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Passions of the Pope: Analysing emotional rhetoric in Pope Gregory VII’s letters Kieryn Mascarenhas 2020 Illustration of Pope Gregory VII from Paul of Bernried’s Vita Gregorii VII (c. 1128), Heiligenkreuz Abbey, Austria A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of BA (Hons) in History, University of Sydney ABSTRACT In recent years, emotions have become a popular lens for historical analysis. Building on existing scholarship, this thesis explores the emotions of Pope Gregory VII, an eleventh- century pope notable for his reform efforts and role in the Investiture Controversy. Focusing on Gregory’s papal letters, this study will analyse the displays of three key emotions: anger, love, and sorrow, to determine how and why Gregory used these displays to achieve his political and religious objectives. Gregory wielded emotional rhetoric in his papal letters to solidify his papal authority, construct and maintain key relationships, and garner support for his reform agenda. 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am deeply indebted to Dr Hélène Sirantoine and Dr John Gagné. I could not have asked for better supervisors. I would like to thank them both for all their insightful recommendations and feedback, as well as their tremendous help in allaying the worst of my anxieties. I would also like to express my appreciation of the help and direction given to me in the wake of my prospectus by the Honours programme coordinator, Dr Andres Rodriguez. I want to thank my family for their patience and encouragement throughout this past year. My gratitude is also due to all the friends that I’ve grumbled about this project to. I’d also like to acknowledge Ben, whose assistance in reading drafts cannot be underestimated, and Rebecca, who has been vital in helping me navigate the confusion of this Honours year. Thanks are also due to all those who’ve assisted me in accessing resources, especially William. 3 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................... 5 Sources ............................................................................................................................. 12 Methodology .................................................................................................................... 13 Structure ........................................................................................................................... 15 CHAPTER 1: ANGER ............................................................................................................ 19 Two Forms of Anger: Zealous and Vicious ......................................................................... 20 Anger in the Papal Letters.................................................................................................... 22 Case Studies: Righteous Wrath ............................................................................................ 26 CHAPTER 2: LOVE................................................................................................................ 38 The Lexicon of Love: From Lactantius to Peter the Venerable ........................................... 39 Love in the Papal Letters ..................................................................................................... 43 Case Studies: Constructed Images of Love ......................................................................... 48 CHAPTER 3: SORROW ......................................................................................................... 56 Understanding sorrow: Between Evagrius and Alcuin ........................................................ 57 Sorrow in the Papal Letters .................................................................................................. 61 Case Studies: Sympathy through Sorrow ............................................................................ 64 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................ 72 APPENDICES ......................................................................................................................... 77 Appendix A: Letters featuring displays of anger ................................................................. 77 Appendix B: Letters featuring displays of love ................................................................... 78 Appendix C: Letters featuring displays of sorrow ............................................................... 79 BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................................... 80 4 INTRODUCTION On February 22nd, 1076, Pope Gregory VII issued an impassioned letter excommunicating and deposing the German king, Henry IV. The missive came at one of the flashpoints of the Investiture Controversy, a power dispute over the control of the Church, that would conclude in 1122 – well past the lifetimes of both Gregory and Henry. In his letter, Gregory denied to Henry rulership of ‘the entire kingdom of the Germans and of Italy’ and ‘[bound] him with the chain of anathema’ for having ‘risen up with unheard-of pride’, taking action to protect the Church so that ‘the gates of hell shall not prevail against it’.1 But what do emotive expressions such as these mean? And what does Gregory gain from his extensive employment of such rhetoric? This study investigates how Pope Gregory VII deployed emotional words and phrases indicative of three emotions – anger, love, and sorrow – to understand the purpose they served in the context of Gregory’s conflict with Henry IV. Analysing the ever-changing history of emotions breathes new life into the study of history, providing another dimension from which historians can now investigate matters of the past. Early histories of emotions grappled with now-controversial paradigms. For example, the notion of the medieval period as one of inherent emotional immaturity and crudeness took root in the 1910s after an influential book by Johan Huizinga.2 Huizinga theorised that medieval emotions fluctuated wildly between unrestrained displays of affect, writing that ‘All experience had yet to the minds of men the directness and absoluteness of 1 Gregory VII, The Register of Pope Gregory VII, 1073-1085: An English translation, ed. H. E. J. Cowdrey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 3.6*, 181. Papal letters are cited by register entry number followed by page number in Cowdrey’s translation. 2 Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction, trans. Keith Tribe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 48-9.; Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Worrying About Emotions in History”, The American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (June 2002): 823.; Barbara H. Rosenwein and Riccardo Cristiani, What is the History of Emotions? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018), 31-2. 5 the pleasure and pain of child-life’.3 More recently, studying the history of emotions has entered historiographical vogue, leading to the so-called ‘affective turn’.4 As we will discuss, subsequent historians have determined that emotions and emotive expression fulfilled nuanced social functions, going far beyond blunt expressions of affect at a given moment. In particular, Barbara H. Rosenwein’s edited collection Anger’s Past (1998) highlighted the complexity of medieval emotions and the variety of social functions they fulfilled.5 Anger’s Past and Rosenwein’s subsequent works in this field have especially influenced this thesis. The weaponisation of rhetoric in the thirteenth century has also been investigated.6 For example, Agostino Paravicini Bagliani explored the concept of ‘verbal violence’ as a tool of Pope Boniface VIII (r. 1294-1303), arguing that the pontiff used rhetorical demonstrations of anger to inspire fear in a range of audiences.7 However, the treatment of emotions by a pope of the Investiture Controversy period remains largely unexamined. This thesis helps to bridge this scholarly lacuna by focusing on the emotional rhetoric of Gregory VII. We now understand that emotions in all their forms deeply enriched the politics and society of the medieval world.8 Unpicking the emotions at play in the medieval world, and the purposes they filled is thus a pertinent area of study. This thesis builds on the work of the burgeoning field of emotional histories and applies this analysis to a historical phenomenon that has been thus fart overlooked by this approach – the Investiture Controversy, the conflict 3 Johann Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (1996), quoted in Rosenwein and Cristiani, What is the History of Emotions?, 31. 4 David Lemmings and Ann Brooks, “The Emotional Turn in the Humanities and Social Sciences”, in Emotions and Social Change: Historical and Sociological Perspectives, ed. David Lemmings and Ann Brooks (New York: Routledge, 2014), 3-5. 5 Barbara H. Rosenwein, ed., Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). 6 Kathleen Neal, “Words as Weapons in the Correspondence of Edward I and Llywelyn ap Gruffyd”, Parergon 30, no. 1 (2013): 66-7. 7 Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, “Boniface VIII, violence du verbe et émotivité”, in Passions et pulsions à la cour (Moyen Âge – Temps modernes), eds. Bernard Andenmatten, Armand Jamme, Laurence Moulinier-Brogi and Marilyn Nicoud. (Florence: SISMEL – Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2015), 45. 8 Damian Boquet and Piroska Nagy, Medieval Sensibilities: A History