Barbara H. Rosenwein contends that the current historiography of emotions is disquieting. Without explicitly articulating its own assumptions, it traces a progressive evolution that begins with a childish, violent, and unrestrained Middle Ages and moves to the present, when emotions are disciplined and supposedly under control. This grand narrative, already found in the work of the turn-of-the-century medievalist Johan Huizinga, is powerfully bolstered by theories of the sociologist Norbert Elias and by the penchant of modernists to bracket off the Middle Ages. It relies, however, on a mistaken view of the nature of emotions, a hydraulic model in which emotions are pressing for release and difficult to contain. The cognitive and social constructionist paradigms of emotions, elaborated by psychologists and anthropologists over the last several decades, have overturned this hydraulic model in scientific circles. Rosenwein argues that these new paradigms can be very useful for historians. She explains that they allow historians to recognize that there is no such thing as “untrammeled” and “pure” emotion. Emotions are evaluations that depend on social norms, mores, and perceptions – and that in turn affect such norms, mores, and perceptions. She calls on historians to jettison the evolutionary model and concentrate instead on “emotional communities,” which exist in every period, and which have their own shape and style of emotional feeling and expression. By bringing to the fore the largely hidden assumptions that have lain behind emotions history as it has been practiced, Rosenwein not only repositions the Middle Ages but also frees historians of any period to explore emotions without being in thrall to the radically simplifying binaries of discipline and indiscipline.
