In contemporary thought, the field of emotion studies represents a very potent framework that allows anthropologists, historians, neuroscientists and philosophers to think of the possible ways in which subjects engage with their own sensory experience and with larger practices that enable them to articulate such experiences in in meaningful ways. Nevertheless, “How do I feel?” is a question that was equally quintessential in the pre-modern Western system of thought even if the contemporary significations of the word “emotion ” did not become concrete until the 17th century. In their attempt to capture pre-modern emotional modes and systems of feelings, contemporary medievalists, especially under the influence of poststructuralism, considered emotions primarily as discursive entities that shape collective and individual subjectivities. Barbara Rosenwein’s influential notion of “emotional communities,” which inaugurates this trajectory in medieval studies, turns away from the Cartesian split between mind and body and, instead, presents emotions as discursive regimes consisting of strategies, tactics and the conscious ways in which subjects engage with these. However, while emotions are indeed discursive cultural constructs producing collective subjectivities they also possess a sensorial aspect that simultaneously escapes being captured by the social while being constitutive of it. This was the special contribution of the affective “turn” in contemporary theory: the epistemological need to distinguish between emotions as discursive constructs, and affects as flashes of sensory experience and feelings.

This volume aims at complicating Rosenwein’s existing notion of emotion as discursive practice and, at the same time, investigating how medieval subjects talked about their somatic, sensorial and affective practices. If emotions belong to the complexities of social dynamics, we ask how are they incorporated in textual artifacts and cultural productions stemming from often conflicting social events, groups and discourses? How do they act as facilitators between the author and its audience, between the period and its meaning, between the genre and its writing? The emotional and affective dimension of a text cannot be rationalized as either its objective or its point of origin. It is more a textual and factual paradigm around which the author develops her intellectual environment, creating the cultural and political dimension for the text. However, it is within this territory of the text, as a socio-cultural entity orchestrated by the auctorial persona, that a whole archive of emotions and affects is disseminated.

We are interested in essays that investigate the constituency of such “archives of feelings” (Cvetkovich) through the study of the affectivity and emotionality of both literary and non-literary texts, such as political and theological treatises, mystical texts, medical works, scientific tracts and pamphlets, hagiographies and encyclopedic compendiums. While we welcome submissions of articles dealing with such topics in different geographic areas, we are particularly interested in late-medieval and Renaissance French texts.

Articles may examine, but are not limited to questions related to:

• discourses and practices of emotions and affect
• the somatization of the emotional act
• affect and emotions in poetry
• emotions, affect and gender
• queer emotions and affects
• emotions, affect and race
• psychogeographies of emotions and affect
• rhetorics of affect or emotions
• emotional rewritings of historical events

Please send 300-word abstracts in English, as well as a short biography with university affiliation and email address, to Andreea Marculescu (marculescu.andreea@gmail.com or amarcule@uci.edu) and Charles-Louis Morand Métivier (cmorandm@uvm.edu) before June 1, 2015. Selected abstracts will be notified on July 1st, and the complete papers will be due on November 1st.

Collected Essays | Tales from the Crypt: Museum Storage and Meaning

Museums are about display. But are they really? In spite of recent curatorial attempts to exhibit ‘visible storage’, prevailing debates in the history of museums and collecting are mainly centred around questions of exhibiting, display and spectatorship. This kind of discourse, however, distorts the museum in many ways: it ignores the fact that museums do not just consist of exhibition halls but of vast hidden spaces; it leaves millions of objects out of our museum histories; and lastly, it presents the museum as an organized and stable space, in which only museological ‘results’ are visible not the intermediate stage of their coming into being. Display seems to be about the structured, purposeful, strategic gathering of things according to a system, the features of which are clearly defined. What remains out of sight is the fact that the majority of museum objects lie in storage. As a result, not only a vast physical but also important epistemological and semantic aspect of museums and their collections are eliminated from our discussions. The binary between ‘display’ and ‘backstage’ of museums has previously evoked the assumption that the exhibition area functions as a kind of theatre with objects ‘perform’ on stage, while in the back they are processed from their existence as a mere ‘thing’ to a proper artefact. But there is much more to say about museum storage. Backstage areas of museums are not simply areas where potential display objects are kept. They perform functions and fulfil intentions that, when studied, reveal deep purposes of the museum that go well beyond a mere history of display. A history of storage is a thus history of things that are not shown, but also not written about. The understanding of museums and the intellectual histories they encode undergoes a radical shift when we consider what a museum shows alongside the (usually much larger) range of things it stores. These issues may and will be discussed very differently in various parts of the world, which is what this volume intends to address.

Seeking a variety of historical contributions (e.g. with specific case studies), theoretical and philosophical intervention as well as reflections on practical issues, we wish to explore these ‘tales from the crypt’ along the lines of the following themes:

• Storage and canonization
• The politics of collecting
• Power and censorship
• The economic and epistemic value of museum objects
• Ethics and moral aspects of preservation
• Disposal, sale, and de-accessioning
• The (scholarly) uses, necessities and functions of storage
• Curated and un-curated storage
• Visible storage, off-side storage, deep storage, ‘non-museological’ storage
• The politics of displayability
• Storage, the archive and data mining
• Architecture, real estate and the physical spaces of storage
• Issues of access to storage
• Economic aspects of storage
• Storage and digitization

The volume will partly present the results of a workshop (Victoria & Albert Museum, October 2014), organized under the aegis of the India-Europe Advanced Research Network on Museum History that invited a small group of scholars to respond to museum storage—concept and practice—in India and Europe. It is this cross-cultural approach that we wish to take with the volume. We therefore welcome contributions addressing a broad variety of material and theories across all continents. A report of the IEARN workshop can be found here.

Abstracts (max. 300 words) for papers (max. 8000 words) should be sent to mirjam.brusius@history.ox.ac.uk and kavising@gmail.com by May 15, 2015. Authors will be notified in June. The deadline for final papers will be October 15, 2015.

Concept by Mirjam Brusius and Kavita Singh for the Research Group on Museums and History, March 2014 and 2015