Stephanie Downes - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Stephanie Downes
Literature, Emotions, and Pre-Modern War, 2021
postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, 2017
This special issue of postmedieval brings together several strands of medieval and medievalist wo... more This special issue of postmedieval brings together several strands of medieval and medievalist work in the history of emotions, with a focus on literary, historical and cinema studies. It asks how we may best 'face up' to work that has been done already in these fields, and speculates about work that might yet be done, especially by medievalists working across medieval and postmedieval sources. In the idiom 'facing up,' we evoke the impulse to assess and realize the place of medieval studies in the burgeoning field of emotions research. We also conjure our conceptual focus-the expressive human faceas a complex and intriguing source for reading emotions in the past. Whether the face is taken as textual or visual, literal or conceptual, represented or embodied, it is, like the emotions, critical in Western understandings of humanity itself. Conceptually, psychologically, and artistically, the face is perceived as being at the forefront of many human interactions and emotional practices. These range from the larger, universalizing claims of Emmanuel Levinas, for whom the face is the 'primordial signifier' that guarantees human relationships with each other and with the divine (Levinas, [1961] 1979), to the dizzying arrays of facial emoticons that compete for our attention on our smart phones when we
Textual Practice, 2016
valences in the context of information overload’ (p. 8). One of the most ubiquitous topics in Ste... more valences in the context of information overload’ (p. 8). One of the most ubiquitous topics in Stephens’s book is the archive, and we find his chapters addressing a series of interrelated questions about information management: How is memory altered when it is recorded rather than embodied? Who determines what information is retained and how it is categorised, filtered, or arranged? What means of bureaucratic control have been enhanced or enabled by the extension of information storage capacities? These are, in many ways, questions about how the archive operates in the service of ideology. The poets studied across this book consistently remind us that information storage and dissemination is a political issue about who controls and structures memory. Stephens’s writing, though at times dense, is skilful at analysing poetic texts within their particular technological and social contexts. This is a detailed book on the poetry of information overload, attentive to historical, cultural, and technological changes that informed and are informing avant-garde poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Parergon, 2010
Publikationsansicht. 59078978. The Poet's Notebook: The Personal Manuscript of Charles d... more Publikationsansicht. 59078978. The Poet's Notebook: The Personal Manuscript of Charles d'Orléans (review) (2010). Stephanie Downes. Abstract. Parergon - Volume 27, Number 1, 2010. Details der Publikation. ...
Contemporary Chaucer across the centuries, 2018
The face is a vital site of embodied emotional display. By examining descriptions of facial pallo... more The face is a vital site of embodied emotional display. By examining descriptions of facial pallor in a range of Chaucer’s works, Downes explores the poet’s representation of the face as an affective text, which launches an interpretative challenge to both the medieval and the modern reader of fiction, as well as deepening our understanding of cultural expressions of feeling in the pre-modern era.
Thesis Eleven, 2022
This article explores the therapeutic potential of narrative fiction during a global health crisi... more This article explores the therapeutic potential of narrative fiction during a global health crisis. We focus on The Decameron Project (2020), a collection of short fiction by writers from around the world, commissioned by the New York Times Magazine. The Decameron Project references the narrative framework established by Giovanni Boccaccio in the mid-14th century, when the Black Death devastated Europe. Drawing on aspects of psychoanalytic theory and principles of bibliotherapy employed since the Middle Ages, we argue that The Decameron Project offers strategies to simultaneously confront and contain the anxious mind. Storytelling, according to both Boccaccio and to the editors of The Decameron Project, is not merely a source of distraction but a means of survival.
Oxford Scholarship Online, 2018
This chapter gives an overview of the state of cross-disciplinary research into objects and emoti... more This chapter gives an overview of the state of cross-disciplinary research into objects and emotions. It considers major intellectual works from the fields of archaeology, anthropology, art and design history, history, literary studies, philosophy, and psychology from the perspective of the history of emotions, in order to assess which current major directions in these fields may be most useful for those seeking to write affective histories of the material world. By investigating the critical history of objects and emotions and reflecting on the state of the field today, the authors offer an interdisciplinary frame for the essays that follow, outlining various methodologies and their implications for emotions research in the humanities in general.
