Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Generations of Feeling
WORK NOTES:b
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1945
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.luc.edu/facultyauthors/barbarahrosenweinphd/ * http://torch.ox.ac.uk/professor-barbara-rosenwein * http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100606070
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1945.
EDUCATION:University of Chicago, B.A., 1966, Ph.D., 1974.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Historian, educator, writer, lecturer. Loyola University Chicago, professor emerita; Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University in London, affiliated research scholar, 2009–. Has been guest professor at numerous institutions, including École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France; École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France; University of Utrecht in the Netherlands; University of Gothenburg, Sweden; Trinity College, Oxford University. American Academy in Rome, scholar in residence, 2001-02.
AWARDS:Elected fellow, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, 1991; elected fellow, Medieval Academy of America, 2003.
WRITINGS
Contributor of numerous articles to journals and chapters to scholarly books.
SIDELIGHTS
Barbara H. Rosenwein is an internationally renowned scholar of the medieval period. An emerita professor at Loyola University Chicago, she has been a guest lecturer at colleges and universities in France, England, the Netherlands, and Sweden, and has also lectured around the world. Rosenwein has published research articles in dozens of journals internationally and in languages including English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and German. Among her published books are To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter: The Social Meaning of Cluny’s Property; Negotiating Space: Power, Restraint, and Privileges of Immunity in Early Medieval Europe; Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages; and Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions 600-1700. Rosenwein has also written the popular textbooks including A Short History of the Middle Ages and Reading the Middle Ages: Sources from Europe, Byzantium, and the Islamic World.
To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter
Rosenwein’s earliest work dealt with research on the monastery of Cluny, also known as Cluny Abbey, in France. Dedicated to St. Peter, it was built in successive stages from the fourth to the twelfth centuries. It was the largest church in the world until the construction of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. With To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter, the author examines archival records to look at monastic donations to this monastery in the century-and-a-half following its founding. Such donations, Rosenwein demonstrates, came largely from neighbors anxious to establish a connection with St. Peter, to whom the church was dedicated. These contributions of land and other property offer insight to the significance of property in the tenth and eleventh centuries.
Reviewing To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter in Historian, Phillip D. Thomas noted: “Rosenwein’s latest work is an important addition to the knowledge of an exemplary monastery. She has developed new techniques for studying monastic property holdings and given a new insight into early medieval society.” Writing in the Catholic Historical Review, Eric John also had praise for the work, commenting: “The import of the title is that Cluny’s property lay in a neighborhood, that is, an area with little, if any, central authority. The charters appear at first sight to be simply records of property transactions, but they are not: Rosenwein has shown they are alliances in the making, feuds being ended, and they reveal a vast network of patronage. . . . This is an important and trailblazing book well worth the effort that has gone into it.”
Negotiating Space
Following her research and writings on the monastery of Cluny, Rosenwein focused on the issue of immunities in the Middle Ages, concessions from the king regarding taxes and judicial obligations due to the king. This led to her 1999 publication, Negotiating Space. While some historians have viewed these immunities as a sign of weakness on the part of a king afraid to send his agents onto certain properties, Rosenwein shows how such immunities were instead used by kings and other leaders to create alliances between powerful noble families and monastic centers. As Rosenwein further demonstrates, this medieval practice has modern implications, leading in part to protections against unreasonable searches and seizures as codified both in English common law and the U.S. Constitution. Rosenwein concentrates much of this study on practices at the monastery of Cluny.
Writing in the English Historical Review, H.E.J. Cowdrey termed Negotiating Space a “useful and stimulating … study.” Arthuriana contributor Thomas F.X. Noble was also impressed, commenting: “Anyone who has picked up a volume of early medieval charters has encountered an immunity diploma. Anyone who has read Barbara Rosenwein’s wonderful book will never read an immunity the same way again. This is one of the most interesting and important books I have read in many years.” Online Medieval Review writer Susan Jane Allen offered further praise, observing: “Certainly the strength of Rosenwein’s book is that it can be read on many levels and by those in numerous fields of study. … It is certainly a book which can be understood by perceptive undergraduates, but it should also appeal to a wide range of scholars–those interested in legal history, anthropology, political theory, as well as students of the early Middle Ages. … Because of this, Negotiating Space is an essential starting point for those wishing to bring themselves up to date on the range and depth of scholarship in this field, as well as to benefit from Rosenwein’s original approach to the study of these documents.” Church History reviewer James A. Brundage likewise concluded: “Rosenwein has produced another original and ambitious study of a topic with wide-ranging implications. One of its greatest merits is that it seems likely to provoke readers to thought and, with luck, to further research on some of the issues that it raises.”
Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages and Generations of Feeling
Rosenwein has also been interested in the history of emotions. In Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages, she offers a short book that “deals with a big theme,” according to online H-Net reviewer Cate Gunn. As Gunn further noted, this is a “history of the expression of the emotions” from about 600 to 700 A.D. Rosenwein employs extensive research to discuss emotional communities in several case studies, including funerary inscriptions and the writings of Pope Gregory the Great, among others. Rosenwein demonstrates that various emotional communities existed in this age, and that religious beliefs helped to form their styles. Gunn felt that in this work Rosenwein “has done valuable research on emotional language and reached conclusions that are interesting and important.” Writing in NUIM History of Emotions Web site, Adam Bermingham had a more mixed assessment, noting: “This book would be perfect for someone who knew about the topic in rather great detail because very little time was given to concepts that where mentioned throughout the book. This made it quite a difficult read. This would not be recommended for someone who had a lack of knowledge on the history of emotions and the terminology associated with it.”
In Generations of Feeling, Rosenwein expands her discussion of emotions to cover the period from 600 to 1700. Again employing her concept of emotional communities, she examines groups in France and England as well as in the written word. Choice critic J. Bussanich called this a “deeply learned but lively excavation of premodern emotions.” Similarly, History Today contributor Catriona Kennedy termed it “ambitious and wide-ranging.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Arthuriana, spring, 2001, Thomas F.X. Noble, review of Negotiating Space: Power, Restraint and Privileges of Immunity in Early Medieval Europe, p. 128.
Catholic Historical Review, April, 1990, Eric John, review of To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter: The Social Meaning of Cluny’s Property, 909-1049, p. 341.
Choice, April, 2016, J. Bussanich, review of Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600-1700, p. 1156.
Church History, March, 2001, James A. Brundage, review of Negotiating Space, p. 151.
English Historical Review, April, 2000, H.E.J. Cowdrey, review of Negotiating Space, p. 426.
Historian, fall, 1990, John B. Freed, review of To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter, p. 119.
Reference & Research Book News, August, 2005, review of A Short History of the Middle Ages: From C.300 to C.1150, 2d ed., vol. 1,” p. 30; August, 2007, review of Reading the Middle Ages: Sources from Europe, Byzantium, and the Islamic World; November, 2007, review of Reading the Middle Ages.
ONLINE
History Today, http://www.historytoday.com/ (November 11, 2016), Catriona Kennedy, review of Generations of Feeling.
H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, https://networks.h-net.org/ (May 2, 2017), Tryntje Helfferich, review of Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages.
