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Upson-Saia, Kristi. “Wounded by Divine Love.” In Melania: Early Christianity through the Life of One Family, edited by Catherine Chin and Caroline Schroeder, 86–105. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017.

In this chapter, Upson-Saia investigates wound metaphors in the ascetic context. She argues that, because of their ubiquity, “wounds and wounding provided a widely recognizable conceptual frame and an immediately meaningful linguistic device” (87). Upson-Saia draws on various sources to demonstrate how ascetics used wound metaphors to construct “a thoroughly medicalized notion of Christian piety” (87).

Upson-Saia notes that her analysis is indebted to Elizabeth Clark’s discussion of the celibate-bride metaphor in early ascetic discourse. However, Upson-Saia draws on cognitive linguistic theory (especially the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson) to strengthen and clarify the relationship between early Christian figurative language and the experiences of everyday life. She suggests that wound metaphors “were not merely linguistic flourishes but that the bodily experience of being wounded structured early Christians’ concepts of sin and heresy” (88). In order to flesh out this connection, Upson-Saia recognizes that one must first define a relatively uniform set of properties and experiences related to wounding which can be “meaningfully exported” to “conceptual categories of sin and heresy” (88).

In Upson-Saia’s analysis, ancient medical typology split wounds into harmful results of accidents, injuries, and diseases on the one hand and the “salutary” wounds caused by the physician on the other. Of course, both types of wounds were painful and greatly feared. Ancient medical writers therefore recognized that the “best physicians” had the “sharp rhetorical skills and easy bedside manner” (90) necessary to deal with even the most truculent patients.

Christian writers and preachers drew on this medical literature when discussing the concepts of sin and heresy. For example, they recognized that sin and heresy – like physical wounds – had a variety of sources. But whatever the origin, the sin corrupted and putrefied the soul just like a gangrenous, septic wound. If left untreated, the sinner will no longer even be able to feel the festering as the wound numbs and the patient becomes oblivious to sin. As Tertullian notes, heretics who suffer delirium and fevers for long will eventually dull their normal senses and lose the ability to perceive orthodoxy. This and other associations were evoked by describing the wounds of sin and heresy “in lurid detail,” including a strong emphasis on the “foul and repellent stench of putrefied flesh” (92).

Christian writers were careful to maintain the dichotomy between salutary and malevolent wounds already established in ancient medical literature. In Upson-Saia’s analysis, “they structured an understanding of beneficent chastisement and ecclesial discipline on the physicians’ rewounding treatments” (93). Spiritual treatments were painful, but the divine physician always “wounds in order that he may heal” (93, echoing Deuteronomy 32:39).[1] Christians must be prepared to follow God’s example in treating “their friends’ wounded souls” (94). For example, John Chrysostom urges his community to imitate the surgeon who heeds not his patients’ cries but cares only for their health (94, quoting Patrologia Graeca 63: 212).[2] At the same time, Chrysostom urges his community to model “Christian reproof on a physician’s gentle persuasion and comforting bedside manner” (94). Thus, treatment of spiritual wounds must be adjusted to the sinner’s temperament.

Ascetics also suffered bodily afflictions because of sin and vice. Melania herself developed an inflammation from her worldly clothes. Upson-Saia reads this as “a corporeal wound inflicted by the Great Physician, a wound that mirrors or manifests the wounding of Melania’s soul” (97). In order to be healed, Melania must adopt a healthier form of life – a more rigorous asceticism. As a good patient, an ascetic must be humble and obedient in order to experience true healing.

In sum, Upson-Saia provides a wide-ranging and lucid demonstration of how embodied experiences of wounding structured early Christian discourse surrounding sin, heresy, and repentance. The polyvalent wound metaphors also structured ascetic piety. In her conclusion, Upson-Saia uses her emphasis on the body “as itself a vehicle for thinking, feeling, and acting” (98, quoting Laurence Kirmayer) to suggest that these metaphors were at the core not only of Christian discourse but also of Christian concepts. This stronger claim seems to link up to Upson-Saia’s initial mention of cognitive linguistic theory, but she should have made this relationship more explicit in order to provide evidence for her stronger claim. Overall, however, this article is an outstanding synthesis of at least three distinct strands of literature – modern, medical, and ecclesiastical – to support a compelling and inventive thesis.

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[1] NRSV: “I kill and I make alive; / I wound and I heal; / and no one can deliver from my hand.”

[2] In English translation, available at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/240230.htm (see the last two paragraphs).

Rosenwein, Barbara. “Worrying about Emotions in History.” The American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002): 821–45.

In this article, Rosenwein examines the historiographyof emotions throughout Western history. She describes the first calls for a history of emotions and the theoretical perspective that emerged based on the grand narrative linking progress to emotional restraint. She then surveys more recent theoretical approaches to emotions, before concluding with her approach based on the recognition of “emotional communities.”

