Posted by Sara M. Butler, 30 November 2025.

Even though medievalist Barbara Rosenwein was among the first group of English-language historians to embrace emotion as an analytical construct, medieval historians in general have been slow to recognize its value.[1] The reticence shown towards the history of emotion, of course, should not come as any surprise: after all, the condescension of early historians who saw medieval men and women as socially and emotionally immature­­—they felt big emotions and were largely incapable of reining them in—has left scars on the field. To offer an example: in describing life in fifteenth-century Europe, Johan Huizinga (d. 1945) captures best the portrait of men stunted in their emotional growth:

The men of that time always oscillate between the fear of hell and the most naïve joy, between cruelty and tenderness, between harsh asceticism and insane attachment to the delights of the world, between hatred and goodness, always running to extremes.[2]

It took years for medievalists to shed the baggage associated with this perception and convince the world that medieval men and women were as complex, both emotionally and intellectually, as were their modern counterparts. Undoubtedly, many historians worry that shifting our focus back to emotion may undo all the hard work accomplished since the 1940s, potentially leading us to make the same mistakes all over again. (One might argue that has happened already with Steven Pinker’s demeaning representation of a Middle Ages devoid of empathy. Sigh.)[3]

Among medievalists, legal historians have been perhaps the most reluctant to see any benefit to the history of emotions.[4] The explanation would seem to be grounded in the belief that law stands in opposition to emotion: law is rational, emotion irrational. In the realm of law, logic and reason supersede emotion. In his 2017 foray into the history of emotions, John Hudson contends that the cultivation of this ideological contrast was a conscious innovation of the medieval period. In the wake of the legal revolution, legal sources, like the treatise Glanvill, “largely attempted to exclude matters of emotion.” Jurists sought to distance law from emotion; more important still, they hoped to use the law to protect people from the “unfair effect of emotion upon behavior.”[5]

Hudson makes a compelling case for the growing divide between law and emotion, as well as the law as an instrument in the regulation of emotion. Nonetheless, his perception strikes me as being overly modern (or at least, post-Enlightenment). Caught up in the scholasticism of the twelfth-century Renaissance, medieval scholars exhorted the need to apply logic and reason to all areas of learning, including the law. This experience is the framework that buttresses Hudson’s conclusion.  But did jurists necessarily see that reason and emotion were in conflict? Was emotion always a threat to the proper implementation of the law? Or could it be considered a positive trait? Finally, will learning about medieval approaches to emotion better help us to understand medieval law?

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The thirteenth-century legal treatise known as Bracton, because it is online and keyword searchable, provides the perfect test case to understand medieval jurists and their attitude towards emotions.

Hudson is correct that emotion was sidelined in favor of an explanation of how the law works. In the 1188 pages of the three volumes of the treatise, emotion words appear the following number of times:

Emotion	Number of Appearances
envy	1
sorrow	3
affection	7
anger/wrath/ire	9
love	11
friend/friendship	18
hate/hatred/enmity	24
fear/dread	25

Emotion certainly did not dominate the discussion. However, if the authors of Bracton saw emotion in conflict with reason, nowhere is that apparent in the preamble, which is mired in emotion. In explaining why they chose to write the treatise, the authors appeal to the emotionality of their readers:

[t]he general intention is to treat of law that the unskilled may be made expert, the expert more expert, the bad good and the good better, as well by the fear of punishment as by the hope of reward, according to this [verse]: Good men hate to err from love of virtue; The wicked from fear of pain.[6]

Indeed, the authors argue that fear is the key to keeping the law free of corruption. Judges need to be reminded that when Domesday comes, those who judged maliciously will feel God’s wrath, as he

cast[s] them into the fiery furnace, where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth, groans and screams, outcries, lamentation and torment, roaring and shouting, fear and trembling, sorrow and suffering, fire and stench, doubt and anxiety, violence and cruelty, ruin and poverty, distress and dejection, oblivion and confusion, tortures and woundings, troubles and terrors, hunger and thirst, cold and heat, brimstone and burning fire for ever and ever.[7]

This last quotation is a powerful reminder of just how religiously-inflected and emotionally-charged the law remained in the late Middle Ages, even with the turn towards logic. In this instance, God’s anger plays a positive role: without it, judges might stray from the needs of justice and rule in their own self-interest.

While God’s anger is righteous, the judge’s is reprehensible: “let each beware of that judgment where the judge is terribly strict, intolerably severe, offended beyond measure and vehemently angered.”[8] In judges, emotion might present a threat to reason: they risk losing sight of truth and justice because of misplaced emotional responses. The authors write, “In truth he is defiled whom the truth of judgment does not adorn, as where bias or hatred, fear, envy or reward leads him to do the contrary, so that the truth of judgment falls in the streets.”[9]

But emotion is not all bad. It might also save a judge from Hell. When sentencing a convicted felon to death, if he does so “out of malice or from pleasure in the shedding of human blood … [he] commits a mortal sin because of his evil purpose. But if it is done from a love of justice, the judge does not sin in condemning him to death.”[10] Emotion must be built into the performance of the law. The righteous judge should be anxious when approaching judgment to ensure his emotional constitution is directed towards love rather than spite.

The appropriate response to God’s anger is fear; but he is not the only authority figure to be feared. So, too, should English subjects fear their king. This is apparent in Bracton’s discussion of rape. The treatise takes a harsh stance on the crime, warning rapists that in England, not only might they lose their life, members, and property,

even his horse shall to his ignominy be put to shame upon its scrotum and its tail, which shall be cut off as close as possible to the buttocks. If he has a dog with him, a greyhound or some other, it shall be put to shame in the same way; if a hawk, let it lose its beak, its claws and its tail.

