Abstract
Medieval Sensibilities is a rare thing: a masterpiece. Its two authors speak as through one voice, unfolding more than a thousand years of European history with clarity, erudition, excitement and critical care. Their subject is ‘emotion’ but there is here no naivete about its substance. Boquet and Nagy are faithful historicists, willing and able to show that not only ideas about ‘emotions’ have changed, wildly, over time, but also that experience is a deeply unstable affair. Necessarily, the latter is inferred where the sources are limited, but there is enough evidence in the aggregate to maintain a claim that the past, from the point of view of affective experience, is a strange country indeed. ‘Emotions,’ they tell us, ‘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’ (p. 1). To the newcomer to the field, such a claim might sound strange, even untenable. But a tapestry of explanation follows, evidencing the social, cultural, theological, political and bodily interweaving of the fabric of feeling. Emotions were performative, relational, practical, symbolic and critically important.
To showcase this, there must first be a sacrifice. ‘To follow a discrete, closed definition of emotion, to pay blind faith to the scientific categories of our times … would not only be a purely practical illusion, but the mark of a ruinous ‘scientism’ projected onto a malleable human reality’ (p. 6). Psychology, broadly construed, therefore bites the dust, in order to give full respect to the concepts and practices of situated medieval realities. It is a radical move, with which I am sympathetic, up to a point. There is an opportunity to make a connection with those psychologists most open to the implications of biocultural dynamics of brains and bodies and cultural contingencies. Indeed, I would offer this book up to bioconstructionist social neuroscientists as evidence in favour of their argument. And not just any old evidence either, but a millennium’s worth of empirical support for the idea that conceptual change has experiential consequences.
Boquet and Nagy use the language of ‘emotion’ but only as a rhetorical placeholder, a shorthand for a daunting array of historical concepts that pertain to subjective, intersubjective and collective feeling and expression. This is handled with care, giving primacy to situated concepts, never failing to remind the reader that any easy association with how ‘we’ feel ought to be resisted until tested. From the monastic cloister to the court, from medical science to governance, and from sex to mysticism, this book traverses the places, epistemologies and practices of ‘emotion’ in carefully reconstructed context. One of its most important innovations is in the treatment of ‘collective emotions’, which revises and extends Rosenwein’s concept of ‘emotional communities’ and provides a theoretical tool for understanding how experiencing ‘an emotional event together’ can ‘revitalize or confirm’ a sense of belonging, but also shatter it, creating ‘rejection, marginalization, exclusion, and opposition’ (p. 217). Boquet and Nagy jolt us from an exclusive focus on the individual and the subjective to ‘show the extent to which emotion was found at the core of social ties’ (p. 247).
One of the most striking observations of this book concerns the entanglement, over the longue durée, of reason in passion, or of ‘emotional rationality’, to coin a phrase (p. 129). This contains a stunning reversal of the theses of Huizinga and Elias, in which medieval actors were like turbulent children, lost to overwhelming passions, to emerge in modernity as rational actors exercising emotional control. The process of revision has long been evidenced in the work of Barbara Rosenwein, but this book should end the argument. Boquet and Nagy offer us a parade of complex emotive processes, of people navigating social, political, theological, sexual and supernatural concerns; they unfold the rich pageantry of medieval performativity, epistolary practices, theological handwringing, sin, the soul, and courtly conformity and transgression. Medieval sensibilities were complex, deeply political, highly symbolic and critical elements of social functioning, related strongly to the growing power of the church and the extent of Christianity.
The modern division of reason and emotion seems crude, blunt, childlike by comparison. Reason’s separation from emotion was a leitmotiv of modern historiography (‘a rather recent historiographical fiction’ (p. 158), as it is styled here), as well as a dominant trope in the modern historical record, but this separation was an affective manoeuvre, a valorisation of a politics of masculinity conceived narrowly, to serve political interests conceived equally narrowly. It is an idea that still has political currency (see the unsupportable reason-boosting of Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, for example). This has not only misrepresented medieval life by implication but modern life too, and it is in this observation that the real importance of works such as Boquet and Nagy’s becomes clear. Here, the ‘evolution of scholarly thought towards a natural philosophy of the emotions’, of the human as an ‘emotive creature endowed with reason’ began in the twelfth century (p. 135), with a ‘science of emotion’ in place by the end of the 13th. Human beings are deeply complex creatures, deeply subject to change over time, at the level of the body, the brain, and of culture. There is nothing more complex about modern human beings or their ideas than about medieval human beings, and explaining what differences there are over time, in feeling, in expression, in bodily and affective practices, in epistemology, cannot be carried out through the mode of increasing complication. Beautifully rich and elegant as a work of medieval history, this work should also prompt modernists to check their assumptions and their starting points.
Truly foundational, Medieval Sensibilities is an ideal introduction for those who wish to embrace ‘the infinite cultural malleability of the strange, affective material from which we are made’ (p. 248).