for the early middle ages but also for the emerging field of the history of emotions. Barbara H. Rosenwein evaluates with superb intelligence the strengths and weaknesses of the various methods that have been applied in this field, and fashions an approach of her own that will serve as a useful model for many other researchers. Using this carefully constructed method, she is able to bring to life for us, as no other scholar has, the emotional communities whose existence is implied in the scattered texts and epigraphs of the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries. A real tour de force."-William M. Reddy, William T. Laprade Professor of History and Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University "With her original book Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages, Barbara H. Rosenwein opens new perspectives on the history of emotions. This includes a persuasive critique of Norbert Elias's influential notion of the civilizing process. Proposing that people lived (and live) in emotional communities, each having its own particular norms and emotional expressions, Rosenwein has written a groundbreaking book that is highly important to historians as well as to social scientists working on the history of emotions."-Ingrid Kasten, Freie Universitt Berlin "With this book Barbara Rosenwein has made the emotions an essential component of our approach to the changing social history."-Jacques Le Goff "Thoroughly discrediting the view of many scholars that medieval people, in contrast to modern ones, were 'emotionally childish, impulsive, and unrestrained,' Barbara H. Rosenwein ably develops and deploys the concept of