The Representation of Women's Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

This collection investigates the social and cultural factors that shaped the representation of women’s emotions in the medieval and early modern periods and explores the consequences of this representation for women’s participation in public and private life. The essays focus on emotions such as sorrow, joy, love, anger, and shame as depicted in a range of texts, including devotional literature, drama, chanson de geste, lyric, theological treatises, and legal texts.             As a central component of human behavior and social interaction, emotion is a fundamental catagory of analysis for understanding cultures of the past. Teachers and scholars of medieval history, religion, and literature will find the questions raised by these essays to be of great value in guiding students to understand medieval culture on its own terms while appreciating the ways in which it continues to influence us today.              An introduction synthesizes the findings of the individual essays, demonstrating how the representation of women’s emotions is rooted in the medieval understanding of female embodiment, which means that emotions are virtually coded as sexual when they apply to women, although class and ethnicity are important factors that are shown to work in conjunction with gender in how emotions are represented. The introduction also lays out several helpful theoretical models of emotion used by anthropologists, psychologists, and social historians.  

Lisa Perfetti is associate professor of French at Muhlenberg College, Allentown, Pennsylvania, and the author of Women and Laughter in Medieval Comic Literature.