Thought About Emotion Among Dominicans in Pisa and the Roman Province in the Thirteenth Century

Thought about Emotion among Dominicans in Pisa and the Roman Province in the Thirteenth Century NICHOLAS TOWNSON PHD UNIVERSITY OF YORK HISTORY SEPTEMBER 2014 ii Abstract This dissertation’s subject is the discussion of emotions in the Order of Preachers in the thirteenth century. In order to provide precise and concrete context, it focuses on a single convent and region, Pisa and the Roman Province. The first part sketches the community at S. Caterina, describing its early history and introducing aspects of the order’s commitment to study. This is followed by a summary of the connection between the thought of the friars-preacher at Paris and the preaching of the Pisan archbishop, Federico Visconti. The second part addresses ideas about emotion put forward in Dominican theological texts and Sentences commentaries more directly. The first step is a consideration of the importance of the Sentences commentary genre as a means for the diffusion of thought about emotion, taking the discussion of Christ’s passions as an example. The next offers a detailed summary of different treatments of hope, outlining developments in the concepts and vocabulary which the friars used in their teaching. The final chapter is an attempt to bring the different threads together by considering the use of thirteenth-century academic thought about emotion, both in later conventual teaching at S. Caterina and in regular preaching to lay men and women in a central Italian commune. iii Table of Contents Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………ii Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………….iv Declaration……………………….......................................................................................v Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1 Part I. S. Caterina 1. A Knowable Community ………………....................................................................15 2. The Practice of Study at S. Caterina………………………………….………….…..40 3. Parisian Theology and the Sermons of Federico Visconti………………..................69 Part II. The Sentences 4. The Sentences as a Vehicle for Thought about Emotion…………………………...101 5. Spes (i): Early Development………………………………………………………..139 6. Spes (ii): The Scriptum……………………………………………………………..175 7. The Passions and Ordinary Life……………………………………………………213 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………243 Abbreviations…………………………………………………………………………...247 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………….248 iv Acknowledgements My greatest thanks go to Peter Biller, a wise, generous, and unfailingly thoughtful supervisor and good friend. Without his advice, moral support and superhuman effort, I could not have completed this project. I could not have hoped for a more dedicated and inspirational supervisor, and I shall always be grateful for his guidance. Many other people have offered their help and support over the past four years. I would like to thank Lucy Sackville for giving up time to discuss some very early ideas, and Mary Garrison and Bill Sheils for their constant encouragement. For their friendship and patience I am particularly indebted to Lachie Murray, Graziana Russo, and Rossella Calandra. A special mention, however, must go to Ale, whose love and optimism have carried me through to the end of this project. Finally, I owe most to Madeleine and Howard, my parents. This project would not have been possible without the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Humanities Research Centre at the University of York, and the staff of the J. B. Morrell Library. v Declaration I hereby declare that this submission is entirely my own work except where due acknowledgement is given, and that the work has not been previously presented for an award at this or any other university. vi 1 INTRODUCTION What follows is an attempt to address thought about emotion as practised by the friars- preacher in Pisa and the Roman Province during the thirteenth century. By addressing the problem of ‘emotion’ in theological texts, this thesis adds to an increasingly large body of historical research, which has been the subject of serious discussion for at least twenty years, and the intellectual origins of which can be traced back much further. The general aim is to follow the articulation of concepts in texts produced for the training of the friars- preacher in the thirteenth century. The starting point for this approach is the view that these forms of thought can be understood historically; a relatively simple claim which places this thesis on the margins of much bolder propositions about the possibilities presented by the history of emotion. The concern for the historical dimension of thought about emotion should not be taken to indicate a particularly strong intellectual allegiance or loyalty to any