History and Theory 53 (February 2014), 69-78 Wesleyan University 2014 ISSN: 0018-2656

DOI: 10.1111/hith.10695


REVIEW ESSAYS


MODERNITY:
A PROBLEMATIC CATEGORY IN THE HISTORY OF EMOTIONS
EMOTIONS IN HISTORY: LOST AND FOUND. The Natalie Zemon Davis Lectures. By
Ute Frevert. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011. Pp. iv. 255.
ABSTRACT
Emotions in History: Lost and Found by Ute Frevert is a lively introduction to some of
the issues that historians must address when writing about emotions. Emotions in History
notes some of the uses emotions have had in both public and private life, and it charts the
changing fate of several emotionsparticularly acedia, honor, and compassionthat have
been either lost or found over time. Nevertheless, it suffers from a notion of modernity
that obscures rather than clarifies. Making modernity the cause of changes in emotional
ideas, comportment, and feeling, it cuts todays society off from its earlier roots and fails
to see the continuities not only in emotions themselves but also in the mechanisms by
which emotions have changed over time. Freverts assumption that only the modern world
has been interested in emotions is belied by eloquent learned writings on the topic in the
medieval period (though not using the term emotions). Further, modernity is not alone
in having effective mechanisms by which ideal standards of emotions and their expression
are transmitted to a larger public.
Keywords: compassion, emotions, friars, love, modernity, vices, virtues
Originally delivered in 2009 as the Natalie Zemon Davis Annual Lecture at the
Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, and subsequently revised,
this slim book is a lively introduction to some of the issues that historians must
address when writing about emotions. A short prelude opens with the outburst by
then-President Nicholas Sarkozy of France in 2010. Criticized by the European
Commissioner for Justice and Fundamental Rights for his anti-Roma policies,
Sarkozy retorted that the Commissioners comments were a humiliation, out-
rageous, disgusting, and shameful. Ute Frevert uses the episode to make
clear that even today emotions are on the public stage. Historians overlook them
at their peril. But how to understand them? In the three chapters that follow,
Frevert argues that although emotions have always been tools of power, they
have changed over time (chapter 1); have served to define women as different
from and (often) inferior to men (chapter 2); and have, in the case of at least one
new emotion, compassion, ameliorated social wrongs while creating (at the
same time) pernicious notions of superiority (chapter 3).
BARBARA H. ROSENWEIN
70
AN OVERVIEW
Like its topic, this is not a dispassionate history. Frevert is deeply concerned
with morality. Lurking in the shadows of this book are the heavy questions of the
twentieth century: Why fascism? Why Hitler? Why the Holocaust?
In 1941 the founder of emotions history, Lucien Febvre, asked similar ques-
tions.
1
He, too, found the answer in human emotions. For Febvre, the emotions
however necessary they may have been initially in the formation of human social
lifewere irrational and therefore very dangerous. Some periods of history were
able to tamp them down; others (the Middle Ages; the 1930s and 40s) allowed
them to rise to the surface and to produce the charnel houses of Febvres
Europe. The historians task, said Febvre, was to understand the factors respon-
sible for such moments of quiet and eruption.
Frevert, Director of the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck
Institute for Human Development and author of books on honor, manliness, and
gender, does not think that the tragedies of the twentieth century hinged on the
explosion or tamping down of emotions. She recognizes that emotions existed
and even reigned in every period of history, sometimes destructively, at other
times constructively. What mattered was which emotions and in what context
they were played out. Emotions, Frevert asserts, come in socially specific and
culturally diverse forms (87). Some, such as acedia (sloth), used to be important.
Today no one speaks of acedia; it is a lost emotion. Other emotions have shed
their old meanings but have found new ones. Honor, for example, used to be the
highly regarded possession of groups like student fraternities and individuals of
rank, such as officers in military service. Today, with the exception of marginal
groups like the Mafia, honor survives in attenuated form in the West, as a vague
aspect of patriotic feeling.
