Feeling for the Premodern

On the Charles Bridge in Prague stands a statue from 1683 of the late fourteenth-century martyr John of Nepomuk, later canonized as the patron saint of former Bohemia. Below it is a bas-relief bronze panel including two scenes from the future saint’s life and death (Figure 1). The website Czech Radio explains that “[i]n modern times it has become traditional to touch the bridge here; this is held to bring good fortune and to ensure that the visitor will return to the city of Prague” (Czech Radio).

John of Nepomuk (or Nepomucene) is the name of a saint, or just possibly two saints, who lived in Prague in the second half of the fourteenth century. Two main versions are given for the reason he was thrown from the Charles Bridge, in chains and with a block of wood in his mouth, to suffer death by drowning in the Vltava river. One is that he endorsed another candidate than King Wenceslas IV’s favorite for an abbacy. The other, not extant before 1459, is that the king suspected his wife of infidelity and that John, as her confessor, refused to break the seal of the confessional to give him information.

The bronze statue set above the bridge, high out of public reach, belongs to the realm of official history. It is an image of an image: a cast by Wolf Hieronymus Herold of Nuremburg of the Viennese sculptor Matthias Rauchmiller’s terra-cotta model, which Jan Brokoff also rendered in wood (Louthan 2008, 71). The statue was commissioned by the Wunschwitz family as an act of conspicuous piety to celebrate the supposed tercentenary of the martyrdom in 1683. They sponsored associated “lavish” ceremonies both on the bridge and in their own chapel, where Brokoff’s wooden version was venerated, “with devotees bringing flowers, candles, and other votive gifts.” In a broader political perspective, the statue and cult have been seen to celebrate the victory of the Catholic cause in the region over its enemies (Louthan 2008, 71).

In a more intimate mode of historical memory, the small inverted body of the martyr in the right-hand relief panel below the statue has been severely worn down by years of public touch. In that way, at least, he has remained contemporary — “close” and “in touch.” A collateral and wayward “laying on of hands” has also occurred to the image of the queen below him, and in the left panel to a random greyhound shown patted by an armed man, perhaps an agent of the king, who waits nearby as the queen makes confession. He may be the same man who in the right panel is shown arresting her with a rough hand on the shoulder. Like the tormented saint, the queen and dog, along with a childlike figure to whom the queen reaches with outstretched arm, touch and are touched within the imaged narrative and outside it. They provide alternative opportunities for the investment of feeling in the legend, and alternative opportunities for feeling the material object that embodies it. As the panels also testify, this touch does not perfectly delineate a sole desired portion of the image: in practice, it spreads messily to adjacent areas, brightening the forearms of the armed men who pat the hound and seize the queen.

In defense of the official history, the website Prague.net warns visitors: “[D]on’t get confused by the shiny dog and woman (the Queen)! Not everybody knows the legend and therefore is not sure what to touch! It became shiny only by chance. It doesn’t mean anything special” (Prague.net). A Facebook site entry reads this development rather differently:

The dog on the left panel, however, is petted simply because he is cute. There is no legend and it seems simply that tour guides have so many people trying to touch the falling man that they have to split the group up into three and have some of them touch something else so the tour can move along. But now the dog is the most popular of the three, and some people will accept no substitutes. So touching him must be good for something. (Baba Studio)¹

There must still be those today who venerate the image in ways not dissimilar to how the first seventeenth-century witnesses, or the saint’s fourteenth-century contemporaries, treated icons. For them, blessing, or just “good luck,” came from the power of the saint to channel divine grace to the faithful. Yet the shiny parts of the image testify also to the power of all the hands that have felt them, not only by wearing away the material object they honor, but also, through a mixture of changing cultural knowledges and commercial pressures, by redistributing attention and favor. Touch has “changed the subject” of the panel and the legend, as the panels register the changing course of “feelings” over time. The Nepomuk monument has undergone, and made visible, what Wordsworth in his poem “Mutability” called “the unimaginable touch of time” (1922, 14).

