A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Medieval Age

Juanita Ruys, Clare Monagle, Juanita Ruys, Clare Monagle

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781350344983
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350091771
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Greek Ancient History
• Index: History

Our period opens at the end of the Roman Empire when intellectual currents are indebted to the Greek philosophical inheritance of Plato and Aristotle, as well as to a Romanized Stoicism. Into this mix entered the new, and from 313CE imperially sanctioned, religion of Christianity. In art, literature, music, and drama, we find an increasing emphasis on the arousal of individual emotions and their acceptance as a means towards devotion. In religion, we see a move from the ascetic regulation of emotions to the affective piety of the later medieval period that valued the believer's identification with the Passion of Christ and the sorrow of Mary. In science and medicine, the nature and causes of emotions, their role in constituting the human person, and their impact on the same became a subject of academic inquiry. Emotions also played an increasingly important public role, evidenced in populace-wide events such as conversion and the strategies of rulership. Between 350 and 1300, emotions were transformed from something to be transcended into a location for meditation upon what it means to be human.

CHAPTER ONE

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Medical and Scientific Understandings

NICOLE ARCHAMBEAU

By 350 CE, the highly decentralized late antique West experienced the slow emergence of Christianity as a dominant religion in a divided Roman Empire. By 1300 CE, there was a far more centralized Christian religion in the West and a well-developed Scholastic mode of learning in a growing university system. The many changes taking place, especially the Carolingian Renaissance and the emergence of universities, had a significant impact on medical and scientific (or natural philosophical) views of emotion.¹

We have only hints of the medical view of emotion in Late Antiquity and the early medieval West. Those hints show that there was no single or even primary medical approach to emotion. Examples from an array of late antique and early medieval medical texts reveal this diversity. By the high Middle Ages, however, during what is often called “the translation movement” in the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, the Galenic system of medicine became the dominant one in the West. Two terms for what we now call emotions—the passions and the accidens anima (the accidents of the soul)—appeared in high and later medieval medical and philosophical texts, revealing the fluid concepts about internal states.

EMOTIONS IN THE MEDICAL TEXTS OF LATE ANTIQUITY (350–700) AND THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES (700–1000)

There is no single way that emotions appear in medical texts from Late Antiquity or the early Middle Ages. Some of these texts, like herbals, lapidaries, and bestiaries, clearly reflect a broader Hellenistic, Mediterranean medical culture. Others, however, may look more like magic or superstition to the modern audience. It is important to keep in mind, however, that the boundaries between medicine and magic that modern audiences perceive did not exist at that time (Kieckhefer 1994). In the Western medieval worldview, God (sometimes through the distant influence of celestial bodies) had imbued stones, plants, animals, and words with secret power—the lodestone being the most obvious example. Humans might not be able to see the cause or fully understand those powers, but they could still use them (Kieckhefer 1989: 129–31).

Many argue that medical learning in the West disappeared after Galen of Pergamum, perhaps the most famous historian of Roman medicine, died in the early third century. However, Vivian Nutton, a historian of medicine, rightly warns of the “distorting effect of Galen and the Galenic Corpus” on medicine in the third through sixth centuries. Galen wrote and argued extensively for a specific view of medicine based on both philosophical learning as well as experience. Seeing Galen as the norm of Roman medicine “creates the impression of a catastrophic decline” after his death (Nutton 2013: 301). But in many ways, Galen was an outlier, not a representative of his time. To focus too much on Galen is to miss the long continuity and the slow change of less prolific authors and local practitioners who combined Hippocratic medicine and local remedies with charms, amulets, and prayers over the centuries.

That said, Galen’s writings, as well as writings attributed to him, Hippocrates, and other ancient physicians, did profoundly shape medicine in the later Roman Empire. The impact differed in the East and West, however. In the fourth through sixth centuries, Hippocratic texts and Galen’s prolific sprawling writings were collected, redacted, and compiled into different forms. Nutton points out that even when authors appeared to be creating similar kinds of medical compilations in the East and West, there were significant differences. For example, in the East, doctors were relatively more available in cities and towns. That was not true in the West outside coastal Mediterranean cities. Western authors, like Marcellus of Bordeaux, emphasized that while the sick should call on doctors if possible, they must themselves “be empirici, not as followers of the Greek Empiricist sect, but as experts in what worked” (Nutton 2013: 307). In other words, doctors were few and one should know how to take care of oneself.

Many historians of medical texts in Western Late Antiquity used the metaphor of islands of learned texts in a sea of local, often oral, culture. The most famous island of learned texts was the monastery of Vivarium in the southern Italian peninsula. The monastery was founded by Cassiodorus, a statesman who lived in the sixth century in both Rome and Constantinople and gathered books from around the Mediterranean. The list of Cassiodorus’s medical texts in Vivarium upholds the importance of Galen and the Hippocratic tradition he built on. But further analysis of those texts shows significant local changes in that textual tradition.

