Text is one of the most valuable and plentiful sources of information available to scholars interested in medieval emotion. The medieval world may have vanished centuries ago, and its human subjects with it, but a wealth of textual traces remains: sermons, romances, poems, plays, treatises, songs, inscriptions, graffiti, and much more. But how is emotion communicated and shaped by these different textual forms? That is the question at the heart of this collection of essays, which aims to open up our sense of what texts can contribute to the history of emotions by considering the variety of ways that texts can function as vehicles - media - for emotion. The essays in this volume examine how literary and dramatic texts, chant, manuscript annotations, and material inscriptions mediate emotion - how they bring it about, communicate it, process it, and shape it via forms that act on various senses. Ranging between the eighth and fifteenth centuries and comprising contributions from scholars of musicology, Old English and Old Norse studies, material culture, Middle English literature, drama, and manuscript studies, the essays contained in this volume serve as a window onto the complex relationship between emotions and different textual forms.
Author(s): Mary C. Flannery (ed.)
Series: Early European Research, 13
Publisher: Brepols
Year: 2018
Language: English
Pages: 296
List of Illustrations vii
List of Abbreviations ix
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction: Medieval Emotion and Texts as/in Media / MARY C. FLANNERY 1
Moved by Music: Problems in Approaching Emotional Expression in Gregorian Chant / DANIEL J. DICENSO 19
Swelling in Anger: Somatic Descriptors in Old English and Old Norse Literature / SARAH BACCIANTI 51
Lancelot in the Friend Zone: Strategies for Offering and Limiting Affection in the 'Stanzaic Morte Arthur' / AMY BROWN 75
Interfaith Empathy and the Formation of Romance / MARCEL ELIAS 99
'Think of me, I think of you. Love me, I love you': The Role of Runic Sticks in the Formation and Maintenance of Emotional Bonds in Medieval Norway (c. 1000–1300) / KIMBERLEY-JOY KNIGHT 125
Spiritual Comfort and Reasonable Feeling: Annotating 'The Chastising of God’s Children' in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson C 57 / MARLEEN CRÉ 149
The Materiality of Metaphors: Why the 'Affectus' Needs Shoes in 'The Doctrine of the Hert' / SARAH BRAZIL 177
Guided Emotional Response in 'A Talkyng of the Love of God' and 'The Tretyse of Love' / DIANA DENISSEN 195
Playing for Emotion: Middle English Abraham and Isaac Plays / CHARLOTTE STEENBRUGGE 215
‘The Weder is Went’: Emotional Form in a Middle English Carol / SEETA CHAGANTI 239
Afterword / RITA COPELAND 263
Index 273