Loyola University Chicago Web site, http://luc.edu/ (February 22, 2017), author profile.
Medieval Review, https://scholarworks.iu.edu/ (June 10, 2002), Susan Jane Allen, review of Negotiating Space.
NUIM History of Emotions, https://nuimhistoryofemotions.wordpress.com (April 18, 2014), review of Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages.
Torch, http://torch.ox.ac.uk/ (February 22, 2017), author profile.*
PROFESSOR BARBARA ROSENWEIN
Humanitas Visiting Professor in Historiography 2014-2015
Barbara H. Rosenwein (Ph.D. (1974), B.A. (1966), University of Chicago) is a professor at Loyola University Chicago. An internationally renowned historian, she has been a guest professor at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France; the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France; the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, and most recently at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Since 2009, Rosenwein has been an affiliated research scholar at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University in London. She was a scholar in residence at the American Academy in Rome in 2001-2002 and was elected Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America in 2003.
Rosenwein has lectures throughout the world, including France, The Netherlands, Great Britain, Spain, Germany, Israel, Sweden, Taiwan, and Australia. Most recently she presented a plenary lecture in Stockholm at the Svenska historikermötet 2014. Her scholarship has evolved through at least four phases. Her earliest work examined the monastery of Cluny, the “light of the world (lux mundi),” as one eleventh-century pope described it, and culminated in To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter: The Social Meaning of Cluny’s Property (Cornell University Press, 1989). Rosenwein then proceeded to examine the issue of immunities in the Middle Ages, resulting in Negotiating Space: Power, Restraint, and Privileges of Immunity in Early Medieval Europe (Cornell University Press, 1999). In a third phase, she explored the history of emotions, editing Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Cornell University Press, 1998), completing several influential publications, the most important of which are “Worrying about Emotions in History,” American Historical Review (2002), “Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions,” Passions in Context: Journal of the History and Philosophy of the Emotions 1/1 (2010), online at < http://www.passionsincontext.de/>, and Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Cornell University, 2006) and the forthcoming (Cambridge University Press) Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions 600-1700. Finally, Rosenwein has sought to link her research to larger themes in medieval and European history. She has published several textbooks on the Middle Ages, including A Short History of the Middle Ages (4d. ed,, University of Toronto Press, 2014); Reading the Middle Ages: Sources from Europe, Byzantium, and the Islamic World (2d ed., University of Toronto Press, 2006); and Debating the Middle Ages: Issues and Readings, edited with Lester K. Little (Blackwell, 1998). She is also the co-author of popular and widely-assigned The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures (4th ed., Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2013). In 2012, a conference was held at Auxerre, France, to honor Rosenwein’s significant contributions to medieval history (De Cluny à Auxerre, par la voie des "émotions". Un parcours d'historienne du Moyen Âge) and in 2014 another conference to honor her work was held at the Newberry Library, Chicago (At the Intersection of Medieval History and the Social Sciences).
Rosenwein has published in many languages, including English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and German, as well as in an impressive array of journals, including Médiévales, Annales, Studia Monastica, Speculum, History Compass, Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures, Historia: Journal of the Historical Society of Israel, Feministische Studien, Revue historique, The Haskins Society Journal, and History and Theory. She has a distinguished record of service as a chair of the history department at Loyola University Chicago, an editorial board member of Médiévales, Reti medievali and Passions in Context, a co-chair of the program committee for the American Historical Association Annual Meeting in 2011, the president of the Illinois Medieval Association (1999-2000), the series editor for “Conjunctions of Religion and Power in the Medieval Past” at Cornell University Press, and a board member for the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago.
Curriculum VitaeBarbara H. ROSENWEINProfessor Emerita, Loyola University Chicago Email: brosenw@gmail.com Recent Books:Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions 600-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)História das Emoções (São Paola: Letra e Voz, 2011) [translation into Portuguese of “Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions”; see below under articles]. Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,2006; paperback, 2007).Recent Articles: “Emotion Keywords,” in Transitional States: Cultural Change, Tradition and Memory in Medieval England. A Festschrift for Allen Frantzen (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2016), forthcoming. “Taking Pleasure in Virtues and Vices: Alcuin’s Manual for Count Wido,” forthcoming “Who Cared about Thomas Aquinas’s Theory of the Passions?” L'Atelier du centre de recherche historique, forthcoming.“The Art of Speaking Well at the Court of the Counts of Toulouse,” in Seduction: The Art of Persuasion in the Medieval World, ed. Elizabeth D. Weber =Essays in Medieval Studies 30 (2015): 141-54. “The Place of Renaissance Italy in the History of Emotions,” in Emotions, Passions, and Power in Renaissance Italy, ed. Fabrizio Ricciardelli and Andrea Zorzi (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), 15-30.“Rereading Askese und Laster: The Case of Alcuin,” in Urkunden - Schriften -Lebensordnungen. Neue Beiträge zur Mediävistik, ed. A. Schwarcz (Vienna: Böhlau, 2015).“The Sorrows of Friendship,” in Splendor Reginae. Passions, genre et famille, ed. Laurent Jégou, Sylvie Joye, Thomas Lienhard, and Jens Schneider (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 311-318.1
Barbara H. Rosenwein“Circumstantiae locutionis at the Court of Toulouse c.1200: Good Manners without a Courtesy Book,” in “Per una severa maestra.” Dono a Daniela Romagnoli (Fidenza: Mattioli, 2014), 61-72. “An Historian in the Amazon,” in Visions of Community. Comparative Approaches to Medieval Forms of Identity in Europe and Asia, ed. Andre Gingrich and Christina Lutter=History and Anthropology ( 2014), DOI 10.1080/02757206.2014.933103“Modernity: A Problematic Category in the History of Emotions,” A review essay in History and Theory 53, no. 1 (February 2014): 69-78. “Christianizing Cicero’s Perturbationes,” Quaestiones Medii Aevi Novae 17 (2012 [appeared in 2013])= The Making of Western Christendom, 4th-8th Centuries, pp. 29-45. Visiting ProfessorshipsHumanitas Visiting Professor, Trinity College, Oxford University, May 2015. Visiting Professor, Technische Universität Dresden, Germany, March 2015. Visiting Professor, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden, March-May, 2014.Visiting Professor, University of Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands, June 2005 Professeur invité, École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France, May 2004.Professeur invité, École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France, November-December 1992.
QUOTE:
deeply learned but lively excavation of premodern emotions,
Rosenwein, Barbara H.: Generations of feeling: a history of emotions, 600-1700
J. Bussanich
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1156.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Listen
Full Text:
Rosenwein, Barbara H. Generations of feeling: a history of emotions, 600-1700. Cambridge, 2015. 368p bibl index ISBN 9781107097049 cloth, $94.99; ISBN 9781107480841 pbk, $29.99; ISBN 9781316435182 ebook, $24.00
53-3350
BF531
2015-14696 CIP
In this deeply learned but lively excavation of premodern emotions, short chapters on theories of the emotions alternate with longer chapters comparing two or more "emotional communities" in representative historical periods. Sensitive to the ambiguity of the term emotion, Rosenwein (Loyola Univ., Chicago) focuses on the words for understanding, expressing, and feeling emotions and on the shifting valorizations of specific emotions over time. In chapter 1, she outlines Cicero's and Augustine's emotional theories as the basis for early medieval theories. In subsequent chapters, she takes the discussion to Carolingian France, ninth-century Northumbria and the English abbot Alcuin's assimilation of emotions into virtues and vices, the court of Toulouse (12th century), and the friendship and treachery in the monastic writings of Aelred of Rievaulx. The philosophical theories of Aquinas and Gerson, which prioritize love, occupy chapters 5 and 7; sorrow and despair are the focus of chapters 6 (on 14th- and 15th-century chroniclers of Burgundy) and 8 (on Margery Kempe). In the last chapter, Rosenwein examines Hobbes's emphasis on kinetic emotions, such as curiosity, as heralds of the scientific pursuits of modernity. This is a rich narrative of tradition, continuity, and change. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.--J. Bussanich, University of New Mexico
Bussanich, J.
