The article brought up many interesting point about emotions that I have not learned about.   I found the conflicting arguments about emotion and reason most interesting.  Today most people tend to believe that emotion is almost opposite to reason but in fact at one point they were argued to go together.  I understand that there is a tendency to view emotion as a reaction versus a thought out process but the arguments of monism stating that mind and body (emotion and reason) are the same is an interesting way to approach emotion.  Ultimately, I agree with emotion being a reaction, especially with the speed at which synapsis are stimulated in the brain, but still an interesting way to approach emotion and the medieval studies.

Plamper’s article complicates our understanding of ‘feeling’ even more as he attempts to find a working definition of emotion that can ultimately be used to discuss emotions throughout history.  While all the definitions and philosophies of emotion were a bit overwhelming, I found the article interesting in light of our studies.  At one point, the author asks, “Can emotional reactions to ‘real’ events that affect me directly be compared or even equated with emotional reactions to cultural products such as novels, films, or computer games?”  Aristotle, he says, considers these emotional reactions to “have a lesser force” (14).  But I think most literature enthusiasts would disagree — of course the emotional reactions are real and probably the same.  The question then becomes, is there a difference between how literature affects us and how it might have been different at the time and place it was written.  Of course, as Palmer points out, “emotional thinking during the Middle ages is not so well researched as that in antiquity, and furthermore had little influence on subsequent centuries” which makes the task of “Feeling Medieval” more difficult (17).

SN. Another point that stood out to me was that in the “court painting of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century North Indian Islam no indication of the face as the site of emotion,” it is all in “bodily movement, colour,” etc.  This immediately reminded me of the images we looked at in class and the contrast between Medieval paintings and contemporary depictions of courtly love, where the faces are the main sites of emotion.

Despite its length, this article was pretty interesting. I especially enjoyed reading about the different people in history that tried to define and understand emotions. I’ve read about Galen before, and I find his theory fascinating. He believed that humans were composed of four fluids: blood, phlegm, yellow gall, and black gall. An excess of one of these caused a person’s humour to exist in a particular sphere where they experienced particular feelings. Galen advocated moral education and moderation to combat this unbalance.

He and other theorists also seemed to place value in a person’s will, implying that if their will was strong enough, they could overcome issues like melancholy and depression. This part of his theory is what I can still see today. Many people are under the impression that a person can “beat” depression and melancholy through the strength of their will, when that isn’t always the case. To me, these sentiments seem just as ignorant and far-fetched as Galen’s theory of fluids and humour.

The author brings up Rosenwein and again talks about how there are two different (at least two) camps of thought regarding emotion. this author describes them as polar opposites in the beginning of his essay. What is weird is that he gives any attention to the idea of the tribes with their primitive nature of deciding if someone was fearful simply by using a ritual. Is my thoughts on this primitive myself and perhaps I can’t widen my horizen to accept this? Or maybe I am not reading the article correctly, but to even entertain this concept is strange. It is clear that emotions are universal, to me, and not governed by any outside force of nature like karma or chi or atua. .

I’d like to take a quick look at the Enlightenment’s view on things: “nature as the body and nature as the environment”.  If we can look to emotions as certainties of the human body or human nature, then we can, as the author says, read nature as absolute certainty. What does that say to the author’s earlier tryst with the amygdala? I am not sure. I do know that this author things that you can take the piece by piece evolution of emotion and look at it, like he does with the amygdala.

The author notes that in a hundred year span there have been 92 different definitions for emotion. I think that this speaks to the way that the author said he wanted to look at the evolution of emotion piece by piece. But are we supposed to cut out the pieces like the tribe mentioned earlier in his work that deemed emotions as ruled by outside forces? I did see the author’s connection with emotions and outside forces when he reminded the reader of the ways that we, as a group of people writing or talking about our feelings, will use such phrases that reference “something external” such as “overcome with rage”.

I guess I struggled to see all of the various definitions of emotion and was most struck by the author’s ability to relate something as concrete and valid as the amygdala with the Maoi tribe’s concepts of emotions being governed by an outside force.

This was a lengthy but interesting work, and I feel further invested in the study of emotion and how it pertains to our class after reading it. There was a lot of information in this article, but the main thing that I took away from it is how difficult it is and has been through history to define emotion, as well as the questions that surround it. Plamper rarely directly answers the questions he titled his chapters with, instead reviewing different ways people have approached such questions beginning with Artistotle into modern day. This emphasizes how complex and nearly impossible to concretely conceptualize emotion is: “everyone knows what [it] is, until asked to give a definition” (11). I like the idea that rather than seeking hard truths to the questions surrounding emotion, it is more productive to instead look at the different ways people have tried to answer them as time has passed.

