Behavioral science · construct
Emotional communities
Barbara Rosenwein, 2006
Rosenwein's quarrel was with the idea that a whole era has a single emotional style — the 'childlike' Middle Ages, the 'repressed' Victorians. Look closer, she argued, and any society turns out to hold many emotional communities at once, each with its own list of valued feelings, its own permitted ways to show them, its own rules about what may be felt aloud. Feeling is plural and local, not a spirit of the age.
Working definition
Groups that share norms about which emotions are valuable and how they may be displayed; they coexist and overlap within a period.
Where Vela uses this
This reframes Vela's whole emotion-historiography: a text does not reveal how people 'back then' felt but how one emotional community valued and voiced feeling. It is essential for reading scriptural and devotional sources without anachronism. Pairs with emotives (the practices that bind such a community) and with the constructionist frame that makes the plurality intelligible.
Origin & lineage
Rosenwein (*Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages*, 2006; *Generations of Feeling*, 2016) → a cornerstone of the history-of-emotions field alongside Reddy and Stearns.
Where it shows up in Vela
Magazine
Related concepts
- Emotives
Sits next to — Reddy supplies the mechanism; Rosenwein the social unit.
Scholars
Honest framing
Identifying a past emotional community from surviving texts is interpretive work, and the boundaries are rarely crisp. Vela uses the concept to resist flattening, while being honest that reconstructing how others felt is always partial.