Susan C. Karant-Nunn. The Reformation of Feeling

Although the subdiscipline of the history of emotions is a fairly recent development, judgments about the ways in which religion enlisted, spoke to, and exploited the human emotions have long played a role in the questions scholars have asked about late medieval and early modern Christianity. Much of this work has often come to distinctly negative conclusions. In Jacques Toussaert's Le sentiment religieux en Flandres à la fin du Moyen Age (1963), the late medieval church was a lax taskmaster that failed to stir much emotional commitment; an arid ritualistic formalism thus bred indifference and ignorance. Those that followed Toussaert debated his judgments, but few saw much positive about the emotional climate of the late medieval church or the successor churches produced by the Protestant and Catholic reformations. For Lawrence Stone, the English Protestant world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a grim place where parents failed to invest their children with love. In Jean Delumeau's works treating the continent, by contrast, both late medieval and early modern Christians were victims of clerics obsessed with inculcating excessive guilt. And although Eamon Duffy concluded that the late medieval church in England had a sunnier disposition—its rich liturgical tradition channeled human feelings and granted expression to a lush variety of emotions—he saw that idyll destroyed by the juggernaut of Tudor politics and harsh Protestant reforms.

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