Feelings as Heraldic Devices in Late Middle English Chivalric Romance
Loading...
Date
2022-10-04
Authors
Odell, Ross
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
This project argues that we can read feelings in medieval chivalric romance the same way one reads conventional heraldic imagery, and doing so shows us how feelings are a site for identity construction in ways that align with our understanding of identity today. The project finds clear evidence that late medieval romance writers thought of feelings as functioning similar to more conventional elements of heraldry, like a knight’s coat of arms, his device, his colors, or his battle cries, in the sense that feelings typically attach to specific knights but are also shared by knights within the same chivalric community. The dual nature of the chivalric device—both a stable, abstracted indication of allegiance and malleable ornament of individual identity—is what makes it productive for understanding how social selfhood is constructed in romance, and the project proposes the term ‘feeling-emblem’ to describe the highly public way in which emotional expressions are used to communicate different aspects of that selfhood. The project mainly tracks a category of weak negative emotions which Sianne Ngai calls “ugly feelings,” and it does so for two reasons: (1) these kinds of emotions are well-represented in the battlefield romances of late medieval Britain which I study most closely, and (2) emotions like irritation, anxiety, envy, and disgust are historically stable in a way that other emotions of medieval romance are not, meaning that focusing on ugly feelings helps us find lines of continuity between medieval and modern identity constructions. By focusing on feeling-emblems of weak negativity, then, the project aims both to better understand how medieval audiences imagined themselves through their period’s most popular literary genre and to explore how our own discourses around identity today are shaped and challenged by that process.
Description
Keywords
Affect Theory, Chivalry, Heraldry, Masculinity Studies, Medieval Romance, Ugly Feelings