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Power and passion Emotional communities in seventh-century Francia Power and the sacred have been convenient categories with which to explore early Medieval politics. Emotions are here proposed as a new and useful category of analysis. The old paradigms of emotions history elaborated by Johan Huizinga and Norbert Elias, which saw the Middle Ages as childish and emotionaly out of control, are no longer viable. Cognitivists and social constructionists have shown that emotions are pre- or non-verbal judgments that are shaped by their societies. This new view allows us to postulate “emotional communities”, each with their own favoured emotional vocabularies and modes of expression. Two different emotional communities of the seventh century are explored. The first formed at the Neustrian court of Clothar II and his son Dagobert; the second represented the factions of the last twenty or so years of the century. Their radical differences shed new light on both power and the sacred in the early Middle Ages.