Abstract
AbstractBreath and breathlessness are flashpoints in medieval literary texts. Medieval medical theories, rooted in classical thought, emphasise the bodily spirits and in particular, the ways that motions of the ‘vital spirit’—closely connected with breath—cause powerful physical responses that write emotions on the body in sighs, swoons, and even death. Physiological theory was complemented by theological notions of pneuma, the Spirit of divinity and life. The movement of breath plays a key role in depictions of emotion from love to grief, and in visionary or mystical experience. This essay explores breath and breathlessness in a range of English secular and devotional literary texts: popular romance writing, the medically alert fictions of Chaucer, and visionary works including the Revelations of Divine Love of Julian of Norwich and the spiritual autobiography of Margery Kempe. In all these works, concepts of the vital spirits and the role of breath in emotion are central. The play of breath underpins and shapes depictions of romantic love, explorations of the boundary between life and death, and ideas of spiritual revelation, creating narratives of profoundly embodied, affective experience.
Highlights
Therwith the sorwe so his herte shette That from his eyen fil there nought a tere, And every spirit his vigour in knette, So they astoned or oppressed were
By visions of Jesus and Mary, falls down to the ground, crying out loudly. Such descriptions seem part and parcel of the conventions and excesses of medieval writing: love-sickness, madness, longing sighs, and visionary swoons. They speak to medieval understandings of breath and breathlessness, and the physiological models of emotion that underpin these, in ways that go far beyond convention
The realisation of embodied being in medieval writing may be foreign in its workings, yet the meanings it conveys concerning the profound connections between breath, feeling, and consciousness remain powerfully and vividly relevant
Summary
Therwith the sorwe so his herte shette That from his eyen fil there nought a tere, And every spirit his vigour in knette, So they astoned or oppressed were. Breath and breathlessness become central to medieval understandings of feeling and emotion through the concept of the ‘vital spirits’ (pneuma/spiritus ), to which breath is integral These ideas take up Galenic models and Arabic extensions of them, to envisage the heart itself as ‘breathing’, as the vital spirits move in and out.. Avicenna presented this vital force enabling the drives in mystical terms as ‘a divine emanation’ comparable to light (7.1.488) His model, was firmly cardiocentric: while he adopted Galen’s view of the brain as essential to physiology, he followed Aristotle in placing the heart as origin of the life force, ‘the one single breath which accounts for the origin of the others’. The heart of Christ and the heart of the lover were in many ways analogous, infused by the Spirit and profoundly wounded by the spirits, breathing out tears and sighs
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