Writing War in Britain and France, 1370–1854, 2018
In the field of late medieval English literary study, work by Ardis Butterfield, Jocelyn Wogan-Br... more In the field of late medieval English literary study, work by Ardis Butterfield, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Judith Jefferson, and Ad Putter, among others, has confirmed that continental French continued to influence the production and consumption of secular literature in England until well into the fifteenth century.1 Those who used French most often — usually, the literate, educated, male elite — ensured the ongoing importance of the language in the political, social, and emotional \life of the court. How the bilingual culture of England’s aristocracy impacted on the work of poets in late medieval England is the subject of this chapter, which concentrates in particular on the relationship between bilingualism — whether individual or cultural — and the expression of emotion in literature. My focus in this chapter is on two secular balade sequences, one written in French, the other in English, by authors who wrote and probably spoke fluently in more than one language: John Gower (c. 1330–...
Parergon, 2017
Abstract:Metaphors of imprisonment in Charles of Orleans' poetic corpus adopt a variety of ar... more Abstract:Metaphors of imprisonment in Charles of Orleans' poetic corpus adopt a variety of architectural and semantic forms, from the secular prison to the religious cell. In both Charles's French and English lyrics, such metaphors conjure a Boethian promise of spiritual and philosophical reconciliation with the prison's walls. Within the formal strictures of the forme-fixe — the ballade and the roundel in particular — Charles explores the contradictions inherent in representations of literary imprisonment in Anglo-French writing during the fifteenth century, and seeks to reconcile them.
During the nineteenth century in Europe and its colonies, “object lessons” emerged as a form of p... more During the nineteenth century in Europe and its colonies, “object lessons” emerged as a form of progressive, alternative pedagogy, designed to help school-age children develop skills of observation and description in a rapidly changing world.2 By the end of the century such classes were common among all academic levels across the social sciences.3 A rock sample might serve as the basis for a lesson on geology, geography, and natural history; imported tobacco, tea leaves or a swatch of cloth might be used to prompt discussion of agricultural and industrial processes, trade routes, economics and exchange. The recent twenty-first century interest in “object-based learning” (OBL), which has often been driven pedagogies used in museums and public collections, inspired this article’s exploration of the role OBL might play in teaching students at tertiary level, especially in teaching the history of emotions. What happens when we move away from text-oriented models of emotions history to n...
Parergon, 2017
typographical errors, the introductory notes, which consistently refer to the essays by a chapter... more typographical errors, the introductory notes, which consistently refer to the essays by a chapter number, do not gel with how the essays are presented in the table of contents where each essay is listed without a chapter number. Nor are the chapter numbers used in the book. There is also an odd moment where an author’s name is inserted into an essay in bold text when perhaps a subtitle was intended. These issues do not detract from the quality of the essays, which propose interesting perspectives on the human condition. Natasha ameNdola, Monash University
postmedieval, 2019
This essay explores diachronic processes of gendered white racial formation, taking HBO’s Game of... more This essay explores diachronic processes of gendered white racial formation, taking HBO’s Game of Thrones (2007-) as a central example of the persistence of the nineteenth century’s aesthetic vision of women in contemporary medievalist television. The series portrays the essential medievalist female body as a white body – clothed or unclothed – reproducing an aesthetic gaze that draws heavily on pre-Raphaelite forms, while orientalism provides the dominant model for a female body coded racially ‘Other.’ Whiteness and medievalist nostalgia coalesce to prioritise white female bodies at the same time as they are made the objects of violent desire, while non-white female bodies are repeatedly displaced or marginalized even as they are stripped bare. Reading the visual program of the HBO series alongside examples from nineteenth-century art, the article shows that the racial coding of women in Game of Thrones reproduces an aesthetic treatment of women’s bodies popularized during the Victorian era.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 2016
