Source : Manchester University Press / The Medieval Review
Carolyne Larrington, Approaches to emotion in Middle English literature, Manchester University Press, 2024
Over the last twenty-five years, the ‘history of emotion’ field has become one of the most dynamic and productive areas for humanities research. This designation, and the marked leadership of historians in the field, has had the unlooked-for consequence of sidelining literature – in particular secular literature – as evidence-source and object of emotion study. Secular literature, whether fable, novel, fantasy or romance, has been understood as prone to exaggeration, hyperbole, and thus as an unreliable indicator of the emotions of the past.
The aim of this book is to decentre history of emotion research and asks new questions, ones that can be answered by literary scholars, using literary texts as sources: how do literary texts understand and depict emotion and, crucially, how do they generate emotion in their audiences – those who read them or hear them read or performed?
Critique – The Medieval Review
The study of medieval emotions is a garden that continues to bloom lavishly, but it also bristles with theoretical concepts. Armed with Carolyne Larrington’s new book, as with a stout pair of secateurs, the reader will find that the thistles can be plucked with the flowers. Larrington does not attempt an exhaustive survey of emotion in Middle English literature, but offers orientation to the scholarly background, four chapters on different thematic and methodological strands, and a fifth chapter discussing what changes in the fifteenth century. Her book is concerned with what is distinctive aboutliterary emotions and specifically Middle English literary emotions. Nonetheless, the book will be of use to historians and to those addressing other languages or periods, thanks to its lucid account of the theoretical issues and its thought-provoking central claim.
The introduction narrows down by stages, looking first at evolutionary, psychological and philosophical accounts of emotion (James, Ekman, Oatley, Scherer, Nussbaum), then historical approaches (Rosenwein, Reddy, Boquet and Nagy, Althoff), then medieval theories (Avicenna, Augustine, Aquinas), and finally questions specific to literature. The survey is necessarily rapid but the account of humoral theory is a useful overview, as is the summary of medieval debates over the roles of the faculties of the soul such as will and appetite. As an early medievalist I note that the period between Augustine and c. 1100 remains a flyover zone, but the reception of classical medicine and philosophy in the twelfth century is certainly key to later medieval understandings. Larrington’s critique of the historians is worth attention: she points out that Rosenwein and Reddy show limited sensitivity to literary issues such as genre, rhetoric and personas, while Boquet and Nagy take more account of imaginative texts and “are inclined to regard literary and non-literary texts as situated on a continuum” (15). Larrington’s own proposal for how to approach the literary emphasises the rise of fictionality, citing Laura Ashe for the argument that “it is precisely…fictionality which allows audiences to reflect upon and develop their own interiority” (28). This can be connected to the emergent concept of the individual. While the idea of literature as a set of “culturally specific practices” (27) has a wider applicability, the emphasis on fictionality singles out what is new in Middle English and has the effect of centring the genre of romance. The centrality of romance throughout Larrington’s study distinguishes it from the work of Sarah McNamer and other scholars who focus on religious self-fashioning and practices of compassion.
Chapter One addresses “Words, Taxonomies and Translations.” It offers a brief account of the changing English vocabulary of emotion under the impact of French and, to a lesser extent, Old Norse, noting how Chaucer plays with dialectal differences in “The Reeve’s Tale” and how alliterative texts reveal “associative networks for key emotion terms” (53). In many romances, the emotions named may be basic and predictable, but narrative settings can imply more complex feelings. Similarly, complexity grows out of simplicity in the section on taxonomies: the Seven Deadly Sins in the personification allegory of Langland’s Piers Plowman acquire social contexts, body language and a range of behaviours. The section on translation emphasises how translators tackle not just equivalence between terms in different languages but the different emotion schemas available to different audiences; translation into Middle English of texts such as Chrétien’s Yvain or Marie de France’s Lai de Lanval means also a move out of the courtly world with its very particular ideology, which is reflected in its expectations for emotion.
Chapter Two, on “Embodiment and Action,” looks at different bodily signs and expressions of emotion, which lie on a continuum from unintended changes to deliberate gestures. Such bodily signs play a large role in Middle English representations of emotion (a respect in which they differ from Old English). Medieval theories of the physiological aspects of emotion, which Larrington follows Stephanie Trigg in labelling “affect” (98), explain that sensory input produces a response from vital spirits within the heart; this in turn gives rise to reactions such as blushing or fainting (99-100). Discussion is offered of changing colour, trembling, laughter and tears, plus kissing, kneeling and smiling as consciously intended expressions of feeling. Tears are particularly complicated; not only are they multivalent–one may cry with joy as much as with sorrow–but they are sometimes fake. Anti-feminist discourse accuses women of being able to cry at will. Bodily signs “are generally legible, even to modern audiences” (122) and the religious and secular texts do not have substantially different gestures, but the possibility of dissimulation complicates the conception of “‘natural’ movements of the humours and the spirits within the body” (p123). This provides a logical progression into the following chapter, which is on “Performativity and Performance.”