particular modern theorist, other than to the position that all thought, as the determination of individuals in a particular place and time, is necessarily provisional and subject to change. A description of the historical study of emotion could begin in 1941 in the Franche- Comté at the farmhouse where Lucien Febvre wrote an article, the crystallisation of a decade or so of work on historical psychology, in which he called for ‘a vast collective investigation into the sentiments of man and the forms they take.’1 For an opening scene, we can picture Febvre at his bureau, surrounded by notes, journal articles, book reviews and monographs. A volume of the recently published Encyclopédie Française is prominent. The article Febvre was working on appeared in Annales under the title ‘Sensibility and History: How to Reconstitute the Affective Life of the Past’. In it, Febvre argued that, first and foremost, any account of emotion ought to be interdisciplinary; it should attempt to break down the compartments between psychology and history. 1 L. Febvre, ‘La sensibilité et l’histoire. Comment reconstituer la vie affective d’autrefois?’, Annales ESC 3 (1941), pp. 221-38, reprinted and translated in A New Kind of History from the Writings of Febvre, ed. P. Burke (London, 1973), pp. 12-26; R. Mandrou, ‘Pour une histoire de la Sensibilité’, Annales ESC 14 (1959), pp. 581-88. 2 Second, it ought to make use of a variety of sources, from political to artistic. On the page in front of him are sentences such as ‘the emotions are contagious’, explained with reference to Henri Wallon’s work on the relationship between affectivity and social life.2 Language, Febvre suggested, is one way in which groups can act upon and influence the individual’s emotional life: ‘He tends towards the social life as towards his state of equilibrium.’ According to Febvre emotions can and do vary between societies and historical periods, and so to apply a contemporary psychology to the past is to be guilty of anachronism. As an example of how to write historically about emotion, Febvre held up Johann Huizinga’s Autumn of the Middle Ages, first published in Dutch in 1919.3 For Febvre, as for Marc Bloch, who had written a glowing review of the second German edition, Huizinga’s ‘childlike’ middle ages, characterised by a general mental changeability and a particular proneness to anger, showed how the collective and social psychology of this period differed from our own. At this point we might move from Febvre’s bureau in his farmhouse in the Franche- Comté to a desk overlooking the ultra-modern campus of Carnegie Mellon University in 1980s Pittsburgh. Here, husband-and-wife team Carol and Peter Stearns, a professional psychiatrist and Harvard-trained historian, wrote a book about anger in Modern America.4 As well as Carol Stearns’s professional interest, Peter Stearns arrived at the subject from a background in labour and family history. He saw work on emotion as (i) an extension of earlier research into cultural expectations of parent-child relations and gender-specific emotional styles, and (ii) an opportunity to put the case for a historical perspective amidst the burgeoning corpus of theoretical work by psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists influenced by cognitive and social constructionist theories of emotion.5 The Stearnses’ research was theoretically up to speed and self-aware. They chose not to recycle English equivalents of Febvre’s ‘psychologie historique’ or ‘vie affective’, which would have looked old-fashioned. Looking for a word to describe ‘the standards by which any society seeks to evaluate and regulate emotions’, they coined ‘emotionology’; a 2 Henri Wallon: La vie mentale, ed. Émile Jalley (Paris, 1982). 3 J. Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. R. J. Payton and U. Mammitzsch (Chicago, 1996). 4 C. Stearns and P. Stearns, Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in America’s History (Chicago, 1986). 5 J. Plamper, ‘The History of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns’, History and Theory 49 (2010), pp. 237-65. 3 neologism they hoped would allow them to talk about cultural differences in emotional behaviour without confusing expectation and experience.6 In part, their work was an off-shoot of social history; the bulk of their attention was ‘turned toward the everyday experiences of common folk’. It also contained an implicit assumption of development that echoed the ideas of Huizinga and Norbert Elias.7 Although accepting the biological certainty of emotion, ‘emotionology, by shaping articulate expectations, does influence actual emotional experience.’8 For proof, we should look at how people tried to get a grip on their emotions in the eighteenth century; ‘an anger-control effort that constituted an important shift in emotional

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