Gender and Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Destroying Order, Structuring Disorder ed. by Susan Broomhall (review)

In the last two decades, scholarly interest in the cultural history of emotion has blossomed, with entire books devoted to the medieval and early modern periods, some focused on a single emotion such as anger or grief, and others devoted to thematic explorations of emotions and their expression. This collection of twelve essays falls into the latter category. In her introduction, Broomhall notes that the collection "demonstrates how gender ideologies palpably informed emotional states, leading both gender and emotion, together and independently, to shape perceived forms of order and disorder" (8). The majority of essays, however, only indirectly examine evidence of gender operating in norms for emotional expression, and only a handful cite pertinent scholarship on gender and emotion specifically or the broader work of medieval historians and literary scholars that has contributed to our understanding of gender in the period. More surprisingly, some essays only partially engage with emotion scholarship, despite Broomhall's discussion in the introduction of the body of research in fields such as anthropology, psychology, and social and cultural history. Thanks to the wide range of social structures examined, the volume, however, largely succeeds in showing how emotions could provoke and respond to social disorder, yet also be channeled and shaped to create order.

The first four essays are gathered under the theme of "structuring emotions of war and peace." Andrew Lynch explores the ethical context surrounding early English battle narratives, contending that courage stems from an individual's loyalty and commitment to duty, whether secular or religious. Lynch asserts that there is nothing particularly manly about courage, yet his examples of female courage are limited to a paragraph on the Anglo-Saxon Judith and a reference to female virgin martyrs found in hagiographies. Megan Cassidy-Welch's examination of the letters of Jacques de Vitry during the crusades of the thirteenth century discusses the military prowess expected of crusaders, but does not explore specifically the ways in which emotion discourses promoted a particular ideology of masculine Christian virtue, and surprisingly makes no mention of Susan Edgington and Sarah Lambert's Gendering the Crusades (2002). An interesting question raised here is whether the troubled feelings Jacques sometimes expressed about crusading were indicative of anxiety about his status as a non-combatant. In the following chapter, Tracy Adams demonstrates how three married noblewomen of the late Middle Ages astutely gauged the emotions of various people at court to deploy diplomatic strategies in support of family interests. The essay could have explored how prudence might differ for men and women in the courts of the time, and the reference to Anne of France as a female mentor raises a dimension of affective relations between women that might have been further explored. Susan Broomhall describes how Catherine de' Medici artfully performed "emotional work" in her correspondence with her son-in-law, Philip II, and members of the Spanish royal household after the death of her daughter, Isabel de Valois. Although in the opening of the piece, Broomhill promises to explore the "gendered grammar" (67) in Catherine's letters, the essay focuses more on the language of familial affection in Catherine's strategy of positioning herself as mother to Philip to ensure his continued alliance to the Valois family and to France. It thereby provides a fascinating demonstration of how maternal feelings could be performed for political ends.

The next four essays are devoted to "chronicling feelings of disaster and ruin." Matthew Champion examines a stained glass window and a chronicle in the sixteenth-century Carthusian monastic community of Louvain to demonstrate how feelings of despair in the face of misfortune enabled a narrative of "affective temporality" (107) that united the community of monks with the founding moment of Christianity embodied in the mourners at the feet of the crucified Christ. The essay briefly considers how monks occupied a "cross-gendered...