Saints are not the only images venerated by touch. The toe of Edinburgh’s modern statue of David Hume, an Enlightenment atheist philosopher, has become an object of touch, first by philosophy students, now by everyone. As the Wikipedia page devoted to the sculptor, Alexander Stoddart, indicates, “Though Stoddart placed the foot over the edge of the plinth to encourage such engagement, the irony of the practice given Hume’s critiques of superstition has been remarked upon” (Wikipedia). No one will feel for Hume’s toe what the worshiper did who in 1554 bit off a toe from St Francis Xavier’s body, obtaining a relic still sometimes exhibited in Goa. Yet venerated objects, material contacts, and bodily witnessings-to-place still structure the past for us, whatever other cognitive resources we bring to its apprehension.

So why and how do we make images of the medieval and early modern past shiny with feeling? What do we feel for, and what have successive ages been feeling for, when they approach the imaginative and material culture of the premodern past? How do we enlist the touch of and by the past in the creation or contestation of contemporary regimes of feeling? When our touch makes the premodern past shine, is it, in the words of the websites, “only by chance”? Is it “good for something”? And if so, what? In different ways, the articles in this volume frame answers to those questions, as they consider the fusion of tactility and temporality, closeness and distance, in the historical accidents of sensibility that divide and connect the present and the past.

This special issue on “Feeling for the Premodern” offers revealing case studies, ranging from the sixteenth century through to the twenty-first, that do not just explore individual affective encounters between modernity and premodernity, but also reflect on the epistemological assumptions and hermeneutic impulses informing these encounters. Concentrating on examples from the Anglophone and Francophone worlds, the articles draw on a range of critical vocabularies from hermeneutics, existentialism, and postcolonialism, and take a shared interest in theories of emotion and ideology (in particular the influential work of Sara Ahmed) and the growing body of work on affective approaches to the past (especially studies by Carolyn Dinshaw). Together, they probe the intersection of ideology and affect, and develop conceptual vocabularies for understanding the types and registers of emotion that emerge when the modern (including the early modern) comes into contact with the texts, artifacts, discourses, and practices of the premodern past.

Recent investigations into the history of emotions, in particular medieval and early modern emotions, have produced a number of important books and essay collections in the past several years, including a special issue of this journal (Trigg 2014). This developing research direction has forged new pathways into understanding how emotional experiences can be treated as phenomena that are intelligible within, and according to, the social and historical contexts within which they take place. The majority of these studies have tended to excavate the emotional regimes, taxonomies, and rhetorics of previous societies in a way that attends carefully to historical specificity and cautions against universalist claims about emotional continuity across time. Their correctives have been aimed chiefly at fields of study in which emotions have been interpreted reductively through neurobiology, such as psychologist Paul Ekman’s famous studies of facial expression, which argue for universal emotions across human cultures (see Downes and Trigg 2017, 5). One of the more forceful rejections of neuroemotionalism — and an equally determined assertion of a study of emotions based on a culturalist metaphysics — can be found in Daniel Gross’s The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science. As Gross (2006) argues, “we do not just naturally express emotions converging on our amygdala or whatever, but rather … are first constituted as expressive agents by what the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment called ‘social passions’” (5).

The articles in this issue do not prosecute a neurouniversalist argument, and do not challenge the historicity or the social inflection of emotions. Rather, in each of the articles, as with our opening example of the Charles Bridge statue, the historical contingencies of modernity play a crucial role in how the past is experienced affectively. What the articles do seek to do is expand current definitions by insisting on the multitemporal nature of emotional historicity — on the idea, that is, that a number of “social passions” are experienced as untimely, incorporating a recognition of, and in some cases a distinct attitude toward, a historical past that persists or reappears in the present. When people touch the Charles Bridge plaques, they are touching something that is present before them and yet also enduring from the past, in an act that does not just repeat earlier touches of that past-present object, but also reenacts them. The tender stroking of the little fourteenth-century greyhound is directed toward it but also to other dogs beloved of the touchers; at the same time, it is also a gesture of solidarity with dog lovers past and present. All of the articles in this issue explore, then, how contact with the premodern or early modern past evokes in modern Western subjects a suite of transhistorical feelings — that is, a range of feelings associated with the affective-imaginative experience of both their own time and another time from their own.

