Christina Bies, StEx

Norms of love in the High Middle Ages. Order, hierarchy and emotion 
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the two institutions that exercised power, the nobility and the clergy, each had their own conflicting understanding of what forms of love were conducive to order. They devised various concepts and norms that were intended to regulate how the emotion of ‘love’ was permitted to be expressed and lived, without threatening the social order. Love between married couples, the concept of courtly love, and love between friends formed distinct group cultures with their own objectives, expectations of behaviour and hierarchies. The aim of the dissertation is to investigate, using specific examples, how members of the clergy and nobility attempted to use different norms of love to regulate social order, and to politically instrumentalize it via discriminatory role expectations and (the threat of) exclusion. The first question asked is how representatives of the emotional regime defined ‘order-promoting’ and ‘order-destroying’ love; the second is what justification they used to support or reject certain forms of love; the third is how they defined their own concepts of social order for this feeling, through expectations of behaviour and constellations of power within the norms of love; the fourth is how they created their own form of norm control through the group cultures (or emotional communities) generated.
The main sources are normative texts which transmit stereotypical role expectations and internal hierarches in relation to love. Another source is letters, which give an insight into individual engagement with and reflection on normative standards. The study is localized in twelfth- and thirteenth-century France, and is primarily based on advice literature, which was widely read and can therefore be considered important for the establishment, control and violation of norms in the High Middle Ages.