Gender, Emotions, and Their Manifestations in the Annales by Jan Długosz

Abstrakt

The article examines the intersection of gender and the manifestation of emotions in Jan Długosz’s late medieval historical work, Annales seu cronicae incliti Regni Poloniae. The text explores how similarities and differences between genders are portrayed in Długosz’s narrative across three key aspects. The first aspect is the depiction of grief. On the one hand, collective emotions associated with the death of a monarch played a significant role in the social life of the Kingdom of Poland. On the other hand, mourning the deaths of other individuals is often represented as a deeply personal and tragic experience, primarily experienced by women. Secondly, the significance of emotions in parenthood and marriage demonstrates that they were more important to women and closely tied to their social position. While emotions could also be important for men, their understanding of fatherhood was broader than that of motherhood. This allowed men to express parental emotions toward their subjects or followers, but they rarely directed those feelings toward their own children. In the third part, the text examines the expressions of emotions related to governance. Despite the long tradition of ira regis, which welcomed the king’s anger, Długosz treated this emotion as marginal when it came to the role in governing and much more favoured in weeping. Anger was even less significant within the repertoire of women’s emotions, and it seemed that Długosz rarely imagined them as capable of manifesting this emotion. Ultimately, the article argues that emotions were primarily associated with the social roles of men and women, and the differences in emotionality were not perceived as part of a fundamental gender distinction.