Evangelic Provocation: Location of Anger in Medieval Conversion Narratives

Abstract

This article explores the range of cultural scripts made available to medieval hagiographers when they depicted anger in accounts of mission and conversion. The focus is communities with prominent “lapsed” Christians, who then become targets of re‐conversion. By reconstructing templates of emotional change and redemption associated with anger in these narratives, we are better able to see how mission hagiographers reconciled extended, politicized and violent Christianization processes with sudden, dramatic conversions. The use of these emotional templates can also be located in the immediate circumstances and longstanding communal pressures of the monastic communities that produced these conversion narratives.