The project organised and sponsored a session on emotion at the Annual Congress of the Humanities, held at the University of Iceland 11-12 March 2022. All the ‘local’ team members presented their early findings, from syntactical characteristics of emotion verbs in Old Icelandic to embodied emotions and hybridity. Below is a description of the session:
Emotion in Medieval Language and Literature: Body, Medicine and the Emotional Self
This session will consider the mediation of emotion in medieval literature and language. The focus will be on the interaction and intersections between the body and the presumed emotional self, the borders between the internal and external and the role of medicine in the understanding of emotions. Moreover, the session will consider how emotions might have been perceived, understood and mediated – as somatic, medical or cognitive experiences – based on both linguistic structure and their literary interpretation. The session forms part of the international research project ‘Emotion and the Medieval Self in Northern Europe’ that is funded by the Icelandic Research Fund.
Þórhallur Eyþórsson – The Syntax of Sorrow: The Syntactic Characteristics of Some Verbs of Emotion in Old Icelandic
Sif Ríkharðsdóttir – Pain and Emotionality in Old Norse Literature
Caroline Batten – Illness, Embodied Emotion, and Old Norse Medicine
Meritxell Risco de la Torre – Hybridising Emotion: Selfhood and Emotionality in Jean d’Arras’s Mélusine ou la Noble Histoire de Lusignan
See programme