In each time and place there are multiple emotional communities. They are not usually isolated from one another, though they may function fairly independently. They often know about each other, as John Paston II knew about the court of Burgundy; as in that case, they interact. Sometimes certain “emotional arenas,” to borrow Mark Seymour's term, bring an assortment of emotional communities together. Samuel Pepys and his wife found themselves at a “mock-wedding,” where one Mrs. Carrick and one Mr. Lucy were freed “to perform as husband and wife.” Pepys testily reported on “a great deal of fooling among them that I and my wife did not like.”

Pepys' reference to his wife raises two questions touched upon only glancingly in this book. Did women form their own emotional communities? Were women, whether in their own communities or as part of larger groups, expected to feel differently from men – especially to be “more emotional” than men? To the first question, the answer is not yet in. It must be sought in the particular sources of particular women's groups. Perhaps female monasteries in twelfth-century England had very different emotional norms from Aelred's Rievaulx. But what should we say of the women's monasteries that admired and tried to imitate the Cistercian lifestyle? At the present state of our knowledge, we simply do not know.

But we do have an answer to the second question: it varied considerably. The primarily male emotional community of the seventh-century Neustrian courtiers imagined women as histrionic, and to some extent, as we see in the letters of Herchenefreda, mother of Desiderius of Cahors, women did express their emotions more volubly than men. But at the court of Toulouse in the twelfth century, women were portrayed as calculating, indifferent to true love, and generally incapable of love themselves. In Gerson's writings, women were “softer” than men and more prone to tears, a “fact” of which he disapproved. But at the very time Gerson was writing, Burgundian chroniclers highly appreciated male tears and bodily gestures. Across the channel, the Pastons, both women and men, were temperate in emotional expression.