Reading the Middle Ages; sources from Europe, Byzantium, and the Islamic world; v.1: From c.300 to c.1150
Reference & Research Book News. 22.4 (Nov. 2007):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
Listen
Full Text:
9781551116952
Reading the Middle Ages; sources from Europe, Byzantium, and the Islamic world; v.1: From c.300 to c.1150.
Ed. by Barbara H. Rosenwein.
Broadview Press
2007
354 pages
$52.95
Paperback
D113
Sinbad the Sailor traveled to many far corners of the world, but until now perhaps had never reached an anthology of readings for an undergraduate medieval history course. His tale is one of the Islamic and Byzantine texts that Rosenwein (history, Loyola U., Chicago) has incorporated alongside traditional Western European literature in her two-volume anthology. Though usable with any history text, it is formatted to accompany A Short History of the Middle Ages volume one, the chapters having the same titles and chronological scope. Among the texts are records of sales, poems, histories, and of course fanciful tales.
([c]20072005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
Reading the Middle Ages; sources from Europe, Byzantium, and the Islamic world
Reference & Research Book News. 22.3 (Aug. 2007):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
Listen
Full Text:
1551116936
Reading the Middle Ages; sources from Europe, Byzantium, and the Islamic world.
Ed. by Barbara H. Rosenwein.
Broadview Press
2006
594 pages
$52.95
Paperback
D113
Rosenwein (history, Loyola U. Chicago) has collected a very lively set of Western, Byzantine and Islamic documents and readings from the later Roman world to the beginning of the sixteenth century. She includes commentary and contexts for each, covering such topics as imperial politics, orthodoxy, thought, the emergence of sibling cultures and the creating of new identities, political reorganizations, the expansion of the concept of "Europe," the Crusades, the Norman conquest of England, the institutionalization of aspiration, catastrophe, creativity and the New World.
([c]20072005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
A Short History of the Middle Ages: From C.300 to C.1150, 2d ed., vol. 1
Reference & Research Book News. 20.3 (Aug. 2005): p30.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
Listen
Full Text:
D117
2004-275605
1-55111-667-7
A short history of the Middle Ages, 2d ed.; v.1: From c.300 to c.1150
Rosenwein, Barbara H.
Broadview Press, [c]2004
237 p.
$26.95 (pa)
These were times of great sinners and great saints, and of new societies that rose and fell in concert or contrary to that of the Romans. In this undergraduate text Rosenwein (history, Loyola U.) introduces readers to European, Byzantine and Islamic cultures up to the middle of the twelfth century, showing how their people coped with political reorganization and created identities, and what they left in cultural and societal structures, artifacts and ideas. With each chapter she provides a well-chosen list of further reading.
QUOTE:
useful and stimulating a study
Negotiating Space: Power, Restraint and Privileges of Immunity in Early Medieval Europe
H.E.J. COWDREY
The English Historical Review. 115.461 (Apr. 2000): p426.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2000 Oxford University Press
http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/
Listen
Full Text:
The subject and the scope of Barbara H. Rosenwein's study, Negotiating Space: Power, Restraint and Privileges of Immunity in Early Medieval Europe (Ithaca: Cornell U.P., 1999; pp. xxii+267. 40.95 [pounds sterling]; pb. 13.95 [pounds sterling]), are somewhat understated by its title. Almost as much attention is given to the development of exemptions as to that of immunities. In time, Dr Rosenwein ranges from the free and immune cities of republican and early imperial Rome by way of medieval English immunities and franchises to the modern assertion that a man's house is his castle and to the Fourth Amendment of the United States constitution. A valuable feature of the study is its abundant demonstration that no sharp line should be drawn between immunities as royal and secular and exemptions as episcopal or papal and ecclesiastical; it is cogently argued that both grew up together from Merovingian times and interacted in response to political factors which changed from age to age. No overall definition of immunities and exemptions is, therefore, possible. They are best considered less in the static and formulaic terms of diplomatic and legal history than through the discussion of specific examples that disclose the dynamics of social and political life at particular times. Thus, prevailing assumptions are illuminatingly and successfully challenged. Even in Merovingian times immunities could be an expression of, not an encroachment upon, royal power. Sharing the view of English medieval liberties that they were (as the cliche has it) cogs in the wheel rather than holes in the net of the king's government, Rosenwein extends it to other countries and centuries. In Merovingian times, the reign of Dagobert (623-39) was critical for the issue of charters of immunity and exemption which must be studied against the background of the royal court; the decades from c. 640-70, described as the heyday of Merovingian immunities, saw them as not only serving charitable, administrative, and fiscal ends but also as key instruments in the politics of social negotiation. Rosenwein epitomizes the developments of the Carolingian period as a control which was illustrated by the novel pairing of the word tuitio (protection) with immunitas; kings became more actively involved in ecclesiastical business. Bishop Chrodegang of Metz's privilege for his monastic foundation of Gorze (757) showed that a bishop as well as a secular ruler could consolidate his control of a monastery. The emphasis upon protection enabled the papacy during the tenth and eleventh centuries, which Rosenwein presents as a time of experimentation and divergence so far as immunities and exemption are concerned, to perform a more active role. She concentrates on the example of Cluny where the amalgamation of immunity and exemption in papal charters and pronouncements found its ultimate expression in the sacred ban established by Cardinal Peter of Albano's visit in 1080 and Pope Urban II's in 1095. Perhaps this highlights Cluny a little too much, and something might have been said about such documents as Gregory VII's pattern privilege of 1075 for Banzi (JL 4929) and other such evidence. But this is a small criticism of so useful and stimulating a study.
H.E.J. COWDREY St Edmund Hall, Oxford
QUOTE:
Anyone who has picked up a volume of early medieval charters has encountered an immunity diploma. Anyone who has read Barbara Rosenwein's wonderful book will never read an immunity the same way again. This is one of the most interesting and important books I have read in many years.
