Cultivating the Heart: Feeling and Emotion in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Religious Texts (Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783162643 ISBN 13: 9781783162642

Publisher: University of Wales Press, 2017

Synopsis

In the past few years, interest has grown in the way human emotions have been experienced, stimulated, and expressed in languages throughout history. Cultivating the Heart studies the language of emotions in religious texts in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, focusing on sermons, saints’ lives, guidebooks for religious recluses, meditations, and lyrical poetry. It offers, as well, substantial commentary on church wall paintings, providing readers with a nuanced understanding of the ways in which the affective strategies of visual resources can be mapped onto texts. This is the first book-length study of affective language in the High Middle Ages, a period which has been previously neglected in work on the history of emotions.

About this title

About the Author

A. S. Lazikani is a stipendiary lecturer in Old and Middle English literature at the University of Oxford.

Review

“This volume demonstrates how early Middle English religious writings and paintings teach their readers and viewers both to thwart and to embrace affective pain—that is, the interconnected stirrings of love, compassion, and sorrow inspired by the redemptive suffering of Christ and the Saints. Framed authoritatively within the latest critical discussion of the history of emotions and affective literacies, Lazikani’s sensitive readings of these sometimes alienating medieval works recover their emotional intensity and illuminate the function of the extreme suffering they evoke.” (Elizabeth Robertson, University of Glasgow)

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1783162643
• ISBN 13: 9781783162642
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 272
• Editor: Lazikani Ayoush S.