The importance of emotional words embedded in religious texts is evidenced as well in Catherine Peyroux’s historical study of the seventh-century Frank- ish figure of St. Gertrude. Working from the hagiographic Life of St. Gertrude, Peyroux offers interpretation that is narrow in one sense—it is an inquiry into the meaning of one word, furor—but that is fruitfully expansive in its attempt to build from the significations of that word a view of a shared culture of emotion, the “affective world of Frankish nobility.” While exploring various medieval lin- guistic idioms indicating anger, she pointedly asks why Gertrude flew into such