ESC: English Studies in Canada

Emotions in Medieval Arthurian Literature: Body, Mind, Voice joins the rising number of books published on the emotions in medieval history, philosophy, and literature since the early 2000s. This number includes volumes on various "emotional communities" and "emotional regimes" (Brooks 2017; Jorgensen, McCormack, and Wilcox 2016; McNamer 2010; Rosenwein 2006); on various literary genres (Goodland 2006; Adams 2005); [End Page 216] on gender and emotion (Broomhall 2016; Perfett 2005; Vaught 2003); on emotion in medieval philosophy (Lombardo 2011; Hirvonen 2004; Knuuttila 2004; Hagerlund and Yrjönsuuri 2002); on medieval lexicons of emotion (Ogura 2013); and on medieval law and emotion (Hyams 2003; Smail 2003), to name but a few, not to mention the scores of journal articles that have appeared on these and related topics. The affective turn in medieval studies has been fruitful for the academic publishing industry and, at present, medievalist interest in emotion shows no sign of waning.

In this crowded arena, Emotions in Medieval Arthurian Literature is the first edited collection dedicated specifically to the Arthurian tradition, with essays on medieval texts written in Dutch, English, French, German, Latin, and Norwegian. The book's introduction covers what has become familiar ground, surveying major theories of emotion since Descartes, the recent emphasis in philosophy and cultural studies on bodily affect over cognition, and the insights offered by neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio, whose research suggests that the mind is embodied. According to Damasio, cognitive and affective circuits work together inextricably, thinking and reasoning processes are not opposed to but depend upon emotion, and feelings are essentially perceptions of changes in the body. Medieval theories of the passions and the four humours, the editors argue, resonate with Damasio's idea of an embodied mind, making medieval texts that express or depict emotions relevant interlocutors in current debates. The book's subtitle, Body, Mind, Voice, likewise "signals the special significance of embodiment in medieval understandings and representations of emotion, the affective quality of the construction of mind, and the intermediary role of voice as both embodied and consciously articulating emotion" (9). The subtitle thus promises a highly nuanced and theoretically sophisticated treatment of medieval representations of emotion, a promise that is mostly fulfilled in the essays that follow. It is not true, as the editors assert at the close of their introduction, that the book presents "an opening move in the literary study of emotion in the medieval period"—such study is already well underway—but it is fair to say that the book makes a welcome and thought-provoking contribution to a rich and thriving field.

The collection is divided into two sections. The first, "Thinking About Emotions in Arthurian Literature," is a shorter section of three essays that each frame the genre with a particular theoretical approach. Jane Gilbert's piece opens the volume by using Jean-Paul Sartre's account of emotion as magical thinking and Martin Jay's account of magical nominalism to inform her reading of "magical affect" in the Prose Lancelot as a source of re-enchantment in the context of thirteenth-century French literature. [End Page 217] This is followed by Corinne Saunders's survey of mind-body theories in medieval psychology and their expression in romance, an essay much more general and expository than Gilbert's philosophically dense and "experimental" piece (Gilbert 22), and one that perhaps would have made a more logical starting point for the collection. Andrew Lynch rounds out the first section with one of the strongest contributions in the book, "What Cheer? Emotion and Action in the Arthurian World." Beginning from the semantic link between the modern term "emotion" and medieval Latin "movere," or, in English, "to move," in the sense of "to excite, arouse, stir up," Lynch notes that medieval emotions are "active movements and stirrings, not simply 'states'" (49–50). He then reads emotions in Arthurian stories specifically as political actions. Arthur's expressions of emotions are politically salient acts...