Bad Feelings across the Middle Ages: Rage, Deceit, and Empire

Francis, Kersti; Francis, Kersti

Medieval Studies, as a discipline, often protests popular understandings of the medieval period as the ‘Dark Ages’. In an effort to counter this imagining of the Middle Ages, scholars have looked for medieval expressions of diversity and tolerance, as opposed to episodes of oppression, persecution, and violence (Gabriele and Perry 2021). Feminist medievalists in particular have adopted a ‘recuperative’ approach to the medieval past, seeking to recover women’s experiences and voices from the archive, in order to rectify enduring perceptions of the Middle Ages as a uniquely misogynistic period. Yet, recent critiques (Blurton and Johnson 2017; Rambaran-Olm 2022) have emphasized that in an effort to ‘recuperate’ the Middle Ages, medievalists often fail to reckon with ‘ugly’ moments or insufficiently proto-feminist figures, let alone the ‘bad feelings’ that medieval texts espouse or evoke for both contemporaneous and modern readers.

These two panels, sponsored by the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, seek to interrogate moments of ‘bad feelings’ in the Middle Ages, with the aim of thinking through how medieval expressions of negativity are entangled with discourses of race, gender and sexuality studies, and theories of embodiment. Although medievalists have long been interested in embodied forms of feeling, this discussion is often limited towards how coherent gendered and sexual identities were formulated through carefully-managed or culturally-comprehensible affects (Crocker 2017). These panels and their attendant papers, in contrast, ask how attending to ‘ugly feelings’ – affects that do not consolidate into intelligible social identities – might nuance our understanding of medieval experiences of race, gender, sexuality, and embodiment (Ngai 2007). Drawing upon studies of queer affects (Halberstam 2011, Ruti 2018, Malatino 2022) and the ‘ugly feelings’ engendered by heteropatriarchal settler colonialism (Anzaldúa 1987, Ngai 2007), these panels aim to demonstrate whether ‘bad feelings’ are not just idiosyncratic but are, in fact, constitutive of resistant ways of being across the medieval world.

599 Bad Feelings across the Middle Ages: Rage, Deceit, and Empire: Calls for Papers