Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion ed. by Glenn D. Burger and Holly A. Crocker

Abstract

Reviewed by: Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion ed. by Glenn D. Burger and Holly A. Crocker Jennifer Sisk Glenn D. Burger and Holly A. Crocker, eds., Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 107. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. x, 249. isbn: 978-1-108-47196-1 (cloth), isbn: 978-1-108-67247-4 (e-book). $99.99 (cloth), $80.00 (e-book). This collection of essays offers sophisticated interpretations of medieval texts that foreground what the editors call the 'necessary intersectionality' (p. 2) of traditional histories of emotion, contemporary affect studies, and historicist approaches to literature. This orientation positions Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion to make valuable interventions in the scholarly realms of both medieval studies and affect studies. The volume prioritizes secular contexts, thus offering a corrective to the disproportionately large place affective piety has held for medievalists in histories of emotion. In its attention to premodern texts, the volume likewise offers a corrective to the insistent 'presentism' (p. 3) of affect studies by demonstrating again and again that medieval texts can and do represent, imply, and urge intensities of feeling that exceed culturally legible emotions. Moreover, the volume demonstrates the necessary ways that affect studies and histories of emotion must come together in any effort adequately to address the range of embodied experience we call feeling. The eight essays featured in the volume share a commitment to this work but contribute to it in refreshingly varied ways. Stephanie Trigg's 'Weeping Like a Beaten Child: Figurative Language and the Emotions in Chaucer and Malory' explores the polysemous potential of proverbial expressions by considering how the same figure of speech is used by two medieval authors to generate radically different emotional responses. Patricia DeMarco, in 'Imagining Jewish Affect in the Siege of Jerusalem' examines the text's suggestion that male aristocratic Christians in the religious wars of the Middle Ages secured their difference from Jews through the careful regulation of affect. Holly Crocker's 'Engendering Affect in Hoccleve's Series' likewise considers the regulation of affect, but from the vantage point of an individual subject's construction of masculine identity. In 'Becoming One Flesh, Inhabiting Two Genders: Ugly Feelings and Blocked Emotion in the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale,' Glenn Burger reads Chaucer's text against the background of conduct literature and the changing subject positions marriage offered to husbands and wives in late medieval England to show how the text invites readers to tap into 'subaltern, blocked emotions' (p. 99) and to stand, empathetically and affectively, 'beside the Wife' (p. 95), uneasily in between the pressures of both tradition and innovation. Brantley Bryant turns to manorial bookkeeping in 'Accounting for Affect in the Reeve's Tale' to argue that the [End Page 122] tale shares with manorial texts an interest in the affective experience of surveillance and accounting systems that quantify and objectify all things, including people. Sarah Salih's 'Affect Machines' considers how Hector's tomb in Lydgate's Troy Book generates affect in viewers, extrapolating more broadly to consider the affective work of objects in contexts of worship and thus the usefulness of descriptions of pagan devotional practices in the image wars of the later Middle Ages. In 'Witnessing and Legal Affect in the York Trial Plays,' Emma Lipton offers an intervention in the study of medieval religious drama by describing what she calls 'legal affect' (p. 158), through which we can best understand the affective work of the plays, since viewers' engagement with the plays resembles the engagement of witnesses to a trial in late medieval England, who were subject not only to individual feeling but also to socially generated emotions. Finally, Anke Bernau's 'Affecting Forms: Theorizing with the Palis of Honoure' argues that Gavin Douglas's notorious lists effectively connote affective intensities experienced by his dreamer, whose successful submission to poetic authority only leads to an ultimate goal that carries a moral imperative poetically limiting in its absoluteness. The volume's Afterword, by Anthony Bale, not only wraps up this diverse yet topically focused collection but also counts as a contribution in its own right, as it explores what we can learn about medieval affect and...