If the purpose of "Speaking in Tongues" is to bridge the divide between medieval and early modern studies, then one issue that must be faced is whether there was a great change in emotions or affectivity from one period to the other. Certainly the prevailing thesis, hanging on the coattails of Norbert Elias's Civilizing Process, is that there was a great change--and it can be summed up as the transition from medieval emotionality to modern restraint.

In this paper, I take issue with that thesis by looking specifically at one form of emotionality, "affective piety." I argue that affective piety, as exemplified by Margery Kempe, continued to some degree, at least among some groups, even in the Protestant world. My focus is on the testimonials of the members of a mid-17th century "gathered church""-that is, a Puritan church-near London. Both Margery and the Puritans wrote in the vernacular, though of course that vernacular changed over time. Thus my exploration is indeed about "speaking in tongues. " I shall conclude with the thought that there are more continuities between medieval and early modern religious emotions than most historians have admitted.

Barbara H. Rosenwein is Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago. She has been at the forefront of research on the history of emotions, editing Anger's Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Cornell, 1998), and authoring Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Cornell, 2006). This talk is from a current project on the history of emotions from late antiquity to about 1700.

This event is part of a yearlong series, “Speaking in Tongues,” organized by the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh and supported by a collaborative research grant from the University of Pittsburgh’s Humanities Center. Our work on this topic seeks to bridge the divide between medieval and early modern studies by taking a long view of three questions surrounding particular uses of vernacular languages and broader processes of vernacularization in this period:

How did changes in technologies of communication, such as the rise of letterpress printing, intersect with the uses of vernacular languages?
How were the structures of "vernacular theology" transfigured during the period leading up to and following the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation?
And how does a focus on vernacularization help us to reevaluate theories and practices of translation-whether from one language to another, from one medium to another, or from one cultural sphere to another?