2 - Mind, Body and Affect in Medieval English Arthurian Romance

Summary

Literary studies have recently been marked by an affective turn – a new interest in and emphasis on the workings of affect that reflects a broader academic trend. The later twentieth century saw an influential shift away from ideas of Cartesian dualism, towards phenomenology: the connections between body and mind, self and world, thinking and feeling all came to the fore in the disciplines of philosophy, psychology and neuroscience. Affect became a prominent subject across the humanities and social sciences. Yet this seemingly radical ‘turn’, like so many, was also a turn to the past: medieval thinkers, using very different models, took for granted many of these ideas. This essay traces the understandings of mind, body and affect that underpin medieval notions of psychology, and the ways that these ideas inform and are explored in medieval English romance. For all their emphasis on action, the intensity of these works is rooted in their affective power and their psychological acuteness. Romance treatments of emotion are dependent on the intimate connections made between minds and bodies within the medieval thought world. Writers rely on and creatively adapt conventional notions of love and grief, exploring how these are felt in hearts and minds, and probing their physiological force. They repeatedly engage with suffering and conflicted psyches, writing the experience of affect on the lived-body, often in extreme ways. And they engage too with the processes of thinking and feeling, demonstrating the crucial interplay of affective and cognitive elements in emotion. These elements animate medieval romance writing and assure its resonance for readers so many centuries later.

Medieval Psychology: Thinking and Feeling

Medieval ideas of body and mind were much more integrated: to be embodied was to be human, and connection with the world was through the lived-body, fallen though this was. Hippocrates’ theory of the humours, developed by Galen in the second century and central to medieval medical thought, necessitated the idea of a mind–body continuum. Both physical and mental health depended on the balance of the four humours, as did individual temperament and complexion, while each humour was also linked to the stars and planets.