Understanding Emotions in Early Europe

396 Pages·2015·2.241 MB·English

by  Michael Champion, Andrew Lynch

Understanding Emotions
in Early Europe
EARLY EUROPEAN RESEARCH
Series founded by the Australian Research Council Network for
Early European Research, and now directed by The University of
Western Australia Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies.
General Editors
Andrew Lynch, University of Western Australia
Claire McIlroy, University of Western Australia
Editorial Board
Tracy Adams, University of Auckland
Emilia Jamroziak, University of Leeds
Matthias Meyer, Universität Wien
Juanita Feros Ruys, University of Sydney
Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Universitetet i Oslo
Nicholas Terpstra, University of Toronto
Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of the book.
Volume 8
Understanding Emotions
in Early Europe
Edited by
Michael Champion
and Andrew Lynch
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
© 2015, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
D/2015/0095/77
ISBN: 978-2-503-55264-4
e-ISBN: 978-2-503-55288-0
Printed in the EU on acid-free paper
Contents
List of Abbreviations vii
Understanding Emotions: ‘The Things They Left Behind’
MICHAEL CHAMPION and ANDREW LYNCH ix
Part I. Intellectual Traditions
From Regret to Remorse: The Origins of a Moral Emotion
DAVID KONSTAN 3
Representing Emotions in Three Byzantine Orations of Michael Psellos
MICHAEL CHAMPION 27
‘Tears such as angels weep’: The Evolution of Sadness in Demons
JUANITA FEROS RUYS 51
From Elegy to Lyric: Changing Emotion in Early English Poetry
DANIEL ANLEzARK 73
Part II. Literature
‘What Passion Cannot Musick Raise and Quell!’ The Pindaric Ode
and the Musical Sublime in the History of Emotions
MIRANDA STANYON 101
vi Contents
Embodied Emotion, Conceptual Metaphor,
and the Aesthetics of Reading Old English Poetry
ANTONINA HARBUS 127
Guinevere as ‘Social Person’:
Emotion and Community in Chrétien de Troyes
ANDREW LYNCH 151
Positive Emotion in the Thirteenth Century:
The Emotional World of Goswin of Bossut
JENNIFER CARPENTER 171
Decoding the Emotions in Aphra Behn’s and
Anna Maria Falconbridge’s Travel Narratives
MARGARETE RUBIK 191
Part III. Social History and Material Culture
Fear, Gender, and Violence in Early Modern Ireland
DIANNE HALL 215
Fear of Crime in Eighteenth-Century London
ROBERT SHOEMAKER 233
Reality and Ritual in the Medieval King’s
Emotions of Ira and Clementia
PENELOPE NASH 251
Affective Bequests: Creating Emotion in York Wills, 1400–1600
LISA LIDDY 273
‘Memento mori’: Love/Fear of and for the Dead
— Archaeological Approaches
SANDRA BOWDLER and JANE BALME 291
General Bibliography 313
Index 349
List of Abbreviations
AQDG Ausgewählte Quellen zur deutschen Geschichte des Mittelalters
(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesell schaft, 1955–)
BIA Borthwick Institute for Archives
BT Bibliotheca Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana
CCSL Corpus Christianorum Series Latina (Turnhout: Brepols, 1951–)
CSEL Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum
(Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1866–)
MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica
AA Auctores antiquissimi, 15 vols (Berlin: Weidmann, 1877–1919)
SRG Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum, 78 vols
(Hannover, Leipzig, and Berlin: Hahn, 1846–)
SRM Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum, 7 vols
(Hannover and Leipzig: Hahn, 1884–1920)
SS Scriptores, 39 vols (Hannover and Leipzig: Hahn, 1826–)
PG Patrologiae cursus completus: series graeca, ed. by Jacques-Paul
Migne, 161 vols (Paris: Migne, 1857–66)
PL Patrologiae cursus completus: series latina, ed. by Jacques-Paul
Migne, 221 vols (Paris: Migne, 1844–64)
SC Sources chrétiennes (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1943–)
TGF Tragicorum graecorum fragmenta, ed. by Bruno Snell,
Stefan Radt, and Richard Kannicht, 5 vols
(Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1971–2004)
YML York Minster Library

