Emotion, Affect, and Feeling in Late Medieval English Devotion

Sponsoring Organization(s)

Special Session

Organizer Name

Jasmin Miller; Spencer Strub

Organizer Affiliation

Univ. of California-Berkeley; Univ. of California-Berkeley

Presider Name

Jasmin Miller

Paper Title 1

Julian of Norwich's Active Humilitas

Presenter 1 Name

Chase Padusniak

Presenter 1 Affiliation

Princeton Univ.

Paper Title 2

"Starke as an Image": Images, Bodies, and Performance

Presenter 2 Name

Clara Wild

Presenter 2 Affiliation

Yale Univ.

Paper Title 3

Fire, Sweetness, and Song in the Inner Sensorium: Constructing Interiority in Richard Rolle's Incendium amoris

Presenter 3 Name

Stephen Armstrong

Presenter 3 Affiliation

Eastman School of Music

Paper Title 4

Trading Pearls and Roses: Understanding Metaphor through Affect in Pearl

Presenter 4 Name

Annika Pattenaude

Presenter 4 Affiliation

Univ. of Michigan-Ann Arbor

Start Date

12-5-2018 10:00 AM

Session Location

Schneider 1225

Description

The past decade has seen a burgeoning of interest in the place of emotion in late medieval English literature and religious writing. Underlying this turn to emotion are two broader modes of thought: the history of emotions and affect theory. Both historians of the emotions and contemporary affect theorists carefully observe distinctions between the cognitive and precognitive elements of emotional experience. But only recently have late medievalists begun to investigate the distinctions between feeling, affect, and emotion in Middle English, Latin, and Anglo-French literature and devotional writing.

This panel provides an opportunity for scholars to think more critically about these terms and the distinctions they encode, focusing in particular on devotional texts and their writers, commentators, and readers.

Spencer A. Strub