Theories of the Passions and the Ecstasies of Late Medieval Religious Women

Abstract

It is well known to those of us who share a passion for the lives and reconstruction of the lives and actions and thoughts--the gestures, behaviors and emotions--of medieval men and women that the people we study did not necessarily understand themselves the way we understand ourselves. This is especially true with regard to the interpretations given to emotions and passions. Even the way I began the last sentence, with the assertion that we share "a passion" evokes a modern psychological conception of how human beings work. It can, however, be instructive to remember that medieval Christians categorized much of what we think of as "passions"--anger, jealousy, lust--among the Seven Deadly Sins. 1 Our common assumption about human passions, like almost all post-Freudian ideas about human nature, is essentially interior, consisting of concepts that begin within the human psyche--or heart--or soul. In contrast, people in the pre-modern world, from classical antiquity and continuing through "the long Middle Ages" into the middle of the seventeenth century, understood human nature in a different way--if not exactly as a result of, then at least intrinsically allied to, external forces. This "humoral theory" of human nature explains human existence as linked to an enormous, cosmic, series of interrelated phenomena: the stars, the cardinal directions, the essential elements of all creation and the essential humors of the human body.

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