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.
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Geoffrey Chaucer frequently depicts the emotions of his characters via the outward physical signs of the body, and he often does so using a discourse that draws on Galenic theories. A striking example of Chaucer's medicalized descriptions of emotion is his adaptation of the suicidal impulse associated with lovesickness. Chaucer reconstructs this motif in "The Knight's Tale" and The Book of the Duchess by altering his sources (Boccaccio, and Froissart and Machaut) to anatomize the emotional body of the suffering knight. Through the medicalized language of bodily health describing emotional upheavals, other characters and the reader are prompted to feel with and begin to understand and appropriately respond to the suffering individual. This reading shows Chaucer using moments of embodied emotional examination to teach his audience how to read, interpret, and respond to literature.
What emotions did people in the Middle Ages associate with suicide, and how did they react emotionally to the possibility or act of suicide? Although pre-modern Europe did not have a dedicated word to signify the concept of self-inflicted death, and although there is no evidence of suicide notes until the seventeenth century, we find in a range of medieval texts an interest in the act and attendant emotions of suicide. In this essay, we demonstrate how scholars might discover emotions related to suicide in two genres: English legal records and first-person life narratives. Through close attention to textual detail and recourse to wider cultural implications of emotionally meaningful contexts, we show that even the unlikeliest of texts can provide inroads to emotions related to medieval suicide. With these models we hope to encourage scholars to seek other genres and ways of reading that will help to unlock the silences of the self-murdered.keywords suicide, emotions, medieval legal records, first-person life narratives, despair, sadness, illness As scholars have noted, "suicide" is not a medieval term. 1 That it is largely the invention of the early modern era eloquently expresses how great a distance lies between our current perceptions of the social contexts surrounding suicide and how the medieval world viewed those who took their own lives. How do we begin to explore something for which a culture itself does not have a name? And if the very idea is not fully conceptualized in its own time, how can we begin to unearth the emotions that were understood to be related to suicide in the pre-modern world?We maintain that even if the concept and action of self-killing had not been condensed into a single definitive term in the Middle Ages, suicide and the issues surrounding it were nonetheless subjects of concern. 2 Furthermore, although suicide was construed as a sinful act, 3 and sometimes characterized as being instigated by the
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