There were two points in these chapters that I found most interesting. One, I enjoyed reading about Artistotle’s definition of “pathos”, and the idea that emotions have positive and negative traits simultaneously – for example, anger producing pain as well as the imagined possibility of ‘sweet’ revenge. This made me think about how this could be applied to the emotion of love or desire. Love produces the obvious pleasure of mental and physical satisfaction and joy, but could also be negative because of the possibility of it being taken away, or the person of your affection hurting you.

Secondly, I was also fascinated by Plamper’s talk about how many of the modern day metaphors for emotion may date back to how the Greeks defined it, as they imply an external force (i.e. overcome with rage, love-struck). I think this idea has also been addressed in another article we have read for class, and this just further helped to show how concepts of emotion have a lineage that has found ways to stay with us despite ever-changing definitions and constructs.

One of the things I found most interesting in Plamper’s piece about emotion was the description of the location of emotions and the reference to the eye as the window to the soul. Plamper explains that in English and German the eyes are often thought of as descriptors for emotions.  When someone is happy, we may describe their eyes as “shining” as Plamper exemplifies.  However, in the Chinese language eyebrows are more commonly used to illustrate emotion.  The explanation of the importance of eyes in the English language made me recall our conversation about grey eyes in the Middle Ages. Grey eyes were considered the most beautiful eyes in the Middle Ages when Pearl was written. Pearl is depicted with grey eyes which were stunning.  Although the thought behind this notion is attributed to the goddess Athena’s grey eyes, I think it is very interesting to think that the Middle English Pearl references eyes multiple times. Rather than focusing on Pearl’s eyebrows like it may have if it had been written in Chinese, Middle English shares a commonality with modern English and German: a focus on the eyes.  Whether the author of Pearl intended the grey eyes of Pearl or the reference to an “eye’s delight” in stanza 16 and other references to the eyes as illustrations of emotion is unclear but it is interesting to consider these Middle English references as a possible precursors to our notion of eyes as the window to the soul.

This poem followed more of the themes I thought that medieval poetry would be like before entering into this coarse.  Many of the poems that we have read so far have deep religious tones to them but Pearl is overtly religious and is centralized around Jesus, St. John, and Mary as much if not more than the dreamer or his daughter.  There is a clear push for living a good life in order to reach the joy and paradise found in the poem.  A good example of the morals the poem tries to convey is in stanza 72 which says, “Concerning death, where hope is best/fear of death the Lamb puts to rest,/At Mass He heaps on happiness…”  This theme is again and again emphasized.

The dreamer in Pearl is mesmerized by the ornamentation of the otherworldly place. His excitement distracts him from mourning the loss of his daughter. On the one hand this is good because he is momentarily relieved from his sorrow. On the other hand, one must question his values as material things make him forget such an important relationship. The dreamer’s distracted amazement at ornamentation raises question to weather he values material things over emotional connection, and further weather he misses Pearl because of her role as his daughter or her position as his most valuable jewel. Her name answers this question in a sense because a pearl is a precious, valuable jewel; from this we learn Pearl’s worth to her father, the dreamer. Though Peal was young when she died the dreamer never mentions any memorable moments, he simply describes her value and purity. To further address the dreamer’s values, when he finally sees Pearl in her maiden state, rather than being relieved by her happiness and well being he seems jealous that she rests peacefully in paradise while he laments her absence on earth, further emphasizing this misplacement of his values and highlighting his flaw. It difficult understanding the dreamer’s feeling toward his daughter at different moments in the text because he does not react as one would expect under these circumstances.

I found the last half of the poem to be slower and slightly less interesting than the first half, mainly because of the constant biblical references and long dialogues.  I did however find myself paying more attention to the fact that the speaker is identified as a jeweler after we talked about this in class.  The poem, with its constant repetition and play on word meanings, also plays on this idea.  As we discussed, his occupation leads him to claim his own authority in evaluating or “deeming” fine jewels and pearls and leads to his questioning Pearl and the theological concept she represents in the second half.  I couldn’t help but relate this to the long descriptions of the city that “bejeweled the base generously;/ twelve cross beams there set on stone…” which begins in stanza 83 and ends in 87.  I thought it was appropriate that he would envision this bedazzled city, but also thought this reinforced the idea that God is the ultimate jeweler and the last lines suggest this as well: “He made us to be His faithful line,/ like precious pearls in Prince’s pay.”  By no longer mourning Pearl, it seems that the speaker is also giving up the materialistic ways that come with his profession and with life in general.