The study of emotions in early medieval history: some starting points

The various problems cited by Airlie, Cubitt and Rosenwein as besetting the study of the emotions of early medieval people are obstacles to a larger challenge: that of understanding past individuals and grasping both the particularity of their emotional experience ± their inner worlds ± and setting those insights into an informed view of the emotional context of their external worlds. Even for those intent on constructing master narratives, the experience of individuals must have a role as a component of that project and as a touchstone for evaluating its success. The challenge of making sense of the emotional worlds of past individuals and cultures seems, at ®rst, to be particularly acute for the early Middle Ages: `Das portraEtlos Jahrtausend', or `the millennium without portraits', as Gerd Tellenbach has characterized it. And as Caroline Walker Bynum reminds us, `it is extraordinarily dif®cult to determine the basic characteristics of the personalities of medieval people'. But, of course, the ®rst millennium was not an era entirely without portraits, and though one might deplore the lack of `intimate' personal sources, I believe that there are yet many insights to be won from sensitive and theoretically informed readings of the sources which do exist. It is salutary to remember, too, that even in this present age of Oprah Winfrey and insatiable appetite for personal revelations from celebrities, the study and indeed even the intuitive understanding of present-day emotions is characterized by competing paradigms: witness the disparity between the everyday understanding of the word emotions and the de®nitional aporia cited by Rosenwein, or Susie Orbach's emphasis on