especially focuses on the twelfth-century Maqamat, with its playful cross-dressing and gestures; the thirteenth- and fouteenth-century miniatures developed to accompany Firdawsi’s Shahnameh, miniatures in which the heroes demonstrate a wide emotional repertoire; and fifteenth-century miniatures that highlight the romantic love in Nizami’s epic poems. These miniatures, Caiozzo observes, are rich in affective suggestion, providing us with a “catalogue of emotions” (294).
The next couple of essays, which form a section called “Expressing or Using Emotions on Trial,” focus on the expression and management of emotions in legal contexts. In “Emotions in the Middle Ages as Reflected in Legal Sources: Shame, Anger, Male Identity and Female Adultery,” Iñaki Bazán Díaz looks at how legal rulings and documents supported a male-centered emotional community in cases of female adultery. In this emotional community--a community that even involved the family of the accused woman--the adultery of the woman was construed as a threat to masculine honor, and so it evoked an emotional response of anger, shame, and disgust. Díaz provides examples of the courts supporting this emotional response by ruling that it is just for the husband to kill his wife if he catches her in the act of adultery, and further, as Díaz points out, even the family of the wife would often approve of this ruling. It was the duty of the familial emotional community to respond emotionally in such ways that masculine honor was preserved. In the next essay, “Tears, Weeping and lacrimae: The Truth of the Eyes? Emotions and Gestures of Female Jewish Converts in Aragon on Trial under the Spanish Inquisition in the Middle Ages,” Jonas Holst and Miguel Ángel Motis study medieval inquisitorial records. The Jewish converts being questioned in these records were at a double disadvantage--first they were women facing male authorities; second, they were Jews facing representatives of Christian orthodoxy. The only way these women could survive such a context was through an affective performance that convinced the inquisitor of their sincere penitence and submission. Tears were an important non-verbal part of this performance, but since tears can be controlled and used for deception, not just any tears would do. Loud wailing would be suspicious; quiet, restrained tears would be considered a sign of humility and modesty. This kind of crying, together with a confession of sin in a submissive posture of kneeling, was more likely to be recognized by the inquisitors as a sincere sign of repentance.
The final section in the book, “Emotional Travellers,” contains three studies: “Facing Hard Times: Emotion and the Expression of Self in the Autobiographical Accounts by al-Qalaṣādī and al-Ḥaǧarī” by Maravillas Aguiar Aguilar, “Emotional Pilgrims in Jacques Le Saige’s Travel Narrative (ca. 1520-1523)” by Alexandra Velissariou, and “Emotions and Marriage Negotiations. Irish Marriages in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain” by Andrea Knox. The first and third of these are only very loosely related to the topic of the book. Aguilar contrasts two examples of medieval Arabic travel literature, al-Qalaṣādī’s Riḥla and al-Ḥaǧarī’s Kitāb Nāṣir al-dīn ‘alā l-qawm al-kāfirīn, arguing that, despite belonging to different sub-genres with different conventions, they both demonstrate a traveller actively constructing his own identity through narrated memories and the collective experiences of the visited spaces. Knox studies the marriage negotiations and divorces of Irish immigrants to Spain, noting that in the later Middle Ages there is a movement from endogamy to exogamy and observing the ways in which these immigrants tried to retain the flexibility of Irish marriage and divorce laws in a new political setting. The second study in this section is more clearly focused on the history of emotion: Velissariou studies the sixteenth-century travel narrative of Jacques Le Saige, a merchant who travelled from Burgundy to Rome and Jerusalem. Le Saige’s account of his travels, Velissariou argues, is set apart from other sixteenth-century travel narratives because of its intense and varied expressions of emotion. Le Saige expresses curiosity and wonder at the places he visits and sorrow and pity when he witnesses injustices, but he does not just experience these emotions as an individual traveller; he experiences them as part of a group of pilgrims that form an emotional community. This community shares laughter, regret, and frustration, and they also at times break into two groups or sub-communities, the Polish pilgrims and the main group of pilgrims, with conflicting emotions.
Though some of the essays are of questionable relevance to the title of the book, overall this collection offers a rich variety of topics and a wealth of knowledge to the reader interested in the history of emotion.
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Notes:
1. Flocal Sabaté, ed., Defining and Perceiving Feelings in the Late Middle Ages, Later Medieval Europe 27 (Leiden: Brill, 2025) and Flocal Sabaté, ed., The Emotional Expression of Authority and Power in the Middle Ages, Later Medieval Europe 28 (Leiden: Brill, 2025).
2. The work’s full title is Liber de passione Christi et doloribus et planctibus Matris eius.
3. Lewis, C. S. The Allegory of Love: A Study in a Medieval Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 12.