Understanding Emotions:
‘The Things They Left Behind’
Michael Champion and Andrew Lynch
In the self-narrative of oral confession, a practice which gave a vital role
to later medieval understandings of personal emotions, the penitent was
required to tell the priest ‘those circumstances and details that identify a
sin for what it is’.1 When modern scholars consider the nature of emotions in
premodern history, they might imagine themselves in a position somewhat like
the priest’s; that is, although aware of formulaic discourses and schemes of clas-
sification, their first task is to attend carefully to testimonies that are inher-
ently subjective, circumstantial, and situational. Joanna Bourke has written that
the ‘primary problem’ in understanding historical emotions ‘has been to define
what emotions actually “are”’.2 Using a metaphor of sight rather than hearing,
she quickly adds that whatever emotions are, ‘they have to be “made visible” if
historians are to examine them’,3 and that they are made visible in the record of
human experience, not as abstractions. So, for example, ‘There is no such thing
1 Allen, ‘Waxing Red’, p. 193.
2 Bourke, ‘Fear and Anxiety’, p. 111.
3 Bourke, ‘Fear and Anxiety’, p. 113.
Michael Champion ([email protected]) is Lecturer in Classics and Medieval
Studies at the Uni ver sity of Western Australia.
Andrew Lynch ([email protected]) is Professor in English and Cultural Studies at the
Uni ver sity of Western Australia, and Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of
Excellence for the History of Emotions.
Understanding Emotions in Early Europe, ed. by Michael Champion and Andrew Lynch, EER 8
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), ix–xxxiv BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.EER-EB.5.105219
x Michael Champion and Andrew Lynch
as “fear”: there are only “fearful people”’, and ‘the only access historians have to
these fearful people in the past is through the things they left behind’.4
Bourke’s views on the study of emotion are more complex than this selective
picture gives, and we do not mention them here in any attempt at definition.
Rather, it is to draw attention to the capaciousness and variety of the human
emotional remains ‘left behind’ from the premodern world, and the distinct
challenges that confront modern attempts to understand them. The analogy of
the scholar of past emotion as qualified listener to a direct self-narrative in a reg-
ulated, highly conventional setting quickly breaks down. The modern scholar
must also consider the many different evidentiary materials, genres, and modes
in which historical emotion may be located, the contested and fluid nature
of the cultural conventions which help to give meaning to emotional experi-
ences in any complex human situation, and the multiple methodologies used to
produce and analyse the voice, or the vision, in which the investigative process
results. And yet an element of likeness in the analogy remains: however bio-
logically instrumental and prelinguistic emotional responses may be considered
to be, and however contested they are by contrary definitions, they are mani-
fested in particular places and times, and in particular words, deeds, and things;
in that important way, emotion — past and present — is always historical.
Equally, although the contemplation of emotions allows a human capacity for
sympathy — ‘feeling with’ — as in any other domain of historical inquiry there
is no direct access to the sources and thus no timeless or natural understanding
of emotions goes unchallenged, and no approach can be treated as unmediated
by particular intellectual, emotional, rhetorical, socio-economic, and institu-
tional formations and their effects, especially in relation to emotionally charged
historical questions of whose emotions matter, and which, why, how, and when.
To give one instance, universalist aspects of both neuro-scientific and tra-
ditional humanist approaches have received strong recent criticism for ignor-
ing the social, political, and moral contexts in which emotional development
occurs and is controlled. Daniel Gross reaches back to Aristotle’s Rhetoric for
the view that
anger […] is constituted not in the biology nor even in the dignity all human beings
are supposed to share equally, but rather in relationships of inequity5
4 Bourke, ‘Fear and Anxiety’, p. 117, citing Harré, ‘An Outline of the Social Constructionist
Viewpoint’, p. 4.
5 Gross, The Secret History of Emotion, p. 2.