Writing without fear about early medieval emotions

For a long time even the political history of the early Middle Ages was belittled. In my Western Civilization class in college, my professor had us read about the Germans invading Rome, then skipped to the Investiture Controversy. `What happened in between?' I asked. `Just a lot of violence,' was the answer. Thanks to J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, who was in uenced by the anthropologist Max Gluckman, and then thanks to the new generation that Wallace-Hadrill taught by word and text, we have come to see the peace in the violence. Anthropologists were the ®rst to give us the tools to make sense of the acephalous polity, and we've made splendid use of them. Merovingian Francia, we now realize, worked by consensus; the Carolingians, far from forging a state, were forever negotiating to stay in power; and the `feudal anarchy' of the post-Carolingian period worked through informal mechanisms of dispute resolution. We know how to think about early medieval politics. We are less lucky with medieval emotions. In the ®rst place, there is no Max Gluckman to give us the ®rm guidance that we would like to have. In 1981, when Paul and Anna Kleinginna tried to come up with a