The only way to avoid death and emasculation (of both rapist and his animals) is to beg the king’s permission to marry his victim. The story the authors recount to explain how this “dispensation” came into being makes clear that this option was open only to “persons of consequence,” but to do so, one had to negotiate with the king’s wrath in mind. 

The authors then launch into their story. During the reign of King Robert the Pious (d.1031), a count whose name is withheld from the record offered hospitality to a jester and “his beautiful wife.” When the jester died, the count took advantage of the wife’s vulnerability to press himself upon her “against her will.”  Eventually, she managed to escape her captivity and head straight to Paris where she threw herself at King Robert’s feet and begged him to intervene. He summoned the count to court “to clear himself if he could.” Yet

[w]hen the count had heard the king’s words, fearing the king’s anger for his wicked deed, he answered that he could not attend at that time, but, on the advice of his friends, in order to appease the king’s anger, advised him that he would give him two hundred pounds in Beauvais money and ten costly horses, and the jester’s wife a hundred pounds, and would give her in marriage to a wealthy burgess or knight who would keep her respectably all the days of her life.

The count’s offer was met with “derision”: to sell the count “immunity from punishment for such great wickedness” would mean betraying God and his trust in the king as his “righteous vicar.” Thus, “in great wrath,” the king assembled his army and began preparations for war. Fearing the king might actually go through with it, the barons begged the king to give them a week so that “they might bring the count to seek his mercy.” They convinced the count to come to court where he, too, attempted to fall at the king’s feet but the king “turned away saying that he should either submit to justice or leave the court.” Only the outcry of the barons helped the king to see reason: he would show the count mercy, but not in the way that he had hoped. The count would marry the jester’s widow, “for she was fair and wise,” and give alms to the church and the poor. The authors then tell us, “This arrangement, made by such persons of consequence, grew and because of such high authority that it is now in many places regarded as a customary.”[11]

This story and its inclusion in the treatise are instructive. As God’s representative here on earth, the king’s anger is righteous: wrath may be a deadly sin, but not for the king, providing he wielded it as a weapon against human sin. The count’s wickedness, in conjunction with his unwillingness to meet the king when summoned warranted anger: such blatant disobedience was a breach of the political hierarchy. Only the supplications of the barons and the count together could move the king from anger to mercy; in doing so, the king handed down a wise decision that would make the jester’s widow financially stable, deter the count from any future bad behavior, and force him to atone for his sins through charitable giving. Without the king’s anger, and his willingness to go to war if obliged, would the count have agreed to the king’s terms?  Probably not. In this instance, anger, fear, and mercy paved the way for acceptance.

Much like Hudson suggested, emotion also appears as a problem that needs to be solved before it has the chance to derail justice. Judges are warned that lords sometimes accuse their tenants of crimes out of greed, or hatred; jurors swear not to declare a defendant guilty “through fear or love or hate”; even judges might be suspect, and thus are encouraged to recuse themselves in instances of fear, hatred, or love.[12] But more frequently, emotion was used as a guideline to help judges discern whether an act was criminal or excusable. This is true in instances of self-defense: the man who kills with “premeditated hatred” is guilty; but the man “with sorrow of heart,” backed into a corner and unable to escape otherwise who kills to save himself or his family is not liable.[13] Emotion plays a key role also in suicide: the criminal who self-slays out of “fear” of being caught has his lands and goods forfeit to the crown; but the man who “slays himself in weariness of life or because he is unwilling to endure further bodily pain … does not lose his inheritance, just his movable goods.”

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What, then, has the history of emotion to offer the study of medieval law?  Bracton’s jurists attempted to create a legal regime founded on logic and reason; doing so meant that sometimes the treatise perceived emotion to be an obstacle to justice. But emotion was also integral to the proper running of the legal system precisely because we are human and sometimes need to be goaded into the correct emotional responses. Anger and fear function as coercive tools to deter justices and jurors from succumbing to corruption. Yet love is just as powerful: what does common law call days of reconciliation, when enemies come together to have their disputes resolved through arbitration? Lovedays. Emotion is everywhere.

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[1] Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, 2006).

[2] J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought and Art in France and the Netherlands in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (London and Tonbridge, 1922), 26-27.

[3] Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined (London, 2011).

[4] The exceptions to the rule: Paul R. Hyams, Rancor and Reconciliation in Medieval England (Ithaca, 2003); Elizabeth Papp Kamali, “The Devil’s Daughter of Hell Fire: Anger’s Role in Medieval English Felony Cases,” Law and History Review 35.1 (2017): 155-200. Kamali has been particularly attentive to the history of emotions and uses it as a lens in much of her research.

[5] John Hudson, “Emotions in the Early Common Law (c.1166-1215),” The Journal of Legal History 38.2 (2017), 145, 151, 133.

[6] Bracton Online, ed. Charles A. Donahue and Thomas R. Bruce (Harvard Law School Library, 2003), 2.20.

[7] Bracton Online, 2.22.

[8] Bracton Online, 2.22.

[9] Bracton Online, 2.303-304.

[10] Bracton Online, 2.340.

[11] Bracton Online, 2.418-19.

[12] Bracton Online, 2.404, 405; 4.280.

[13] Bracton Online, 2.340.