Barbara Rosenwein
Theories and Methods: How Medievalists (and Others) Write the History of Emotions
The topic of this conference—“What is the current state of research on the theory of emotions?”—was also the question at the start of this series twenty years ago. The argument I wish to make today is threefold. First, every theory implies a method of research. Second, that fact has been (on the whole) a welcome guide and constraint on how historians have treated the history of emotions. In this talk I shall concentrate on medieval history because that is my field of specialization. Finally, I will argue that there is by now a surfeit of theories and I worry a bit about the fragmentation of the field.
Barbara H. Rosenwein is Professor Emerita at Loyola University Chicago. She has been a guest professor at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris; the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, the University of Utrecht; the University of Gothenburg; Oxford University; Reykjavik University. Since 2009, Rosenwein has been an affiliated research scholar at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University in London. Selected publications: Love: A History in Five Fantasies (2021); Anger: The Conflicted History of an Emotion (2020); The Middle Ages in 50 Objects (co-author, 2018); Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions 600–1700 (2016); A Short History of the Middle Ages (2009, 2023); Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (2006); Negotiating Space: Power, Restraint, and Privileges of Immunity in Early Medieval Europe (1999); Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (1998); To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter: The Social Meaning of Cluny’s Property (1989); and A Short Medieval Reader (editor, 2022).