DAY TWO
This was probably the most productive day for me, due to a
small epiphany I experienced at a talk given by Jonathan Couser concerning
emotionality (or evidently more often the lack of it) in the letters of St
Boniface. He spoke of Barbara Rosenwein’s concept of “emotional communities,” and
asked if one might be able to contemplate a “history of the emotions” for the
Middle Ages. Patrick Geary mentioned separate rhetorics involved with modes of
emotional expression—for a rough example: one might choose a different vocabulary
when one talks with teachers or priests. I had an interesting conversation with
Jonathan at lunchtime the next day to refine the matter a bit.
I had written and also presented (at a Medieval Association
of the Pacific conference in Santa Clara last year) about the “poems of male
friendship” and the homoerotic imagery richly, indeed outrageously present in
the letters of Carolingian churchmen. It occurred to me that I could revisit
this whole topic conceptually in terms of an existing emotional community, which
from my perspective is doubtless the most blatantly emotional within the entire
E.M.A.
In the afternoon on to Fred Astren’s paper on the activities
of rabbis in the medieval Mediterranean, followed by a whole bunch of other interesting
stuff.
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