Body Talk: Gestures of Emotion in Late Medieval England

Abstract

AbstractThe affective turn in medieval studies has produced insightful scholarship into the embodied nature of late medieval religious life. While considerable attention has been paid to emotions, senses and feelings, little dedicated focus has been pinpointed on gestures and how they figure in such phenomenological perspectives. This essay seeks to illuminate some of the means by which bodily motions, particularly those mimicking biblical figures, were perceived to heighten the emotional responsiveness of devout fifteenth‐century Christians. The kinesthetic empathy detailed in the work of Reginald Pecock, Nicholas Love and Margery Kempe underlines the widespread contemporary belief in the transformative power of performance. It highlights the need to consider motion, and particularly gestural imitation, as a primary mode of emotional engagement with Christ and his followers.