Emotional Alterity in the Medieval Northern Sea World

In medieval texts, readers are often confronted with emotional reactions that seem incongruous or implausible, or even unimaginable. These texts rarely explain emotional responses or motivations. We are rarely told how people feel or why they do what they do. Nothing about the way these texts unfold suggest that there is anything surprising about them or that people would find them unusual. The implication is that the meanings communicated by such emotional display were obvious to their intended audience. So, can such meanings be recovered? This volume addresses the depiction of perplexing emotional reactions: displays of emotion that are improbable, physiologically impossible, or unfathomable in modern social contexts. Attempting to recover these meanings is the task to which the contributors to this volume have put themselves. In approaching this question, this book does not set out to be a collection of literary studies that treat portrayals of emotion as simple tropes or motifs, isolated within their corpora. Rather, it seeks to uncover how such manifestations of feeling may reflect cultural and social dynamics underlying vernacular literatures from across the medieval North Sea world.