Arthuriana
Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 2001
pp. 128-130 |
Thomas F.X. Noble
Barbara ROSENWEiN, Negotiating Space: Power, Restraint, and Privileges ofImmunity in Early Medieval Europe. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Pp. xii, 267. isbn: 08014 -8512-5. $55. (cloth), $18.95 (paper). Anyone who has picked up a volume of early medieval charters has encountered an immunity diploma. Anyone who has read Barbara Rosenwein's wonderful book will never read an immunity the same way again. This is one of the most interesting and important books I have read in many years. Rosenwein begins by taking the reader to Cluny in the autumn of 1095. Urban II, amidst many other concerns, consecrated two altars, presided at the consecration of three others, and declared a large ring ofterritory around Cluny to be holy. Rosenwein REVIEWS129 says that the purpose ofher book is to explain why that happened and what it meant. Over the course ofher discussion she proves that 'immunities and exemptions emerged and changed together; they both represented an outcome of negotiations between kings, courtiers, and their religious associates' (p. 213). Put by her a little differently, 'immunities had begun largely as a way to accommodate political power to a new sensibility about religious space' (p. 212). But there is more: 'The second purpose of this book, then is to bring immunities (and exemptions) back into modern historical discourse: to show how they are rich and polyvalent sources, how they served social and political strategics beyond their surface meanings, and how the negotiations, conflicts, and accords that they variously embodied, reflected diffused, and/or confirmed changed under different circumstances and at different times' (p. 5). Let me begin, then, with that second purpose. For more than a century immunities have been interpreted mainly by legal and constitutional historians. They have sought to excavate the Roman origins of the practice and to trace its medieval history. Generally, such scholars have viewed immunities as deleterious to central power—in so far as that power gave away some ofits authority—and, on more or less technical terms...
QUOTE:
Rosenwein has produced another original and ambitious study of a topic with wide-ranging implications. One of its greatest merits is that it seems likely to provoke readers to thought and, with luck, to further research on some of the issues that it raises.
Brundage, James A. Church History. Mar2001, Vol. 70 Issue 1, p151. 3p.
Church History
BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES
Negotiating Space: Power, Restraint, and Privileges of Immunity in Early Medieval Europe. By Barbara H. Rosenwein. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999. xxiv + 267 pp. $59.50 cloth; $18.95 paper.
Barbara Rosenwein's earlier work has made notable contributions to the history of the monastery of Cluny. Cluny was, among other things, a conspicuous beneficiary of grants of immunity and exemption that it secured from a series of kings and popes. It seems a natural development from her earlier research, therefore, that Rosenwein should now undertake an investigation of the broader history of immunities and exemptions in the early Middle Ages.
An immunity consisted of a legal grant of privilege whereby a ruler enjoined his officials, and by implication his other subjects and the world at large, to respect the peace and security of a named beneficiary within a designated territory and threatened to punish anyone who dared to violate this privilege. An exemption (commonly described as a carta libertatis in early medieval Latin) was another type of privilege by which a ruler freed recipients from some specified obligations to which they would otherwise have been subject.
Earlier studies of immunities and exemptions have typically dealt with them in isolation from one another and from the political negotiations out of which they sprang. Rosenwein argues, however, that the two cannot be properly understood when disconnected from one another. Earlier authors, in her view, looked at immunities too narrowly. They either focused on the consequences--administrative, jurisdictional, or fiscal--of these privileges or else on their place in the history of chancery procedures. Some previous studies, in addition, treated immunities and exemptions primarily as adjuncts of efforts at church reform.
In contrast to these approaches, Rosenwein maintains that immunities and exemptions need to be studied in conjunction with one another. They become intelligible, moreover, only when placed within the social, political, and above all the religious contexts in which the grants originated. Immunities and exemptions, she contends, were first and foremost acts of religious policy. Hence, treating them serially and in isolation from their attendant circumstances only obscures their meaning.
Rosenwein thus sees grants of immunity in the early Merovingian period as mechanisms that kings and bishops used to set themselves up as defenders of monastic communities and thereby sought to create useful alliances with those popular and potent sources of divine power. By the latter part of the seventh century, immunities had come to form part of "the politics of negotiation" (96) between monarchs, prelates, and monks.
The advent of the Carolingians saw an important transformation of immunities and exemptions. In earlier periods they had functioned as negative mechanisms by which a ruler simply forbade attacks upon a religious house and its circumjacent space. Carolingian monarchs, Rosenwein maintains, converted immunities and exemptions into tools that allowed the ruler to exert positive control over monastic communities. The key element in this change, she argues, was the insertion of the terms tuitio and defensio into grants of immunity.
These are of course significant innovations. Indeed, the addition of tuitio to the formula seems even more far-reaching than Rosenwein makes it out to be. She renders tuitio as "protection" (8, 22, 99, 110, and passim), which is accurate enough so far as it goes; but the term also means rather more than that. In juristic usage--a vocabulary that was certainly familiar to those who drafted charters for kings and popes in the Carolingian period--tuitio carried the additional meaning of guardianship or supervision. In the words of the jurist Servius Sulpicius Rufus, guardianship involved "a right and authority over the person of a free man in order to safeguard him when on account of his age he is unable to defend himself." This definition was beyond serious doubt known to notaries of the Carolingian age, since it was quoted in Justinian's Institutes 1.13.1, a text that not only circulated, but was also studied and commented upon both in Italy and Francia from at least the eighth century onward.
The addition of tuitio and defensio to Carolingian grants of immunity thus implied that the grantor asserted a right to supervise as well as safeguard the beneficiary. Supervision of course necessarily involves some element of control over the grantee's use and administration of property and other rights. This notion of guardianship seems to be the key to what Rosenwein rightly calls a "familial model" (112-14) of the relationship between grantors and grantees of Carolingian immunity privileges.
Rosenwein concludes her book with a chapter that examines the relationship between medieval immunity doctrines, especially as they developed in England, and the prohibition in the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution of unreasonable searches and seizures of persons, houses, papers, and effects." There clearly is a relationship between the two, although as the author admits, it is scarcely a simple linear one. Events in the American colonies before and during the Revolutionary War inevitably colored the form that the Fourth Amendment was to take. While Rosenwein deals briefly with these matters, she ignores another, albeit more remote, set of complications, namely the relationship between the development of the Common Law of franchises in England and the teachings of the pan-European ius commune, which was known and taught in England at the same time that English law concerning entry onto the premises of a subject was taking shape. That is a larger and infinitely more complicated matter than can be explored in a review. A great deal more work remains to be done before that aspect of the topic will become clear.
In summary, Rosenwein has produced another original and ambitious study of a topic with wide-ranging implications. One of its greatest merits is that it seems likely to provoke readers to thought and, with luck, to further research on some of the issues that it raises.
~~~~~~~~
By James A. Brundage, University of Kansas h Carolina-Chapel Hill
QUOTE:
Rosenwein's latest work is an important addition to the knowledge of an exemplary monastery. She has developed new techniques for studying monastic property holdings and given a new insight into early medieval society
THOMAS, PHILLIP D.; Freed, John B. Historian. Autumn90, Vol. 53 Issue 1, p119-120. 2p.
To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter: The Social Meaning of Cluny's Property, 909-1049. By Barbara H. Rosenwein. (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989. Pp. XVIII, 258 $32.50)
Applying modern anomie theory, Barbara H. Rosenwein argued in her previous book, Rhinoceros Bound: Cluny in the Tenth Century (1982), that Cluniac ritualism was a response to the breakdown of the Carolingian order. Cluny's socially mobile benefactors, both the beneficiaries and the victims of social change, patronized the abbey, not because it was innovative, but precisely because it reasserted traditional norms.
