Drawing on a range of interdisciplinary approaches and innovative methodologies, this collection contributes ground-breaking new scholarship in the burgeoning field of emotions studies by examining how medieval and early modern Europeans communicated and 'performed' their emotions. Rejecting the notion that emotions are 'essential' or 'natural', this volume seeks to pay particular attention to cultural understandings of emotion by examining how they were expressed and conveyed in a wide range of historical situations. The contributors investigate the performance and reception of pre-modern emotions in a variety of contexts - in literature, art, and music, as well as through various social and religious performances - and in a variety of time periods ranging from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries.
These studies provide both case-studies of particular emotions and emotional negotiations, and examinations of how their categorisation, interpretation, and meaning has changed over time. The contributors provide new insights into the expression and performance of pre-modern emotions from a wide range of disciplinary fields, including historical studies, literature, art history, musicology, gender studies, religious studies, and philosophy. Collectively, they theorise the performativity of medieval and early modern emotions and outline a new approach that takes fuller account of the historical specificity and cultural meanings of emotions at particular points in time. This volume complements the earlier volume 'Understanding Emotions in Early Europe', edited by Michael Champion and Andrew Lynch (2015).
Author(s): Philippa Maddern, Joanne McEwan, Anne M. Scott (eds.)
Series: Early European Research, 11
Publisher: Brepols
Year: 2018
Language: English
Pages: 296
List of Illustrations vii
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction: Performing Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Worlds / Philippa Maddern, Joanne McEwan, and Anne M. Scott xiii
Part I. Emotional Performativity in Music, Literature, and the Visual Arts
Emotion, Time, and Music at Cambrai Cathedral / Matthew S. Champion 3
'Affecting glory from vices': Negotiating Shame in Prostitution Texts, 1660–1750 / Emily Cock 27
Pageant, Spectacle, Dread, and Love in 'Piers Plowman', Brueghel's 'Triumph of Death', and the Good Samaritan Window of Bourges Cathedral / Anne M. Scott 51
Affected Bodies and Bodily Affect: Visualizing Emotion in Renaissance Plague Images / Louise Marshall 73
Part II. Social Performance
The 'Slime of Vice' and the 'Passions of the Mind': Emotional Histories in the Anglo-Norman World / Lindsay Diggelmann 107
Courting Nassau Affections: Performing Love in Orange-Nassau Marriage Negotiations / Susan Broomhall and Jacqueline Van Gent 133
'[D]id ringe at oure parish churche... for joye that the Queene of Skotts... was beheaded': Public Performances of Early Modern English Emotions / Dolly MacKinnon 169
Part III. Religious Performance
Emotion, Place, and Memory at the Royal Abbey of St. Denis / Megan Cassidy-Welch 185
Boosting the Emotional Power of New Liturgy: The Hidden Sides of Things in Giotto's 'Crib at Greccio' / Richard Read 201
Discursive Affect and Emotional Prescriptiveness: On the 'Man of Sorrows' in Fourteenth-Century Italian Painting / Lachlan Turnbull 221
Martin Luther's Heart / Susan C. Karant-Nunn 243
Part IV. Recreating Emotional Performance
'Laughing at Death': Emotional Excess in 'The Duchess of Malfi' in Performance / Steve Chinna 267
Index 287