Finally, some emotions are modern: even if they arguably had earlier ana-
logues, they have become so important since the eighteenth century as to merit
considering them brand new. Compassion is Freverts example. Compassion
and its sisters sympathy, pity, and empathyhas been responsible for some of
the most progressive movements and acts of the modern era, such as abolishing
slavery and donating to the unfortunate across the globe. At the same time, how-
ever, compassion has been deleterious, as when one Nazi official declared that
compassion should principally be reserved for German people (187). Nor
need the Nazis be invoked: in 2010 more money went to Haiti after its earthquake
than to Pakistan after terrible flooding. Compassion, then, is far less universally
committed than claimed (202). Equally bad, it is the prerogative of the powerful
and leads to an overweening sense of virtuousness.
1. Lucien Febvre, La sensibilit et lhistoire: Comment reconstituer la vie affective dautrefois?
Annales dhistoire sociale 3 (1941), 5-20. I thank Damien Boquet and Riccardo Cristiani for reading
and commenting on an earlier version of this essay.
MODERNITY: A PROBLEMATIC CATEGORY IN THE HISTORY OF EMOTIONS
71
Frevert accounts for changes in public and private emotions in a variety of
ways. One is that they follow shifts in social structure. For example, after the
World Wars, European societies became far more egalitarian and less class-
structured. The social stratification of honour that had survived the early modern
period lost its legitimacy (80-81). This is one reason why honor fell out of the
emotional limelight. Another factor inducing emotional change is experience
itself, which is capable of tutoring sensibilities. After two devastating wars and
mass murder of an unprecedented scale, Europeans were less inclined to cherish
[the] concepts of male heroism implicit in honor (81). For Frevert, then, new
and unpleasant associations with certain emotions can effect their abandonment.
Still more important for changing emotional norms are seminal thinkers.
Here Frevert looks to the philosophers and scientists of what used to be called
the Enlightenment and beyond. They literally taught people new emotions as
they elaborated unprecedented definitions of the human. They saw emotions as
natural, and they lauded certain ones among them. Their thinking, far from
being confined to elite circles, was enshrined . . . in school curricula, sermons,
advisory manuals, educational and medical texts (103). Reared under these
new norms, people not only followed new emotional display rules (rules for
emotional comportment) but also experienced real changes in feelings. Para-
phrasing Nietzsche, Frevert plausibly asserts that even if those rules merely aim
at moderating the passions language and gestures, they eventually change the
passion proper (194). Although she does not mention the term emotionology
coined by Peter and Carol Stearns, Freverts formulation is very close to theirs:
as emotional standards change, new sorts of feelings emerge and others are lost.
2
What accounts for new emotional standards? For Peter Stearns it is almost
always new economic forms and demands. For example, in American Cool, he
notes that Victorian emotional standards responded to the needs of industrializa-
tion and urbanization. By the late 1840s, he writes, people began to realize
that the same industrial world that required the family as emotional haven also
required new emotional motivations for competitive work.
3
For Frevert, how-
ever, the underlying cause of change is modernity.
MODERNITY AND A MEDIEVALISTS DISCONTENTS
Modernity is Freverts great protagonist of change. She defines it as ongoing
processes of literacy, urbanisation, industrialisation as well as an economic
reality . . . a political challenge, and . . . a large-scale social laboratory (17). She
makes it the subject of many a verb: modernity engaged more and more people
(17). It was lived and practised (17). It declar[ed] compassion a social norm
(198). It was also a project that developed and by now has texture (10).
Above all, for Frevert, modernity takes an interest in emotions (16). To an
extent unknown previously, modern philosophers and scientists areand since
2. Peter N. Stearns with Carol Z. Stearns, Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and
Emotional Standards, American Historical Review 90, no. 4 (1985), 813-836.
3. Peter N. Stearns, American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style (New
York: New York University Press, 1994), 63.
BARBARA H. ROSENWEIN
72
the eighteenth century have beenmoved to explore sentiment. No era before
then, Frevert asserts, had been so keen to understand emotions or to recognize
their importance in human society and culture. Emotions were analysed, mea-
sured, talked about, communicated, and managed. Arthur Schopenhauer (d.
1860), for example, declared compassion to be one of the three prime factors
determining human behaviour . . . [and said that it] served as the true basis of
morality (179). Friedrich Nietzsche (d. 1900) vehemently disagreed (albeit
long after Schopenhauers death). Neuroscientists today, Frevert asserts, with
their discovery of the mirror neuron system (151), serve as a sort of modern
confirmation of Schopenhauer. But societies can choose whether to encourage
mirror neurons or override their effects. Frevert has heeded Febvres call after all:
Exploring [the counter-forces working against compassion] helps us understand
how emotions are embedded into social and cultural environments, how they are
stirred, mobilised and silenced. . . . The history of emotions informs us how to
handle such responsibility and what to avoid along its path (218-219).