Cassiodorus’s list included texts such as Gargilius Martialis’s third-century Medicines from Fruits and Vegetables and Caelius Aurelianus’s fifth-century translation/adaptation of Soranus’s On Acute and Chronic Disease. A text such as On Herbs and Cures, attributed to Hippocrates, was more likely not a separate treatise but extracts from Hippocrates’ Diet. Other texts that would have been available in Latin in centers of monastic learning, like Vivarium, included Hippocrates’ Aphorisms, Prognostic, and Airs, Waters, Places (Nutton 2013: 307). The limited number of texts and their limited spread in the West did not mean that people had no medicine. Instead, it emphasizes Nutton’s point that medicine in Late Antiquity was a field typified by diverse local practice.

Emotions appeared in diverse ways in many learned texts. For example, Caelius Aurelianus’s On Acute and Chronic Disease, discussed emotions in a way that reflected Methodic medicine, rather than Galenic. The Methodic tradition, one of three main medical traditions in the Roman Empire, emphasized observation of the illness and treatment, with less emphasis on the individuality of the sufferer (Gourevitch 1998: 112–15). In Aurelianus’s text, emotion appears most clearly in several illnesses thought to exist in the head: incubus (nightmare), epilepsy, mania, and melancholy. Emotion appeared in descriptions of symptoms and therapies for these illnesses. For example, the text states that “those who have suffered from the affliction [of nightmare] for a long time are pale and thin, for because of their fear they do not get sleep.” Along with poultices, cupping, and fasting to treat nightmare, the text also recommends “having the patient lie in a moderately light and warm room. His mind and body should be at rest.” The person offering treatment should also try to keep the sufferer from fearing the nightmares by telling gentle and strengthening stories (Caelius Aurelianus 1950: 476–7).

Emotions such as anger and levity appear in Aurelianus’s descriptions of symptoms of and therapies for mania. In his therapies, he suggests calming an overabundance of one emotion (like levity) with its opposite (seriousness), through methods like conversation and having the sufferer read aloud to an audience. In particular, he contradicted practitioners who believed that love could heal forms of insanity because it distracted the sufferer and therefore purified the problematic thoughts. Aurelianus argued instead that sufferers of mania could not appreciate beauty and therefore could not love. Instead, he considered love a cause of insanity rather than a cure and sex as a potentially dangerous activity that could weaken the body (Caelius Aurelianus 1950: 558–9; Wack 1990: 11–13).

Music was another therapeutic approach to distressed emotions that appeared in some medical texts. Music was considered to be a mathematical discipline searching for order, including hearing the harmony of the celestial spheres (Stahl 1962: 193–202). The sixth-century Roman philosopher and politician Boethius wrote the Fundamentals of Music based on Pythagorean and Neoplatonic thought. According to Boethius, music was also associated with morality. Lascivious music, for example, could corrupt the chaste, causing them to feel and act lasciviously (Boethius 1989: 3). As a therapy for extreme and potentially unhealthy emotional states, Boethius wrote: “It is common knowledge that song has many times calmed rages, and that it has often worked great wonders on the affections of bodies or minds” (Boethius 1989: 5).²

But it is important not to overgeneralize about emotions and medicine at this time from the work of Boethius and Caelius Aurelianus. While they give us glimpses, there was not one system of medicine in the late antique West. Instead, Roman, Hellenistic, and Germanic ideas were gradually melding in local and oral cultures and possibly in written texts that no longer survive (Duffin 2005: 50). Medical texts, as they were copied and adapted across the West, were changing too. For example, while Aurelianus’s work was available in certain places in the late antique West, by later centuries most of his work appeared only in excerpts and much of the information on emotion was lost (Wack 1990: 11–13). Boethius too, with his strong ties to Plato and Pythagoras, was eclipsed in later centuries by Aristotelian ideas about nature (Horden 2000: 103–8).

The local nature of Western medicine continued into the early Middle Ages. As Peregrine Horden notes, over 160 medical texts survive from the period 700–1000. But the manuscripts, mostly in Latin and Old English, remain difficult to contextualize or generalize as a group. The manuscripts are highly individual and, when taken out of context (or, as is more common, remain difficult to contextualize at all), often appear quite strange to the modern reader (Horden 2011).

If medicine in Late Antiquity looked like islands of learned text-based medicine in seas of local practice, in the early Middle Ages, those islands grew even farther apart. While some local practice may have had links to a broader Mediterranean culture of medicine—Gregory of Tours’ description of local doctors suggests a learned culture of healing—we have little surviving evidence of their practice or any theories of emotion they might have had (Gregory of Tours 1974: 263–4, 570–1; Amundsen 1971). The survival of medical texts in Anglo-Saxon, including the 500-folio Bald’s Leechbook, a medical recipe book, gives us a northern island of medical texts to look at, but again, no medical theory of emotion (Cameron 1993: 30–1).

That does not mean,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• General Editors’ Preface
• Introduction: Medieval Emotions Near and Far
• 1 Medical and Scientific Understandings
• 2 Religion and Spirituality
• 3 Music and Dance
• 4 Drama
• 5 The Visual Arts
• 6 Literature
• 7 In Private: The Individual and the Domestic Community
• 8 In Public: Collectivities and Polities
• Notes on Contributors
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright