ABSTRACT
Despite the fact that ‘emotion’ does not describe a psychic and/or bodily state in the English lexicon until the early seventeenth century, 1 a great deal of recent scholarship explores not only medieval emotion and ‘emotionology,’ 2 but also the English words used to describe emotion before emotion. 3 As Stephanie Downes and Rebecca F. McNamara note, Middle English texts employ words like passioun, felyng, sentement, care, and affeccioun to describe something resembling at least some uses of the Modern English emotion. 4 This chapter surveys how various Middle English devotional texts employ affeccioun. Of course, there is no absolute consensus amongst these texts regarding exactly what affeccioun means (and much less the role it should play in Christian devotion). Nevertheless, myriad Middle English devotional texts employ affeccioun to signify a sort of loving desire in the context of teaching their audience to cultivate certain forms of affeccioun and suppress others. 5 Before turning to these texts, I will briefly discuss the semantic valence and etymology of affeccioun.