At the beginning of the twentieth century the philologist Paul Meyer published the first descript... more At the beginning of the twentieth century the philologist Paul Meyer published the first description of the French texts in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.20. Meyer’s primary interest in the manuscript was in the continental balades copied by Shirley in the third group of French poems, but in between brief mention of the lyrics Shirley attributes to William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and those Meyer attributes to continental French poets, including Eustache Deschamps and Alain Chartier, Meyer noticed Shirley’s inclusion of a proverbial debate, the “Desputacion entre Salamon ly saage et Marcoulf le foole” (“Disputation between Salamon the Wise and Marcolf the Fool” [82]).1 He either missed, or chose to omit from his description of the manuscript’s French contents, two other short French texts, the “dit de Saynt Beede” (9) and the “Prouerbes de les xvij sages” (86). Following Meyer, throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the lyric contents of the manuscript have tended to be the focus of most discussions of Shirley’s French. Read alongside his French lyrics, however, Shirley’s non-lyric French inclusions come into dialogue with them in dynamic and revealing ways. In R.3.20, non-lyric French texts tend toward the proverbial, the instructional, or both, and they buttress the manuscript’s continental lyric inclusions, strengthening in turn the ways in which
Literature Compass, 2016
Critics have long addressed questions of affect, feeling and emotional expression in Middle Engli... more Critics have long addressed questions of affect, feeling and emotional expression in Middle English literature , but only in recent years has their interest begun to take theoretical form under the rubric of the 'history of emotions'. Current critical attitudes to the study of emotions in the past have been shaped substantially by the work of historians, whose focus on emotion in documentary sources has been inf luenced in turn by research in the fields of sociology, anthropology, psychology, linguistics and, increasingly, the cognitive sciences. How might existing methodologies situating emotions historically drive new approaches in Middle English literary studies? This article contends that existing analyses of Middle English literature relating to affective discourses might fruitfully be brought into conversation with new multidisciplinary forms of research into past emotions. We survey current critical trends in both the history of emotions and in Middle English literature. Case studies of two late Middle English literary texts, the anonymous Sir Orfeo and Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, show how the last fifty years of scholarship has addressed emotions in Middle English literature. We conclude by suggesting future directions that might be taken up by critics of medieval English literary texts and genres to develop further the relationship between literary studies and the history of emotions.
Emotions and War, 2015
The Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial in Ballarat, Victoria, was opened in 2004 to commemor... more The Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial in Ballarat, Victoria, was opened in 2004 to commemorate more than 36,000 Australian prisoners taken during the Boer War, First and Second World Wars, and the Korean War. Its design included an inscribed granite slab and a pool of water in acknowledgement of ‘the pain and suffering of those that returned and those that remain on foreign shores’ and to remember ‘those men and women who, while captured, suffered appalling hardship and horrendous atrocities but maintained their dignity, courage and mateship’.1 In the later medieval period that this essay considers, the experience of those captured in conflict was less likely to reach the levels of human suffering recalled at the Ballarat memorial. Most combatants overcome would be killed where they stood on the battleground, and only those of high social status would be taken prisoner. These men were valuable assets, and it was rarely in the best interest of the enemy to treat them poorly: they were worth more alive.
