In recent years historians and literary scholars have turned in large numbers to the study of emotions and mind. Pioneering studies by Barbara Rosenwein, William Reddy, Thomas Dixon and others have been succeeded by large-scale collaborative projects and research centres. Such a burgeoning of work challenges current scholarship to assimilate and evaluate what has been done so far. In Emotion and Medieval Textual Media the editor has worked hard to turn a multi-authored collection into a single project, with a strong sense of its methodological contribution. The volume contains not one but two overviews, one in the editor's introduction and one in an afterward supplied by Rita Copeland. The collection is framed through ideas of emotion as practice, drawing on sociological theory in the tradition of Bourdieu, and concepts of performativity developing out of the thought of J.L. Austin. While some contributors are more invested in this theoretical model than others, together their studies exemplify a range of ways of relating textual media to emotional practice. In addition, individual essays will be of interest to scholars interested not so much in emotions as in Middle English devotional literature, runic literacy, mystery plays, Old English, Old Norse, or lyric poetry.
In her introduction Mary C. Flannery draws on the work of William Reddy, Sarah McNamer, Stephanie Trigg, and Monique Scheer to argue that textual media are not representations intervening between the historian and actual emotional experience but "tools and vehicles for emotion" (2). Carruthers has alerted us to the "craft of thought" enabled by medieval texts and art, and both she and McNamer point to the importance of artistic form: "the surfaces and forms of an artefact...are the means by which practitioners of memory, meditation, and also emotion can practice these crafts" (8). The essays that follow offer case studies in how formal analysis can contribute to the history of emotions, with subgroups addressing "how medieval writers sought to put emotions into words in different genres...how physical and metaphorical materiality shaped textual constructions of medieval emotion; and...how medieval texts were used to produce emotion in different contexts" (11). The introduction is a lucid and helpful account of an approach with which the present reviewer is in full sympathy.
The first of the essays turns to the barriers to studying emotion in a particular medium, Gregorian chant. Daniel J. DiCenso argues chant is an excellent resource for emotion's history because medieval authorities frequently refer to the emotional potency of music, but he identifies seven "specious barriers" to focusing on emotion, including long-standing scholarly assumptions about how medieval music works (for example, that text and melody are not closely related), the association of emotional readings with faith-based rather than scholarly discourses, and a suspicion of emotionality in church music. The latter part of the essay offers a review of work available so far, especially on text-music relationships, and argues for a pluralistic approach to chant that would acknowledge it is not all the same and was produced by different emotional communities. This is an intriguing glimpse of a rich field of study.
Sarah Baccianti's essay compares portrayals of anger in Old English and Old Norse, uncovering parallels but also substantial differences between how these literatures approach the physicality of emotion. In Old English interior swelling and boiling in anger issues in exterior action, especially violent action; in Old Norse there is little explicit attention to interior feeling, but emotions are evident when they are involuntarily manifested through often startling physical symptoms, such as blood bursting out of the ears or swelling of the body. In Old English it is not shameful for a man to express emotion through tears or cries but in Old Norse apparently it is. I am not convinced by the suggestion that the physicality of emotion in these sources is an argument against social constructionism (57), but certainly the notion of emotion as practice outlined in the introduction needs to be nuanced carefully when applied to cultures that conceived of anger as bodily boiling and swelling.
Amy Brown's playfully-titled "Lancelot in the Friend Zone" contrasts the negotiation between Lancelot and the Maid of Astolat in the French Prose Vulgate and the Stanzaic Morte Arthur. In the former, the Maid tricks Lancelot into carrying her sleeve, but in the latter Lancelot himself offers to bear her token out of a love short of the love he feels for Guinevere, implicitly a form of friendship. Brown explores the areas of overlap and demarcation between the languages of love and friendship and delicately uncovers a relationship that is suggested but not fulfilled in the Stanzaic Morte. It is a useful reminder of how romance can open out possibilities beyond its central tropes, and a welcome addition to the criticism on this still under-studied text.
Continuing the focus on romance, Marcel Elias shows how Middle English adaptors of Charlemagne romances use emotion language to shift or guide audience response to Saracen and Christian characters. In reshaping their sources they exemplify a textual culture that facilitates reworking and variation (Elias appeals here to the work of Zumthor and Cerquiglini), while the connection of emotion language with evaluation is contextualised in terms both of medieval humoral theory and contemporary media theory.
