Photo: “Apparition de Dieu”, Apocalypse of Saint Sever (www.wikipedia.org)

This project has studied emotions by analyzing Old English texts composed and read in early medieval England (heroic poetry, elegies, riddles, sermons, chronicles).  Using methodologies drawing on the sociology of shame and the self, cognitive narratology, and the history of emotions and inspired by ecocriticism, affect theory, and the ontological turn in anthropology, it has sought to open new horizons in the study of medieval emotions.  By approaching emotional performance as structured social action whose rhythms and order can be extracted from a range of literary sources in a way that allows tracing patterns of change over time and in adaptation to various socio-cultural needs, this project aims to provide a methodological and theoretical toolkit for future research on premodern emotion.

The results were published in four papers and presented at international conferences. The first article looks at the Old English elegies, contradicting the idea that medieval emotions were strictly individual and interior phenomena and showing that they emerged from interactions between humans, non-human persons (animals, plants, and spiritual beings), and their environment. The second explains how intense emotions change the perception of time and the narrative structure of the epic poem Beowulf. The third explores emotions unattached to human perceivers, occurring in affective atmospheres or feeling things whose identity shifts in time in Old English riddles and elegies, which points to the relational ontology underlying how the makers of these texts understood the world around them. The fourth uses shame, the most social and most intimate emotion, as a privileged entry-point into the dynamics between texts and audience in a number of cultural products emerging at a very turbulent time in Anglo-Saxon history (the 990s to the 1010s) marked by increasing Viking raids and invasions and socio-political dissolution: the heroic poem The Battle of Maldon, Archbishop Wulfstans sermons, penitential royal edicts, all seek to shame their audiences to shape their behaviour.

The project has also had a strong international dimension, with presentations at conferences in Freiburg, Reykjavik and Leeds, as well as lectures at Bates College (USA) and the “Nicolae Iorga” Institute of History of the Romanian Academy. In addition, it organized two important initiatives: the “Emotions Through History” working group, where scholars from different fields (history, literature, sociology, anthropology, philosophy) discussed emotions from different perspectives, shared ideas, and presented their work in progress and a book club for medieval literature enthusiasts among students and the broader public.

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[A presentation of the project in Romanian]

Proiectul a studiat rolul social al emoțiilor în Anglia anglo-saxonă prin analiza textelor în engleza veche (poezie eroică, elegii, ghicitori, predici, cronici). Folosind abordări inspirate de sociologia rușinii și a sinelui, de psihologia cognitivă și istoria emoțiilor, proiectul a căutat să deschidă noi orizonturi în studiul emoțiilor medievale, oferind un set de instrumente metodologice și teoretice pentru cercetările viitoare. Studierea emoției, înțeleasă ca un limbaj social al căror ritmuri și structuri pot fi desprinse din surse literare, permite urmărirea schimbărilor de-a lungul timpului în tiparele socio-culturale care modelează comportamente, credințe, viziuni despre lume.

Rezultatele proiectului, prezentate la șase conferințe internaționale și în cadrul unui atelier lunar, sunt în curs de publicare sub forma a patru articole. Primul articol analizează elegiile din engleza veche și originalitatea lui vine din contrazicerea ideii preconcepute conform căreia emoțiile medievale erau fenomene strict individuale și interioare și arată că acestea apar, de fapt, ca rezultat al interacțiunii dintre indivizi, grupuri și spațiul locuit, în multiplele lui accepțiuni. Al doilea articol explică modul în care emoțiile intense schimbă percepția timpului și structura narativă a poemului epic Beowulf. Cel de-al treilea explorează emoțiile din ghicitorile și elegiile din engleza veche care nu le sunt atribuite oamenilor, ci atmosferei afective sau persoanelor non-umane (animale, plante și ființe spirituale). Al patrulea studiu oferă o nouă perspectivă asupra textelor apărute într-o perioadă turbulentă a istoriei anglo-saxone (anii 990 – 1020), marcată de intensificarea raidurilor vikingilor și de disoluția socio-politică (poemul eroic Bătălia de la Maldon, predicile arhiepiscopului Wulfstan, edictele regale penitențiale), toate căutând să folosească rușinea ca instrument pentru a modela comportamentul publicului.

