This chapter gives an overview of the state of cross-disciplinary research into objects and emotions. It considers major intellectual works from the fields of archaeology, anthropology, art and design history, history, literary studies, philosophy, and psychology from the perspective of the history of emotions, in order to assess which current major directions in these fields may be most useful for those seeking to write affective histories of the material world. By investigating the critical history of objects and emotions and reflecting on the state of the field today, the authors offer an interdisciplinary frame for the essays that follow, outlining various methodologies and their implications for emotions research in the humanities in general.
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.
This article explores the therapeutic potential of narrative fiction during a global health crisis. We focus on The Decameron Project (2020), a collection of short fiction by writers from around the world, commissioned by the New York Times Magazine. The Decameron Project references the narrative framework established by Giovanni Boccaccio in the mid-14th century, when the Black Death devastated Europe. Drawing on aspects of psychoanalytic theory and principles of bibliotherapy employed since the Middle Ages, we argue that The Decameron Project offers strategies to simultaneously confront and contain the anxious mind. Storytelling, according to both Boccaccio and to the editors of The Decameron Project, is not merely a source of distraction but a means of survival.
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