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Sara Ritchey, Naama Cohen-Hanegbi. Caring for the Living Soul: Emotions, Medicine and Penance in the Late Medieval Mediterranean., The American Historical Review, Volume 124, Issue 2, April 2019, Pages 730–731, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhz148
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Academic interest in the historicization of emotion stretches back at least to Lucien Febvre’s early twentieth-century inquiries into village life in the Franche-Comté, and it has since undergone numerous upheavals of methodology, particularly in the last decade as historians have sought to adapt insights from the cognitive sciences. Medievalists are among the vanguard of historians tapping into the layered processes of the construction of emotion, from Barbara Rosenwein’s broad theorization of emotional communities to more focused studies on specific emotional experiences such as Karl Morrison’s investigation of empathy and Esther Cohen’s analysis of pain expression. Naama Cohen-Hanegbi’s Caring for the Living Soul: Emotions, Medicine and Penance in the Late Medieval Mediterranean pushes forward the conversation with splendid clarity, deftly combining case studies of single emotions with linguistic analyses of broader medical and pastoral discourses. The resulting book exposes the role of emotions in the co-constitution of the intellectual and practical categories of medicine and religion in the late Middle Ages.