Proiectul a avut o puternică prezență internațională, cu prezentări la conferințe din Freiburg, Reykjavik și Leeds, dar și prelegeri la Bates College (SUA) și Institutul de Istorie „Nicolae Iorga” al Academiei Române. O parte importantă a lui a constat în colaborarea cu cercetători din diverse domenii (istorie, literatură, sociologie, antropologie, filosofie), care se întâlneau lunar pentru a discuta studii de specialitate, prezenta lucrări și împărtăși idei despre emoții din diferite perspective în cadrul grupului de lucru „Emotions Through History”. Cea de-a doua serie de evenimente a constat dintr-un cerc de limbă și literatură pentru pasionații de literatură medievală din rândul studenților și al publicului larg.

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Emotions Through History Working Group

Photo: Chute d’Adam et Eve – Adam et Eve chassés du Paradis (France, Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine, Ms 38 f. 006v) | portail.biblissima.fr

In the cultural production of past societies we encounter emotional landscapes that appear alien to our sensibilities. Inspired by the recent growth of research dedicated to exploring the inner worlds of people in the past, Emotions Through History is a cross-disciplinary working group dedicated to discussing the recent developments on this topic. We warmly welcome all scholars and students interested in the theoretical issues arising from the understanding of past affects, passions, sentiments – from antiquity to the modern era, in history, literature, philosophy, and beyond.

The Emotions Through History Working Group is the product of the collective interests and expertise of its convenors and participants, so please share any ideas, questions, and suggestions you might have at ctaranu@nec.ro. Depending on interest and subject to your suggestions, we can organize additional meetings, change some of the topics or have you present your work in progress.

Please do not feel that, in order to attend, you must already be well-versed in the history of emotions, or in any particular historical methods, philosophical enquiries, or theoretical debates. Our monthly meetings are a venue for open and frank discussions of recent scholarship, readings of primary sources, and presentations of work in progress. Working languages are Romanian and English.

We meet in a hybrid format: in person, at New Europe College (Plantelor 21, Bucharest) and online on Zoom – links and readings are shared well in advance via email, so please write to us if you are interested in attending online.

2023/ 2024 Academic Year

19 November 2024 – Using Literature as a Source for the History of Emotions

At times the only glimpses of affectivity in past societies can be found in their literature. However, the relationship between literary emotion and the affects of flesh-and-blood people has been the subject of much debate. Historians are sometimes wary of using literature as a source for studying the emotional regimes of historical communities, while literary scholars are sometimes content to investigate literature as a sui generis, largely virtual realm of fictional affectivity. Yet literary texts both represent and produce emotions, and to do this, they always need to refer to existing codes of affective behaviour, upholding, subverting, and sometimes, creating them. We will then join the rich debate around the uses of literature for reconstructing historical emotions, and as a starting point for our discussion you are invited to read a study laying out some of these themes: Sif Rikhardsdottir, ‘Medieval emotionality: The feeling subject in medieval literature’, Comparative Literature 69 (2017), 74-90.

22 July 2024 – Shame in Classical Sanskrit Literature

Our next meeting will take us on a less beaten path. Dr. Rainer Grafenhorst will kindly introduce us to the world of emotions in Classical India. In his intervention, he will share with us some of his – until now mostly empirical – findings from his research into the concept of shame in Classical Sanskrit literature. He will present a number of examples from various registers and texts of the use of the principal terms in Sanskrit that mean (or at least are usually translated as) ‘shame’. He proposes that we simply read through these specimens and jointly comment on them, eventually bringing in notions and ideas from the amassed treasure of theoretical reflections on the nature and history of shame (Simmel, Elias, Schnell, Neckel, Goffman, Rosenwein etc.). Comparative perspectives from the cultural spaces on which the other participants are experts are most welcome!

17 June 2024 – How to Study Historical Trauma

Trauma, the emotional response to distressing events that are outside the usual range of human experience, is only slowly beginning to be recognized as a legitimate subject of historical study, meeting even more scepticism along the way than the general topic of historical emotions. And yet, throughout the past and all over the world to this day, distressing circumstances have never been far, and if responses like grief, mourning, and anger are more readily detected and thus have been more thoroughly studied, trauma is still a more elusive emotional experience. In this meeting of our working group we will explore the understudied and controversial topic of historical trauma.

