The Mellon Workshop Corpus: “Premodern Books and Bodies” presents a lecture and workshop by Barbara Rosenwein, Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago.

Lecture: “Texts, Emotions, Bodies”

April 12 at 4 pm

7191 Helen C. White

Modern psychologists are nearly unanimous in viewing all emotions as entirely corporeal, by which they generally mean that they are expressed via the limbic system, the face, or the autonomic nervous system. However, as I shall argue, the associations between emotions and the body were (and remain) highly variable.  Rather than look at isolated emotions--fear, anger, and so on--I suggest that we consider emotions within the context of emotional communities.  These are generally the same as social groups, but the researcher interested in them considers, above all, the common interests, values, and emotional styles that characterize their members.  I will suggest that different emotional communities have different ways of incorporating (or not) the body in emotional expression. Some emotional communities welcome the body as part of their affective repertory, others gingerly accept--or indeed reject--the body’s role. In “Texts, Emotions, and Bodies,” I will look at three medieval emotional communities: the seventh-century Neustrian court, Thomas Aquinas and his disciples, and finally Margery Kempe and her supporters.

Workshop: “Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions”

April 13 at 9:30 am

7190 Helen C. White

The reading for this workshop can be found here: http://www.passionsincontext.de