Scholars of medieval literature have been interested for some time in transhistorical feelings as the basis for hermeneutic engagement with the medieval past. As early as 1995, Dinshaw spoke about the “queer touch” that reaches across time, mutually inflecting the “then” and the “now” and creating a sense of intellectual and affective proximity between the scholar and her medieval counterpart and object of study (1995). Dinshaw (2012) has continued in her influential recent work to develop this notion of untimely contact in which “different time frames or temporal systems collid[e] in a single moment of now” (5). This “now” captures perfectly the moment at which any given tourist in Prague places her hand on the images rendered shiny by a multitude of hands before her. The untimely affective states informing and emerging out of such practices confound easy historical categorization, and so both pose a conundrum and offer a singular angle on the history of emotion.²

Such “feeling for” the past is not limited to modernity’s response to the premodern, or to the medieval in particular. But this approach has broad applicability to considerations of medievalism, in that the medieval is the historical era that has, as the articles in this issue demonstrate, long attracted a host of richly capacious and associative-emotive forms of apprehension — apprehensions that cut across history, myth, and fantasy. The medieval also invites from modernity a uniquely empathic relationship based on what many have described as its contradictory dual positioning as both “other” to the modern and as the crucible of the modern. It is in this paradoxical imaginative space that it becomes both premodern and proleptically modern.

In many cases, strong emotions, of connection but also of loss, are elicited by a generalized apprehension of “the medieval” or “medievalness,” which can best be thought of as “a dynamic aggregate forged” by modernity’s “repeated encounters with objects, texts, artefacts, and with interpretations of the medieval” (D’Arcens 2016, 7). This “medievalness” is part of what attracts tourists to the Nepomuk monument, and part of what they experience themselves as touching when they touch the worn image of the saint. The articles that follow demonstrate, though, that as pervasive as this generalized notion might be, many encounters with the premodern have emotional valences that are specific to the cultural time and place out of which they emerge. Such encounters demand to be analyzed in a way that is historicist, taking account of the cultural, ideological, and aesthetic conditions with which the texts intersect — what Derek Attridge (2011) has usefully called their “idioculture” (682–83). But we must also recognize their inherently multitemporal nature.

Michael Rodman Jones’s analysis of post-Reformation English feelings for the medieval highlights a self-conscious literary “moment” in the 1590s that “brings together an intense interest in medieval texts and cultures with a voguish, decorum-breaking effusion of contemporary energy.” At mid-century, Jones discerns an insistence on a radical discontinuity with the past, albeit a past mined for support of present needs. At the end of the century, he finds that productions revisit the medieval and associate it with an exuberant “extemporality,” a “performance of antiquity” that is at once “both à la mode and deliberately old.” Here, dealings with the premodern are a badge of literary experimentation and tend to neglect rhetorical decorum in favor of brilliant opportunistic improvisation.

Jones then points to a surprising contemporary turn towards historical narratives that revoice medieval figures — Rosamund, Robert of Normandy, Matilda, and Gaveston — in order to cater to a readership willing to “passionate” the past through affective reenactments. Late sixteenth-century writers, including Greene, Nashe, Daniel, and Drayton, seem compelled to hear “dead men speake” — and women — and for “the temporal and chronological distance between medieval subject, contemporary poet, and reader to be effaced in an emotional moment of concentration.” Jones suggests that after the polemical rejection of the doctrine of Purgatory in previous generations, these resuscitations and backward looks to “help” the suffering dead seem to encode a very different climate of feeling. Nevertheless, they can also be emotionally connected with a feature of polemic Reformation historiography: both the reformers and those who held to the “old” religion insist on their close bond with relics of the true primitive church. Thus, John Foxe and Matthew Parker evinced “a palpable need for the material reality of the premodern object”; and Thomas Stapleton made Bede an “icon” to allow England “to be reintegrated into the body of the Church.” A close feeling for the “remains” of the premodern past was bound up with the impulse to sunder from it.

David Matthews’s reading of English medievalism as “feeling about the past” pays attention to three cultural periods he considers crucial to its development “as an object of emotional understanding.” Whereas in Jones’s study, the chief emotional bond with the medieval seems to center on self-defining desires for forms of communication with it, for Matthews, the main element is the degree of fear involved in the imaginative contact. Is the medieval past really dead? How much can it still hurt us? Does it produce a sense of horror, disgust, or terror that goes beyond conscious ideology, amounting almost to a nonvolitional and prediscursive “affect”? Or does confrontation with this past allow the pleasure of observing a fearful object that can no longer harm? Answers to these questions define, for Matthews, the contrast between, on the one hand, the “darkness” of the medieval in post-Reformation writings and into the seventeenth century, after a temporal “rupture that nothing could repair,” and, on the other, the mid-to-later eighteenth-century climate epitomized by Percy’s Reliques, which can see the “seeds of Enlightenment” in the now more neutrally named “Middle Ages” because they are no longer truly fearful. Since reason is the hallmark of the Enlightenment present, the medieval past is called on to supply emotion, but in a tolerant, rather than desiring, spirit. This past has no power to return.