Emotions and War, 2015
The word ‘emotion’, first used in France in the fifteenth century to denote political or social u... more The word ‘emotion’, first used in France in the fifteenth century to denote political or social upheaval, was also commonly linked to physical violence. Nicole Hochner observes that in the 1429 Chronique du Bon duc Loys de Bourbon, ‘l’esmotion du duc de Bretaigne’ (the ‘emotion’ of the Duke of Brittany), leads directly to a siege of the French town of Troyes. The OED puts the earliest reference to ‘emotiones’ in English over a century later, in 1562, where it was also used to describe manifestations of social unrest: ‘the great tumultes and emotiones that were in Fraunce between the king and the nobilite.’1 During the reign of Elizabeth I the term entered English vocabulary in this triangulation of the French, Italian, and English languages as a description of — and an explanation for — escalating conflict, most frequently in historical accounts. Throughout history emotions have not just started wars, but been firmly entrenched within them, and are a heightened condition of their narrative aftermath. The history of emotions must necessarily therefore take this long written history of war and violent conflict into account.
Spaces for Reading in Later Medieval England, 2016
In a letter to John Paston, Henry Windsor compares William Worcester’s delight in having “a good ... more In a letter to John Paston, Henry Windsor compares William Worcester’s delight in having “a good booke of Frensh or of poetre” with John Fastolf’s pleasure in purchasing a manor-house. Worcester’s reading habit was clearly an expensive one, and he was already in debt to his instructor for the purchase of “diverse bokes”: there is a considerable financial risk, Windsor tells Paston he has tried to warn their mutual acquaintance, in buying too many. But what, on the surface, is a rather unlikely comparison of late medieval book and manor-house invites us to think about the pleasure of purchasing goods for personal use in the later medieval period. In this case, the pleasure of purchasing material to read is similar to the pleasure of owning a home: the latter is a domestic, architectural space; the former designates a “space” for reading—perhaps domestically—with pages rather than rooms through which the purchaser might wander. As described by Windsor, Worcester’s particular bibliophilic pleasure was in acquiring books of poetry and books written in French. Both of these taken together, will be the subject of this chapter, which considers the practice of reading continental French poetry in late medieval England, the affective potential of such reading, and some of the ways in which surviving manuscripts can offer evidence of French reading in England The chapter provides a brief description and case study of one such manuscript—London, Westminster Abbey MS 21 (hereafter, Westminster MS 21)—in which a number of late fifteenth-century English readers left their trace.
Literature, Emotions, and Pre-Modern War, 2021
postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, 2017
This special issue of postmedieval brings together several strands of medieval and medievalist wo... more This special issue of postmedieval brings together several strands of medieval and medievalist work in the history of emotions, with a focus on literary, historical and cinema studies. It asks how we may best 'face up' to work that has been done already in these fields, and speculates about work that might yet be done, especially by medievalists working across medieval and postmedieval sources. In the idiom 'facing up,' we evoke the impulse to assess and realize the place of medieval studies in the burgeoning field of emotions research. We also conjure our conceptual focus-the expressive human faceas a complex and intriguing source for reading emotions in the past. Whether the face is taken as textual or visual, literal or conceptual, represented or embodied, it is, like the emotions, critical in Western understandings of humanity itself. Conceptually, psychologically, and artistically, the face is perceived as being at the forefront of many human interactions and emotional practices. These range from the larger, universalizing claims of Emmanuel Levinas, for whom the face is the 'primordial signifier' that guarantees human relationships with each other and with the divine (Levinas, [1961] 1979), to the dizzying arrays of facial emoticons that compete for our attention on our smart phones when we
Textual Practice, 2016
valences in the context of information overload’ (p. 8). One of the most ubiquitous topics in Ste... more valences in the context of information overload’ (p. 8). One of the most ubiquitous topics in Stephens’s book is the archive, and we find his chapters addressing a series of interrelated questions about information management: How is memory altered when it is recorded rather than embodied? Who determines what information is retained and how it is categorised, filtered, or arranged? What means of bureaucratic control have been enhanced or enabled by the extension of information storage capacities? These are, in many ways, questions about how the archive operates in the service of ideology. The poets studied across this book consistently remind us that information storage and dissemination is a political issue about who controls and structures memory. Stephens’s writing, though at times dense, is skilful at analysing poetic texts within their particular technological and social contexts. This is a detailed book on the poetry of information overload, attentive to historical, cultural, and technological changes that informed and are informing avant-garde poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Parergon, 2010
Publikationsansicht. 59078978. The Poet's Notebook: The Personal Manuscript of Charles d... more Publikationsansicht. 59078978. The Poet's Notebook: The Personal Manuscript of Charles d'Orléans (review) (2010). Stephanie Downes. Abstract. Parergon - Volume 27, Number 1, 2010. Details der Publikation. ...
