The History of Emotions and Middle English Literature

Abstract

Critics have long addressed questions of affect, feeling and emotional expression in Middle English literature, but only in recent years has their interest begun to take theoretical form under the rubric of the ‘history of emotions’. Current critical attitudes to the study of emotions in the past have been shaped substantially by the work of historians, whose focus on emotion in documentary sources has been influenced in turn by research in the fields of sociology, anthropology, psychology, linguistics and, increasingly, the cognitive sciences. How might existing methodologies situating emotions historically drive new approaches in Middle English literary studies? This article contends that existing analyses of Middle English literature relating to affective discourses might fruitfully be brought into conversation with new multidisciplinary forms of research into past emotions. We survey current critical trends in both the history of emotions and in Middle English literature. Case studies of two late Middle English literary texts, the anonymous Sir Orfeo and Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, show how the last fifty years of scholarship has addressed emotions in Middle English literature. We conclude by suggesting future directions that might be taken up by critics of medieval English literary texts and genres to develop further the relationship between literary studies and the history of emotions.

Ambiguity and beauty: Japanese-German cross-cultural comparisons on aesthetic evaluation of haiku poetry.

“…For example, Obermeier et al (2016) stated that although most poems are harder to read than newspapers, such cognitive ambiguity 3 should be expected in poems. Similarly, it has been suggested that ambiguous emotions that impact appreciation are evoked in English poetry (Downes & McNamara, 2016). Based on these observations, in this study, we selected cognitive and emotional ambiguity from the broad concept of ambiguity that is considered important in haiku and poetry and examined how each of these are related to beauty.…”

Medieval multilingualism and the expression ofemotion:fearin theGawain-poet's texts

“…Indeed, there was much change amongst the terms for emotion from the Old to the Middle English period: over 2,000 of the Old English terms in this field became obsolete early in the Middle English period and an almost equal number were first recorded during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Diller 2014: 114) 3 . Given the impact of language contact on the development of this lexico-semantic field, there have been recent calls to bring together the findings in the study of historical emotions and medieval multilingualism in order to gain a better understanding of ‘the range of emotional utterance in Middle English texts’ (Downes & McNamara 2016: 451).…”

Drinking Sorrow and Bathing in Bliss: Liquid Emotions in Chaucer

“…3 There are several studies of emotion in Middle English literature; Downes and McNamara (2016) have offered an initiatory exposé on this methodology. In the same journal issue, an article deals with embodied practice in personified emotions (Flannery, 2016) and a whole book has been dedicated to the study of emotions in Arthurian literature (Brandsma, Larrington, Saunders, 2015).…”