Juanita Feros Ruys

Unlocking the Silences of the Self-Murdered: Textual Approaches to Suicidal Emotions in the Middle Ages

Abstract What emotions did people in the Middle Ages associate with suicide, and how did they react emotionally to the possibility or act of suicide? Although pre-modern Europe did not have a dedicated word to signify the concept of self-inflicted death, and although there is no evidence of suicide notes until the seventeenth century, we find in a range of medieval texts an interest in the act and attendant emotions of suicide. In this essay, we demonstrate how scholars might discover emotions related to suicide in two genres: English legal records and first-person life narratives. Through close attention to textual detail and recourse to wider cultural implications of emotionally meaningful contexts, we show that even the unlikeliest of texts can provide inroads to emotions related to medieval suicide. With these models we hope to encourage scholars to seek other genres and ways of reading that will help to unlock the silences of the self-murdered.What emotions did people in the Middle Ages associate with suicide, and how did they react emotionally to the possibility or act of suicide? Although pre-modern Europe did not have a dedicated word to signify the concept of self-inflicted death, and although there is no evidence of suicide notes until the seventeenth century, we find in a range of medieval texts an interest in the act and attendant emotions of suicide. In this essay, we demonstrate how scholars might discover emotions related to suicide in two genres: English legal records and first-person life narratives. Through close attention to textual detail and recourse to wider cultural implications of emotionally meaningful contexts, we show that even the unlikeliest of texts can provide inroads to emotions related to medieval suicide. With these models we hope to encourage scholars to seek other genres and ways of reading that will help to unlock the silences of the self-murdered.

Dying 101: Emotion, Experience, and Learning How to Die in the Late Medieval artes moriendi

This article explores the complex interaction of imagination, self-formation, emotion, and experience at play in the developing ars moriendi genre of late medieval Europe. The art of learning how to die was designed to instruct readers in how to prepare themselves for death. Early exemplars aimed to arouse fear, asking readers to identify with and learn from the experience of a young man dying unprepared. Yet a problem with a strategy of extreme emotional investment was that the emotion of fear could become overwhelming, leading to terrified stasis rather than positive action. A remedy appears through the application to the genre of the emergent epistemology of experience.

The classics in the medieval and Renaissance classroom : the role of ancient texts in the arts curriculum as revealed by surviving manuscripts and early printed books

Référence électronique G. Matteo Roccati, « The Classics in the Medieval and Renaissance Classroom. The Role of Ancient Texts in the Arts Curriculum as Revealed by Surviving Manuscripts and Early Printed Books, eds. Juanita Feros Ruys, John O. Ward, and Melanie Heyworth », Studi Francesi [En ligne], 180 (LX | III) | 2016, mis en ligne le 01 janvier 2017, consulté le 27 avril 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/studifrancesi/5245

Sensitive Spirits: Changing Depictions of Demonic Emotions in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries

4Satan and demonic beings as represented in Latin theological treatises undergo a surprising transformation during the Middle Ages. Initially depicted as impersonal manifestations of a divinely ordained world with labile frontiers between the natural and the supernatural, they become passionate beings, usually portrayed as envious, angry, and vengeful, with a particular animus towards morally upstanding humans. Concomitant with the portrayal of demonic emotion is the development of the first-person conversion narrative. This essay documents the evolution in the portrayal of demonic emotions across two key genres of the Latinate Middle Ages: the first-person life narratives of monks that began to appear in the twelfth century, and collections of miracle narratives from the twelfth to the thirteenth centuries. This progressive “personalization” of supernatural beings offers insight into Milton’s portrayal of Satan in Paradise Lost.

Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England (review)

This volume offers an insight into the transition from print to manuscript that transformed ‘the discursive field of parenting’, causing issues surrounding sexuality and gender to be expressed through anxieties over print and the book trade (p. 2). It is, however, subject to an unbalanced editorial rationale. Newly written innovative papers that cross-reference each other sit alongside isolated (and sometimes dated) reprints from earlier volumes, and even a chapter of a 1987 monograph which is inadequately melded into the current volume (its footnotes require the context of its original publication). The volume is divided into five sections, yet the fifth, which draws issues of printing and parenting into the present, while interesting, is misplaced in a volume with ‘Early Modern England’ in its title. There are sixteen chapters in this volume, but a more compact and cohesive volume could have been formed. The ‘Introduction’ by Douglas A. Brooks outlines the relevant issues and literature; interestingly, in a series devoted to ‘Women and Gender’, the questions asked by the volume are focused on paternity (p. 18). Margreta de Grazia’s chapter is an introduction to the early modern cultural resonances of printing, imprinting, and the generation of thought, word, and child and is frequently cited by other contributors. The Thompsons’ chapter could have been omitted. Reprinted from 1987, and grounded in a 1970s academic dispute, it thinks through the technology of photocopying and tattooing. Its conclusion that ‘we must see the printing metaphors as carrying a strong phallocentric bias’ (p. 81) is both axiomatic and facile in view of other chapters. The chapter by Katharine Eisaman Maus, first published in 1993, shows its age with references to Gilbert and Gubar, Cixous, Irigaray, and Clément. It remains nevertheless a useful study of female metaphors for male literary productivity. Lynne Dickson Bruckner’s chapter is a brilliant study of Ben Jonson’s crisis over and negotiation of the limits and longevity of a paternity read as both biological and textual. In this context, it seems unnecessary to include a reprint of a 1994 article by David Lee Miller which deals with similar subject matter, including the same key texts. Miller’s is a good article and has been updated for this volume, at least as regards references, but it remains indebted to a psychoanalytic theory of trauma which adds little to its subject.

Planctus magis quam cantici: The generic significance of Abelard's planctus

What did the planctus mean to Abelard? During the 1130s Abelard was rethinking this musical genre and its potential for expressing personalized, dramatic lament. Abelards relationship with Heloise at this time (and indeed her own literary output) may have provoked a reaction to the generic features of the planctus.

Quae Maternae Immemor Naturae: The Rhetorical Struggle Over the Meaning of Motherhood in the Writings of Heloise and Abelard

It has long been thought that the issue of Heloise’s motherhood in general and her mothering of her son, Astrolabe, in particular were not issues of great importance to Heloise and Abelard. Scholars point to Abelard’s mention of Astrolabe in his Historia calamitatum, his later verses of advice to his son, and Heloise’s entreaty to Peter the Venerable regarding Astrolabe’s future as representing the sum total of their interest in the subject.1 Nothing could be further from the truth. As I intend to show, the issue of Heloise’s status and practice as mother was a topic of great contention between Heloise and Abelard throughout their monastic careers.