In an impassioned article written in 1941 Lucien Febvre urges the writing of a history of human sensibility and suggests in particular writing a history of cruelty.'The general direction indicated by Febvre has been followed, but as far as cruelty is concerned his plea is still as relevant today as it was five decades ago. And since cruelty is one of the attributes commonly associated with the Middle Ages, 2 it is particularly interesting to examine what and how medi-eval thinkers wrote on the subject.

An examination of sources dealing with cruelty from late antiquity to the early moder period yields surprising results. Whereas the writings of the thinkers of late classical antiquity and of the early moder period do include discus-sions of the issue, the writings of medieval thinkers before the thirteenth cen-tury contain only brief remarks. The first and only exception until the end of the Middle Ages is a short question on cruelty in Thomas Aquinas's Summa theologiae. Other types of medieval sources, such as legal texts, chronicles, and literary texts, reveal the same scarcity of references to the subject during most of the Middle Ages. Thus this period seems to represent a gap between antiquity and the early moder period, with a reawakening of interest in the issue of cruelty towards the end of the Middle Ages. The relative silence of medieval sources calls for identifying the factors which affected the treatment of cruelty by medieval thinkers. What are the