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 Barbara Zimbalist Glenn D. Burger and Holly A. Crocker, eds. Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. x, 249. $99.99 cloth; $29.99 paper; $24.00 e-book. Given the incredible scholarly energy responding to the affective turn—and the corresponding attention to affective piety in medieval studies—it is perhaps surprising that a book such as Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion has not appeared before now. As the editors deftly argue, the evolving fields of affect theory and the history of emotions require nuanced consideration of their different effects and forces, and medieval literature not only enables critical reflection on contemporary affect theory but also generates new understandings of premodern affectivity and emotion. The introduction, anchored in a reading of Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, takes up the distinction between the titular terms of inquiry. It argues for the importance of the secular in the understanding of premodern emotions and affect, and while, like many of the essays collected here, it draws on well-known work such as Sarah McNamer’s, it departs from the primarily religious orientation and singular, chronological teleology of such studies. Declaring that their “intersectional premodern affect/emotion studies seeks, first, to historicize affect” and thus speak specifically to the affective turn writ large, the editors aim “to challenge an assumption that the history of emotions should function as the privileged method of investigation for feeling before the modern period” (3). As the eight chapters in the collection subsequently demonstrate, medieval literature provides a uniquely rich departure-point from which to analyze the historical and social construction of any particular emotion or affect, and that focus both unites the volume and acts as its major critical intervention. The first two chapters, Stephanie Trigg’s “Weeping like a Beaten Child: Figurative Language and the Emotions in Chaucer and Malory” and Patricia DeMarco’s “Imagining Jewish Affect in the Siege of Jerusalem,” nicely counterpoise each other in their secular and religious investments. Trigg compares the unusual trope of her title as it appears in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale and Malory’s Morte Darthur, ultimately arguing that it signals gendered meaning depending on context, and reveals “a complex network of proverbial feeling, translation, genre instability and gender anxiety, across the medieval period and beyond” (42). She shows how the formal capacity of figurative language reveals medieval emotions by surveying early [End Page 291] medieval instances of the trope, its proverbial character, and its transmission in early modern literature. DeMarco adds genre and audience to the terms of analysis as she traces masculine affect in the Siege of Jerusalem. Arguing that the poem both contrasts and complicates religious difference between Jewish and Christian leaders, DeMarco shows how the Siege dehumanizes Jews as “a critical foil against which the masculine Christian subject is defined in the poem” (57). Considering distress, pleasure, joy, anger, and pity, DeMarco reads the poem’s construction of Christian masculinity through affective agency figured as the mastering of the passions and the exercise of a habitus that mediates and contains emotional performance. These chapters’ shared call for reading both historically and contextually anticipate the essays that follow, as each in turn explores specific, often secular, and sometimes overlooked instances of literary, embodied, or performed feeling. Chapters 3 and 4 analyze the intersection of gender and embodiment with affect and emotion. Crocker’s “Engendering Affect in Hoccleve’s Series” offers one of the clearest discussions of terminology in the volume, distinguishing affect from emotion in medieval texts by showing how “affects are not simply pre-emotions, but refer to a broad range of somatic, psychic, and spiritual intensities that frequently remain unnamed” (71). Crocker examines how affect allows Hoccleve to create an embodied, “socially intelligible masculinity in late medieval London” with a moral, ethical valence, contingent on a social context that sanctions approved acts of violent aggression and fulfills a regulatory function in relation to women. In Middle English literature, then, ethical masculinity meant not only controlling feelings associated with women through the exercise of...