Introducing the topic, we are pleased to have Dr. Roman Shliakhtin share some of his work on Byzantine trauma relative to the Battle of Manzikert. Then, Catalin will briefly discuss trauma in the Old English elegy ‘The Wanderer’. In similar fashion to our May meeting, we invite participants to share episodes, vignettes, anecdotes from the sources they work on that relate to trauma.

20 May 2024 – Shame: A Kaleidoscope

Shame is the most intensely social and deeply intimate of emotions. A crucial ingredient in all social interactions and central to how we construct our self (always living in the minds of other people, per Cooley and Goffman), shame is also a protean emotion, found in so many shapes and contexts across cultures and societies that all of us have encountered it in our work at some point.

Hence, the next meeting will be a bit different. We will start with a series of 3-5-minute interventions (volunteers welcome!), each sharing an excerpt/episode from their sources or informants that they found intriguing, puzzling, or just funny. The central topic is shame in all its forms and linkages (embarrassment, humiliation, violence, honour, respect etc.). There will be a lot to learn from each other, and it will make for a more dynamic experience.

Reading: Thomas J. Scheff, ‘Looking Glass Selves: The Cooley/Goffman Conjecture’,  (paper given at the American Sociological Association’s 98th meeting, 2003)

22 April 2024 – The ‘Civilisational Process’: Do Emotions Evolve?

If emotional norms change over historical time, can we talk about a progressive refinement of emotion, a betterment of affective capacities and manifestations? In his grand synthesis of the 1930s, Norbert Elias argued for a civilisational process taking European society from a childish, unrestrained medieval emotionality, to the cool-headed reasonableness of modernity. His vision has had many critics, yet it has proven to be a very successful narrative, especially for the larger public, confirming popular ideas about a benighted pre-modernity contrasting with the benefits of the Enlightenment project. But beyond Elias, we find a recurring tendency to assess emotions on a moral scale even among researchers of emotion (e.g., shame-based cultures are developmentally inferior to guilt-based cultures). Should the history of emotions be guided by a moral compass – if so, on what basis, and using which methods?

Reading: Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Cornell University Press, 2006), pp. 5-25

25 March 2024 – Is it Even Possible to Study Historical Emotions?

From its relatively recent beginning, the history of emotions has been met with scepticism, sometimes implicit in the work of some of its practitioners: how can one study such an elusive phenomenon as emotion, a private event that is almost impossible to represent through language, a physiological impulse best left to the research of psychologists? Once again, we reach the issue of defining what it is exactly that we study: a mere linguistic shadow of an essentially embodied reality?; a set of scripts that we absorb from the culture surrounding us?; a tool for socialization? What do we talk about when we talk about emotion? In our conversation, we will be engaging with a very recent survey of the debates in the field and the possibilities of going forward despite a fundamental scepticism built in many of the approaches and definitions we use when studying emotion.

Reading: Douglas Cairns, ‘Emotions through time?’, in Douglas Cairns et al., eds., Emotions through Time: From Antiquity to Byzantium (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2022), pp. 3-34

23 January 2024 – Affect Theory

Historians of emotion have only recently begun to engage with this alternative paradigm to emotions, which foregrounds intensities of feeling that go beyond (or come before) language and that engage the bodily senses. Hence, breaking with psychoanalytic or psychological frameworks, affect theory is not concerned with discrete emotions constructed through words via cognitive faculties but with studying affectivity expressed in spaces outside human subjectivity or interiority. We will discuss the potential of this framework to cast light on previously unconsidered issues in studying feelings in the sources of the past.

Readings: * Yael Navaro-Yashin, ‘Affective spaces, melancholic objects: ruination and the production of anthropological knowledge‘ (Malinowski Memorial Lecture 2007), Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15.1 (2009), 1-18

*(Optionally) Brian Massumi, ‘The Autonomy of Affect‘, The Politics of Systems and Environments 31 (1995), 83-109

28 November 2023 – Authenticity and Convention

One of the biggest obstacles in studying emotions represented in historical sources appears to be their authenticity. How do we know whether this king’s anger or that mother’s grief was sincere or went no deeper than a rhetorical commonplace? What is the relationship between the performance and verbal expression of emotions and what people actually felt? Perhaps authenticity itself is a paradigm that needs to be historically contextualized and seen for the post-Romantic expectation that it is. Our discussion will focus on these issues and will partly aim to tease out more productive ways of investigating emotions in the past that bypass a perceived disjunction between sincere inner feeling and conventional outer expression.

