A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Medieval Age

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Our period opens at the end of the Roman Empire when intellectual currents are indebted to the Greek philosophical inheritance of Plato and Aristotle, as well as to a Romanized Stoicism. Into this mix entered the new, and from 313CE imperially sanctioned, religion of Christianity. In art, literature, music, and drama, we find an increasing emphasis on the arousal of individual emotions and their acceptance as a means towards devotion. In religion, we see a move from the ascetic regulation of emotions to the affective piety of the later medieval period that valued the believers identification with the Passion of Christ and the sorrow of Mary. In science and medicine, the nature and causes of emotions, their role in constituting the human person, and their impact on the same became a subject of academic inquiry. Emotions also played an increasingly important public role, evidenced in populace-wide events such as conversion and the strategies of rulership. Between 350 and 1300, emotions were transformed from something to be transcended into a location for meditation upon what it means to be human.

Author Bio

Clare Monagle is Associate Professor in the Department of Modern History, Politics and International Relations at Macquarie University, Australia. She has published widely in the fields of medieval intellectual history, as well as in the history of political and theoretical medievalism in the twentieth century. Juanita Feros Ruys is Senior Research Fellow and Associate Director of the Medieval and Early Modern Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia. She is the author of The Repentant Abelard (2014) and Demons in the Middle Ages (2017).