Now, Rosenwein examines in more detail Cluny's ties to its friends, who could also be its enemies, by studying the social relationships created by property transactions and arrives in the process at a new understanding of the meaning of ownership in the tenth and early eleventh centuries. While she concentrated in 1982 on the great aristocrats who gave monasteries to Cluny, the use of sophisticated computer techniques enables her to analyze in this book the vicissitudes in the abbey's holdings and to identify the social groups that appear in the nearly three thousand charters that deal with the period from 909 to 1049. She intended originally to map Cluny's holdings but discovered that the same piece of land could be the subject of multiple transactions as it was given, claimed by the donor's heirs, granted in precaria, and renounced in a series of events that involved the same group of individuals and their descendants for several generations. Donors or sellers did not lose, in other words, all their rights to the land as they do in the classical and modern understanding of property transfers.
Rosenwein utilizes the anthropological concept of a "gift economy" to explain this phenomenon. Gifts, but also exchanges and apparent sales, created social relationships among the participants and between them and Cluny. Ancestral memories were attached to the land, and claims to previously donated land were asserted to renew the relationship. In the process, Cluny -- or to be more precise, Saint Peter, the doorkeeper of heaven -- became a neighbor. This proximity to a powerful saint was itself a countergift. Property transactions were a device that united a society without a central authority. Rosenwein has thus apparently revised her earlier assessment in Rhinoceros Bound that Cluny was not "extraordinarily important either to the population of the Mâconnais as a whole, or to any particular social group within it" before the 980s (34). This system of gift giving declined after 1000 as the memories attached to particular parcels faded, and land became increasingly important, both economically and politically, with the establishment of Cluny's own seigneurie and the formation of patrilineal inheritance among the nobility. After 1050, donors were no longer satisfied merely with being the neighbors of Saint Peter but expected to be remembered in the monks' prayers.
The impact that the formation of patrilineal inheritance had on the "gift economy" and Cluniac spirituality requires further elucidation. Rosenwein's latest work is an important addition to the knowledge of an exemplary monastery. She has developed new techniques for studying monastic property holdings and given a new insight into early medieval society.
~~~~~~~~
By PHILLIP D. THOMAS, EDITOR and John B. Freed, Illinois State University
QUOTE:
The import of the title is that Cluny's property lay in a neighborhood, that is, an area with little, if any, central authority. The charters appear at first sight to be simply records of property transactions, but they are not: Rosenwein has shown they are alliances in the making, feuds being ended, and they reveal a vast network of patronage. . . . This is an important and trailblazing book well worth the effort that has gone into it
EDITOR NOTE: Full review (unavailable for download) is over 1000 words)
John, Eric. Catholic Historical Review. Apr1990, Vol. 76 Issue 2, p341. 2p.
"The import of the title is that Cluny's property lay in a neighborhood, that is, an area with little, if any, central authority. The charters appear at first sight to be simply records of property transactions, but they are not: Rosenwein has shown they are alliances in the making, feuds being ended, and they reveal a vast network of patronage. . . . This is an important and trailblazing book well worth the effort that has gone into it."―Eric John, Catholic Historical Review
Quote:
ambitious and wide-ranging
The History of Emotions
By Catriona Kennedy
Published in History Today Volume 66 Issue 11 November 2016
The History of Emotions: An Introduction
Jan Plamper
Oxford University Press 368pp £35
Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600-1700
Barbara H. Rosenwein
Cambridge University Press 390pp £19.99
Jan Plamper opens The History of Emotions with a visit to an anatomy room. His research on the history of fear among soldiers had led him to examine the human amygdala, the almond-shaped mass of nerve cells beneath the cerebral cortex, considered by many neuroscientists to be the seat of negative emotions. The study of emotions is currently a booming field in historical research, operating at the intersection of anthropology, sociology, psychology and the life sciences. Historians have long been interested in emotions as explanations for individual and collective actions, to evoke the moods of particular periods – ‘the age of anxiety’, for example – and in social histories of love, marriage and death. However, historians have often deployed a rather rudimentary notion of what emotions are, how they work and how they might change over time. Plamper’s book sets out to provide an introduction to past and current research in the field. This is an ambitious aim, but one in which Plamper succeeds admirably, providing lucid and stimulating distillations of key work and debates.
While Plamper is clear that historians interested in the emotional life of the past must engage with other disciplines, he is also adamant that they must not do so uncritically. In one original intervention, he offers a bracing critique of the tendency of popular neuroscience and some scholars in the humanities to incorporate over-simplified claims from works of science into their research. While Plamper’s research on the history of fear may have led him to investigate the significance of the amygdala, the idea that certain regions of the brain are responsible for particular emotional responses is not uncontested. In one experiment, a dead salmon placed in an fMRI scanner seemed to light up when shown assorted photographs of emotional expressions. A claim that emotions are to some extent ‘hard-wired’ also runs counter to currents in historical research which, drawing on anthropological approaches, have tended to emphasise the extent to which emotions are culturally constructed. Yet a middle ground between ‘constructionist’ and ‘neuroscientific’ approaches to emotions may be found in the emerging understandings of ‘neuroplasticity’, which understands the brain as constantly shaped and reshaped by its environment. As Plamper suggests, it is here that neuroscience can learn from history rather than vice versa. When neuroscientists scan someone’s brain, they have to understand that it is not ‘the brain’ that they are scanning, but an individual’s brain, one with its own history from a particular time and culture.
Barbara Rosenwein’s Generations of Feeling is also ambitious and wide-ranging. As a medievalist and one of the pre-eminent historians of the emotions, Rosenwein challenges some of the still influential narratives in the history of emotions associated with the historian Johan Huizinga and the sociologist Norbert Elias. Writing in the first half of the 20th century, both Huizinga and Elias tended to characterise the Middle Ages as a period of emotional excess and immaturity and to contrast it with a more emotionally controlled and sophisticated modern era.
By contrast, Rosenwein insists that the history of emotions cannot be viewed as unfolding in a linear progression from excess to restraint. Rather, in different periods many different ‘emotional communities’ have co-existed, each with their own emotional norms and standards. So, for example, the melodramatic emotional world of the profusely weeping religious mystic, Margery Kempe (c.1373-c.1439), was contemporaneous with the more constrained approach to emotional expression to be found in the letters of the Paston family of Norfolk, in which affairs of the heart were treated in the same sober tone as discussions of horses and property. Rosenwein contends that, like the human genome, the emotional makeup of any society at any moment is a mosaic consisting of older inherited notions of feeling and newer mutations. Our notions of romantic love were not, as some suggest, invented by 12th-century troubadours singing songs of courtly love, they can already be found 500 years earlier in the writings of Gregory of Tours.
As both these works suggest, the history of emotions has the potential to address vital questions about what makes us human. Neither book is particularly aimed at the uninitiated or general reader, but anyone looking for a readable and engaging introduction to this fascinating field would do well to read Plamper’s stimulating survey.
Catriona Kennedy is Senior Lecturer in Modern British and Irish History at the University of York.
