Rosenwein Barbara H.

What is the History of Emotions? A Primer offers an accessible path through the thicket of approaches, debates, and past and current trends in the history of emotions. Although historians have always talked about how people felt in the past, it is only in the last few decades that they have found systematic and well-grounded ways to treat the topic. In this updated edition of their acclaimed introduction to this field, Rosenwein and Cristiani begin with the science of emotion, where most of today’s working definitions originate, and explain what contemporary psychologists and neuropsychologists think emotions are. They continue with the foundational approaches to the history of emotions and then treat in depth new work that builds on and develops this scholarship, pushing into some of the field's liveliest debates, including the emotions of animals and plants. In an entirely new and hands-on section, they offer practical exercises at a variety of levels to help readers engage in and do the history of emotions themselves. Drawing upon a wide range of sources from across time and space, they offer guided analyses of extant historical material. Students, teachers, and anyone else interested in emotions and how to think about them historically will find this primer to be an indispensable and fascinating escort into a new and exciting field.

What is the History of Emotions? A Primer offers an accessible path through the thicket of approaches, debates, and past and current trends in the history of emotions. Although historians have always talked about how people felt in the past, it is only in the last few decades that they have found systematic and well-grounded ways to treat the topic. In this updated edition of their acclaimed introduction to this field, Rosenwein and Cristiani begin with the science of emotion, where most of today’s working definitions originate, and explain what contemporary psychologists and neuropsychologists think emotions are. They continue with the foundational approaches to the history of emotions and then treat in depth new work that builds on and develops this scholarship, pushing into some of the field's liveliest debates, including the emotions of animals and plants. In an entirely new and hands-on section, they offer practical exercises at a variety of levels to help readers engage in and do the history of emotions themselves. Drawing upon a wide range of sources from across time and space, they offer guided analyses of extant historical material. Students, teachers, and anyone else interested in emotions and how to think about them historically will find this primer to be an indispensable and fascinating escort into a new and exciting field.

Barbara H. Rosenwein's bestselling survey text continues to stand out by integrating the history of three medieval civilizations (European, Byzantine, and Islamic) in a lively narrative that is complemented beautifully by 70 full-color plates, 46 maps, and 13 genealogies, many of them new to this edition. The fourth edition begins with an essay entitled "Why the Middle Ages Matter Today," and the book now covers East Central Europe in some depth. This edition includes three "Seeing the Middle Ages" features, each discussing a work of art in depth: An Ivory Diptych of Christ and the Virgin, Saint Luke, Gospel Book of Otto III; and A Shrine Madonna. The sections for further reading have been updated, and ancillary materials, including study questions, can be found on the History Matters website (www.utphistorymatters.com).

Proposing that people lived (and live) in "emotional communities"—each having its own particular norms of emotional valuation and expression—Barbara H. Rosenwein here discusses some instances from the Early Middle Ages. Drawing on extensive microhistorical research, as well as cognitive and social constructionist theories of the emotions, Rosenwein 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. This highly original book is both a study of emotional discourse in the Early Middle Ages and a contribution to the debates among historians and social scientists about the nature of human emotions. Rosenwein explores the character of emotional communities as discovered in several case studies: the funerary inscriptions of three different Gallic cities; the writings of Pope Gregory the Great; the affective world of two friends, Gregory of Tours and Venantius Fortunatus; the Neustrian court of Clothar II and his heirs; and finally the tumultuous period of the late seventh century. In this essay, the author presents a new way to consider the history of emotions, inviting others to continue and advance the inquiry. For medievalists, early modernists, and historians of the modern world, the book will be of interest for its persuasive critique of Norbert Elias's highly influential notion of the "civilizing process." Rosenwein's notion of emotional communities is one with which all historians and social scientists working on the emotions will need to contend.

Barbara H. Rosenwein here reassesses the significance of property in the tenth and eleventh centuries, a period of transition from the Carolingian empire to the regional monarchies of the High Middle Ages. In To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter she explores in rich detail the question of monastic donations, illuminating the human motives, needs, and practices behind gifts of land and churches to the French monastery of Cluny during the 140 years that followed its founding. Donations, Rosenwein shows, were largely the work of neighbors, and they set up and affirmed relationships with Saint Peter, to whom Cluny was dedicated. Cluny was an eminent religious institution and served as a model for other monasteries. It attracted numerous donations and was party to many land transactions. Its charters and cartularies constitute perhaps the single richest collection of information on property for the period 909–1049. Analyzing the evidence found in these records, Rosenwein considers the precise nature of Cluny's ownership of land, the character of its claims to property, and its tutelage over the land of some of the monasteries in its ecclesia.