Text is one of the most valuable and plentiful sources of information available to scholars interested in medieval emotion. The medieval world may have vanished centuries ago, and its human subjects with it, but a wealth of textual traces remains: sermons, romances, poems, plays, treatises, songs, inscriptions, graffiti, and much more. But how is emotion communicated and shaped by these different textual forms? That is the question at the heart of this collection of essays, which aims to open up our sense of what texts can contribute to the history of emotions by considering the variety of ways that texts can function as vehicles--media--for emotion. The essays in this volume examine how literary and dramatic texts, chant, manuscript annotations, and material inscriptions mediate emotion--how they bring it about, communicate it, process it, and shape it via forms that act on various senses. Ranging between the eighth and fifteenth centuries and comprising contributions from scholars of musicology, Old English and Old Norse studies, material culture, Middle English literature, drama, and manuscript studies, the essays contained in this volume serve as a window onto the complex relationship between emotions and different textual forms.

"Text is one of the most valuable and plentiful sources of information available to scholars interested in medieval emotion. The medieval world may have vanished centuries ago, and its human subjects with it, but a wealth of textual traces remains: sermons, romances, poems, plays, treatises, songs, inscriptions, graffiti, and much more. But how is emotion communicated and shaped by these different textual forms? That is the question at the heart of this collection of essays, which aims to open up our sense of what texts can contribute to the history of emotions by considering the variety of ways that texts can function as vehicles - media - for emotion. The essays in this volume examine how literary and dramatic texts, chant, manuscript annotations, and material inscriptions mediate emotion - how they bring it about, communicate it, process it, and shape it via forms that act on various senses. Ranging between the eighth and fifteenth centuries and comprising contributions from scholars of musicology, Old English and Old Norse studies, material culture, Middle English literature, drama, and manuscript studies, the essays contained in this volume serve as a window onto the complex relationship between emotions and different textual forms." - Publisher's website.

Rhetoric is an engine of social discourse and the art charged with generating and swaying emotion. The history of rhetoric provides a continuous structure by which we can measure how emotions were understood, articulated, and mobilized under various historical circumstances and social contracts. This book is about how rhetoric in the West, from Late Antiquity to the later Middle Ages, represented the role of emotion in shaping persuasions. It is the first book-length study of medieval rhetoric and the emotions, coloring that rhetorical history between about 600 CE and the cusp of early modernity. Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, as in other periods, constituted the gateway training for anyone engaged in emotionally persuasive writing. Medieval rhetorical thought on emotion has multiple strands of influence and sedimentations of practice. The earliest and most persistent tradition treated emotional persuasion as a property of surface stylistic effect, which can be seen in the medieval rhetorics of poetry and prose, and in literary production. But the impact of Aristotelian rhetoric, which reached the Latin West in the thirteenth century, gave emotional persuasion a core role in reasoning, incorporating it into the key device of proof, the enthymeme. In Aristotle, medieval teachers and writers found a new rhetorical language to explain the social and psychological factors that affect an audience. With Aristotelian rhetoric, the emotions became political. The impact of Aristotle's rhetorical approach to emotions was to be felt in medieval political treatises, in poetry, and in preaching.

Over the last twenty-five years, the ‘history of emotion’ field has become one of the most dynamic and productive areas for humanities research. This designation, and the marked leadership of historians in the field, has had the unlooked-for consequence of sidelining literature — in particular secular literature — as evidence-source and object of emotion study. Secular literature, whether fable, novel, fantasy or romance, has been understood as prone to exaggeration, hyperbole, and thus as an unreliable indicator of the emotions of the past. The aim of this book is to decentre history of emotion research and asks new questions, ones that can be answered by literary scholars, using literary texts as sources: how do literary texts understand and depict emotion and, crucially, how do they generate emotion in their audiences — those who read them or hear them read or performed?

Analysis of how emotion is pictured in Arthurian legend.

The Erotics of Grief considers how emotions propagate power by exploring whose lives are grieved and what kinds of grief are valuable within and eroticized by medieval narratives. Megan Moore argues that grief is not only routinely eroticized in medieval literature but that it is a foundational emotion of medieval elite culture. Focusing on the concept of grief as desire, Moore builds on the history of the emotions and Georges Bataille's theory of the erotic as the conflict between desire and death, one that perversely builds a sense of community organized around a desire for death. The link between desire and death serves as an affirmation of living communities. Moore incorporates literary, visual, and codicological evidence in sources from across the Mediterranean—from Old French chansons de geste, such as the Song of Roland and La mort le roi Artu and romances such as Erec et Enide, Philomena, and Floire et Blancheflor; to Byzantine and ancient Greek novels; to Middle English travel narratives such as Mandeville's Travels. In her reading of the performance of grief as one of community and remembrance, Moore assesses why some lives are imagined as mattering more than others and explores how a language of grief becomes a common language of status among the medieval Mediterranean elite.

An examination of how emotions were practised and performed through Old English texts.Scholarship is increasingly interested in investigating concepts of emotion found in Old English literature. This study takes the next step, arguing that both heroic and religious texts were vehicles for emotional practice - that is, for doing things with emotion. Using case studies from heroic poetry (Beowulf, The Battle of Brunanburh and The Battle of Maldon), religious poetry (Christ I and Christ III) and homilies (selections from the Vercelli Book, Blickling Homilies and the works of Wulfstan), it shows via detailed close readings that texts could be used to act out emotional styles, manage the emotions arising from specific events, and negotiate relationships both within social groups and with God. Meanwhile, a chapter on the Old English Boethius explores how the control of unruly emotions is theorized as the transfer of attachment from the things of this world to the things of the divine. Overall, the volume offers new angles on the social functions of genres and questions of reception and performance; and it gives insight into how early medieval people used emotions to relate to their world, temporal and eternal. angles on the social functions of genres and questions of reception and performance; and it gives insight into how early medieval people used emotions to relate to their world, temporal and eternal. angles on the social functions of genres and questions of reception and performance; and it gives insight into how early medieval people used emotions to relate to their world, temporal and eternal. angles on the social functions of genres and questions of reception and performance; and it gives insight into how early medieval people used emotions to relate to their world, temporal and eternal.