Band 14, Heft 1 - Furor, zorn, irance. Interdisziplinäre Sichtweisen auf mittelalterliche Emotionen. Hrsg. von Bele Freudenberg

In medieval medical anthropology, emotions are closely tied up with humoral pathology, e.g. joy with blood, anger with yellow bile, and sorrow with black bile. The face and body are external signs of a person's constitutional emotionality. Health is based on mental stability: Rage should be channelled into something constructive; love-sickness can even cause death. The use of drugs must respect emotional side effects: While some herbs and gems can brighten the mind, others cause sadness und discomfort. Inadequate emotions not only cause mental illnesses, but can also be mental illnesses in themselves, e.g. raving madness or deep depression. Thus, calming and cheering psychotherapy complements dietary, physical, medicinal, and surgical treatment.

The first part of this essay discusses certain aspects of current research dealing with historical theories of emotions as well as with historical (fictional and non-fictional) descriptions of emotions; trends in medieval philology that apply a vague concept of social constructionism to emotions are criticised. The second part attempts to provide some historical background in regard to the question of the location of anger within medieval faculty-based psychology. The third and fourth parts focus on the medieval conception of anger as a specifically “moral” – and therefore human – emotion straddling the border between the animal and spiritual world.

Rage in the ‘Nibelungenlied’ is a positive, aboriginal energy. The more easily the hero can access this energetic source, the more powerful he becomes. Marshal charisma is essentially associated with the primary emotion of rage – a fact supremely exemplified by Siegfried. However, charismatic army commanders are quite different from political leaders. The position of the ruler is characterized by a high degree of self-control. Yet the disciplined king depends on his warriors, since the buttressing of his own cognitive distance is accompanied by a weakening of his physical power. Representatives of this position are Gunther in the first part, and in the second, Etzel and his vassal Dietrich. Suspense in the ‘Nibelungenlied’ is thus built around the ambivalent qualities associated with anger. As a basic affect, anger's power stems from the sheer power of life itself; it helps those who admire the hero to identify with him and even feel a sense of delight in doing so. But whilst wrathful devotion is largely celebrated, it emerges elsewhere as the ugly face of general social impotence. The ecstasy of battle, which suggests narcissistic invulnerability, leads to deeply felt mourning amongst the survivors. Thus in the ‘Nibelungenlied’, anger is celebrated and unmasked simultaneously and in equal measure.

In my presentation I understand anger as an emotion that, in addition to its relationship to time, is also subject to cultural rules and is therefore related to probability and predictability. With the use of selected references from the theory of emotions (ranging from antiquity to the present day) I identify several consistent fundamental assumptions about this emotion and reconstruct a discourse of “just” anger. Viewed from the perspective of such extra-literary concepts of anger (particularly Thomas Aquinas' ‘De passionibus animae’) Willehalm's outbursts of anger at the French court can be seen not only as an “illegitimate”, universally condemned act, through which the margrave unnecessarily puts at risk his legitimate claim to the king's support; equally, the very forbearance and expressions of solidarity which he is successively shown after his intemperate behaviour in Munleun can also be reinterpreted in light of the Aristotelian-Thomistic model of anger.

Many scholars working on the Old French ‘Song of Roland’ (from about 1100) and its Middle High German adaptation (from about 1170) have commented on the inconsistencies of the main character, the emperor Charlemagne. On the one hand, he is strong and active; on the other, he sinks into passivity and weakness. In this context, the ruler's emotions have often been seen as signs of his helplessness and, therefore, his humanity. By analyzing Charlemagne's grief and anger more closely, this article aims to elaborate a different interpretation. Firstly, it shows that the contradictory depiction of the ruler's emotions is part of a strategy which brings Charlemagne into line with Christ. Thus, Charlemagne's emotions – even those apparently underlining his weakness – ultimately legitimize his position as a ruler. Secondly, there is another significant finding: Charlemagne's emotions do not simply represent the “human” part of his character, as has been suggested, but are themselves important means of power.

In this article, I propose to see the emotion of anger in the ‘Antapodosis’ by Liudprand of Cremona as an important means of assessing characters. By depicting the anger of the Ottonian kings as just and predictable, Liudprand shows how the ideal ruler should behave. He uses various examples from the Old Testament and especially the Deuterocanonical books of the Maccabees to present the anger of the Ottonian kings in the same fashion. In his vision, the negative counterpart to the Ottonians is played by the Italic kings, who show their unworthiness precisely through the inept and tyrannical use of anger. In addition to this, Liudprand writes about aristocratic anger-management as well as the anger of women. Although a man of the church, Liudprand shows himself to understand and to use the code of honour which applied to noblemen in conflicts. Women do not, on the contrary, show unmediated anger. Their emotion is mixed with grief and tears.

Basing his arguments on Abelard's ‘Historia Calamitatum’ the author questions whether the category “negative emotions” is indeed the central and adequate category for describing medieval texts broadly attributable to amonastic context. Instead he stresses categories that are inherent to the text and its world. The first part contains a survey of those episodes of the ‘Historia Calamitatum’ in which negative emotions are mentioned. In a second part, attention turns to the patterns behind these descriptions and their purpose. By considering various aspects of the ‘Historia Calamitatum’ – its theological-monastic background, literary genre, and implicit public dimension, as well as contemporary testimonies – a calculated and varied ascription of negative emotions can be revealed within the work.

The depiction of negative emotions in neo-Latin tragedies of the 14th and 15th centuries is to a great extent influenced by the Younger Seneca, whose works of the same genre furnished numerous descriptions of the highly destructive emotion furor (conceived as an aggravation of ira ) and its physical effects on the characters on stage. This accords strongly with Seneca's philosophical doctrines on anger described especially in ‘De ira’. On the basis of three texts – Albertino Mussato's ‘Ecerinis’ (Padua 1315), Leonardo Dati's ‘Hyempsal’ (Florence 1440) and Carlo and Marcellino Verardi's ‘Fernandus servatus’ (staged in Rome 1493) – this essay examines the reception and modification of the theme of furor, taking into account especially the tragedies' contexts and their intended effect. In none of the cases presented was the author's main interest directed towards emotions per se. They rather act as a means of morally classifying the characters on stage. There is also (compared to Seneca's tragedies) an increased interest in the remedies against negative emotions. The Stoic theory of affects, according to which emotions are always negative and act as a kind of illness of the soul, is not fully adopted. Rather, many passages imply an Aristotelian or Christian understanding of emotions, which involve both justified anger and damnable apathy.