Personification and Embodied Emotional Practice in Middle English Literature

A pressing question facing literary scholars who are working on emotion is that of what literary analysis and literary history can bring to the history of emotions. While disciplines such as psychology, anthropology, linguistics and various branches of history have made notable contributions to the study of emotions past and present, precisely how imaginative literature might fit into emotion studies remains unclear. This essay suggests that attention to the tropes and forms with which literature performs its imagining may be the best way to incorporate literature into the history of emotions. I focus in particular on how personification in Middle English texts translates abstract emotions into bodily terms in order to represent them as embodied phenomena and to elicit emotional responses. By examining the personification of emotions in these texts, we can see how imaginative literature might both shape and constitute emotional practice.