Every historian is obliged to find turning points. But I would like to argue
that modernity is an unhelpful and even retrograde turning point for the his-
torian of emotions. Modernity as ongoing processes is a simplified version
of what Norbert Elias called the civilizing process.
4
This, as Frevert sums
up the argument, saw the development of absolutism as the moment in which
Europeans . . . learnt how to control their affects (15). Before that was the
Middle Ages, an era of exuberant passions (14). Frevert knows that medieval-
ists have challenged this dualism, but she sidesteps the issue herself, noting that
Natalie Zemon Davis has not yet taken sides in this controversy (15). And
what of Frevert? She knows very well that her lost emotions could be said
to have modern counterparts (acedia, for example, might be likened to modern
depression) and that her new emotions had older analogues (as, for example,
the eighteenth-century cult of brotherhood had precedents in medieval Christian
notions of fraternity). She is absolutely right to stress that the words that people
used to describe emotions (terms like perturbationes animi, motus animi, affec-
tus) and their many progeny (ira, tristitia, metus, in Latin and many other words
in the many vernacular languages) have changed. But they have changed in the
modern period as well. Thomas Dixon has traced the path by which terms like
affection, appetite, emotion, feeling, and so on turned into our special-
ized term emotion in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
5

As Dixon shows, the eighteenth-century Scottish philosophers unbound the
emotions from religion. This is an important change, but it is also limited: the
modern men and women who, inspired by notions of compassion, fought for
abolition, acted in the fervor of the Second Great Awakening.
6
4. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civi-
lization, transl. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). The thesis was originally published in
1939.
5. Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
6. See, for example, Barry Hankins, The Second Great Awakening and the Transcendentalists
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004).
MODERNITY: A PROBLEMATIC CATEGORY IN THE HISTORY OF EMOTIONS
73
Frevert might rightly have observed that the goals, values, comportment rules,
and norms in the Middle Ages were different from modern ones. But it did not
take modernity to make such changes; the ninth century was also different from
the fourteenth. More important, Frevert has left out the fact that keen interest in
the emotions was also true in the Middle Ages. Lively discussions were, even
then, enshrined . . . in school curricula, sermons, advisory manuals, educational
and medical texts, to repeat what Frevert says about modernity. But because the
emotions were not ordinarily called emotions, but rather, very often, virtues and
vices, we may miss this point.
7
It is worth some discussion.
The ancient Stoics, perhaps even more than eighteenth-century philosophers,
were obsessed with emotions (their term was the path) and their management.
8

In the Middle Ages, the regulation and shaping of emotions were on the minds
of thinkers as far back as Evagrius of Pontus in the fourth century. Drawing on
the Stoics, Evagrius assimilated their theory to the notion of the vices. These
became the equivalent of the Stoic propath, the pre-emotional pricking and
tickling that alerted the vigilant person that an emotion was on the way. The good
Stoic countered the pre-emotions through reason. The good Evagrian monk, by
contrast, fought each pre-emotion with another. Thus the monk was to enlist the
vice of vainglory to oppose the vice of fornication, the two canceling each other
out in battle.
9
Saint Augustine (d. 430) revised these notions: for him, emotions (he used
many terms for them, including motus and affectiones) were vices if directed
against God but virtues if directed toward Him. The character of a mans will is
at issue, he said. For if it is turned the wrong way [that is, away from God], it
will turn these emotions awry; but if it is straightforward [hence turned to God],
the emotions will be not only blameless, but even praiseworthy.
10
Thus, [the
citizens of the City of God] feel fear and desire, grieve and rejoice; and because
their love is right (rectus est amor), all these feelings (affectiones) are right.
11

Pope Gregory the Great (590604), who established the notion of the Seven
Deadly Sins, also considered rightly directed emotions to be virtuous. In his com-
mentary on the Book of Job, he outlined how the pastor should join his feelings
to those of his flock. This was the condescension of emotion (condescensio
passionis), the lowering of the self to the level of another in order to draw him or
her up to God. The pastor condescended out of compassion (per compassionem).
