Emotions of Amazement in Old English Hagiography

Acknowledgments

This monograph offers the results of my recent incursion into the hagiographical genre. I would like to thank several people whose advice, feedback and suggestions have been extremely helpful in completing this manuscript and in my current studies on Old English hagiography. To begin with, I would like to thank my former PhD supervisor, Professor Javier Díaz-Vera, for his constant encouragement, bibliography suggestions and overall support. Many thanks to Professor Christine Rauer, for helping me with my research on the Old English Martyrology, which certainly paved the way for the completion of this monograph. I would like to thank my former Medieval English Literature Student as well, Daniel Prado, for helping me out cleaning up and categorising the corpus data for this study. Needless to say, any mistakes or omissions remain my own responsibility.

This research was carried out in the framework of the research group EMOTCL: Emotions across times, cultures and languages, and this research and the publication of this monograph was funded by the Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha (JCCM) in the research project ‘La expression y la conceptualización de las emociones estéticas: Variación cultural y lingüística’ (reference SBPLY/17/180501/000267).

Introduction

Amazement is part and parcel of human experience. On a daily basis, we are surprised, fascinated and mesmerised by different objects, people, circumstances, and events. A new song may enthral us, entertain us, or move us to tears. The contemplation of a sharp mountain landscape might dazzle and terrify us in equal parts. A person’s intelligence or wit can easily leave us open-mouthed. Furthermore, wonder and curiosity lie at the heart of important human processes of learning and knowledge acquisition. Wondering about how something works and operates at its very core is behind some of the most remarkable scientific discoveries in the history of humankind.

Nowadays, amazement is a fundamentally secular response. We associate it with the arts, the contemplation of natural landscape and phenomena, and with scientific progress. Nevertheless, historically speaking, amazement has a long history, and an important spiritual dimension. For centuries, emotions of amazement have been placed at the very core of religious experience, and they have played an important role in the emotion-regulation scripts that are at work in Christian literature. More specifically, in the context of one of the most common literary genres in the Middle Ages, hagiography, emotions of amazement are central to the narrative and become important conversion tools inside and outside these stories.

During my doctoral research, partially published in a monography by this publisher, titled The lexical domain of beauty and its metaphors in the Anglo-Saxon formulaic style (Minaya, 2021), I looked into the role of beauty in the existing poetic production in Old English. During this research project, I also engaged with the study of wonder in these Old English sources. Several texts from the poetic corpus, particularly the verse Lives of Saints, gave me an insight as to how important these emotions were in the hagiographical genre. It was not until I became familiar with the Emotional Communities Theory (Rosenwein, 2007) that I realised the potential that could arise from I bring together the more recent studies in the field of emotion research and some of the most innovative aesthetic emotion theories with research on the role of emotion in monastic or religious contexts. Following this idea, I decided to combine some of the theories and methodologies that I had employed in my doctoral research in the study of a narrower textual corpus.

This monograph presents the result of this research project. Its six chapters offer an analysis and an examination of the lexical domain of amazement in the ←9 | 10→hagiographical writings of an early Medieval English author, Ælfric of Eynsham. The purposes of this study are more specifically detailed in the first, second and third chapters of this monograph, but, in brief, they include carrying out an examination of the role of the emotions of wonder, awe and the sublime in this author’s Lives of Saints. In other words, combining the most recent research in the fields of Cognitive Science and Literary Studies, this study aims at looking into how this particular author employs emotions of amazement to achieve the goals of his emotional community.

1. Emotions of amazement: What are they? How can they be studied in literary texts?

In certain occasions, affective phenomena lie at the core of experiences that are transformative in the life of the individual. Emotions are an important part of our social and individual lives. Experiences like fear, sadness, joy, and happiness give meaning to our lives and condition the ways in which we act and react. Furthermore, specific emotions like fear, wonder, awe and pleasure have always played a fundamental role in the spiritual dimension of the subject. Religious experience is intertwined with the experience of many of these emotions that condition and give shape to how people have interacted with the texts and contexts in which the religious figures that prove to be meaningful in the subject’s relation with the divine.

Before delving deeper into the literary and spiritual dimension of hagiographical texts, the purpose of this chapter is to offer an overview of the ongoing and most relevant research in the field of emotion research. The first section of this chapter will offer some preliminary notes on the study of emotion and will define the key concepts that will be employed through this study. The next two sections will examine some of the different ways in which emotions can be divided and categorised, paying special attention to emotions of an aesthetic nature. Finally, the last section will examine the emotion family that is the focus of this study, emotions of amazement. Broadly speaking, the main aim of this chapter is to provide a solid theoretical framework with recent studies from the discipline of Cognitive Science for the study of this emotion family in Ælfric’s hagiography.

1.1. Some notes on the study of emotion

In recent years, the study of emotions, particularly in linguistic and literary contexts, has bloomed. The research carried out on the part of scientist, doctors, and psychologists in the field of Cognitive Science and Affective Research (Cupchik, 2016; Damásio, 1999; Roseman and Smith, 2001; or Scherer, 2005, to name a few) has provided with solid models and theoretical frameworks upon which research on emotions, their expression and conceptualisation in other areas can be carried out. These range from in-depth examinations of emotional responses to recent events in collective contexts (for example, Goldenberg et al., 2020, who analyse the role of emotion in the development of the Black Lives Matter movement) to how metonymy and metaphor influence the etymological development ←11 | 12→of emotion vocabulary (for example, Díaz-Vera, 2015, who analyses the role of somatic profiles in the Old English expressions of awe, or Díaz-Vera, 2011, which details an analysis of the lexical domain of fear). This being so, the purpose of this section is to define and develop several key concepts of the emotion theories that are relevant to the present study of emotions of amazement in the Old English hagiographical text under analysis.

This definition emphasises the fact that, during the emotion episode, the subject realises a private and inward feeling and, in doing so, it becomes an emotion. Other definitions of the term ‘emotion’ include those proposed by Munteanu (2009: 117), for whom an emotion is “a transaction between the person and the environment,” or by Scherer (2005: 697–698), who considers an emotion to be “an episode of interrelated, synchronised changes in the states of all or most of the fiver organismic subsystems in response to the evaluation of an external stimulus event as relevant to major concerns of the organism.” Similarly, Juslin ←12 | 13→(2013: 236) uses the term emotion to “refer to a quite brief but intense affective reaction that usually involves a number of subcomponents … that are more or less ‘synchronized.’” Going over all of the definitions for the term ‘emotion’ is certainly useless and far beyond the scope of this study, above all considering that Kleinginna and Kleinginna (1981) already reviewed more than a hundred definitions in the 1980s. However, these definitions have in common two main factors: one, that emotion is understood as an interaction between the subject and their surrounding reality; two, that emotions are integrated by different interrelated components.