In the hierarchical societies of late medieval Iran and Central Asia, different norms and behaviors were expected from different members of society. Certain people were lauded for having particular emotions and acting upon them, while others might be chastised for the same behavior. Understanding how these emotional norms were articulated and maintained gives us a sense of the social and gender hierarchies of the time. Following Barbara Rosenwein’s concept of emotional communities, the permissibility and even virtuous deployment of certain emotions for some members of society marked them as separate from other groups. We get a sense of the types of authority these elite emotional communities—Sufis in the case of this paper—tried to wield amongst a general populace, alongside how they conceived the proper ways that they as Sufis should feel and behave. This paper will examine the language of emotion, particularly sorrow and ecstasy, as it applied to exemplary Sufi saints. It will focus on Abd al-Rahman Jami’s Nafahat al-Uns min Hadarat al-Quds, a comprehensive biographical dictionary of Sufis, composed in the fifteenth century. Jami was not only an eminent Persian poet, but also a member of the Naqshbandi Sufi order. He was a politically, culturally, and religiously influential figure in the Timurid Empire. The way he constructs the emotional feats of saints in the hagiographic stories in his work reflects forms of cultural training that was important to both the target community—here the Sufis—and the larger society in general. His framing of emotional norms will be compared to those presented in the more popular pious hagiographies found in fifteenth-century shrine visitation guides for the cities of Herat, Samarkand, and Bukhara. These works employ simpler language and have different ways of speaking about the emotional virtues of saints. Additionally, they have added sections prescribing proper emotional behavior on the part of lay pilgrims. When reading both Jami’s elite hagiography alongside popular shrine-based hagiography, a deeper view of emotions comes to light. This paper will examine the different ways that the language of sorrow and ecstasy is deployed in these texts to draw conclusions on how these emotions were used to draw boundaries between social groups and between the genders. Further, it will try to make clear how these emotional norms informed ideas of morality in fifteenth-century Iran and Central Asia.