Abstract: The articles featured in this special issue contribute to a contemporary reevaluation of the history of the passions: how they influence and arise from sensory perception, how they are embodied and performed. Since the very beginnings of French literary history, lyric and narrative texts have portrayed a dynamic interplay between sense emotional response, and action. (1) In learned and popular accounts alike, medieval sources reveal elaborate sensory constructs bridging the inner and outer worlds, governing the formulation and expression of emotional states in often surprising ways. The natural philosophy of the later medieval West boasted a highly developed theorization of perception and cognition, and these faculties' role in arousing what we would today call emotion. This learned model is largely Aristotelian in inspiration, especially following the thirteenth-century boom in commentaries on the newly translated De sensu, pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata, and, most influential of all, De anima. (2) According to this construct, perceptions arise from the interaction of the external (bodily) senses, usually numbered five, (3) and the internal senses (the cognitive faculties of common sense, imagination, cogitation, estimation, and memory). (4) Passions, in the sense of impressions, constitute raw input into this perceptual and cognitive system. (5) Such an understanding of passion--as a passive mode of interaction with the outside world rather than an emotional state--is at odds with common usage of the term in later periods. The word passion comes to designate strong emotions toward the end of the Middle Ages: the earliest such usage cited in the Dictionnaire du Moyen Francais comes from Antoine de la Sales mid-fifteenth-century Jehan de Saintre. More commonly, however, medieval French writers use the term to designate (in religious texts) the suffering of Christ, or (in moralizing texts) base impulses, (6) or (in medical and scientific texts) a passively received effect, a physical or meteorological phenomenon, or suffering or disease attributable to an external cause. In this latter, medicalized context, passions fall under the Galenic rubric of non-naturals, that is, conditions that influence human health and that can be manipulated through changes in regimen. Rather than stemming from our perceptions of the world around us, passions were seen to shape those perceptions and our physiological response to them. If passions are those influences that the human body receives passively, however, this does not mean that our senses are construed as uniquely passive receptors. According to both learned and popular notions of perception, the body exudes influences just as it absorbs them. Perception was a two-way process. The influences of the body flowed out through the senses, gateways which also brought to the individual impressions of the external world. Moral and spiritual qualities, as much as tangible ones, transferred in this way. In addition, these influences and qualities transferred to and from a range of objects and environments beyond those we would consider as implying animate life. Light shining from a jewel might bring benefit to the body; the virtue of a stone might be corrupted by the poor moral quality of the wearer; ghosts and angels could have an influence for good or bad. The boundaries of life, especially its end, were located at points beyond our expectation. (7) Perception is simultaneously passive and active, inwardly and outwardly directed (as in the famous intromission/extramission models of vision). It forges a bond between human subjects and the inanimate objects that shape their intellectual and affective responses to the world around them. (8) In a cultural environment in which a persons or objects perceptible attributes are typically interpreted as signs of his/her/its internal qualities, perception becomes, in a very real sense, a mode of social performance. …
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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