Periodic Reporting for period 1 - EmbPatristics (Crafting Emotion: The Late Antique Panegyris as Embodied Experience (ca. 330-ca. 500))
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2021-04-01 al 2023-03-31
EmbPatristics set out to produce a working model for identifying the emotional profile of complex human experiences. Because affect was shown to influence human decision making, it is essential to develop the instruments for assessing how individual and collective experiences engage affect. To this end, a nuanced analysis of all three components of cognition was necessary, since body, mind, and affect are intertwined in our interaction with the world. Applying methodologies from across the historical and cognitive sciences, EmbPatristics analysed in detail a multiple-day collective experience that was designed by Christian bishops in the 4th-century CE integrating theoretical and empirical know-how on human perception, memory, and emotions that had been accumulated for almost a millennium in Graeco-Roman culture. The experience’s constitutive parts were identified, as well as how they engaged participants. This produced an affective blueprint of the experience. Finally, how the experience’s features related to what its designers knew about human cognition was assessed, in order to identify the effects they sought to achieve.
Emotions became an important research topic in the last two decades, with scholars speaking of an “affective turn.” Theories regarding the evolutionary origin of emotions and their relationship with the body and mind have been proposed. In parallel, cultural historians pointed out the instrumental role societies play in managing emotions by establishing categories that allow us to make sense of what we feel and by indicating ways to react. Thus, it is now established that emotions are interior phenomena caused by specific events and whose experiencing is shaped by biological factors and socio-cultural norms. Of particular relevance are recent findings regarding the human capacity to experience emotions in groups and of the role collective actions play in synchronising affect. This opens the way for us to study the emotional eliciting and synchronising dimension of rituals, as well as to inquire whether they had been designed as mechanisms for emotional regulation. In the last few years, it has become known that the computer algorithms that select which news we see—thus shaping our perception of the world, political decisions, and social behaviour—are calibrated to elicit negative emotional responses in order to keep viewers engaged. Thus, awareness of how emotions are used to steer individuals and communities has grown but there lacked the methodology to identify the emotional profile of complex experiences and how it can be traced back to the intentions of the designers. Focused on an exceptionally well-documented historical context, EmbPatristics provides both a methodology and a model for such analyses, thus opening the way for a better understanding of the role emotions played in human behaviour.
EmbPatristics’s overall objectives were to, on the one hand, deconstruct and analyse as an embodied experience—i.e. engaging body, mind, and affect—the annual celebration of martyrs as performed in fourth- and fifth-centuries CE Asia Minor and, on the other, develop a methodology that allows us to relate the features of complex experiences to individual and collective emotional responses. Both objectives were reached.
Emotions became an important research topic in the last two decades, with scholars speaking of an “affective turn.” Theories regarding the evolutionary origin of emotions and their relationship with the body and mind have been proposed. In parallel, cultural historians pointed out the instrumental role societies play in managing emotions by establishing categories that allow us to make sense of what we feel and by indicating ways to react. Thus, it is now established that emotions are interior phenomena caused by specific events and whose experiencing is shaped by biological factors and socio-cultural norms. Of particular relevance are recent findings regarding the human capacity to experience emotions in groups and of the role collective actions play in synchronising affect. This opens the way for us to study the emotional eliciting and synchronising dimension of rituals, as well as to inquire whether they had been designed as mechanisms for emotional regulation. In the last few years, it has become known that the computer algorithms that select which news we see—thus shaping our perception of the world, political decisions, and social behaviour—are calibrated to elicit negative emotional responses in order to keep viewers engaged. Thus, awareness of how emotions are used to steer individuals and communities has grown but there lacked the methodology to identify the emotional profile of complex experiences and how it can be traced back to the intentions of the designers. Focused on an exceptionally well-documented historical context, EmbPatristics provides both a methodology and a model for such analyses, thus opening the way for a better understanding of the role emotions played in human behaviour.
EmbPatristics’s overall objectives were to, on the one hand, deconstruct and analyse as an embodied experience—i.e. engaging body, mind, and affect—the annual celebration of martyrs as performed in fourth- and fifth-centuries CE Asia Minor and, on the other, develop a methodology that allows us to relate the features of complex experiences to individual and collective emotional responses. Both objectives were reached.