QUOTE:
deals with a big theme:
a history of the expression of the emotions
she has done valuable
research on emotional language and reached conclusions that are
interesting and important.
View the H-HRE Discussion Logs by month
View the Prior Message in H-HRE's June 2007 logs by: [date] [author] [thread]
View the Next Message in H-HRE's June 2007 logs by: [date] [author] [thread]
Visit the H-HRE home page.
From: Tryntje Helfferich
Author's Subject: Review: Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages [X-Post
Date Written: Monday June 4, 2007
Date Posted: Tue, 04 Jun 2007 21:41:06 -0400
H-Catholic]
H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Catholic@h-net.msu.edu (May 2007)
Barbara H. Rosenwein. _Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages_.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. xv + 228 pp. Tables, map, index.
$39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8014-4478-4.
Reviewed for H-Catholic by Cate Gunn, Independent Scholar
A Short History of Love and Grief
This is a slim volume (by her own admission, Barbara H. Rosenwein states
it is a "deliberately short book," p. 29) but it deals with a big theme:
a history of the expression of the emotions. It covers a relatively short
period "from the papacy of Gregory the Great (590-604) to about 700" (p.
192). It begins, however, with a discussion of the "ancient legacy" and
Plato's distaste of the display of emotion (pp. 32 ff.).
Rosenwein starts with a challenge to Johan Huizinga's characterization of
the Middle Ages as the "childhood of man" (p. 5) with the emotional tenor
appropriate for children. This characterization fed into a theory of
history and civilization that interpreted the passage of the centuries as
a maturing of humankind--a growing from childhood into adulthood. Such
views may seem outdated, but still have an influence on popular thinking.
Rosenwein argues that "many medievalists have moved beyond the paradigm of
an emotionally childlike and impulsive Middle Ages" (p. 13). With the
backing of current psychological and anthropological theories of the
emotions, she uses a close analysis of a selection of texts to offer a
nuanced account of emotions in the early Middle Ages to show not only that
emotions in the Middle Ages cannot be considered childish, but also that
emotional expression was not homogenous either in this period or in the
area--western Christendom--covered.
This can be considered another step in the important exercise of
overturning popular recent attitudes towards the Middle Ages. In 1990,
Lee Patterson claimed that "what needs to be challenged is the crude
binarism that locates modernity ('us') on one side and premodernity
('them') on the other, thus condemning the Middle Ages to the role of
all-purpose alternative."[1] Rosenwein herself is writing of a period
that is still referred to as the Dark Ages. But, she points out, "'early
modern' itself is a historical construct whose validity must come from a
sound understanding of the Middle Ages" (p. 10). To challenge the view of
the Middle Ages as "emotionally childish, impulsive, and unrestrained" (p.
10) is to question how we view the modern emotional world; it is to
question the model of advancing civilization and maturation. Not, "have
we grown up as a society?" but "does it make any sense to talk in these
terms?" These are fascinating questions, and form the theoretical basis
for Rosenwein's work. But the bulk of the book is concerned with the
minutiae of textual analysis and contextualization. In the same paper
quoted above, Patterson questions the "standard tactic" of invoking theory
as "an all-purpose panacea." What is required is "historical
particularity" and this is what Rosenwein provides us with.[2] These texts
include funerary inscriptions, letters, hagiographies, and even charters.
There are, as Rosenwein is acutely aware, methodological problems with her
material and its interpretation.
The main problem is with the very term "community." Communities in the
Middle Ages make one think of religious communities; although there is,
for example, reference to the communities that Fortunatus and Gregory of
Tours belonged to, these are not the focus of Rosenwein's analysis. Her
communities are defined by the communication and expression between their
members, their discourse. Rosenwein appropriates the methods of
anthropologists, but she does not have the communities themselves to
study, only the texts their members left behind. Recently there has been
discussion of communities such as reading communities, where the sharing
of books has been traced.[3] In such studies, the readers are sharing a
common type of reading material which gives the community common purpose.
These reading communities are also united by gender. Rosenwein does not
deal explicitly with gender issues, but there is an interesting strand
about mothers and motherhood, especially when the natural instincts of the
mother are brought into conflict with religious duty and belief. The use
of biblical and hagiographical models in the accounts of mothers are of
particular interest for an understanding of the construction of the ideal
of motherhood.
Rosenwein uses texts, not as the definition of community, but as the
access to the nature of the communities; she defines an emotional
community as "a group in which people have a common stake, interest,
values, and goals." This could stand as a definition of most communities;
what makes such a group an emotional community is the common range of
emotional terms used by the particular community, and in distinction from
other communities. Rosenwein is able to show that emotions (or at least
their expression) are socially determined, according to norms common to
the group; it is the lack of homogeneity in emotional expression between
the groups that leads Rosenwein to posit the idea of emotional communities
that can be compared geographically and diachronically. She uses "the
term 'communities' in order to stress the social and relational nature of
emotions" (p. 25).
What is meant by the emotions also needs to be discussed, and here we are
up against the problems of translation. Rosenwein refers back to the key
emotional terms employed by Plato, and traces their use and the
accompanying theory of emotions through Aristotle and the Stoics.
Rosenwein's ability to use both modern psychological theory and classical
scholarship is one of the strengths of this book. Rosenwein seems extreme
when she claims that "nothing of the past is the same today. That's why
we have historians" (p. 37). But the force of her arguments requires that
we understand what is meant by the emotional terms used in the past. She
gives lists of Latin emotional terms with their English translations. It
may help that her material is in a "dead language" whose words have not
shifted their meaning and emotional content over the centuries. When
introducing adult learners to the literature of the Middle Ages, I point
out that, although the lives of medieval people seem very different from
ours, they experienced the same hopes and fears--the same emotions--we
know. It is the space between what is the same, the basic human urges,
and what is different, their expression according to social norms, in
which Rosenwein is operating. We live in a different emotional community
from Gregory the Great or the Neustrian court. But if we express emotions
differently, do we also feel them differently? This is a question that
can never be answered. Rosenwein points out that "in Japan there is a
feeling, _amae_, of contented dependence on another; but in English there
is nothing comparable and presumably no feeling that corresponds to it"
(p. 15). That "presumably" is important: in what sense can one have (or
know that one has) an emotion that is not communicable within one's
society? _Emotional Communities_ is haunted always by the "ghost in the
machine": is there any "real" correlative to the expression of emotions?
The real subject of this book is emotional discourse. Historians deal
with texts: "We no longer think that texts are transparent windows onto
'reality'" (p. 28). But they are often the only windows we have. In the
case of this book, the windows are often small and fragmented. This leads
to a problem with the concept of comparable emotional communities. Their
definition varies from one example to another and runs the risk of being
merely reductive. Academia, like all aspects of cultural life, is
affected by fashion, and "community" may be a more fashionable concept
than "discourse," but it is the emotional language that Rosenwein is
writing about.
