Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion

Description

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.

Glenn D. Burger is Professor of English and Medieval Studies at Queens College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York, and Dean of Graduate Studies at Queens College. He has edited Hetoum's A Lytell Cronycle (1988) and (with Steven Kruger) Queering the Middle Ages (2001). He is author of Chaucer's Queer Nation (2003) and Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages (2017). Holly A. Crocker is Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. She is author of The Matter of Virtue: Women's Ethical Action from Chaucer to Shakespeare (forthcoming), Chaucer's Visions of Manhood (2007), editor of Comic Provocations: Exposing the Corpus of Old French Fabliaux (2006), and co-editor of Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debates (2014; with D. Vance Smith).

'... excellent collection ...' Barbara Zimbalist, Studies in the Age of Chaucer