EmbPatristics began with an analysis of textual and material sources on the studied experience. This produced a database of references that allowed us to better understand the experience. It also shed light on the stable, recurrent aspects of the panegyris and on the flexible ones, thus drawing attention to the important role played by local practices. Next, we assessed how the experience was advertised through oral, written, and visual strategies that created expectations that influenced how it would be experienced. Then, we considered the symbolism the various features of the experience had in the culture of the time, in order to reconstruct what the experience meant to those who attended. Recurrent features of the experience were then discussed in order, considering how each engaged body, mind, and affect by addressing biological (e.g. walking, sleep deprivation), cultural (e.g. analogies), and individual (e.g. healing) aspects. At this stage, how the culture of the designers thought the specific and combined actions impacted participants and what current research in the cognitive sciences revealed about these actions was considered. After considering the panegyris in general, the approach was used to analyse two case studies, namely the annual celebration of the Apostles Philip (Hierapolis, Asia Minor) and Paul (Philippi, Macedonia). Virtual reconstructions were produced of the two sites and of how participants interacted with them during the celebration. Finally, we considered how the various categories of audience (e.g. men, women, children, ill persons) interacted with the sites in the context of the celebration, thus shifting the focus from reconstructing a unique, idealised perspective, to keeping with the experiences' attested diversity.
Partial results were disseminated through the project website—which contains in open-access the database of references to panegyria and the virtual reconstructions produced of the two sites—as well as through congress panels, conference papers, and invited lectures. Non-specialists were informed through posts on social media, in press, and open-access presentations.
The analysis produced a number of consequential results. First of all, it produced a model analysis that enables us to identify the emotional profile of complex individual and collective experiences, and that keeps with our current understanding of the mechanics of human cognition. This model will be made available through the main outcome of the initiative, namely a monographic study, as well as in summarised form through an open-access article. In addition, EmbPatristics shed light on the existence and defining features of a thus-far ignored category of Christian shrine, namely relicless martyria that enclosed the spot where one was martyred but did not contain corporeal remains. It also showed that the late antique bishops who redesigned most Christian collective experiences carefully staged them and shaped their perception by controlling their ante and post factum image. The analysis showed that the figure, shrine, and celebration of martyrs were adapted to match those of local polytheistic cults bishops hoped the martyr’s cult would uproot. Finally, EmbPatristics documented the bishops’ repurposing of theoretical and empirical knowledge on human cognition that had been gathered by the Greek and Roman philosophical schools and polytheistic sanctuaries, thus shedding light on the transmission of ancient knowledge and drawing attention to the role it played in the spread of Christianity.
Partial results were disseminated through the project website—which contains in open-access the database of references to panegyria and the virtual reconstructions produced of the two sites—as well as through congress panels, conference papers, and invited lectures. Non-specialists were informed through posts on social media, in press, and open-access presentations.
The analysis produced a number of consequential results. First of all, it produced a model analysis that enables us to identify the emotional profile of complex individual and collective experiences, and that keeps with our current understanding of the mechanics of human cognition. This model will be made available through the main outcome of the initiative, namely a monographic study, as well as in summarised form through an open-access article. In addition, EmbPatristics shed light on the existence and defining features of a thus-far ignored category of Christian shrine, namely relicless martyria that enclosed the spot where one was martyred but did not contain corporeal remains. It also showed that the late antique bishops who redesigned most Christian collective experiences carefully staged them and shaped their perception by controlling their ante and post factum image. The analysis showed that the figure, shrine, and celebration of martyrs were adapted to match those of local polytheistic cults bishops hoped the martyr’s cult would uproot. Finally, EmbPatristics documented the bishops’ repurposing of theoretical and empirical knowledge on human cognition that had been gathered by the Greek and Roman philosophical schools and polytheistic sanctuaries, thus shedding light on the transmission of ancient knowledge and drawing attention to the role it played in the spread of Christianity.
Thus far, researchers attempted to reconstruct the emotional implications of simple experiences. EmbPatristics integrated the latest finds in the history of emotions and cognitive sciences with the analysis of primary textural, material, and visual sources, and cutting-edge digital tools to produce an in-depth, nuanced analysis of a complex, multiple-day experience. This opens the possibility to study other experiences, identify their emotional profiles, and consider whether it was intentional or spontaneous. As such, EmbPatristics opens a new stage in our capacity to study past and present experiences.