Contemporary Chaucer across the centuries, 2018
The face is a vital site of embodied emotional display. By examining descriptions of facial pallo... more The face is a vital site of embodied emotional display. By examining descriptions of facial pallor in a range of Chaucer’s works, Downes explores the poet’s representation of the face as an affective text, which launches an interpretative challenge to both the medieval and the modern reader of fiction, as well as deepening our understanding of cultural expressions of feeling in the pre-modern era.
Thesis Eleven, 2022
This article explores the therapeutic potential of narrative fiction during a global health crisi... more This article explores the therapeutic potential of narrative fiction during a global health crisis. We focus on The Decameron Project (2020), a collection of short fiction by writers from around the world, commissioned by the New York Times Magazine. The Decameron Project references the narrative framework established by Giovanni Boccaccio in the mid-14th century, when the Black Death devastated Europe. Drawing on aspects of psychoanalytic theory and principles of bibliotherapy employed since the Middle Ages, we argue that The Decameron Project offers strategies to simultaneously confront and contain the anxious mind. Storytelling, according to both Boccaccio and to the editors of The Decameron Project, is not merely a source of distraction but a means of survival.
Oxford Scholarship Online, 2018
This chapter gives an overview of the state of cross-disciplinary research into objects and emoti... more This chapter gives an overview of the state of cross-disciplinary research into objects and emotions. It considers major intellectual works from the fields of archaeology, anthropology, art and design history, history, literary studies, philosophy, and psychology from the perspective of the history of emotions, in order to assess which current major directions in these fields may be most useful for those seeking to write affective histories of the material world. By investigating the critical history of objects and emotions and reflecting on the state of the field today, the authors offer an interdisciplinary frame for the essays that follow, outlining various methodologies and their implications for emotions research in the humanities in general.
Writing War in Britain and France, 1370–1854, 2018
In the field of late medieval English literary study, work by Ardis Butterfield, Jocelyn Wogan-Br... more In the field of late medieval English literary study, work by Ardis Butterfield, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Judith Jefferson, and Ad Putter, among others, has confirmed that continental French continued to influence the production and consumption of secular literature in England until well into the fifteenth century.1 Those who used French most often — usually, the literate, educated, male elite — ensured the ongoing importance of the language in the political, social, and emotional \life of the court. How the bilingual culture of England’s aristocracy impacted on the work of poets in late medieval England is the subject of this chapter, which concentrates in particular on the relationship between bilingualism — whether individual or cultural — and the expression of emotion in literature. My focus in this chapter is on two secular balade sequences, one written in French, the other in English, by authors who wrote and probably spoke fluently in more than one language: John Gower (c. 1330–...
Parergon, 2017
Abstract:Metaphors of imprisonment in Charles of Orleans' poetic corpus adopt a variety of ar... more Abstract:Metaphors of imprisonment in Charles of Orleans' poetic corpus adopt a variety of architectural and semantic forms, from the secular prison to the religious cell. In both Charles's French and English lyrics, such metaphors conjure a Boethian promise of spiritual and philosophical reconciliation with the prison's walls. Within the formal strictures of the forme-fixe — the ballade and the roundel in particular — Charles explores the contradictions inherent in representations of literary imprisonment in Anglo-French writing during the fifteenth century, and seeks to reconcile them.
