Introduction

The history of the emotions: that great silence!1

What remains of the joys and pains of the men and women of the Middle Ages? Their laughter, their moans, and their cries built no monuments, and yet their echoes live on within them. Reading texts and studying images from across the long thousand years of the Middle Ages, a historian would have to possess a heart of stone not to be moved by the life behind them. That life was not solely one of hierarchies, means of production, and taxes. It was also full of desires, tensions, sudden gasps, and endless sighs.

It is impossible to understand any human society without exploring its emotional rhythms, from the most dramatic to the most subtle. For too long, historians have ignored this simple truth. At times, they have perhaps been myopic; but above all, they have been too tied to their own times. The discipline of history that took root in the nineteenth century had trouble taking emotions seriously, and even more in admitting that they were not merely intimate expressions, but also an essential part of cultural and social systems.2 Yet in the Middle Ages, emotions were everywhere. They could be found not only deep within the heart but far beyond it: they were present in the churches, in the palaces, in the shacks, in the markets, and on the battlefields. Saint Louis (d. 1270), on return from Egypt in 1254, was inconsolable at the loss of the crusade: ‘Fixing his eyes to the earth with a profound sadness and sighing deeply, he lingered on his captivity and the general confusion of Christianity wrought through it.’3 The princes grieved for the misfortunes of their realms and were loved for doing so. Yet they did not hesitate to unleash their wrath, the terrible ira regis, which struck rebels like divine lightning. While Louis the Pious (d. 840) was known for his wisdom, he still blinded his own nephew, Bernard of Italy (d. 818), king of the Lombards, for daring to defy his authority.

All manner of emotions – hate, laughter, jealousy, and so on – could serve to enliven the theatre of politics and engender social harmony. Through them one negotiated, through them one governed. In the celebrated fresco painted in 1337 by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (d. 1348) that adorns the walls of the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena, a winged figure personifying ‘Security’, who protects the gates of the city, assures that ‘without fear, let every man may walk safely’.4 She seems to add that, while the inhabitants should not fear chaos, they should still tremble before justice – in her hand she brandishes a gibbet, from which a corpse hangs. The fear brought to life in this image was encouraged by others elsewhere, such as the innumerable depictions of the Last Judgement that adorned church walls by the end of the Middle Ages. Here, it was no longer the marks of good and bad government that were portrayed, but rather those of a virtuous life and one abandoned to sin. In the mid-thirteenth century, the Dominican Humbert of Romans (d. 1277), author of a preaching manual, On the Gift of Fear, encouraged priests to go ever further in reminding their congregations of the horrible demonic figures who visited every sort of torture on the damned. The faithful were to fear the torturers of hell on account of their ceaseless cruelty. They were to tremble before the anger of God – for if he was roused by the people of Israel, he would surely be merciless with inveterate sinners at the moment of judgement. Already horrified at the thought of demons, they would only be more aghast when they learned that the anger of God would ‘be so great that it will attack them like a furious madman’.5 Worse still, God would compound their pain with humiliation, heightening the suffering of the damned by mocking them: ‘I also will laugh in your destruction, and will mock when that shall come to you which you feared’ (Prov 1: 26).6

In societies where the imperatives of honour were profoundly important, shame was often even more dreaded than physical suffering. One can thus understand the way in which the Church came to challenge the faithful: it maintained that there was nothing better for delivering man from sin than shame, a shame which had to be deeply felt, and at times even acted out in public. By the eleventh century, a time when honour was defined less by material wealth or office than by a collection of values and sentiments synonymous with good repute (bona fama), the reparation of faults was no longer enough to complete the penitential journey: one was also expected to make a sincere, moving expression of moral suffering and repentance. Emotions went to the very heart of man's social and symbolic bonds: there was nothing secondary or incidental about them.

Difficult though it is to believe, for the last twenty years the history of the emotions has been seen as essential.7 Without doubt, that is a testament to the tenacity of a certain set of historians, both in France and further afield. Their work nevertheless stands on the shoulders of some notable pioneers: Johan Huizinga, Lucien Febvre, Robert Mandrou, Georges Duby, and Jacques Le Goff. This recent development is a sign of the times and especially of changing attitudes towards the emotions within Western societies. Prior to the mid-twentieth century, emotion had a bad reputation, mistrusted at best, especially when it appeared outside of the cathartic enclosure of the arts or the private sphere. Today, however, it appears to be a central component of social life. This new emphasis can be attributed to various factors. For one, the collapse of globalist ideologies and the crisis of liberal democracy has brought the individual and the inner life to the fore.8 Other factors include the rise of many new disciplines (neuroscience, cognitive psychology) that have highlighted the rationality of emotions;9 the reaction against an all-powerful economy that has rendered man an object of management;10 and the multifaceted achievements of therapeutic culture.11 The effects of this transformation are palpable. They have challenged the dichotomy of reason and emotion, which for so long had structured the Western conception of man, and in turn revealed its strangeness.12 Integrating emotion into how we understand society – as it is today and as it was in days gone by – has consequently become essential. Past and present here go hand in hand.13

In 1941, Lucien Febvre published an article in Annales that would become the manifesto for a history of the emotions.14 Here, he called for a ‘vast collective study of the fundamental sentiments of humanity and their forms’. The project was prompted by one conviction: emotions, contagious by nature, reveal the most profound cultural phenomena, which language and social codes are unable to embrace. At the same time, and like his contemporaries, Febvre saw them as irrational and spontaneous, an expression of unconscious trends. How then are historians to understand the medieval period, a period characterized by exactly this sort of emotional enthusiasm? The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga made this question the foundation of his masterwork, The Autumn of the Middle Ages. First published in 1919 and translated into English in 1924, this book has fascinated generations of historians. For Huizinga, affectivity, aesthetics, and the life of the senses were at the heart of the mindset of medieval civilization. He stressed the ‘extravagance and emotivity’ of the men and women of the Middle Ages: they seemed to pass in a split-second from laughter to tears, from sweetness to cruelty. Incapable of controlling the emotions that overpowered them, medieval people were ‘like giants with the heads of children’. Behind the flamboyant scene that Huizinga painted lay a grand historical narrative founded on the emotions: the Middle Ages heralded the Modern Age, characterized by self-mastery and reflective distance. The vitality of the Middle Ages resided in its raw and violent emotional dynamism. Its decline resulted from an exhaustion that led to formalism. Incapable of regeneration, medieval civilization fell into a kind of fin de siècle depression according to Huizinga: ‘Here above all, if men were not to fall into crude barbarism, there was a need to frame emotions within fixed forms.’15

Michelet had already said something similar when he compared the Middle Ages to a tormented child that had to die ‘in heartfelt anguish’ so that modernity and its triumphant herald, the rational spirit, could arrive.16 Historians have long sought to trace the development of this civilizing march of reason. They thus enthusiastically took up the idea of ‘the civilizing process’, a model first elaborated by Norbert Elias in 1939, but which only became widely influential in the 1970s.17 Elias established a truly bold parallel between the advent of monarchical states and the developmental psychology of individuals: he bound the two together under a governing principle of rationality. As orderly political regimes expanded in Europe, individuals became better able to master their emotions and to transcend them within the social theatre. The power of Elias’ model came from its capacity to theoretically unify the individual and society, the political and the unconscious. But this grand theory – influenced by Freud as much as Huizinga – only perpetuated the view that the Middle Ages had an infantile character: ‘Because emotions were here expressed in a manner...