Written by Nadja Dixon
Dr. Kirsty Day joined Retrospect for an interview to discuss her upcoming research, as well as medieval gender, religion, and emotion. Here we offer an edited transcript of the conversation.
Would you mind introducing yourself and telling me what your academic focus is?
My name is Kirsty Day; I’m a lecturer and historian of medieval religion and gender, broadly speaking. In the past, I’ve worked on [the] relationship between noble and royal families and women who joined the Franciscan order in various forms in the thirteenth century in East-Central Europe. I’m interested in integrating East-Central Europe more into the historiography of Latin Christendom. More recently I’ve been interested in the gender of the Pope and how we can use methodologies from the history of emotion to be able to access this.
How did you get into history? How did this love of knowing the past spark for you?
I really think that it was something that was nurtured at school. I had a fantastic history teacher; he really loved history for history’s sake, so the notion that history was important in and of itself was always at the forefront of his teaching. And I think this maybe sounds a bit pretentious, but it’s good to be honest; I’m not from an academic background, my parents didn’t go to university. I think it’s important to be able to say that.
I’m wondering if any particular books also influenced your interests, specifically in medievalism or just history in general?
I can remember, for an essay that I wrote in my first year of university, reading about the lives of the virgin martyrs, of all things. I was not a religious person and not really interested in the Middle Ages, but I remember being struck by how engaging they were for me as somebody who was obviously not of the same time as the intended audience. Despite not being religious at all, I felt compelled to empathize with the person who the hagiographer was writing about. Before, I wouldn’t have necessarily thought of a saint’s life as a really interesting kind of medium. There was so much interesting social and political commentary that I had assigned to religious history and nothing else.
Being a history lecturer, what do you think makes an effective social or cultural historian?
Something that I hope I can impart on students a little bit is that social and cultural historians are sensitive to their subjects. There are ethics and morality involved in reproducing the subject’s lives and experiences; the history must be made as accurately as possible for audiences, even if this means it doesn’t always match up with what the audience wants or thinks it will be. Sometimes we’re presenting lives and experiences in a way that might make the audience uncomfortable. The best social and cultural historians have to be okay with this. Sometimes it is crucial to shatter illusions. There are a lot of illusions, misconceptions, and preconceptions about the Middle Ages that need to be shattered. And the very best ones can write really well. I think that’s a massive skill for the historian, to be able to tell stories well; this is true of all historians, but I think cultural and social historians have to grapple with these kinds of questions a bit more just owing to the nature of what they study, and the stakes involved for people.
That has got to be a difficult balance, being willing to shatter illusions knowing what the audience is likely thinking and feeling about a period of time, a person, or an idea, while also presenting to your audience something they’re going to be willing to and interested in consuming – how do you balance these two?
It is really hard. I find this in writing on the history of emotions; it’s not necessarily morally tricky in and of itself, but medieval people had different words for anger than we do today. There’s a bit of debate if we should use the “anger” word that medieval people used and actually think about whether this is really anger. Generally speaking, I suppose the balance is: will the modern audience for whom I’m writing, which is primarily academic, understand it and feel like they have a stake in it, while also remaining true to the medieval form of the word or what it means in context? All this while making clear that there is a massive range of distinctions that people made with anger. On the gender history side of things, I think this is a bigger point. History is really important for history’s sake and with increasing cuts to higher education in the arts and the humanities, there should be an ultimate end goal in which I think about why anyone cares about the gender of this particular pope. I try to write in mind of what this insight means in the grander scheme of things. What does this mean for women’s ability to access positions of authority within the church? What are the longer kinds of effects?
How do you go about your research? What’s your most used methodological approach?