Readings: *Mary Garrison, ‘The study of emotions in early medieval history: some starting points‘, Early Medieval Europe 10 (2001), 243–50
*Stuart Airlie, ‘The history of emotions and emotional history‘, Early Medieval Europe 10 (2001), 235–41

31 October 2023 – Non-human Emotions

Animals, gods, swords, forests: narratives from all ages and places are full of non-human agents that have agency and feel or express emotion. However, the history of emotion has yet to acknowledge this rich corpus of evidence for affect that does not have a human subject as its source or that does not recognize the subject-object distinction. We will discuss various theoretical frameworks that might enable us to account for these non-human emotions (animism, mimesis, extended mind theory, cognitive metaphor, actor-network theory etc.) and what we can do with feeling subjectivities outside /beyond a human self.

Readings: *Rane Willerslev, Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs (University of California Press 2007), pp. 73-79; 97-100; 105-114; 181-188
*James Paz, Nonhuman Voices in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Material Culture (Manchester University Press, 2017), pp. 1-4; 17-24

*(Optionally) Ellen Arnold, ‘Environmental History and Hagiography‘, in Hagiography and the History of Latin Christendom, 500–1500, ed. by Samantha Kahn Herrick (Brill, 2020), pp. 351-71 (especially pp. 365-370)

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2022/ 2023 Academic Year

17 July 2023 – Emotions in Translation
Does emotion reside anywhere else but language? From the (im)possibility of translating the verbal expression of emotion to power structures shaping emotions through discourse, we will discuss the role of language in shaping, expressing, concealing, and translating emotions.

Reading: Language and the Politics of Emotion, ed. by Catherine A. Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod (Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 1-22

19 June 2023 – Visual Emotions
Hand gestures, blushing, blood rushing out of the hero’s ears out of anger. Emotions are not just felt or practiced, but seen. There is a visual grammar of emotions peculiar to each society and cultural community that, for past eras, we glimpse in iconography whose relationship to lived reality is much debated. How are emotions codified visually and what is the connection between visual representations of emotion and social reality?

Reading: Giuseppina Brunetti, ‘Pathosformeln. Iconographie et représentation verbale des émotions dans les Romans de Tristan (XIIe -XIII e siècles)’ [en ligne], conférence tenue dans le cadre du séminaire Le Corps régulé. Du biologique au culturel, ed. by A. Carol and I. Renaudet (Maison Méditerranée des Sciences de l’Homme d’Aix-en-Provence)
https://emma.hypotheses.org/1061

15 May 2023 – The Seat of Emotions
In this first informal get-together we will discuss various theories of emotion, focusing particularly on the locus where affects arise: various regions of the body, the soul, the heart, the brain, touching upon Classical as well as vernacular/folk theories of emotion.

Reading: Leslie Lockett, Anglo-Saxon Psychologies in the Vernacular and Latin Traditions (University of Toronto Press, 2011), pp. 1-53

24 April 2023 – Subjectivity, Selfhood, and Emotion
The discovery of the individual self (pushed back by successive generations of scholars from the Renaissance to the High Middle Ages to Classical Antiquity and out of Western Europe to other cultures and societies) appears to be central to the narrative framing of emotions, and vice versa: emotions are central to the construction of selfhood. And yet, are there other ways of conceptualizing emotion which do not presuppose a subject/self at the centre of the world?

Reading: Antonina Harbus, ‘Anglo-Saxon Perspectives on Autobiographical Memory and the Self’, in Cognitive Approaches to Old English Poetry (D. S. Brewer, 2012), pp. 130-161
Discussion preceded by a Work in Progress presentation by Cătălin Țăranu: Do Emotions Need a Self?

27 March 2023 – Emotion as a Social Practice
Emotion is often conceptualized in the terms of a post-Romantic and post-Freudian discrepancy between the private, ineffable feelings of one’s inmost being and its outward expression fraught with the dangers of misunderstanding and repression by other people. The conversation will revolve around newer theories of emotion bypassing this binary logic: emotion seen as a system of social practice, action, and gestures, as a performance determined by cultural scripts, as a phenomenon that emerges out of the interactions with other humans and objects.

Reading: Monique Scheer, ‘Emotions as a Kind of Practice: Six Case Studies Utilizing Monique Scheer’s Practice-Based Approach to Emotions in History’, Cultural History, 7.2, 226-38