ABSTRACT
Western intellectuals and Christian theologians in the medieval and early modern periods understood human deviancy through their theories of the emotions. As they theorized, deviant thoughts, deviant beliefs and deviant actions ultimately resulted from misguided love. In their theory of love, love should be directed towards the immaterial God who created all material things. Deviancy, in contrast, resulted from love directed towards created things instead of their creator. Correct love had a spiritual orientation, while bad love had a corporeal one. The spiritual orientation was straight, a direct line between created human and the creator God; the corporeal orientation was inverted, a turning of the created back into itself. 1 This framework, or ideology, of love and its two essential orientations was enormously influential, shaping ideas about supposedly aberrant social groups and individuals. In it, love acted as both an emotion and as an emotional governor, directing and shaping other emotions and experiences linked to the emotions. In particular, the orientation of love was an essential element of successful hermeneutics, as only those who love rightly can ultimately read past the outer appearances of things and of words to understand inner meanings.
