Since Feeling is First: Teaching Royal Ethics through Managing the Emotions in the Late Middle Ages

The appropriation of the works of Aristotle and his commentators on the emotions by scholars like Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century brought about the challenge of accommodating them within the Christian ethical tradition. I explore the transformation of emotions discourse by analysing three specula written for the French royal family by Vincent of Beauvais, Giles of Rome, and Durand of Champagne. I argue that these works create a space in which new and older modes of managing behaviour coexist, even as the gradual privileging of the emotions against the traditional focus on the mores amounts to emotions’ discursive reification.