With Denis Renevey, I’ll be co-organising sessions at the 2014 International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo on ‘Motion and Emotion in Medieval England’.  These sessions will be sponsored by the Swiss Association of Medieval and Early Modern English Studies (SAMEMES), and will be joined to sessions organised by Dr Stephanie Downes on behalf of the Australian Research Council’s Centre for the History of Emotions (CHE).

Our sessions on ‘Motion and Emotion’ will pose a number of questions concerning the relationship between emotion and literature in medieval England.  How do authors, scribes, and illuminators seek to ‘move’ their readers?  What affective responses do texts seek to inspire, and how? In what ways do spaces, communities, and languages in medieval England affect and respond to emotion in literature?  How does medievalism address and respond to emotion in medieval English literature and culture?

MOTION & EMOTION I: Moveable Texts

While Barbara Rosenwein’s work on what she has termed ‘emotional communities’ has shed light on how emotional values can be shared within groups, less attention has been paid to how the circulation of texts can reflect or redefine the priorities of emotional communities.  In order to test the limits of Rosenwein’s theory, this session’s papers will investigate the emotional consequences of how texts move between and within communities.  Among the topics that presenters may wish to consider in relation to emotion are the following:

  • translations and redactions of texts
  • borrowed, sold, or stolen books
  • intertextuality
  • characters or narratives that move between genres
  • emotion and medievalism

MOTION & EMOTION II: Textual Triggers

This session merges the history of reading and reception with the history of emotion by exploring the notion of emotional cause and effect in medieval English literature.  In what ways do authors play upon the emotions of their readers?  What affective responses can medieval texts provoke?  How can texts script affective performance?  Papers may consider some of the following topics:

  • emotional manipulation
  • propaganda
  • performing emotion
  • exchanges between authors
  • rhetoric

Please send a 300 word abstract, along with a title and a completed participant information form (available here), by 15 September, to Dr Mary Flannery, University of Lausanne (mary.flannery@unil.ch).  Postgraduate proposals are especially encouraged!