During the nineteenth century in Europe and its colonies, “object lessons” emerged as a form of p... more During the nineteenth century in Europe and its colonies, “object lessons” emerged as a form of progressive, alternative pedagogy, designed to help school-age children develop skills of observation and description in a rapidly changing world.2 By the end of the century such classes were common among all academic levels across the social sciences.3 A rock sample might serve as the basis for a lesson on geology, geography, and natural history; imported tobacco, tea leaves or a swatch of cloth might be used to prompt discussion of agricultural and industrial processes, trade routes, economics and exchange. The recent twenty-first century interest in “object-based learning” (OBL), which has often been driven pedagogies used in museums and public collections, inspired this article’s exploration of the role OBL might play in teaching students at tertiary level, especially in teaching the history of emotions. What happens when we move away from text-oriented models of emotions history to n...
Parergon, 2017
typographical errors, the introductory notes, which consistently refer to the essays by a chapter... more typographical errors, the introductory notes, which consistently refer to the essays by a chapter number, do not gel with how the essays are presented in the table of contents where each essay is listed without a chapter number. Nor are the chapter numbers used in the book. There is also an odd moment where an author’s name is inserted into an essay in bold text when perhaps a subtitle was intended. These issues do not detract from the quality of the essays, which propose interesting perspectives on the human condition. Natasha ameNdola, Monash University
postmedieval, 2019
This essay explores diachronic processes of gendered white racial formation, taking HBO’s Game of... more This essay explores diachronic processes of gendered white racial formation, taking HBO’s Game of Thrones (2007-) as a central example of the persistence of the nineteenth century’s aesthetic vision of women in contemporary medievalist television. The series portrays the essential medievalist female body as a white body – clothed or unclothed – reproducing an aesthetic gaze that draws heavily on pre-Raphaelite forms, while orientalism provides the dominant model for a female body coded racially ‘Other.’ Whiteness and medievalist nostalgia coalesce to prioritise white female bodies at the same time as they are made the objects of violent desire, while non-white female bodies are repeatedly displaced or marginalized even as they are stripped bare. Reading the visual program of the HBO series alongside examples from nineteenth-century art, the article shows that the racial coding of women in Game of Thrones reproduces an aesthetic treatment of women’s bodies popularized during the Victorian era.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 2016
At the beginning of the twentieth century the philologist Paul Meyer published the first descript... more At the beginning of the twentieth century the philologist Paul Meyer published the first description of the French texts in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.20. Meyer’s primary interest in the manuscript was in the continental balades copied by Shirley in the third group of French poems, but in between brief mention of the lyrics Shirley attributes to William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and those Meyer attributes to continental French poets, including Eustache Deschamps and Alain Chartier, Meyer noticed Shirley’s inclusion of a proverbial debate, the “Desputacion entre Salamon ly saage et Marcoulf le foole” (“Disputation between Salamon the Wise and Marcolf the Fool” [82]).1 He either missed, or chose to omit from his description of the manuscript’s French contents, two other short French texts, the “dit de Saynt Beede” (9) and the “Prouerbes de les xvij sages” (86). Following Meyer, throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the lyric contents of the manuscript have tended to be the focus of most discussions of Shirley’s French. Read alongside his French lyrics, however, Shirley’s non-lyric French inclusions come into dialogue with them in dynamic and revealing ways. In R.3.20, non-lyric French texts tend toward the proverbial, the instructional, or both, and they buttress the manuscript’s continental lyric inclusions, strengthening in turn the ways in which
Literature Compass, 2016
Critics have long addressed questions of affect, feeling and emotional expression in Middle Engli... more Critics have long addressed questions of affect, feeling and emotional expression in Middle English literature , but only in recent years has their interest begun to take theoretical form under the rubric of the 'history of emotions'. Current critical attitudes to the study of emotions in the past have been shaped substantially by the work of historians, whose focus on emotion in documentary sources has been inf luenced in turn by research in the fields of sociology, anthropology, psychology, linguistics and, increasingly, the cognitive sciences. How might existing methodologies situating emotions historically drive new approaches in Middle English literary studies? This article contends that existing analyses of Middle English literature relating to affective discourses might fruitfully be brought into conversation with new multidisciplinary forms of research into past emotions. We survey current critical trends in both the history of emotions and in Middle English literature. Case studies of two late Middle English literary texts, the anonymous Sir Orfeo and Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, show how the last fifty years of scholarship has addressed emotions in Middle English literature. We conclude by suggesting future directions that might be taken up by critics of medieval English literary texts and genres to develop further the relationship between literary studies and the history of emotions.