Rosenwein herself questions the premises on which she claims community
status. One of her examples is the emotional community of Gregory the
Great, although, as she asks, "what can we say of one man?" She answers
her own question by claiming that "Gregory allows us to see _his_
emotional community" (p. 80). One could also ask in what sense the few
people who recorded their feelings on funerary inscriptions constitute a
community. Rosenwein examines clusters of these inscriptions in the
cities of Trier, Vienne, and Clermont, and is able to suggest differences
in the expression of emotions in these cities. Such differences support
the theoretical substructure to this work which is that the emotions rely
on conventions for their expression and that this expression is "highly
scripted by social norms" (see p. 59 n. 2, which encapsulates the
argument in the introduction). Rosenwein claims that the inscriptions
represent "real communities of the dead and the living" (p. 63) and that
the high rate of child commemoration at Trier says something about that
emotional community. Unfortunately, no statistics about child mortality
are provided. The mourning of parents needs to be seen within the context
of how common it was for children to die young. In contrast, the evidence
from Clermont suggests an emotional community "quite different from the
one at Trier" (p. 69). Only six epitaphs at Clermont "used any emotion
word whatever," however, the emotional words which were used "were highly
charged," including exclamations such as "ha! hem! ho!" (p. 71).
Rosenwein concludes that "at Clermont people on the whole were taciturn
when confronting death, at least publicly" (p. 72). But, I was left
wanting to know more. What proportion of people were commemorated at all?
Do we know what percentage of original inscriptions are still extant?
Rosenwein draws the conclusion that "the epitaphs for the dead suggest
that there were at least three different emotional communities in Gaul
before the eighth century" while admitting, "insofar as our small sample
allows us to make any generalization at all" (p. 77), that here emotional
communities are defined by the common modes of expressing emotions at
death.
The influence of "the fierce Irish monk" Columbanus (p. 130) on the courts
of Clothar, Dagobert I, Sigibert III and Clovis II is shown through a
useful analysis of emotional expression. Rosenwein argues persuasively
that the character of Clothar's court was largely due to the influence of
Columbanus: "Its restrained emotional character--the feelings and modes
of expression that it privileged and the many that it did not--contrasts
with the exuberance of Gregory of Tours and his associates" (p. 132).
Here we see a community in a real sense, and the emotional culture
expressed in extant texts has a clear relationship to the politics and
religious values of the court. But where the bases for nominating
emotional communities vary so greatly--shared expression of grief,
correspondence with one person, social connexions as at court--we must ask
whether we can really compare these communities. If the emotional
expression of different communities is to be compared in order to suggest
a development and change over time, those communities need to be defined
by something more than that emotional expression, or the argument is
merely reductive. This may sound as though I am condemning Rosenwein's
work out of hand. On the contrary, I believe she has done valuable
research on emotional language and reached conclusions that are
interesting and important. My only concern is with the term "emotional
community."
In her conclusion, Rosenwein makes explicit a theme that has been central
to her argument throughout: the relationship between emotional expression
and religious experience. She argues for a synergic relationship. While
"religion, in this instance Christianity, helped shaped emotional
communities" so "emotional communities in turn helped shape religious
expression" (p. 201). It is through an examination of this dynamic and
ever-changing relationship, and its expression in language, that Rosenwein
is able to challenge the idea of a _longue duree_ with regard to the
history of the emotions in Western culture. Her conclusion, applied to
the study of discourse rather than communities, would stand as the
conclusion to this review. This study of emotional discourse "alerts us
to transformations at the core of human societies once considered
invariably and offers new ways to think about the perennial historical
issues of stasis and change" (p. 203).
Notes
[1]. Lee Patterson, "On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and
Medieval Studies," _Speculum_ 65 (1990): 93.
[2]. Ibid., 106.
[3]. For example Catherine Innes-Parker refers to reading circles in her
essay on "The Legacy of _Ancrene Wisse_," in _A Companion to Ancrene
Wisse_, ed. Yoko Wada (Cambridge: Brewer, 2003), 145-173. Implicitly, the
female audience constitutes a community in Anne Clark Bartlett's _Male
Authors, Female Readers: Representation and Subjectivity in Middle
English Devotional Literature_ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).
Copyright (c) 2007 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits
the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit,
educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the
author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and
H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses
contact the Reviews editorial staff: hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu.
QUOTE:
This book would be perfect for someone who knew about the topic in rather great detail because very little time was given to concepts that where mentioned throughout the book. This made it quite a difficult read. This would not be recommended for someone who had a lack of knowledge on the history of emotions and the terminology associated with it.
Adam Bermingham Review on Barbara Rosenwein’s Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages
By nuimemotions
In this review Barbara Rosenwein’s Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages will be reviewed. Throughout this, one will explore the context and content of the book and review it based on personal opinion. The main central argument she tries to explore is using language as a lens the existence of emotional communities in the Early Middle Ages[1]. Currently a professor at the Loyola University of Chicago, she separates her book into different sections trying to identify these emotional communities by using language. The concept of this idea is quite interesting but is something that I was not able to be convinced by whilst reading. Throughout, there will be reference to the first three chapters which can be found as the most unconvincing followed by an exploration of her use of sources. Rosenwein opens the book on an interesting topic.She starts by reviewing the use of language for emotional words throughout different global languages. She than explores the use of emotions true ancient scholars such as Homer. Aristotle was one of these in topic. He was quite fond of the words love, envy and pity and believed it was instrumental in decision making[2]. Rosenwein shortly refers to Reddy’s emotives and her own definition of emotional communities something which one could expected to have been explained more fully but sadly was not.
The language itself in this book was very hard to comprehend. In the beginning it was easy to follow where she was coming from but was difficult to see her try and expand on her point. Rosenwein beings her studies with exploring three Gaelic cities during the early middle ages. Trier, Vienne, and Clermont, around 350 and 750 AD, are where she bases her study. She attempts to show the existence of three separate emotional communities in each of these regions by referring to the relics they left for their dead. I believed that this concept was interesting but unconvincing. She bases her argument on the choice of emotional words on these relics and then is convinced these results created an emotional community of the middle ages[3]. The number of relics Rosenwein’s chooses are inaccurate to the topic on hand. She samples roughly 1,200 relics. This leads to a very small sample area of words in a growing illiterate population. For this reason I found the chapter on hand very hard to follow and was not credible to her argument.
Rosenwein’s next chapter is based on the supposed emotional community created by Gregory the Great. Her she shed’s light onto Gregory’s works such as ‘’Dialogue’’. Rosenwein analyses these works and the use of emotional words in them. She explores the use of these words and concludes that any word that is directed towards god is a positive one and any one directed at the person is evil[4]. This chapter I also found to be quite feeble. The idea of basing on entire emotional community on a single person views and his attempts to implement these views makes it difficult to take on board.
The next chapter she explores is the life of Gregory of Tour’s and Venantius Fortunatus who were friends and moved in the same set of overlapping communities in Gaul in the late sixth century. These two people wrote about different ways in which they viewed friendship[5]. However they came together in opinion with regards to the relationships of family bonds. This chapter was very difficult to follow and hard to understand and found myself returning to past pages to try and find what point she was trying to make.
