Stephanie Trigg

Introduction: Emotional Histories — Beyond the Personalization of the Past and the Abstraction of Affect Theory

Abstract This editor’s introduction to the special issue analyzes some of the historical, semantic and disciplinary differences between the terms “feelings,” “passions,” “emotions,” “sentiments,” and “affects,” and assesses their usefulness in the study of medieval and early modern culture, and within the disciplinary frame of the “history of emotions.” The “affective turn” — both in cultural theory and in the autobiographical impulse in the humanities — is a strong impulse in much modern scholarship but as the essays in this special issue show, the discipline of the history of emotions offers rich and promising insights into the social, political, and cultural frameworks in which medieval and early modern individuals navigated, narrated, and performed emotional and social relationships.

Shamed be...: Historicizing Shame in Medieval and Early Modern Courtly Ritual

Abstract This essay explores the relationship between shame and honor in various texts and practices associated with medieval chivalry, and especially in The Order of the Garter. The meaning and significance of the motto of thr Order–Honi soit qui mal y pense–is contested, but it emphasizes the close relationship between shame and honor in courtly society. The motto may not be an embedded coded reference to an unknown event; it may have been coined by Edward III to generate a sense of mystery appropriate to a courtly elite. An examination of selected literary texts (incluing Malorys Works and Shakesperes Henry VI, Part One) and historical documents describing the ceremonial rituals of heraldic degradation and courtly shame suggests a remarkable continuity in the understanding of courtly shame between the medieval and the early modern period in England. This continuity is ignored by several recent commentators on shame, who unconsciously rehearse and repeat the abjection of the medieval past in contrast to the renaissance understanding of shame.

Langland’s Tears: Poetry, Emotion, and Mouvance

This essay explores several incidents in Piers Plowman where a male character, most often Will himself, weeps tears. Most of these incidents of weeping seem relatively straightforward in comparison with the complexity of Langland’s theological, spiritual, personal and political concerns, but they generate intriguing questions about the expression and interpretation of feeling in medieval literature and its reception history, about the relation between feeling and bodily gesture, and the contribution medieval poetry can make to the history of emotions. Emotional responses also play a role in judgements about the fluid mouvance of the poem’s versions, in the multitude of competing readings.

Friendship, Association and Service in The Manciple's Tale

Like many of the tales told on the way to Canterbury, The Manciple’s Tale offers a closely observed meditation on power relationships. More precisely, I suggest that this tale is specifically concerned with the difficulties involved in performing a series of subordinate and overlapping roles in hierarchically organized structures: that is, the roles of courtier, servant, and poet. Like many other commentators, I read the tale as self-reflexive, though rather than finding an expression of purely poetic anxiety, I identify an anxiety that is primarily social, about how to speak—or write—in the context of courtly service or literary patronage. In my reading, the tale dramatizes, though it does not resolve, the question of when and how to speak to one’s superiors. But I also want to foreground the Tale’s thematic and moralizing concern with the question of friendship, to suggest that the idea of a relationship among equals provides a powerful counterpoint to the Manciple’s interest in the relationships between servant and master, and between courtier and lord. This counterpoint is almost always problematic, however: at what point, if ever, can the discourses of friendship overlap with those of service? And what are the social and political implications of such crossover? To summarize: I want to argue that the tale sets up two principal axes of relationship among men: a horizontal axis of friendship, or at least of homosocial identity; and a vertical axis of service. At the same time, the tale’s narrative works to confound that distinction. The resultant uncertainty dramatizes Chaucer’s own position as poet and servant. Like the Manciple perhaps, he too is writing, or telling stories, for both his superiors and his friends. Many recent critics foreground the self-reflexive aspects of this tale, in its context as the penultimate contribution to the storytelling context

The New Medievalization of Chaucer

Introducing his study of Chaucer’s words in The Making of Chaucer’s English, Christopher Cannon argues that the linguistic study of Chaucer comes ‘‘tarred with the brush of philology’s past and its nowdisreputable positivism.’’1 It’s true that after its heyday in the nineteenth century, philology, like positivism, attracted some very negative press in the twentieth, especially under those paradigms of literary criticism which prized ambiguity, complexity, or undecidability. Destabilizing the customary opposition between philology and criticism, between the restrictive certainties of positivism and the beautiful uncertainties of interpretation, Cannon argues that even philology can be ‘‘rooted in crushing doubt.’’2 Central to his claims for the subtle attractions of philology is his lengthy quotation from the introduction to the Oxford English Dictionary and its editors’ understanding that ‘‘fixing quantities and circumscribing limits can only be a point of departure for the mind that endeavours to grasp ambiguity and uncertainty.’’3 In the field of literary studies, it’s almost a point of honor to embrace ambiguity and uncertainty. It’s also true that if we learned anything from the heady days of deconstruction, we learned that any text, of any kind, can be reduced to doubt, to undecidability, even to meaninglessness. So it should be easy for us to accept, theoretically, that the materials and data of linguistic analysis, for example, might not all sustain the epistemological priority they are traditionally accorded over criticism. Similarly, we are increasingly ready to accept that the decisions of textual critics aren’t made independently of, or meaningfully prior to, the work of literary critics. We have also learned to pay due attention to the

