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This book analyzes how acts of feeling at a discursive, somatic,
and rhetorical level were theorized and practiced in multiple
medieval and early-modern sources (literary, medical, theological,
and archival). It covers a large chronological and geographical
span from eleventh-century France, to fifteenth-century Iberia and
England, and ending with seventeenth-century Jesuit meditative
literature. Essays in this book explore how particular emotional
norms belonging to different socio-cultural communities (courtly,
academic, urban elites) were subverted or re-shaped; engage with
the study of emotions as sudden, but impactful, bursts of sensory
experience and feelings; and analyze how emotions are filtered and
negotiated through the prism of literary texts and the
socio-political status of their authors.
This book analyzes how acts of feeling at a discursive, somatic,
and rhetorical level were theorized and practiced in multiple
medieval and early-modern sources (literary, medical, theological,
and archival). It covers a large chronological and geographical
span from eleventh-century France, to fifteenth-century Iberia and
England, and ending with seventeenth-century Jesuit meditative
literature. Essays in this book explore how particular emotional
norms belonging to different socio-cultural communities (courtly,
academic, urban elites) were subverted or re-shaped; engage with
the study of emotions as sudden, but impactful, bursts of sensory
experience and feelings; and analyze how emotions are filtered and
negotiated through the prism of literary texts and the
socio-political status of their authors.
Just like the modern hysteric, a figure that catalyzes clinical
vocabularies confirming medieval theological anxieties, the
demoniac has been considered an "anomalous" and "abnormal"
manifestation of womanhood. Incapable of self-governance, both
linguistic and corporeal, the medieval possessed is placed in the
category of the pathological. The symptoms of possession are part
of a multilayered discourse coined by medieval theologians, authors
of exempla, hagiographers, and natural philosophers. The
subjectivity of the demoniac becomes, thus, a fetishistic
construction which allows medieval male intellectuals to ponder
questions about demons, the supernatural, and the human body.
Demonic Possession, Vulnerability, and Performance in Medieval
French Drama advocates for an affective and ethical framework of
reading the vocabularies of possession in which the demoniac's
convulsions, contortions, shrieks of pain, and snapshots of
disarticulated language are not conceptualized as "pathological"
but as a model of intercorporeality built around modalities of
sensuous exchange between the bodies of both the possessed and of
those whom she comes in contact with. Can we think of a corporeal
agency of the "anomalous" body of the possessed independent of
reason and articulated language? What happens when such distorted
bodies enter zones of visual, haptic, and aural contact with
abled-bodied individuals? Can possession be considered as a
producer of a sensuous type of knowledge that alters the way
sovereign subjects perceive themselves? Taking as primary sources a
series of late-medieval French Passion Plays and hagiographical
plays authored by poetic and religious figures such as Arnoul
Greban, Andre de la Vigne, Eustache Mercade, and Jean Michel, this
book argues that the lyrical capaciousness of the plays as forms of
narrativized poetics allows us to understand demonic possession as
a series of bodily narratives of pain, of healing, of witnessing,
and, ultimately, of vulnerability.
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