ABSTRACT
Barbara Rosenwein has made the subject of emotions very much her own, above all in 2006 in her Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages and, most recently, in Generations of Feeling of 2015. Already, however, she had made a claim to the topic in Anger’s Past, the collection of essays which she edited in 1998. In all these publications Gregory of Tours, Venantius Fortunatus, and also the letter writers of seventh-century Francia, have major roles. Perhaps slightly lower down the cast of characters, although still significant, have been Columbanus and his biographer, Jonas of Bobbio. Columbanus’s somewhat limited emotional vocabulary (amor, caritas, diligo, laetitia, timor) has been noted,1 as indeed has the cool tone of Jonas and his age.2 For Rosenwein Jonas’s version of emotional virtue is to be found in Columbanus’s rejection of his mother, with the Gospel words: “He who loves his father and mother more than me is not worthy of me.”3 John of Réomé’s parallel rejection of his mother, which involves the same Biblical quotation, in Jonas’s Vita Iohannis is also noted.4 For Rosenwein, Jonas downgrades family feeling.5 Coming from a historian for whom family and friendship mean a good deal one might perhaps detect a slight note of disapproval.