This was not a notion of compassion as a universal aspect of human nature, but it
was, nevertheless (much like Schopenhauers compassion), seen as an instrument
of moral reform.
7. As was noted long ago: see Heinrich Fichtenau, Askese und Laster in der Anschauung des Mit-
telalters (Vienna: Herder, 1948).
8. See Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Tempta-
tion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Simo Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval
Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004); Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory
and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
9. See Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2006), chap. 1.
10. Augustine, De civitate dei 14.6, ed. B. Dombart and A. Kalb, Corpus Christianorum. Series
Latina, vols. 47-48 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1955), 421.
11. Augustine, De civ. Dei 14.9, 425-426.
BARBARA H. ROSENWEIN
74
Thus virtues, too, were emotions, key to how to live in the world and get to
heaven. Such ideas were not confined to monks. Even in the ninth century, for
example, before the great schools and universities of Europe churned out treatises
on the topic of the affects, Alcuin, an intellectualbut not a monkat the court
of Charlemagne, wrote about the virtues and vices for the layman Wido, count of
the Breton march. Alcuins treatise was a veritable survey of the emotions, and
it had a sentimental purpose: to lead the reader from external troubles to internal
joy.
12
Did it in fact give Wido joy? It is hard to know. But the work was enor-
mously popular throughout the Middle Ages, with over 140 manuscripts extant.
Translated into a number of medieval vernacular languages, it was no doubt read
by laypeople. Some of its materials ended up in homilies and sermons, suitable
for a wide audience.
13

By the twelfth century, new notions of human nature in the image of God led
thinkers to see the origin of the passions in the soul rather than in virtues and
vices per se. In the anonymous treatise On the Spirit and the Soul, a compilation
of various sources produced some time after 1170, the soul is rational, posi-
tively appetitive [that is, loving] and negatively appetitive [that is, hating].
14
In
the thirteenth century the dissociation of emotions from the virtues and vices
tradition was reinforced by the infusion of Aristotles works.
15
Nevertheless, all
thinkers remained keen to parse the moral implications of their topic. (That has
persisted well into the modern period.
16
) The views of thirteenth-century scho-
lastics were not only aired in the lecture halls of the schools and universities but
also made their way into the streets of cities and into the private homes of pious
(and less pious) laypeople.
The Franciscans began as an order of poverty, but within a century they had
set up schools and libraries, and their scholars were professors at the universi-
ties.
17
The Dominicans, from the first devoted to preaching, did the same with
even greater alacrity. Both groups taught novices, disputed with one another,
and brought their messages to the people via sermons, often in the vernacular.
First the bow is bent in study; then the arrow is released in preaching, wrote the
Dominican scholar Hugh of Saint-Cher. He meant that what masters taught and
12. Alcuin, Epistola 305, ed. E. Dmmler, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Epistolae 4:
Epistolae Karolini Aevi 2 [1895] (Munich: Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 1994), 464. I discuss
the treatise in some detail in my Rereading Askese und Laster: The Case of Alcuin, in Urkunden
- Schriften - Lebensordnungen: Neue Beitrge zur Medivistik, ed. A. Schwarcz (Vienna: Bhlau,
forthcoming).
13. See, for example, Paul E. Szarmach, The Latin Tradition of Alcuins Liber de Virtutibus et
Vitiis, cap. xxvii-xxxv, with Special Reference to Vercelli Homily xx, Mediaevalia 12 (1989 for
1986), 12-41.
14. See Three Treatises on Man: A Cistercian Anthropology, ed. Bernard McGinn (Kalamazoo,
MI: Cistercian Publications, 1977), 183; 67 for the probable date; and 181-288 for the full text in
translation.
15. See Knuuttila, Emotions, 178.
16. See Robert C. Solomon, The Philosophy of Emotions, in Handbook of Emotions, ed. Michael
Lewis, Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones, and Lisa Feldman Barrett, 3d ed. (New York: Guilford Press,
2008), chap. 1.
17. See Nislihan enocak, The Poor and the Perfect: The Rise of Learning in the Franciscan
Order, 12091310 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).
MODERNITY: A PROBLEMATIC CATEGORY IN THE HISTORY OF EMOTIONS
75
students learned in school hit their intended mark when they were communicated
to heretics, infidels, and laypeople.
