Words, Emotions and Reading the Past I

My new research project, which I started at HHU, deals with the study of medieval texts in translation. I work with one piece of literature written in Old French and its later translation into Middle English. This means, in practice, that I spend a lot of time looking very closely at language and words. This might seem quite tedious to some (though if you are an Anglistik student, you probably love words too) but it is the very reason I got into medieval literature in the first place. Because we study literary texts written in a language that we no longer speak, there is always some form of translation at play – which as you may know is already a form of interpretation! Even words which appear readily understandable to modern readers may hide lost meanings or connotations.

For example, the Middle English word pleasaunce looks and sounds familiar. While the word may be obsolete in Modern English, where it has come to refer to a pleasant place, it is not difficult to imagine that it is a cognate of pleasure. And yet, the Middle English word’s first meaning is that of ‘satisfaction of a deity or a superior’, ‘a person’s will’ (definitions from the Middle English Dictionary, an incredible online resource and my best research friend!). To do someone’s pleasaunce refers to the act of pleasing or serving someone: to hold pleasaunce is thus a form of privilege and authority! Geoffrey Chaucer, for example, expertly exploits the ambiguity of this term to create dynamics where pleasaunce in love is both an act of service and a sensual feeling. Chaucer uses the term very frequently in his tragic love story Troilus and Criseyde, where the ambiguity of the word is used to great effect as a feeling of pleasure which submits and eventually annihilates Troilus. This may appear as a very small thing, but this very small thing is interesting enough for me to be writing a whole article on it! In fact, I am writing a whole book on the word ‘joy’ in European medieval literature (and I am only half joking!).

I find the study of emotion words particularly interesting because it can tell us a lot about past emotional cultures and how the category of emotion itself changes. Working on the joy of love in medieval literature, I was surprised to find expressions that seemed so distant from the modern concept of psycho-somatic emotion. I mean look at this passage from The Mirror of Simple Souls by the wonderful French mystic Marguerite Porete: ‘Such a Soul, Love says, Swims in the sea of joy […] And so she feels no joy, for she is joy itself. She swims and flows in joy without feeling any joy, for she dwells in Joy and Joy dwells in her.’ Joy here is not an internal emotion anymore but a sea where the soul swims, until it eventually becomes joy! This is quite foreign from the modern concept of emotion, and yet, doesn’t joy still somehow feel like a wide, open space, like getting out of oneself?

Studying the meaning of past words illuminates the past but, also, sometimes, the present! Next time I blog I’ll tell you about my current translation project.