Embodied emotions in Medieval English language and visual arts

Current Emotion Research in English Linguistics: Words for Emotions in the History of English

“…One was to classify words into different groups revealing the conceptual structure of an emotion in the course of time (Coleman, 1999; Sylvester, 1994). The other was to collect occurrences of particular words and analyze them in their context, for example in terms of which senses they represented (e.g., different senses of sorg and sár in Molina, 2005), or which conceptual metaphors occurred together with them (e.g., metaphors of fear in Díaz Vera, 2013). The third method was to collect and analyze expressions denoting an emotion in terms of which conceptual metaphor they represented (e.g., Gevaert, 2001, on anger).…”

“…The Bayeux Tapestry is an embroidered cloth which, like a medieval cartoon strip, depicts the Norman invasion of England in 1066. The intriguing thing about Díaz Vera’s study (2013), which sets it apart from other studies of fear in the history of English, is the combination of linguistic and pictorial analysis.…”

“…To continue with Old English, Díaz Vera (2013) studied responses to fear in Old English texts and in the Bayeux Tapestry. The Bayeux Tapestry is an embroidered cloth which, like a medieval cartoon strip, depicts the Norman invasion of England in 1066.…”

“…Díaz Vera (2013) divided the responses of fear into four groups, which were: escaping and hiding, freezing and paralysis, fighting and body pressure responses. The escaping and hiding responses comprised movement back, movement down, shrinking, and change of color.…”

“…The body pressure responses had to do with the metaphorical notions that the body is a container for emotions and that emotions are temperature changes . For example, Díaz Vera (2013) claimed that characters in the Bayeux Tapestry who had bulging eyes represented the metaphor emotions are fluids in a container , the emotion being fear and the container being the body. He also proposed another interpretation for bulging eyes, which was that they marked increased body heat in response to fear.…”