18

Emotion was one of the topics that the friars and other schoolmen tackled with
zest. The nature of loveand of different sorts of lovewas of particular interest
to them. What and whose love was disinterested? What sorts of love were born of
desire? How natural was love to human nature? What was the right sort of love?
Let us consider just this last question. The right sort of love was ordered. In
the Song of Songs 2:4 the lover says He led me into the wine cellar; he ordered
love in me. Support me with flowers, surround me with apples, for I languish in
love.
19
The Church Fathers glossed the passage with delight. Origen, for exam-
ple, said that Order is gracefully put, because very often love is disordered.
What people ought to love in the first place, they love in the second; what they
should love second, they love first.
20
Saint Augustine found a comprehensive
formulation for ordered loves objects: Four things are to be loved: first, that
which is above us; second, we ourselves; third, that which is next to us; fourth,
that which is below us.
21
The topic was taken up with still greater alacrity in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries. The Victorines, twelfth-century scholar-canons based at the church of
Saint-Victor in Paris, argued that the Trinity itself was the order of love.
22
Other
scholars stressed the place of ordered love in human beings. In the thirteenth cen-
tury the Dominican Thomas Aquinas made love govern all of the passions of the
soulthat is, the emotions. For Thomas, it was root of all the emotions.
23
He
named eleven major ones. Love and hate, desire and avoidance, pleasure and pain
constituted the so-called concupiscible emotions, whereas hope and despair,
fear and boldness, and anger made up the irascible.
24

When Thomas said that love was the root of these emotions, he meant much
more than Pope Gregory the Great had wanted to claim for pride when he made
18. See M. Michle Mulchahey, First the Bow is Bent in Study . . .: Dominican Education before
1350 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1998). The Franciscans, Dominicans, and
other religious orders emphasized schooling not only at universities but also in their study-houses
(studia), which were widely distributed throughout Europe; see Philosophy and Theology in the Stu-
dia of the Religious Orders and at Papal and Royal Courts, ed. Kent Emery, William J. Courtenay,
and Stephen M. Metzger (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012).
19. Biblia sacra iuxta vulgatam versionem, ed. Robertus Weber, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Wrttember-
gishe Bibelanstalt, 1969), II, 997: introduxit me in cellam vinariam ordinavit in me caritatem/ fulcite
me floribus stipate me malis quia amore langueo.
20. Origen, Homiliae in canticum canticorum 2.8, ed and transl. O. Rousseau, SC 37 (Paris: Cerf,
1953), 92: Eleganter locutus est: ordinate; plurimorum quippe inordinata est caritas; quod in
primo loco debent diligere, diligunt in secundo; quod in secundo, diligunt in primo.
21. Augustine, De doctrina christiana 1.22, ed. Joseph Martin, CCSL 32 (Turnhout: Brepols,
1962), 18: Quattuor sint diligenda, unum quod supra nos est, alterum quod nos sumus, tertium quod
iuxta nos est, quartum quod infra nos est.
22.The view is summarized in Charles Baladier, rs au Moyen ge: Amour, dsir et delectatio
morosa (Paris: Cerf, 1999), 50-52.
23. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I-II, q. 46 a. 1: amor enim est prima radix omnium pas-
sionum. The text is edited by Roberto Busa et al. at Corpus Thomisticum, http://www.corpusthomis-
ticum.org (accessed December 9, 2013).
24. On Thomass theory, see most conveniently Robert Miner, Thomas Aquinas on the Passions:
A Study of Summa Theologiae 1a2ae 22-48 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009) and
Nicholas E. Lombardo, The Logic of Desire: Aquinas on Emotion (Washington, DC: The Catholic
University of America Press, 2011).
BARBARA H. ROSENWEIN
76
it the root of all evil. For Thomas, the emotions moved, and for that they needed
a mover: love (directed, to be sure, by the will). Thereafter they fell into place,
one by one, helping love get to its goal or object: the good. In the best of all
possible sequences, love came first, then desire, and finally pleasure when the
object was achieved. But that sequence was rare. Often the end result was pain,
when the goal was not reached. Or a person was confronted with an object that
was not loved: in that case hate (itself depending on love for its orientation) came
first. Still more often the goal was hedged about with obstacles. In that case, the
irascible emotions joined the sequence in order to help.
