On April 8th, the project’s Postdoctoral Researcher, Timothy Bourns, attended another workshop on medieval emotions: the Contributors Workshop for the volume Cultural Models for Emotions in the North Atlantic Vernaculars, 700-1400. The event was hosted by the University of Castilla La Mancha and will lead to a published volume with Brepols, edited by Professor Javier Díaz Vera, Dr Teodoro Manrique Antón, and Dr Edel Porter.
Timothy’s chapter is titled ‘Blood, Rain, and Tears: Eco-Emotive Metaphor in the Medieval North’. It examines the figurative relationship between emotion and the environment in Old Norse tradition, drawing on comparative material in Latin, English, Irish, and Saxon, with a focus on crying and fluids. These eco-emotive metaphors combine a somatic marker with an environmental feature, simultaneously revealing the depth and nature of an emotional gesture as well as the symbolic associations of various natural phenomena. The chapter will thus argue that the fluids of the living body and the natural environment form a figurative, affective, symbiotic relationship in the related emotive scripts of the medieval North.