Barbara H. Rosenwein, PhD

Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages

(ISBN: 978-0-8014-4478-4)

Synopsis:

This book proposes that people lived (and live) in "emotional communities," each having its own particular norms of emotional valuation and expression. It takes up in particular some instances from the Early Middle Ages. Drawing on extensive historical research as well as cognitive and social constructionist theories of the emotions, this book shows that different emotional communities coexisted, that some were dominant at times, and that religious beliefs affected emotional styles even as those styles helped shape religious expression.