Damien Boquet

This was rather a slog. The subtitle is A History of Emotions in the Middle Ages, but it'd be more accurate to say A History of Emotions Experienced by Elite Literate Christian Men Who Mostly Lived in What is Now France. Which, fine, but then state that's what you're producing. Boquet and Nagy seem far more interested in Christian theories about emotions than I am, and far less interested in the questions which made me pick up this book in the first place: what emotional experiences did people (Christian, Jewish, Muslim, men and women) have in the Middle Ages? How can we access them? Also contains some of the usual kinds of weird swipes at women's/gender studies that you often find in Francophone scholarship on the Middle Ages, which goes some way to explaining the way they analyze (or more to the point, don't) Froissart's story of the burghers of Calais. The bibliography will be useful for graduate students; the prose is so turgid that I have to imagine the book would be too much for even upper-level undergraduates to tackle.… (plus d'informations)