Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion

Glenn D. Burger, Holly A. Crocker

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781108471961
• eBook ISBN: 9781108634854
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Representations of feeling in medieval literature are varied and complex. This new collection of essays demonstrates that the history of emotions and affect theory are similarly insufficient for investigating the intersection of body and mind that late Middle English literatures evoke. While medieval studies has generated a rich scholarly literature on 'affective piety', this collection charts an intersectional new investigation of affects, feelings, and emotions in non-religious contexts. From Geoffrey Chaucer to Gavin Douglas, and from practices of witnessing to the adoration of objects, essays in this volume analyze the coexistence of emotion and affect in late medieval representations of feeling.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Weeping Like a Beaten Child: Figurative Language and the Emotions in Chaucer and Malory
• Chapter 2 Imagining Jewish Affect in the Siege of Jerusalem
• Chapter 3 Engendering Affect in Hoccleve’s Series
• Chapter 4 Becoming One Flesh, Inhabiting Two Genders: Ugly Feelings and Blocked Emotion in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale
• Chapter 5 Accounting for Affect in the Reeve’s Tale
• Chapter 6 Affect Machines
• Chapter 7 Witnessing and Legal Affect in the York Trial Plays
• Chapter 8 Affecting Forms: Theorizing with the Palis of Honoure
• Afterword: Three Letters
• Bibliography
• Index