ABSTRACT
Starting with a brief discussion of the prime importance of emotions in Christian anthropology and how their expression is related to the moral economy of salvation, this chapter investigates the way historians can apprehend emotions in the religious sources of medieval Western Christendom. The first section is concerned with textuality as a spiritual and affective path toward salvation, and the second section is concerned with the affective components of religious practice. We are interested in the role of relics as materialisations of the sacred, as they both convoke and provoke emotions. The chapter ends with a discussion of the complex notion of ritual and the multiple ways by which emotional communion may be carefully staged.