Rosenwein argues that historians have neglected emotions in the past because they were primarily writing history with political aims in mind. Rosenwein considers Febvre, who in 1941 called for writing histories of emotions. In her analysis, his appeal was not driven by a real recognition of the value of emotions but rather by a need to identify how some periods “could keep passions tamped down better than others” (823) ­– and in so doing construct a rational, ordered civilization. In her view, Febvre was advocating “public policy masquerading as history” (823).

Next, Rosenwein discusses the “emotionology” endorsed by Peter and Carol Stearns. In this field, the emphasis is less on feelings themselves and more on the social norms towards emotions and their expression (especially in public contexts). Rosenwein describes this as an examination of the “managed hearts of the past” (824). The Stearnses attempted to avoid “elite” history and therefore turned to “non-elite” sources such as advice manuals. Rosenwein argues that emotionology therefore excludes almost all pre-modern sources, meaning that medievalists find it impossible to engage in “true” emotionology. The Stearnses acknowledge this limitation by claiming that there was essentially no management of public emotion – no “general emotional control” (825, citing Stearns 25) – in the Middle Ages.

The German historian Norbert Elias supported this view in his 1939 book, republished and translated in the 1970s. In it, he traces the evolution of emotional control from the rude and violent folk to the restrained and civilized court, which became institutionalized with the emergence of the modern state. Indeed, Elias identifies the history of Western civilization with the history of increasing emotional restraint. Rosenwein finds echoes of this paradigm in many great theorists, from Weber to Freud to Foucault. In fact, Rosenwein sees this “grand narrative” as part of the wider use by historians of the Middle Ages as a “convenient foil for modernity” (828). She also sees a similar pattern in the use of the South – both American and European – to describe emotions and the subsequent move to civilize and tame them.

Rosenwein next turns to the Annales school, which reacted against elitist tendencies of traditional historiography by centering the “folk.” In so doing, the Annalistes “depicted the masses as passive slaves to their own mental structures” (831). Medievalists often adopt this perspective, which in Rosenwein’s view is another manifestation of Elias’ grand narrative – identifying civilization with emotional restraint. To flesh out a specific example, Rosenwein highlights the work of Peter Dinzelbacher. He largely aligns with the Annalistes, but with a distinctive emphasis on the church. Dinzelbacher agrees that the masses were slaves to mental structures, but argues that it was the church who knew how to kindle these emotions in the medieval population. Delumeau, similarly, argues that the fears are “not the passions of primitive minds but rather the transferal and broadening out of the emotional climate of the monastery” (832).

Rosenwein asserts that the grand narrative adhered to by these diverse scholars has a clear conceptual understanding of emotions at its heart. This is what Rosenwein calls “the ‘hydraulic’ model: the emotions are like great liquids within each person, heaving and frothing, eager to be let out” (834). This model derives from the medieval humors, but also accords with early-twentieth-century scientific theories of energy. The turning point in the grand narrative can be imagined as the moment when the immense flow of liquid was finally constrained and confined to its proper place. This view was “dethroned” in the 1960s and 70s by two rivals: first, the cognitive view by which emotions derive from perception and judgment; second, the view by which emotions and their display are created and transformed by their social context.

In response to the shifts in the theoretical understanding of emotion, historians have adopted new perspectives on the history of emotions. One example Rosenwein gives is Reddy’s theory of “emotives.” These are the processes by which all of us manage and shape our emotions. This theory subsumes the earlier emotionology by acknowledging that emotives are influenced both by societal norms and by individual choices. A much broader array of sources is seen as acceptable for this theory. In particular, Rosenwein asserts that medievalists think about gestures as valuable sources for emotives. An example comes from Althoff’s examination of confraternities. He sees gestures – and therefore emotions – as constituting “the medium through which power was expressed, understood, and manipulated” (841). Emotions are governed by coherent social rules that allow for their use as carriers of information – for example, about the possibility of peace, friendship, or enmity. One issue with the theory of emotives that Rosenwein highlights is that it hinges on power and politics, even though emotions were “as much a part of intimate family constellations as of high politics” (842).

In response to these trends, Rosenwein suggests her own historical approach to emotions. Her theory is based on the concept of “emotional communities.” Each of these communities has their own way of evaluating emotions and modes of emotional expression. Rosenwein recognizes that people moved amongst these communities and adjusted their approaches to emotions appropriately. What might seem to be contradictory values and attitudes in a society are seen as the characteristics of different emotional communities. Rosenwein’s model accounts for the diversity of medieval approaches to emotions by recognizing the various emotional communities in which people can exist – even simultaneously. The narrative a historian should emphasize is not based on the progress of emotional restraint but rather “on the interactions and transformations of communities holding various values and ideas, practicing various forms of sociability, and privileging various emotions and styles of expression” (845).

Rosenwein’s scholarship in this paper is admirably expansive and sensitive to her predecessors. She successfully probes a variety of sophisticated theoretical perspectives to create a coherent, sustained narrative of historiography. Her conclusion provides an intriguing and convincing suggestion for a better theoretical approach to emotions.