ABSTRACT
This paper looks at invective or vituperative poetry from the eleventh century. In this poetry, anger, being expressed by the person speaking, or (more often) imputed to the person attacked, plays an important role. The paper discusses the relationship between the representation of anger in these poems and the cognitive models by which humans generally perceive and express anger in their speech, through metaphor and metonymy. The study also makes use of the concept of ‘emotional communities’, proposed by Barbara Rosenwein, to describe the normative frameworks and social motivations which caused a coherent group of people to represent and value emotions in a certain way. It explores how the description (the ‘emotion-terms’) and valuation of anger in invective poetry can be an indication of social relationships, more particularly the desire to confirm or to contest social hierarchies. These poems can be partly considered as ‘anger speech’, that is to say, as a poetic speech act, sanctioned by literary tradition, which expresses a kind of anger that is represented as justified and honourable, in contrast to the anger imputed to the opponent.
