Politics of emotions and empathy walls in thirteenth-century Livonia

This chapter studies the representations and (self-)attributions of emotions to and of different social groups in two pieces of historiography penned in thirteenth-century Livonia, the Chronicle of Henry of Livonia and the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle. The processes of conversion and colonisation of Livonia in the thirteenth century durably shaped the relations between the native population and the arriving missionaries, settlers and crusaders, and formed the religious and ethnic identities of both groups. In order to access the emotional landscapes of thirteenth-century Livonia this study uses the only two locally penned historiographical accounts: The Chronicle of Henry of Livonia and the anonymous Livonian Rhymed Chronicle. The overuse of vro generates so much noise in this emotion’s data that it is difficult to isolate a meaningful signal. However, we can conveniently look at its less frequent but similarly attributed cognate, vreuden.