Z+ (content subject to subscription); History of Emotions: Why did people feel differently in the Middle Ages?

Imagine this: In the Middle Ages, no one felt love the way we do today. The historian Rob Boddice states quite clearly that emotions are not fixed quantities but change over time. At first, this sounds absurd, because we often believe that joy, anger, or sadness are universal. But Boddice disagrees. In his view, emotions are highly dependent on culture, time, and social context. For him, the idea that a medieval Henry would have felt love in the same way we do is a myth. He believes that what we know today as romantic love did not exist in that form back then. Henry would probably have felt something else – perhaps a sense of duty, perhaps religious devotion – but not what we watch on Netflix on a Saturday night. Boddice, a researcher at the University of Helsinki, provides an example: In the Middle Ages, emotions were seen as something that came from the outside, not from the inside. People believed that anger was caused by demons or by divine punishment. That sounds crazy, but it explains why people also behaved very differently back then. Grief, for example, was often a public ritual, not a private emotion that people experienced alone in their bedroom. In the chronicles of that era, we read about people who pulled out their hair or wept loudly in times of bereavement—not because they were particularly emotional, but because that was what society expected of them. Anthropologist Barbara Rosenwein even speaks of “emotional communities”: groups that share certain emotions and are completely unaware of others. For Heinrich, in the Middle Ages, there may not have been a word for what we would call “depression” today. And what about anger? In the Middle Ages, it was often seen as a sign of honor – today, as a loss of control. All of this means that, if we want to empathize with how Heinrich of the Middle Ages loved, grieved, or hoped, we have to put our own feelings aside and take the old contexts seriously. There is no time travel into one's own heart. What we feel “quite naturally” is the result of centuries of cultural history. Now let's look at it the other way around: Imagine someone looking back on our emotions 500 years from now. Would they think we love in a strange way because we send messages instead of writing poems? Maybe. For me, one thought sticks: feelings aren't fixed colors, but rather like light shining through different windows. If the idea that love and grief were very different in the Middle Ages has struck a chord with you, then you can use I'm In on Lara Notes to show that this is now part of your world. And if you talk to someone about Heinrich's strange feelings tonight, there's Shared Offline – that way, the other person will know that the conversation was special to you. This idea comes from ZEITmagazin – and it only took you a few minutes instead of reading a long article.