The Negative Erotics of Medievalism

What is the difference between medieval studies and medievalism studies?1 One of the easiest answers to this question makes a distinction between the Middle Ages as a finite historical period, and those cultural, political, and social forms that, coming after that period, seem to allude to it in some way. According to this model, the medieval period functions as the primary text, where all expressions of medievalism constitute a kind of secondary commentary on that period, necessarily belated, derivative, and attenuated by historical distance. Our scholarly training teaches us how to tell these things apart; and how to privilege the former, so that when the discipline of medievalism studies emerged, in the 1970s, it was seen by many as hopelessly tertiary: a weak discipline that studied the weak reflections of the Middle Ages.

Samuel Pepys and the Great Fire of London: Trauma and Emotion, Private and Public

This essay reads Samuel Pepys’ account of the 1666 fire in London as a test case for the study of ‘literary’ texts in the history of emotions and of disasters. Journals and diaries are invaluable evidence for the history of trauma and disaster, but as self-conscious texts written for an uncertain future their testimony is not always straightforward. Pepys interweaves a mixture of private and public emotions in his diary, which testifies to the important mediating role of language in the history of emotions. He also tracks his own emotional state after the trauma of the fire: one of the reasons his account remains so compelling for modern readers. Pepys’ account of the fire is paradoxical as a trauma narrative: it is deeply personal and yet offers invaluable insights into the behaviour of the people of London as they confront the destruction of their city.

The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages: On the Unwritten History of Theory (review)

the last, symbolic plays of the 1890s and early 1900s — Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, John Gabriel Borkman, When We Dead Awaken — represent his finest work, Dublin was very late in seeing them: the average time lag from world premiere to Dublin was nineteen years. Notwithstanding that time factor, which might have provided at least theoretical opportunity for scholars and theater patrons to enrich their knowledge of possibly the most important dramatist since Shakespeare, reception was often incomprehending and perfomances of mediocre standard. There is, in addition, very little evidence of Ibsen’s unmediated influence on the work of Irish dramatists, with the possible exception of Edward Martyn, his life-long admirer. Instead — one of Ruppo Malone’s most persuasive lines of discussion — one can speak of the impact of Ibsenite drama, in which the scaffolding, the social coloring, the apparent presentation of motivation, look like the genuine article. This use of Ibsen manqué may be observed in such plays as Lennox Robinson’s 1909 The Cross Roads (the conscientious woman in a loveless marriage), T. C. Murray’s 1912 Maurice Harte (the destructively strong mother), and Oliver St. John Gogarty’s 1917 Blight (the horrors of disease and poverty, á la Ghosts). Ruppo Malone is an ever-alert close reader, as we appreciate in her informed and informative comments on O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars, where she adjudicates adroitly between the published text and the prompt book, not found until 1997. Similarly, her account of the preparations for Peer Gynt, with which, under the management of Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLiammóir, the Gate Theatre opened in 1928, is surely definitive in its marshalling of fact and comment. However, as with the fascinating collocations between Joyce’s “An Encounter,” Yeats’s “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” and the spiritual emphases of Ibsen, some of this compelling commentary seems a little redundant, unconnected contextually, and, on occasion, less than totally persuasive. However, in terms of her stated and daunting objective — to use Ibsen’s plays “to explore the tensions between Irish writers and their audiences, and between the developments in the literary and the stage traditions in Ireland” — this is work of remarkable perceptiveness.

Mary Dove, 1944-2009

Medievalists around the world were shocked to hear of the sudden death of Mary Dove at her home in Lewes, Sussex, on June 5, 2009. Mary came to Australia in 1975 to take up a position as Lecturer in English at La Trobe University. She held this position till 1978, when she moved to the Department of English at the University of Melbourne, where she was soon promoted to Senior Lecturer. In 1995 she took up a position in the Department of English at the University of Sussex. She was promoted to Reader in 2000 and Professor of English in 2008. She was a highly regarded friend, teacher and colleague to many Australian scholars, and played an active role in the community of medieval scholars. Many readers of Parergon will remember the successful ANZAMRS conference she hosted in Melbourne in 1992. She was also a lay preacher at the Anglican church of St Mary in North Melbourne. Mary was born on December 10, 1944 and studied at Cambridge and Oxford. Her first monograph, The Perfect Age of Man’s Life (Cambridge, 1986) was a rich investigation into the medieval literature of the ‘prime of life’. Mary also published extensively on the Bible in medieval culture, and on medieval and modern interpretations of the Song of Songs. She edited and translated the Glossa Ordinaria of the Song of Songs (Brepols, 1997), and in 2007 published her major study of the Wycliffite Bible, The First English Bible: The Text and Context of the Wycliffite Versions (Cambridge, 2007). From 2007-9 she held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, and was preparing an edition of medieval English texts advocating the translation of the Bible into English. Mary is remembered as a passionate and uncompromising teacher, who helped her students rise to the high standards she set them. One of her former students from Melbourne, Helen Hickey, writes: