This stunning fragment of a much longer prayer in a twelfth century prayerbook, probably from the female community at Nonnberg in the bishopric of Salzburg, may rightly, or so it seems, be labelled ‘emotional’, even if we would perhaps not expect this kind of expression in a monastic context. But what directs our expectations when reading such a text? What indicates that we are dealing with ‘emotions’ here? And if we are, how can we be sure that the medieval contemporaries' understanding of ‘emotions’ and their modes of expression are accessible to our modern approaches and comparable to our notions? In this chapter I want to approach these questions via a close reading of monastic source material of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.

Current debates on ‘emotions’ in the humanities, cultural studies and sciences alike are characterized by a range of different attempts to enumerate, classify and define what ‘emotions’ are; so far, though, they seem to defy a systematic definition.