Kimberley-Joy Knight's contribution brings us close to people's handling of emotions through literate practices in their daily lives with its examination of love-messages carved as runic inscriptions on sticks or bones in medieval Norway. While all the other essays in the book focus on literary texts and their uses, this one looks at ephemeral and personal communications; the small objects on which the inscriptions were carved were portable and easily concealed and can suggest hidden or clandestine transactions.
The next three essays all examine late medieval devotional treatises and may conveniently be discussed together; all illuminate the resources deployed by authors and compilers to shape affective piety. Marleen Cré examines annotations in a copy of The Chastising of God's Children in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson C. 57, arguing that "the manuscript page is the medium for the practice of feeling the compiler wants to teach...readers" (171). The treatise is one that advocates "reasonable" passions, that is, ones moderated and directed by reason; on the one hand it extolls the sweetness of communion with the divine, but on the other hand it warns against despair, and it relates virtuous feleing to the shared life of the church, not individual ends. The annotators actively engage with this by marking up passages apparently for copying as well as performative sections such as prayers. Sarah Brazil provides a fascinating and detailed exposition of metaphors of feet and shoes in The Doctrine of the Hert, including the representation of the affectus as a foot; embodied knowledge proves important to the appreciation of teaching about how affections must proceed from the right alignment of the will. Diana Denissen's examination of two devotional compilations further illuminates embodied knowledge. Her first focus, A Talking of the Love of God, gives prominent place to what Caroline Walker Bynum calls the "theme of the body," with its sensual emphasis on sweetness of sound and taste (feet turn up again here, interestingly--the treatise describes kissing and sucking the blood from Christ's feet--and so does music, providing a link back to DiCenso's essay). The second text, The Tretyse of Love, advocates moderation rather as does The Chastising of God's Children; its secular patroness is not expected to imitate the suffering of Christ but to alleviate the suffering of others. However, the compilers' comments in both texts make of them guides for how to feel as well as how to act; in the case of The Tretyse this is within a framework of collaborative reading and feeling in a household.
Charlotte Steenbrugge's reading of six Middle English Abraham and Isaac plays finds a tension between the standard exegesis of this biblical episode and the emotions portrayed on stage. While Abraham is generally taken to be a type of God giving his son for mankind's sins, and this interpretation is underscored in the York play by the use of an adult Isaac and in the Chester play by the inclusion of an expositor who explains the meaning, the theme is an obviously poignant one and even the York play provides space for the sorrow and confusion of the characters. Steenbrugge suggests these plays may have functioned "as a kind of safety valve for latent doubts that some member of the audience may have harboured about God's justice and benevolence towards mankind" (236).
Seeta Chaganti offers a dense formalist analysis of the lyric "Þou sikest sore". She both uses and critiques Sara Ahmed's model in The Cultural Politics of Emotion: Ahmed's emphasis on how emotions circulate between "nodal point[s]" helps Chaganti show how emotion in the lyric moves between Christ, Mary and the reader, but the lyric exposes a lack in how Ahmed deals with time. "Þou sikest sore", according to Chaganti, "reveals microclimates of temporality, unexpected and shifting sensations of temporal interval and pacing that accommodate the complexity of emotional experience" (260). This complexity embraces the encounter with the manuscript page itself, as Chaganti shows how red lines on the page mimic the bloody scratches in the text.
Finally, in her afterword, Rita Copeland again draws attention to the issue of form, making the striking observation that medieval theorizations of the soul, the passions or the cardinal sins often seem to have very little to say to how medieval writers provoke or engage emotions in practice (267). Those who work on literature--or runic inscriptions, or music--can contribute by "insisting on the opacity of media" (267), the need to examine them on their own terms and for their own sake.
In sum, this is a well-edited and rewarding collection. It has most to say to how textual compilation, adaptation, copying, and annotation can scaffold emotional practice, especially affective piety. Any collection, especially one like this that emerges from a conference and thus has an element of serendipity in its contents, can be criticised for omissions. I would rather highlight the way the essays that might be characterised as outliers point to additional dimensions. In particular, the suggestion of resistance and conflict brought out by Steenbrugge, the focus on music from DiCenso, and the real-life strategies so vividly conjured by Knight, indicate that we must never over-simplify our ideas of medieval emotional communities; while Baccianti not only flies the flag for Old English and Old Norse, but reminds us of the crucial contributions of historical linguistics.