Many people in the twenty-first century spend a great deal of time thinking about our emotions: where they come from, how they show up in our bodies, and whether they drive us toward productive or destructive acts. As historians Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy write, ideas about this topic in Europe changed dramatically in the high Middle Ages.

Intellectual life in medieval Europe was thoroughly bound up in Christianity, and, early on, this often translated to viewing human feelings in stark terms of good and evil. For example, Gregory the Great, a Church Father from the early medieval period, wrote that even though it was necessary to slake one’s thirst, the pleasure of tasting a drink could contain an element of sin.

Boquet and Nagy write that this began to change in the late eleventh century, thanks partly to new translations of Arabic texts. Christian intellectuals increasingly accepted input from classical and contemporary non-Christian sources, particularly in emerging urban schools, which were beginning to replace monastic cloisters as centers of learning in Europe.

In this context, feelings like anger, joy, sadness, fear, and shame could be understood through humoral medicine, a longstanding framework for addressing the body’s needs. Joy, for example, represented the movement of the body’s heat outward from the heart—something that was beneficial to the body in small doses but potentially dangerous or even lethal in sudden sharp bursts.

Around the same time, Boquet and Nagy write, Christian thinkers increasingly came to view emotional feeling as an aspect of human nature that did not necessarily have a moral weight in and of itself. As French philosopher and theologian Peter Abelard wrote in the 1130s, “the sin is not the desire for the wife of another, but rather to consent to this desire.”

For Abelard, having tendencies toward wrong thoughts or actions might be a natural defect of the soul, but it was not itself evil—and, in fact, it provided the opportunity for a person to virtuously triumph over their innate drive toward wrath, luxury, or other evils.

Working with emotion to improve virtue became part of the job of religious authorities. For example, William of Auvergne, who served as bishop of Paris in the thirteenth century, described the need to convert fleeting passions such as love and joy into lasting dispositions—and to avoid allowing hate, pain, or anger to congeal similarly. This process might involve cultivating appropriate feelings during penance, such as promoting “virtuous shame,” which encourages contrition, and avoiding “arrogant shame,” which discourages it.

In place of a stoic effort to avoid the influence of emotion, thirteenth-century thinkers including Thomas Aquinas sought to use reason to direct the passions correctly, turning them into tools for self-improvement.

“The way to salvation proposed by late medieval thinkers was no longer bound in an austere dialectic opposing spiritual and carnal man but instead proceeded from the new understanding of the divine project as expressed by the physical world,” Boquet and Nagy write.

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