IN HER PIONEERING BOOK, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages, Barbara H. Rosenwein suggests the term ‘emotional communities’ to describe ‘groups in which people adhere to the same norms of emotional expression and value – or devalue – the same or related emotions’. She notes that such emotional communities are not mutually exclusive, but may co-exist and change over time. None of these communities will have been fixed and stable – any more than such ideological systems ever are – but they will nevertheless have provided a frame of reference to give credence and significance to emotional behaviour and have subtly shaped emotive responses. Rosenwein coins the term to identify and categorise the presumed emotions exhibited and felt by people in the Middle Ages; that is emotions that can be deduced from their artefacts.

While Rosenwein seeks the historicised emotions of medieval peoples I would like to posit a slightly different concept, one that is not focused on the actual emotions experienced by peoples inhibiting those communities, but rather on the emotive coding apparent in the literary products produced by those medieval communities, which I shall refer to as ‘emotive literary identities’. Admittedly, historians seeking the emotive life of medieval men and women will by necessity seek it through source materials, including texts, but the emphasis and the goal of the historian differ from that of the literary analyst. While my approach is based on Rosenwein's concept of emotional communities, it departs from it in its specific focus on literary products, i.e. on narrative material and the potential evidence that those materials may provide of literary emotive coding. Like Rosenwein's communities, such literary identities are based on established perceptions of emotional behaviour or expression, except that these are specific to literary works or narrative material rather than actual historical communities of people.

Emotive literary identities dictate the framework of emotional values and behavioural codes that guide the reader in the interpretation of a character's emotional behaviour or in deciphering the emotive subtext. These identities obviously reflect the emotional communities out of which they grow, but they are not restricted by them. A text's emotive coding may defy its relevant emotional community, it may subvert it or parody it or even impact it, leading to changes across time in the emotional behaviour of its readers and audiences.