Facing Up to the History of Emotions

Abstract

This special issue of postmedieval brings together several strands of medieval and medievalist work in the history of emotions, with a focus on literary, historical and cinema studies. It asks how we may best 'face up' to work that has been done already in these fields, and speculates about work that might yet be done, especially by medievalists working across medieval and postmedieval sources. In the idiom 'facing up,' we evoke the impulse to assess and realize the place of medieval studies in the burgeoning field of emotions research. We also conjure our conceptual focus -the expressive human faceas a complex and intriguing source for reading emotions in the past. Whether the face is taken as textual or visual, literal or conceptual, represented or embodied, it is, like the emotions, critical in Western understandings of humanity itself.Conceptually, psychologically, and artistically, the face is perceived as being at the forefront of many human interactions and emotional practices. These range from the larger, universalizing claims of Emmanuel Levinas, for whom the face is the 'primordial signifier' that guarantees human relationships with each other and with the divine (Levinas, [1961(Levinas, [ ] 1979, to the dizzying arrays of facial emoticons that compete for our attention on our smart phones when we Ó