Chapter Three has the heaviest lifting to do of all the chapters in terms of explaining concepts. For Larrington, the difference, indeed the tension, between performativity and performance is important to various medieval texts; the chapter offers subtle analyses of scenes from Chaucer’s Troilus and Malory’s Morte Darthur. Nonetheless, there is often overlap in practice between emotional performances and performativity. Drawing on J. L. Austin’s account of performative utterances, performativity is explained as “getting things done with emotion,” making changes, especially in a social setting but also within the self. Reddy’s much-criticised concept of the “emotive” (a statement about emotion that enacts emotion or even brings it into being) finds rehabilitation here: Criseyde’s words about her own emotions are “exploratory and self-altering”; Lancelot and Guinevere’s words at their parting are “managerial” and “both lovers say what they must in order to discipline themselves” (140). Meanwhile, performance has to do with displaying emotion and is “calculated” (138). Performativity may seem to look inward to the real feeling that really happens and performance to the outward display that can be fake, but the performance itself can be performative. The chapter finishes with a case study on danger, the modest reluctance women show in response to approaches from a lover. Danger is both required and resented; a woman without reserve is too easy to get and loses honour, but men resent danger and always suspect it of being dissembled. There is very little space for a woman simply to refuse a man because she does not desire him, as the story of Ettarde illustrates in Malory. This chapter makes an especially strong case for the presence of complex depictions of emotional interiority in medieval texts; references to emotion do more than just “get things done” in the plot.
Chapter Four turns to “Audiences and affectivity.” Reconstructing the feelings of medieval audiences carries a risk of anachronistically projecting modern responses, but it can be attempted thanks to a combination of biological and cultural continuities and devices within texts. The reader of Middle English texts may be helped to use their mirror neurons by “mirror characters” within the text, who model expected emotional reactions. Emotions aroused by texts include emotions related to the artistic properties of the text (A-emotions, in Ed Tan’s terminology), while presenting the puzzle of affective response to events and people who are only represented, not real. A point that emerges strongly from the chapter is how deeply interested medieval writers were in the latter issue. Augustine reproached himself for being so easily stirred by the superficial emotions of tragedies; in the twelfth century, Aelred of Rievaulx and Peter of Blois were bothered by weeping over Arthurian literature when they ought to weep for Christ. Three hundred years later, the author of the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge thought that play audiences were moved by the staging of physical pain rather than by sorrow for sin. Nonetheless, as Larrington shows, medieval authors not only deployed a range of sonic, rhetorical and formal devices to elicit affect, including using romance tropes to arouse religious feeling, they also told stories within stories and represented characters responding to them. The Canterbury Tales is the most sophisticated but by no means the only example. Group pressures and emotional contagion are important to shaping audience emotion; in medieval plays, gestures are often accompanied by verbal commentary, to make sure people get the right message.
Chapter Five introduces a diachronic dimension. At the end of the fourteenth century, Chaucer is the great innovator in the representation of character. His direct imitators didn’t respond so much to this aspect of his art, but nonetheless individual character and greater complexity in the representation of emotion come increasingly to the fore in the fifteenth century. Larrington argues the key developments are the turn to long-form romance, especially prose romance, and the rise of life-writing. Many of the features that are newly found in fifteenth-century Middle English romances were already present in their much earlier French sources, but were generally curtailed in earlier translations. More extended dialogue, elaborated scenes of emotional display and increased narratorial comment are all encountered in texts such as the Prose Melusine, Malory’s Morte, Partonope of Blois and Blanchardyn and Eglantyne. In life-writing, the major examples discussed are the Male regle, Complaint and Dialogue of Hoccleve and the Book of Margery Kempe. Larrington repeatedly draws attention to something dynamic, tricky and shifting in these texts: Hoccleve achieves “a precarious integration of private and social self” (254) while Margery’s book offers “a highly unstable mixture of plausible fact and unverifiable interior experience” (256). Fifteenth-century developments provide the foundation for further change in the sixteenth century.
Finally, the conclusion summarizes the foregoing discussion and once more stresses the importance of romance, which enables the exploration of individual interiority in a way audiences can apply to themselves and to others. Devotional texts may offer routes to affectivity, but they are concerned not with distinctiveness but with salvation. Chaucer and theGawain-poet (another major source of examples throughout the book) are singled out as writers who “revolutionised the writing of interiority” (277).
It is difficult to do justice to the many observations and ideas offered in this book, and I am aware my precis is already rather long, while omitting many of the texts and ideas it addresses. As an Old English specialist, I find the thesis concerning fictionality, interiority and individuality especially intriguing. A favourite pastime of medievalists is arguing that the developments claimed as new and special by scholars of later periods are anticipated earlier. This is certainly true of affective piety; there are already texts in Old English and Anglo-Latin that promote a cultivation of emotion for devotional purposes, though penitence and fear are more prominent than compassion (see for example Jennifer Lorden’s 2023 study, Forms of Devotion in Early English Poetry). With respect to fictionality, one might say that, as Larrington acknowledges, the matter of romance is often framed as history. WhileBeowulf strikes a similar balance to the Arthurian texts between fantastic elements and historical claims, it also repeatedly mentions the subjective feelings of its characters, such as Grendel’s expectation of a feast or Beowulf’s moment of inner weariness as he fights Grendel’s mother. But romance expands the repertoire of emotions salient for narrative, foregrounds personal goals and relationships and enables a more granular exploration. The tension of performance and performativity and the connection Larrington draws between the possibility of dissembling and the possession of a private interiority are especially worth further thought. Larrington is responding in part to Graham Williams’ brilliant book, Sincerity in Medieval English Language and Literature (2018), in which he argues that the concept of sincerity has its origins in Christian teaching on scrutinising the heart and forming a right inner disposition. However, there has to be a movement from the religious to the secular realm for the actual state of the heart to be as interesting as the formation of a righteous heart.
This book is warmly recommended to anyone interested in the periodization of English literature, audience response and subjectivity and the emergence of the individual, as well as the study of emotions in literature.
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Damien Boquet (17 mai 2025). Approaches to emotion in Middle English literature. Les émotions au Moyen Âge, carnet d'EMMA. Consulté le 14 juin 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/13y1w