Thus, like a medieval Elisabeth Kbler-Ross, Thomas did not see virtue in
just one isolated emotion but rather in a whole set of them unfolding in stages.
25

Just as for Kbler-Ross human beings do not simply jump to the acceptance
of their own deaths but rather undertake an emotional journey that takes time,
so too for Thomas the passions worked sequentially as they made their way to
loves goal. When the goalthe goodwas rightly defined and Godly, then the
emotions were ordered. When the goal was misconstrued and not Godly, then
the emotions were turned awry and were disordered.
26
In this way, Thomas took
Augustines notions of will and right order and grafted them onto a theory of
emotions that depended on a sequence.
Did these medieval discussions about ordered love matter in the way that
Frevert sees Schopenhauer and Nietzsches theories mattering to moderns? The
only way to answer this question is to see if theoretical ideas about ordered love
appeared in other sorts of writings, or sermons, meant for a more general audi-
ence. This we can find.
For example, the Dominican William of Tocco wrote an account of the life
of Saint Thomas with an eye to his subjects canonization. In this text, ordered
and disordered love was a recurrent theme.
27
For example, when Thomass
mother, Theodora, rushed to Naples to see her son, who was newly installed in
the Dominican friary there, she did so (William said) with well-ordered emo-
tion (ordinatum affectum).
28
But the friars misunderstood and thought her love
was disordered (turbatum). This resulted in exactly what they feared, for their
hostile reaction caused her feelings to become disordered (turbata), As a result,
she had Thomas captured and imprisoned.
29
In just such ways was learned think-
ing about the right and wrong sorts of loves disseminated to a larger audience.
But perhaps an account largely written (as was Toccos) for a papal canoniza-
tion commission is insufficient to prove that discussions of ordered love were
relevant to more than a tiny minority. Consider, then, a sermon of the Florentine
25. Elisabeth Kbler-Ross, On Death and Dying (London: MacMillan, 1969). Her sequence was
(1) denial and isolation; (2) anger; (3) bargaining; (4) depression; (5) acceptance. Already in the
twelfth century, Cistercian monks had elaborated a sequence of emotions. It was rather simpler than
Thomass, starting with fear, moving on to joy, then sorrow, and ending in love. See Damien Boquet,
Lordre de laffect au Moyen ge: Autour de lanthropologie affective dAelred de Rievaulx (Caen:
Publications du CRAHM, 2005), 248.
26. See Boquet, Lordre de laffect au Moyen ge, chap. 8.
27. William of Tocco, Ystoria sancti Thome de Aquino de Guillaume de Tocco (1323), ed. Claire
le Brun-Gouanvic (Toronto: Pontifical Institute, 1996).
28. Ibid., 106.
29. Ibid., 107-108.
MODERNITY: A PROBLEMATIC CATEGORY IN THE HISTORY OF EMOTIONS
77
preacher Remigio de Girolami (d. 1319). He was a disciple of Saint Thomas,
having studied with him in Paris 126972.
30
A master of theology at Santa Maria
Novella in Florence, Remigio wrote numerous treatises and sermons. Let us
consider one sermon, given c. 1315 on the occasion of the death of Beatrice of
Anjou. Its emphasis was on the feelings of the bereaved husband, Bertrand de
Baux. The sermon began with the mode of grieving (modum indolitionis) of a
husband who was understood to love (tenebatur diligere) his wife more than his
father and mother.
31
As a lover, a husband rejoices (gaudet) when good things
happen to his beloved and grieves (dolet) when bad things come her way. But,
Remigio continued, nothing is worse than death: And thus, let a husband mourn
the death of his wife in accordance with the order of love (ordinem caritatis).
What did he mean?
He meant that Bertrand should follow a sort of script. First he should think
of Job whose very name meant grieving (dolens) and whose land, Hus, meant
hastenas in an untimely death.
32
Remigio explained: Job was simple and
upright, fearing God, and avoiding evil (Job 1:1). Ecclesiasticus 22:11 gave
the right model: Weep but little for the dead. Ponder, Remigio continued, the
fact that no oneno matter how beautiful, young, or wealthycan evade death.
