Jilana Ordman

Master's essay examines expressions of fear, methods for its mitigation, and the social context and consequences of its expression among men who took part in the First Crusade to Jerusalem.  This essay explores primary sources’ disparities regarding fear and analyzes the varied reactions they portrayed to those who expressed this emotion. I hope to illuminate the social conventions for the expression of fear in a late eleventh-century military context, including the influences of social class and gender identity on the expression of this emotion.

This dissertation explores two areas of human experience that have been criticized as potentially dangerous and uncontrollable almost consistently since Late Antiquity: violence and those who engage in it, and emotions. However, it will be seen that in the Western Mediterranean and Southern and Central Western Europe, from Late Antiquity through the early-Twelfth Century, these areas were carefully controlled and directed by complex philosophical and religious systems. Polytheist Roman, and later patristic Christian, authors who wrote within classical and late antique philosophical and religious systems created the accepted norms for the undertaking of organized violence - that which was fought under recognized leadership and undertaken for an acceptable moral or ethical goal. These authors also constructed norms for acceptable experiences and expressions of emotions such as anger, fear, courage, joy, sorrow and religious devotion.