Making a Collective Emotional Body

Abstract

Asking how emotional communities are born and how an emotional event may help something new to emerge, this chapter analyses the episode when Francis of Assisi celebrates Christmas in the little town of Greccio according to the earliest sources--first, his biography written in 1228-29 by Thomas of Celano, and then in a few early vitae and iconographic evidence. Doing so, it suggests that shared emotional events, through the work of emotions and senses, create a new emotional body, which can either last, or remain ephemeral. Studying the way different sources treat the event gives the occasion to observe what can be called a Franciscan politics of emotion.