Emotions in a Crusading Context, 1095–1291, by Stephen J. Spencer

Addressing the current interest among historians in the history of emotions, Stephen J. Spencer aims to shed light on the issue of the representation versus the reality of emotional experience in crusade narratives. Rightly challenging the idea that their emotional rhetoric is an uncomplicated reflection of crusaders’ lived affective experiences, he examines ways in which emotions were represented in the medieval histories of the crusades, the textual functions they performed, and how emotional language interacted with themes particularly associated with crusading. Seeking to understand the emotions and affective performances that Latin Christians were expected to embrace and relinquish in a crusading context, how and why medieval chroniclers represented and used certain passions, and how far emotional registers associated with crusading changed during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, he defines his position as that of the ‘weak’ social constructionist: while acknowledging that there exists a neurobiological, and hence universal, aptitude for...

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