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Meeting ID: 839 3181 8191
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The ‘Civilisational Process’: Do Emotions Evolve? If emotional norms change over historical time, can we talk about a progressive refinement of emotion, a betterment of affective capacities and manifestations? In his grand synthesis of the 1930s, Norbert Elias argued for a civilisational process taking European society from a childish, unrestrained medieval emotionality, to the cool-headed reasonableness of modernity. His vision has had many critics, yet it has proven to be a very successful narrative, especially for the larger public, confirming popular ideas about a benighted pre-modernity contrasting with the benefits of the Enlightenment project. But beyond Elias, we find a recurring tendency to assess emotions on a moral scale even among researchers of emotion (e.g., shame-based cultures are developmentally inferior to guilt-based cultures). Should the history of emotions be guided by a moral compass – if so, on what basis, and using which methods?

Reading: Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Cornell University Press, 2006), pp. 5-25

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This event is organized within Emotions Through History Research Group in the framework of the Grammars of Emotion: Shame and the Social Economy of Honour in Medieval Heroic Literatures research project supported by Romania’s Recovery and Resilience Plan | Ministry of European Investment and Projects – Government of Romania | #NextGenerationEU – European Union (Postdoctoral Research PNRR-III-C9-2022 – I9) and hosted by New Europe College.