That set of feelings is contrasted again with the earlier nineteenth century, where Matthews argues that vigorous and varied forms of desire to repossess the “real” medieval sprang from the culture of the historical novel, empowering political critique from below, as well as the better-known restorative nostalgia for aristocratic ideals and practices. Wat Tyler surpassed Robin Hood as a popular hero. In his overview, Matthews argues that the later nineteenth-century division between such forms of medievalism and the discipline of medieval studies reduced the range of popular emotional attachments to the medieval past, but that contemporary neoliberal cultural conditions have brought back “passions” for the medieval at the same time as academic attention has redeemed the status of premodern emotions from their earlier twentieth-century place in the “childhood” of Europe.

Over the past few years, and the last two in particular, scholars have increasingly investigated contemporary uses of the medieval or early modern past to support forms of racial, religious, national, or gender supremacy. There has been increasing recognition that to investigate medievalism is to deal with a deeply troubling history. Supremacist dogmas or assumptions of various kinds have not only accompanied but helped to create, recreate, and sustain views of the past through which the “medieval” and the “modern” have received cultural valence at different times. The articles in the volume open up to critique ways in which historical and contemporary investments of emotion in the past promote or assume such supremacy, whether directly or indirectly, and also show how they differ from or oppose its agenda. Their analyses inform and strengthen knowledge of the complex cultural structures and connections of medievalist reference. 

Robin Macdonald’s article offers one such account, exploring how a community of twentieth-century Canadian nuns, the Quebec City Hospitalières, came to evoke feelings of nationalist pride about Canada’s colonial past. Macdonald’s article is unique in this special issue, in that it focuses not on medievalism but on the less examined terrain of later modernity’s transhistorical attachment to the early modern period. The object at the center of Macdonald’s account, a birch-bark letter created by the nuns in 1925 to commemorate the tercentenary of the Jesuits’ arrival in New France, quite literally combined text and landscape to “forge feelings for the seventeenth-century missionary era.”

Taking up Sara Ahmed’s idea of “emotional economies,” in which emotion inheres not in objects but in their circulation between entities, Macdonald recounts how the nuns created the document to evoke the historic missionary identity they shared with the Jesuits, and thereby to forge an affective bond between the orders. But the results were mixed. On the one hand, the letter interrupts the masculinism of nation-building and colonial narratives, allowing the nuns to craft a discreet yet vital place for themselves as women religious within Canada’s founding story. On the other hand, it perpetuates forms of colonialist exclusion and occlusion. Despite the nuns’ professions of love for Canada’s indigenous people, the Algonquian and Iroquoian peoples, whom early missionaries sought to convert to Christianity, are excluded from the essentially European and religious community formed in the letter. Macdonald explores, furthermore, how the letter itself, as an object, ends up becoming a symbol of appropriation: the perception in Canada of the birch letter as an iconic medium of Jesuit missionary communication ignores the long history of indigenous birch document production in Canada. Macdonald’s article offers a sophisticated account of how even objects that appear to exist in Dinshaw’s “queer time” (the letter is atemporal, neither an “historical object” nor a replica, though it does the work of both) can perpetuate troubling linear histories of colonialism and nation building.

The investigation into gender, community, and social exclusion continues in Paul Megna’s article on Simone de Beauvoir’s The Useless Mouths (Les bouches inutiles). Written toward the end of the German occupation of Paris, Beauvoir’s play dramatizes the medieval practice in which noncombatants from cities under siege were expelled on the grounds that they consumed valuable resources without contributing to the war effort. Megna discusses how the play signals a clear parallel between the extreme suffering of the play’s characters and that of the millions of people systematically dehumanized by the Nazis, with its title chillingly evoking Himmler’s infamous phrase, “nutzlose Esser” [useless eaters], which was employed in World War II to justify the strategic murder of noncombatants. Megna does not see the play as simply offering a historical parallel, but goes further, arguing that the play represents an early stage in Beauvoir’s emerging theory of history — a nonprogressive, nontriumphalist model that rejects Hegel’s dialectical view of history as a deterministic forward march, in favor of a Kierkegaardian focus on freedom and subjectivity.