I find myself drawn to conceptual approaches that help to fight the urge that we have as humans to sort into categories of good-bad, genuine-not genuine, positive-negative, and so on. I really like Monique Scheer’s work on emotions as an embodied practice. I remember reading her work and thinking, everything makes sense now. She argues that how one experiences and expresses emotion and how emotion changes over time results because of how we name them and are socialized to express them. It’s more importantly about how we practice emotion and how changes in practice induce emotions that make them really interesting for history. Practices are not just performative, they shape emotion, they generate emotions in the body. This doesn’t make them more or less genuine; determining whether an emotion is genuine or not is also not really the most interesting question we ask of our source material. A great text by Peter the Chancellor in the 12th century, for example, lists a number of painful or uncomfortable positions with which to sit in, in order to induce the tears that were necessary for contrition. When you demonstrate contrition for sin, it’s supposed to be an emotional response, and tears are the best way of signaling. From a modern perspective, we go “That’s completely fake, that’s ridiculous.” What Scheer forces us to focus on is the practice of how history thought to generate “correct feeling,” i.e. how sitting in painful positions was thought to generate this. This can tell us about medieval attitudes towards emotions and the body and their relationship to faith.
Your research is a nice mix of gender, religion, and emotion – what’s the common thread between the three?
It’s important to study religion, emotion, and gender histories together because they are all things that are presented to us as being fixed, stable, and as sitting outside of history. Gender changes over time; it’s too tricky to be a medievalist and argue that it is not malleable and can’t change. The way people think about bodies and the way people present bodies and present themselves changes radically over time. The same thing with emotions; emotions sometimes exist in the past and sometimes drop out of existence. The way we express and practice emotions changes. God has a history; Christ has a history. It’s important, though, to also be sensitive and realize for some people God is the beginning and the end, that he/she/it does sit outside of history. Recognizing these are all interlinked is really helpful, because it’s not just a modern thing, this is something medieval people realized, too.
I noticed a shift in your publications from gender and religious research to emotion history. What prompted the shift?
What got me there was a suggestion from someone and what made me stay was that it’s so fascinating. The history of emotion has the benefit of learning from other fields, it goes interdisciplinary really well. It will cite insights from psychology, anthropology, and sociology; it’s had the chance to learn from gender history, histories of medicine and science, etc. I find that really exciting and generative. So, it doesn’t matter what you work on, a lot of the theories and things people will be reading will be the same. It’s really easy for medievalists to speak to modernists or people who work on China to speak to people who work on France because the people who have been involved in developing the field have been very careful that there are a shared set of reference points. Even if you don’t necessarily agree, we will be able to refer to the same things.
Can you shed any light on your research or projects coming up?
I’m co-authoring an article with a colleague at Aalborg University. It’s looking at anger in papal writing of Pope Innocent III. We’re trying to trace how this particular pope used anger and explore the distinctions he makes when he refers to his own anger and divine anger. I’m also finishing my book on Franciscan women in Eastern Europe that looks at the connections between these women and royal and noble families of that region. The book is about grappling with questions of marginality and religion, but also making a bigger commentary on how we marginalize people and regions.
For any students starting their journey on a historian’s path or in the process of their journey, what advice might you have for them?
You don’t stop being a historian when your degree ends. If you’re wondering what to do next, broadening what you think a career in history might look like might be quite important. I know this may sound silly because I’m about to give some advice, but be wary of advice not based on experience; we all tell people what we wish we would have done rather than what we actually did do and how we got here. A career in history might not be what you think it is. I’m really fortunate to be able to teach and research, and I love doing it. A lot of the job, though, is preparing and securing funding, answering emails, a lot of marking, a lot of doing administrative tasks, writing big grant applications, and so on. For me that’s worth it, it means I get to do what I really love, but it’s a part of the job I don’t think people always realize. Also, work is not the only route to or always the best route to feeling satisfied that you’re doing interesting things with history.
Many thanks to Dr. Kirsty Day for a riveting conversation about the importance of ethical history making and the medieval history of religion, emotion, and gender.
Dr. Kirsty Day is Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Edinburgh specializing in how women and gender shaped the central-late medieval Church. Her work includes cultures of power and authority, the Franciscan Order, gift theory, the History of Emotions, the papal curia, and East-Central Europe.
This interview was conducted and transcribed by Nadja Dixon.
Feature image credit: Day, Kirsty. “Historical Research: Approaches to History.” PowerPoint Presentation, 1 February, 2024.
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