Provides a new, intersectional investigation of affects, feelings, and emotions in late Middle English literature.

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?

What do we know of the emotional life of the Middle Ages? Though a long-neglected subject, a multitude of sources – spiritual and secular literature, iconography, chronicles, as well as theological and medical works – provide clues to the central role emotions played in medieval society. In this work, historians Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy delve into a rich variety of texts and images to reveal the many and nuanced experiences of emotion during the Middle Ages – from the demonstrative shame of a saint to a nobleman's fear of embarrassment, from the enthusiasm of a crusading band to the fear of a town threatened by the approach of war or plague. Boquet and Nagy show how these outbursts of joy and pain, while universal expressions, must be understood within the specific context of medieval society. During the Middle Ages, a Christian model of affectivity was formed in the ‘laboratory’ of the monasteries, one which gradually seeped into wider society, interacting with the sensibilities of courtly culture and other forms of expression. Bouqet and Nagy bring a thousand years of history to life, demonstrating how the study of emotions in medieval society can also allow us to understand better our own social outlooks and customs.

This highly original book is both a study of emotional discourse in the Early Middle Ages and a contribution to the debates among historians and social scientists about the nature of human emotions.

The first part of the book covers the theories of the emotions of Plato and Aristotle and later ancient views from Stoicism to Neoplatonism (Ch. 1) and their reception and transformation by early Christian thinkers from Clement and Origen to Gregory of Nyssa, Cassian and Augustine (Ch. 2). The basic ancient alternatives were the compositional theories of Plato and Aristotle and their followers and the Stoic judgement theory. These were associated with different conceptions of philosophical therapy. Ancient theories were employed in early Christian discussions of sin, Christian love, mystical union, and other forms of spiritual experience. The most influential theological themes were the monastic idea of supernaturally caused feelings and Augustine's analysis of the relations between the emotions and the will. The first part of Ch. 3 deals with the twelfth-century reception of ancient themes through monastic, theological, medical, and philosophical literature. The subject of the second part is the theory of emotions in Avicenna's faculty psychology, which, to a great extent, dominated the philosophical discussion of emotions in early thirteenth century. This approach was combined with Aristotelian ideas in later thirteenth century, particularly in Thomas Aquinas' extensive taxonomical theory. The increasing interest in psychological voluntarism led many Franciscan authors to abandon the traditional view that emotions belong only to the lower psychosomatic level. John Duns Scotus, William Ockham and their followers argued that there are also emotions of the will. Chapter 4 is about these new issues introduced in early fourteenth-century discussions, with some remarks on their influence on early modern thought.

Envy, irritation, paranoia—in contrast to powerful and dynamic negative emotions like anger, these non-cathartic states of feeling are associated with situations in which action is blocked or suspended. In her examination of the cultural forms to which these affects give rise, Sianne Ngai suggests that these minor and more politically ambiguous feelings become all the more suited for diagnosing the character of late modernity. Along with her inquiry into the aesthetics of unprestigious negative affects such as irritation, envy, and disgust, Ngai examines a racialized affect called “animatedness,” and a paradoxical synthesis of shock and boredom called “stuplimity.” She explores the politically equivocal work of these affective concepts in the cultural contexts where they seem most at stake, from academic feminist debates to the Harlem Renaissance, from late-twentieth-century American poetry to Hollywood film and network television. Through readings of Herman Melville, Nella Larsen, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Hitchcock, Gertrude Stein, Ralph Ellison, John Yau, and Bruce Andrews, among others, Ngai shows how art turns to ugly feelings as a site for interrogating its own suspended agency in the affirmative culture of a market society, where art is tolerated as essentially unthreatening. Ngai mobilizes the aesthetics of ugly feelings to investigate not only ideological and representational dilemmas in literature—with a particular focus on those inflected by gender and race—but also blind spots in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Her work maps a major intersection of literary studies, media and cultural studies, feminist studies, and aesthetic theory.

What do we know of the emotional life of the Middle Ages? Though a long-neglected subject, a multitude of sources – spiritual and secular literature, iconography, chronicles, as well as theological and medical works – provide clues to the central role emotions played in medieval society. In this work, historians Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy delve into a rich variety of texts and images to reveal the many and nuanced experiences of emotion during the Middle Ages – from the demonstrative shame of a saint to a nobleman's fear of embarrassment, from the enthusiasm of a crusading band to the fear of a town threatened by the approach of war or plague. Boquet and Nagy show how these outbursts of joy and pain, while universal expressions, must be understood within the specific context of medieval society. During the Middle Ages, a Christian model of affectivity was formed in the ‘laboratory’ of the monasteries, one which gradually seeped into wider society, interacting with the sensibilities of courtly culture and other forms of expression. Bouqet and Nagy bring a thousand years of history to life, demonstrating how the study of emotions in medieval society can also allow us to understand better our own social outlooks and customs.

Before Emotion: The Language of Feeling, 400-1800 advances current interdisciplinary research in the history of emotions through in-depth studies of the European language of emotion from late antiquity to the modern period. Focusing specifically on the premodern cognates of ‘affect’ or ‘affection’ (such as affectus, affectio, affeccioun, etc.), an international team of scholars explores the cultural and intellectual contexts in which emotion was discussed before the term ‘emotion’ itself came into widespread use. By tracing the history of key terms and concepts associated with what we identify as ‘emotions’ today, the volume offers a first-time critical foundation for understanding pre- and early modern emotions discourse, charts continuities and changes across cultures, time periods, genres, and languages, and helps contextualize modern shifts in the understanding of emotions.

This volume explores the relationship between representation, affect, and emotion in texts for children and young adults. It demonstrates how texts for young people function as tools for emotional socialisation, enculturation, and political persuasion. The collection provides an introduction to this emerging field and engages with the representation of emotions, ranging from shame, grief, and anguish to compassion and happiness, as psychological and embodied states and cultural constructs with ideological significance. It also explores the role of narrative empathy in relation to emotional socialisation and to the ethics of representation in relation to politics, social justice, and identity categories including gender, ethnicity, disability, and sexuality. Addressing a range of genres, including advice literature, novels, picture books, and film, this collection examines contemporary, historical, and canonical children’s and young adult literature to highlight the variety of approaches to emotion and affect in these texts and to consider the ways in which these approaches offer new perspectives on these texts. The individual chapters apply a variety of theoretical approaches and perspectives, including cognitive poetics, narratology, and poststructuralism, to the analysis of affect and emotion in children’s and young adult literature.