Thank God, then, for this death as one would thank a doctor for a bitter (but effec-
tive) medicine or a father for a harsh (but just) punishment. The loss of a wife
leads to God: We ought to be grateful to God for the death of a wife, because
although marriage is good, nevertheless it is better and more beneficial to be
without a wife than with one. Without a wife (here Remigio quoted St. Paul),
a man is solicitous for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please
God.
33
The whole sermon was thus a disquisition on different and ever-improv-
ing forms of love, led by reason, which here correctly apprehended the good.
This is a distasteful pilgrims progress for the modern reader. But that does not
mean that the sermon was not valued and had no impact at the time it was given.
Bertrand and others in Remigios audience surely understood what it meant as
well as Nietzsches readers understood his advocacy of Fernsten-Liebe.
30. On the chronology of Remigios life, see Emilio Panella, Per lo studio di fra Remigio dei
Girolami (1319). Contra falsos ecclesie professores cc. 5-37 (Pistoia: Memorie domenicane, 1979),
206-233; Mulchahey, First the Bow is Bent, 389-396; see also Mulchahey, Education in Dantes
Florence Revisited: Remigio de Girolami and the Schools of Santa Maria Novella, in Medieval
Education, ed. Ronald B. Begley and Joseph W. Koterski (New York: Fordham University Press,
2005), chap. 10. Important work by Emilio Panella on Remigio is published on the web: http://
www.e-theca.net/emiliopanella/remigio/index.htm (accessed December 9, 2013).
31. The husband and wife of the sermon are identified by Panella at http://www.e-theca.net/
emiliopanella/remigio/8150.htm (accessed December 9, 2013), where the sermon is transcribed in
full in Latin and translated into Italian.
32. Panella notes that a manuscript of the Interpretationes nominum hebraicorum, attributed to
Stephen Langton in the Santa Maria Novella Library, gives these meanings to Iob and Hus.
33. 1 Cor. 7:32: qui sine uxore est, sollicitus est quae Domini sunt, quomodo placeat Deo.
BARBARA H. ROSENWEIN
78
EMOTIONAL COMMUNITIES
From time to time, though a bit more forcefully at the very end of her book, Fre-
vert points out that the codes and styles that defined the mainstream history of
emotions did not apply to all people. . . . How men and women, adolescents and
senior citizens, peasants and city dwellers dealt with their emotions . . . did not
follow the same pattern. Immigrant communities harboured emotional regimes
that frequently differed substantially from those of the host society (206). Here
Frevert used a termemotional regimesthat had been introduced by Wil-
liam Reddy a bit over a decade ago.
34
As Reddy defined it, however, emotional
regime designated the ruling class and its norms. More apt for Freverts pur-
poses, then, might have been the term emotional communities, for these have
been defined to encompass marginal groups as well as dominant ones.
35

Although these divergent groups make for a livelier picture in Freverts book,
they are there largely as relics of older emotional norms. Modernity, as it comes
to involve more and more people (145), will, it seems, put an end to most of
them. This view derives from a vision of modern cultural hegemony that may
be traced back to the theories of Gerhard Oestreich on social discipline, and
beyond him to Elias.
36
But people have a way of carving out their own emotional
communities even in the hegemonic world of today.
37
It is not so much that emo-
tions are lost and found as that different emotional communities come to the
fore at various times. Modernity is not responsible for that; it happened in the
Middle Ages, and it happens today. The margins are often the breeding grounds
of historical change.
BARBARA H. ROSENWEIN
Loyola University Chicago
34. William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 129.
35. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities.
36. Gerhard Oestreich, Strukturprobleme des europischen Absolutismus, Vierteljahresschrift
fr Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 55 (1968), 329-347, translated as The Structure of the Absolute
State, in Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State, ed. Brigitta Oestreich and H. G.
Koenigsberger, transl. David McLintock (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 258-
273. For the Eliasian foundations of this view, see Heinrich Richard Schmidt, Sozialdisziplinierung?
Ein Pldoyer fr das Ende des Etatismus in der Konfessionalisierungsforschung, Historische
Zeitschrift 265 (1997), 639-640, and Giorgia Alessi, Discipline: I nuovi orizzonti del disciplinamento
sociale, Storica 4 (1996), 7-37.
37. See, for example, the negotiations between old and new emotional norms chronicled in the
articles in Jennifer Cole and Lynn M. Thomas, Love in Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2009).