Rosenwein’s piece “Worrying about Emotions in History” reminded me of Evans’ from the first week of class in its attempt to come to terms with the emotional life of the people of the past. Given the significant divide in time and culture between the present day and Rosenwein’s area of study (the Middle Ages), one can ask the reasonable question if the emotional life of a man or woman in the 13th century is readily accessible to a reader today or whether that divide is too difficult to bridge.

One aspect of the text that I found interesting was the author’s condemnation of philosophers who, in the vein of Max Weber, use the Middle Ages as a convenient foil for the present. For another class I have been having to read Weber for the last few weeks and his notion that Western societies have achieved a level of unsurpassed rationality that allows them to manipulate probabilities and attain access to the objective and true, as opposed to people from other cultures (or earlier eras) who lived in superstition. Besides the obvious Euro-centrism of that idea, what this paper reinforces for me is that that notion is very biased toward the present. In an era where we are constantly expanding the boundaries of what it is that we understand (or can be understood), it is too easy to dismiss people from earlier times as backward or fundamentally different from how we are now.

Of all creatures women be best is a fun read for those of you who enjoy the bouquet of your misogyny to be a bit more … subtle and condescending. The key for the poem seems to be the Latin phrase “Cuins contrarium verum est,” glossed as “The opposite of this is true,” which follows the title of the poem. While the text goes out of its way to address specific charges against women, namely that ladies are prone to gossip and enjoy spending their man’s earnings irresponsibly, it does so in a tongue-in-cheek way that instead reinforces the power of those stereotypes.

Obviously you have to grade things like bigotry on a curve. Given the fact that societal attitudes have shifted so drastically since the era these poems cover, it would be unfair to expect the author of the poem to adhere to our particular contemporary worldview. With that being said, one aspect that intrigued me about the poem was actually the introduction to the section on lyrics, which observes that many of these poets were likely members of the clergy. The possibility that “Of all creatures…” was written by a man of the cloth is interesting to consider given that celibacy was of course the norm for the clergy (at least in the lower rungs of the Church), and so the misogyny of the text is of a piece with Church orthodoxy. Just as the poet’s continued harping on how women are not [insert litany of awful things here] draws attention to the fact that the poet is instead insinuating exactly that, I wonder whether the lady-bashing of the text overcompensates for the difficulty of a priest or monk choosing the celibate life? It is a lot easier to avoid the temptation of settling down if all women are terrible she-beasts, after all. Did anyone else have any other reactions to the poem?

As others have already noted, Evans argues in his piece for the role of emotion as a common part of the human experience. Although some of what we would classify of emotion is highly specific to an individual culture or background, anthropology today suggests there are some human emotions that can be considered constant across the whole of humanity.

Where this interests me is in Evans’ discussion of the concept of the word 甘え, or amae. (Side-note: The character 甘 carries the meaning sweet, which seems fitting). Although the word does not exist in English, the ultimate feeling that Evans argues can be summed up with the word amae can still be experienced by non-Japanese people. This flies in direct contrast to the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, also known as linguistic relativism. Sapir-Whorf is the concept that our thought processes are constrained by the language within which we operate to the extent that considering a reality outside of our linguistic construction becomes endlessly difficult. When Orwell considered the terror of Newspeak, with its doubleplus good here and Miniluv there, it was with Sapir-Whorf in mind because he viewed the implementation of Newspeak as a political process to undermine the ability of the masses to critique the undemocratic society in which they lived. If anything, that there is a core of the human experience in the form of a set of emotions that remain consistent across languages and cultures should provide us comfort not only that we can more confidently wade into the literature of the medieval era but also that the emotions we express now can be followed by those long after we pass.