The sources Rosenwein makes in the book are quite biased. In numerous cases she finds herself referring to anthropological sources something which can be quite influential in her central beliefs. On the argument based between social constructivism and Universalism one can find Rosenwein to be the epicentre of social constructivism. This is the argument based on that all emotions are socially created by means of interaction with other people rather than created biologically. For this reason the sources she uses can be quite biased. There was not much mention to psychological analysis to try and base her argument as a means of proving the other side wrong. Quite often she found herself frequently moving from point to point. The language in the book was rather disjointed. Every chapter ended with one line linking it to the next. The language on some important chapters was also difficult to follow and rather un-comprehensible at times. This book would be perfect for someone who knew about the topic in rather great detail because very little time was given to concepts that where mentioned throughout the book. This made it quite a difficult read. This would not be recommended for someone who had a lack of knowledge on the history of emotions and the terminology associated with it.
Bibliography Rosenwein, B, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages, (Cornwell,2006).
[1] Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional communities in the Early Middle Ages (Cornell,2006), p.21 [2] Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional communities in the Early Middle Ages (Cornell,2006), p.35 [3] Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional communities in the Early Middle Ages (Cornell,2006), p.59 [4] Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional communities in the Early Middle Ages (Cornell,2006), p.81-84 [5] Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional communities in the Early Middle Ages (Cornell,2006), p.108-114
April 18, 2014
QUOTE:
Certainly the strength of Rosenwein's book is that it can be read on many levels and by those in numerous fields of study.
It is certainly a book which can be understood by perceptive undergraduates, but it should also appeal to a wide range of scholars--those interested in legal history, anthropology, political theory, as well as students of the early Middle Ages.Because of this, Negotiating Space is an essential starting point for those wishing to bring themselves up to date on the range and depth of scholarship in this field, as well as to benefit from Rosenwein's original approach to the study of these documents.
Rosenwein, Barbara. Negotiating Space: Power, Restraint, and Privileges of Immunity in Early Medieval Europe. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Pp. xxii, 267. $18.95. ISBN: 8-801-48521-5.
Reviewed by:
Susan Jane Allen
Hood College
allen@hood.edu
Barbara Rosenwein's Negotiating Space: Power, Restraint, and Privileges of Immunity in Early Medieval Europe seeks to define, qualify and understand the function and context of early medieval immunities. It is a much needed and long overdue analysis, countering outdated notions on the relationship of secular and ecclesiastical power, and the blanket assumptions which historians have traditionally made about this practice. Rosenwein not only examines the privilege of immunities, but also that of exemptions. Both are clearly defined and brought into the realm of modern historical research. As Rosenwein points out, it had been the custom to use such charters within the domain of diplomatics. Useful as this application might have been, it had the consequence of binding these documents to a mode of scholarship that did not allow for a broader understanding of their context and implication. Rosenwein's aim, therefore, is to look beyond their overt function and "show how they are rich and polyvalent sources, how they serve social and political strategies far beyond their surface meanings". (5)
In a skillful introduction, she details the complexity of immunities, noting the myriad ways in which they developed over time and with regard to differing circumstances. Rosenwein rightly draws attention to the "chameleon-like character" of these charters, which were in a constant state of change and were thus open to reinterpretation. Her offering of the conventional definition of an immunity, that of "a document-- initially a royal document that prohibited the king's agents from entering onto certain lands to collect taxes and carry out judicial functions", and the immunities and privileges represented by this, clearly demonstrates its limitations. Not only does this narrow description ignore the variations and developments cited by Rosenwein, but it also disregards the benefits which, as she goes on to demonstrate, such documents bring to modern historical scholarship. Included in this examination are exemptions, which are comparable with immunities in their intricacy, diversity and relevance to the institutions and conventions that created them.
Central to Rosenwein's work is her assertion that while previous historians "believed such documents gave away power" (6), current thinking sees these charters as indicators of strength. She further supports this view by noting the way in which immunities and exemptions allowed rulers, churchmen and others in authority to "maintain their positions as pivotal and central figures in the lives of key families, ...friends...warriors, and religious figures". (6) Observing that the very origin of the word "immunities" implies a sense of gift as well as an obligation, Rosenwein argues that immunities serve to enhance the manipulative power of the giver, enabling him to influence and control alliances among his supporters, be they secular or ecclesiastical.
True, they are gifts, but what Rosenwein clearly shows is that bound to these gifts--to this apparent loss of resources--is an equally binding set of prohibitions. Again she interprets this as a strength rather than a weakness. Immunities work to circumscribe the actions and authority of a ruler's agents, and in particular their ability to enter onto certain lands. Rosenwein argues, "...does not the very expression of restraint announce the power of the king?" (7) Rosenwein sees this power as threefold: "...first, it is a declaration of self-control; second, it is an affirmation of royal control over public agents and their jurisdiction; third, it is an announcement of control over the configuration of space". (7)
As for methodology, while acknowledging other approaches to the study of immunities, Rosenwein has concentrated on the environment in which these charters were issued and their role in the "religious politic" of medieval rulers. This book seeks to show the manifold ways in which immunities were conceived, negotiated, and manipulated when they were issued or confirmed, locating these 'acts of state' in specific religious, social, and political contexts. (9) She accomplishes this by means of a thorough chronological examination of immunities, beginning with Late Antiquity and moving through the Merovingian and Carolingian periods (including Carolingian Italy).
Here, in the body of Rosenwein's work, the depth of scholarship is impressive, as is her analysis of the implications of immunities. In addition to drawing together political and governmental developments, she also provides an original framework in which to gauge contemporary events within the ecclesiastical sphere. Her discussion of the Carolingian concept of protection is particularly worthy of note as it clearly demonstrates how immunities could be adapted to new concepts of authority and government. Her thorough grasp of the material and clear understanding of this issue permits her to employ current anthropological theory to explain the burden of power and the interrelationship of control and responsibility. Refreshingly, in this and other discussions, she does not feel compelled to lapse into jargon and thus her points are both lucid and balanced.
It is, however, Rosenwein's conclusions on the diverse employment of immunities that distinguishes Negotiating Space from earlier works on this subject. Her detailed examination of individual immunities and documents related to them provides fascinating insight into the intent and significance behind each document. Moreover, her footnotes offer the reader a wealth of information on related issues such as asylum, and demonstrate the full range of current thought and work in these areas.
If there is anything that weakens Rosenwein's book it is perhaps the inclusion of her final chapter, ''A Man's House is His Castle'--Anglo-American Echoes'' which tries to draw a direct line from early medieval politics to the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution. This concern does perhaps reflect the narrow view of a medievalist who feels uneasy about such a stretch, and to be fair, this final chapter is a carefully measured attempt to trace the progression of immunities and their subsequent relevance to modern political thought.
Certainly the strength of Rosenwein's book is that it can be read on many levels and by those in numerous fields of study. In her acknowledgments Rosenwein expresses the hope that the book can and will be read by her college-age sons. It is certainly a book which can be understood by perceptive undergraduates, but it should also appeal to a wide range of scholars--those interested in legal history, anthropology, political theory, as well as students of the early Middle Ages. The final chapter may well grate on the medievalist's finer feelings, but it also serves to speak to those wishing a broader view. The book's particular appeal to the specialist lies in Rosenwein's meticulous assembly of primary and secondary sources and her copious and detailed notes. Because of this, Negotiating Space is an essential starting point for those wishing to bring themselves up to date on the range and depth of scholarship in this field, as well as to benefit from Rosenwein's original approach to the study of these documents.