Anglo-Saxon Emotions: Reading the Heart in Old English Language, Literature and Culture ed. by Alice Jorgensen, Frances McCormack, and Jonathan Wilcox (review)

This volume comes out of a workshop held at Trinity College, Dublin, in 2012, on the history of emotion. Although a topic of longstanding interest to literary critics, emotion has recently become big business. The Max Planck Institute in Berlin supports a Center of the History of the Emotions, as does the University of London. The Australian Research Council sponsored a similar center at the University of Western Australia. Other centers can be found in Amsterdam; Liège; Berkeley; Washington, D.C.; Madrid; Geneva (where it is called "affective sciences"); Exeter; and online in no small number. Computer scientists, purveyors of Big Search, and online retailers are pursuing sentiment analysis in order to optimize user experiences and increase sales. Siri, Alexa, Watson, and others are being trained to respond to emotional cues. Industrial psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts, all of whom have been studying emotions for generations, are in high demand. In all these professional areas of inquiry, the speed and volume of publication inundates even the most assiduous reader. Handbooks and introductions to the study of emotions gush from presses. Anglo-Saxon Emotions contains thirty-five pages of bibliography. Consuming it at breakneck speed, say an item a day, would require almost two years.

Unsurprisingly for such a profuse subfield, its exponents contend with uncoordinated jargon and with an ill-defined body of evidence. Even when confining oneself to linguistic reflexes of physiological states, methodology is an obvious challenge. In the volume under review, one finds secondhand descriptions of brain physiology next to historical reports, and etymologies jumbled up with snippets of psychoanalysis. Such a jumble recalls Jan Plamper's warning in his The History of Emotions (Oxford, 2012): those who study literature and its images of emotion tend to "make casual use of the neurosciences, which are today so much in vogue." He warns, "One needs a degree of literacy in the neurosciences to understand what one is borrowing from, when one borrows" (p. 8). As far as I can tell (there is no list of contributors), none of the authors in this collection is professionally trained in psychology, neurology, or cognitive science. Neither is this reader, who is incapable of assessing the accuracy of their scientific claims.

A terrific introduction by Alice Jorgensen explains the challenges faced by anyone studying emotions described in texts. Her overview of the debates and her review of the literature is exemplary. The Introduction alone recommends the book. Perhaps relying on Jorgensen's careful and measured analysis, most contributors to the volume deal cursorily with methodological difficulties of mining literary portraits for emotional states. This is understandable, given that the contributors are philologists eager to explain texts, not scientists explaining emotion. All contributors make clear that a single physiological state can link to a variety of vocabulary items. Conversely, a set of related vocabulary items does not always link to a single physiological state. So, the Latin model of a skull-centered mind that Leslie Lockett explores does not produce vocabulary items that correlate completely with a chest-centered Old English model. Daria Izdebeska describes the consequent conundrum well in her chapter. Izdebeska attempts to resolve it by employing "semantic primes," which may be the same as hypernyms. She escapes physiological universalism through a kind of Platonism, treating emotions as eternal forms that take varied, historically contingent shapes. One is invited to assume a transhistorical continuity of the Platonic form, notwithstanding "underlying conceptual structures specific to that language" (p. 53). So Hroðgar's grief (OE torn) is essentially our grief—it points to the same abstract form, Grief—but manifests in culturally and historically specific conditions. Other contributors make similar moves toward abstract universalism. From a more Aristotelian perspective, one wonders if "grief" describes the same emotional state as French chagrin or...