Megna’s account focuses closely on the emotional dynamics of the play, in which expressions of such intersubjective feelings as anguish, love, and shame (as well as shame’s inauthentic counterpart, guilt) are dominant. In order to link history to her favored themes of freedom and identity, Beauvoir has her main medieval character learn to love authentically and to freely embrace the existential anxiety of his straitened circumstances. Megna claims that in depicting a historical situation that is analogous to Beauvoir’s own times, “the play goes to great lengths to demonstrate the hard emotional labor necessary to build and maintain an egalitarian society.” The play’s depiction of a patriarchal and hierarchical society, in which power is unequally distributed—indeed, the male leaders have power of life and death over the “useless mouths” — is part of Beauvoir’s larger corrective to Sartrean existentialism’s assumption of a universally available will to freedom. Megna argues, finally, that by prompting its audience to reach that realization along with its medieval characters, The Useless Mouths demonstrates how an emotional engagement with the past might furnish insights crucial to building a more ethical and just future.

Louise D’Arcens’s article examines the complicated link between medievalism, geopolitics, and the emotions of loss in the two most recent novels of Michel Houellebecq: The Map and the Territory (2010) and Submission (2015). D’Arcens’s analyses of the novels situate their conflicted feelings for the premodern within a French cultural scene in which heritage industries have commodified the Middle Ages and in which neoreactionary public figures regularly deploy emotional rhetorics in relation to the medieval past. The article traces Houellebecq’s shift from a nihilistic satire of how medievalism becomes an instrument of neoliberalism to an ideologically ambiguous engagement with uses of the Middle Ages in recent neoreactionary thought in France. Although Houellebecq’s novels maintain a satiric distance from the medievalist-inflected ideologies they portray, their respective narrative arcs play out conservative fears about the replacement of a medievally-rooted French culture by a global niche-consumer culture or by a modern-medieval French-based “Eurabian” Empire.

Taking up German hermeneutic theory’s refined formulations of transhistorical emotion and nonpositivistic apprehension of the past, D’Arcens argues that such emotions vitally underpin and motivate ideological medievalisms. She then applies this claim to the medievalism in Houellebecq’s novels, looking at how it is intertwined with the “temporal-emotional regimes” of nostalgia and melancholy. Although nostalgia and melancholy appear to have similar affective complexions, with the past-present gap being registered as a form of loss, for D’Arcens they are importantly “distinct in their deeper emotional economies of loss and replacement.” While nostalgia accommodates approximations and substitutions of the lost past, melancholy refuses to accept the loss of the beloved object or state, even while acknowledging the impossibility of ever recovering it. D’Arcens’s analysis of Houellebecq’s novels shows that nostalgic and melancholic dispositions toward the French Middle Ages express ideological positions that range from acceptance to rejection of the impact of globalization on the nation as historical, cultural, and political entity.

Together these articles reveal that not all “feeling for” the premodern is as tender or spontaneous as the touching of the monument on the Charles Bridge. Much of it is troubling and densely wrought; fueled by emotions of fear, anguish, shame, and melancholy; and implicated in a range of ideological and political systems of exclusion. Conversely, though, these same articles show that this “feeling for” the distant past can also provide the impetus to build societies founded on justice and inclusion. One thing that is undeniable is that the emotions elicited by premodernity are closely bound to the abiding question of how communities can and should be formed: what they have been before, and what they can be in times to come.

Notes on Contributors

Louise D’Arcens is Professor in the Department of English at Macquarie University. Her publications include Comic Medievalism: Laughing at the Middle Ages (2014) Old Songs in the Timeless Land: Medievalism in Australian Literature 1840–1910 (2011), and the co-edited volumes The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism (2016) and International Medievalism and Popular Culture (2014). She is currently writing World Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Global Textual Cultures (2019).

Andrew Lynch is Professor in English and Cultural Studies at The University of Western Australia, and Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (CE110001011). He is co-editor of the forthcoming Writing War in Britain and France, 1370–1854: An Emotional History (Routledge). He is also co-editor of the journal Emotions: History, Culture, Society.

Notes

1. The site editors promise that they will soon be posting more entries on “Magic Prague,” where this item first appeared.

2. For a forthcoming study exploring medievalism and emotion, see Prendergast and Trigg (forthcoming).