Emotions and War, 2015
The Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial in Ballarat, Victoria, was opened in 2004 to commemor... more The Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial in Ballarat, Victoria, was opened in 2004 to commemorate more than 36,000 Australian prisoners taken during the Boer War, First and Second World Wars, and the Korean War. Its design included an inscribed granite slab and a pool of water in acknowledgement of ‘the pain and suffering of those that returned and those that remain on foreign shores’ and to remember ‘those men and women who, while captured, suffered appalling hardship and horrendous atrocities but maintained their dignity, courage and mateship’.1 In the later medieval period that this essay considers, the experience of those captured in conflict was less likely to reach the levels of human suffering recalled at the Ballarat memorial. Most combatants overcome would be killed where they stood on the battleground, and only those of high social status would be taken prisoner. These men were valuable assets, and it was rarely in the best interest of the enemy to treat them poorly: they were worth more alive.
Emotions and War, 2015
The word ‘emotion’, first used in France in the fifteenth century to denote political or social u... more The word ‘emotion’, first used in France in the fifteenth century to denote political or social upheaval, was also commonly linked to physical violence. Nicole Hochner observes that in the 1429 Chronique du Bon duc Loys de Bourbon, ‘l’esmotion du duc de Bretaigne’ (the ‘emotion’ of the Duke of Brittany), leads directly to a siege of the French town of Troyes. The OED puts the earliest reference to ‘emotiones’ in English over a century later, in 1562, where it was also used to describe manifestations of social unrest: ‘the great tumultes and emotiones that were in Fraunce between the king and the nobilite.’1 During the reign of Elizabeth I the term entered English vocabulary in this triangulation of the French, Italian, and English languages as a description of — and an explanation for — escalating conflict, most frequently in historical accounts. Throughout history emotions have not just started wars, but been firmly entrenched within them, and are a heightened condition of their narrative aftermath. The history of emotions must necessarily therefore take this long written history of war and violent conflict into account.
Spaces for Reading in Later Medieval England, 2016
In a letter to John Paston, Henry Windsor compares William Worcester’s delight in having “a good ... more In a letter to John Paston, Henry Windsor compares William Worcester’s delight in having “a good booke of Frensh or of poetre” with John Fastolf’s pleasure in purchasing a manor-house. Worcester’s reading habit was clearly an expensive one, and he was already in debt to his instructor for the purchase of “diverse bokes”: there is a considerable financial risk, Windsor tells Paston he has tried to warn their mutual acquaintance, in buying too many. But what, on the surface, is a rather unlikely comparison of late medieval book and manor-house invites us to think about the pleasure of purchasing goods for personal use in the later medieval period. In this case, the pleasure of purchasing material to read is similar to the pleasure of owning a home: the latter is a domestic, architectural space; the former designates a “space” for reading—perhaps domestically—with pages rather than rooms through which the purchaser might wander. As described by Windsor, Worcester’s particular bibliophilic pleasure was in acquiring books of poetry and books written in French. Both of these taken together, will be the subject of this chapter, which considers the practice of reading continental French poetry in late medieval England, the affective potential of such reading, and some of the ways in which surviving manuscripts can offer evidence of French reading in England The chapter provides a brief description and case study of one such manuscript—London, Westminster Abbey MS 21 (hereafter, Westminster MS 21)—in which a number of late fifteenth-century English readers left their trace.