ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions Study Day: ‘The Heart’

Date: 11 March, 2016
Venue: The University of Melbourne
Contact: Convenors Katie Barclay (katie.barclay@adelaide.edu.au) or Bronwyn Reddan (b.reddan@student.unimelb.edu.au)

The significance of the heart across time in Western culture is hard to underestimate. It is a beating heart that haunts Edgar Allan Poe’s murderous narrator; his guilt embodied as another’s heart. The relationship between conscience and the heart is encapsulated in the expression ‘black-hearted’ – disposed to evil; a metaphor that the contemporary author, Frank Peretti, captured in his horror fiction, where sin manifested as an oozing wound over the heart. Similarly, early modern Christians often imagined religious conversion as a change of heart, the physical embodiment of spiritual transformation. Here the heart was a space of conscience, cognition, morality; for others, it was closely tied to constructions of self. The practice of ‘heart burial’ across medieval and early modern world operated in part due to the association of the heart with the soul; the heart became a key organ that signified the person and enabled it to stand in place of them.

St Teresa of Avila’s heart became a reliquary, perhaps in part due to her famous and agonising visions of being stabbed in the heart, only to be left with an overwhelming love of God; whilst four hundred years later, the French Republican Leon Gambetta’s heart was used as a secular reliquary that encouraged patriotism amongst his followers. Here the heart signified the qualities of the deceased that enabled it to inspire devotion amongst worshippers.

Perhaps most famously, the heart has been associated with emotion. ‘Sweetheart’, ‘Dearhart’ were the most popular affectionate nicknames amongst seventeenth-century Scottish lovers, and hearts remain a key symbol of romantic love, found on Valentine Day’s cards and in numerous songs. Christ should be loved with your ‘whole heart’, the gospel of Mark reminds readers. Conversely, sorrow is often signified as an attack on the heart. The Virgin Mary, in the Marian play The Betrayal, felt her ‘hert hard as ston’ on hearing of Christ’s death. Richard the Lionheart reminds us that hearts were associated with courage, whilst Snow White’s evil stepmother had an ‘envious heart’ that led her to seek the murder of her stepdaughter. The heart then is a site of emotional experience, of conscience, character, self and soul – a physical organ that does considerable symbolic work, and an organ that in turn has been understood through metaphor, with heart disease and broken-heartedness, as illnesses, closely tied to emotional wellbeing and health.

This CHE study day seeks presentations that explore ‘The heart’ across time and place. Our aim is to facilitate an interdisciplinary conversation about the association between the heart and emotion. Papers might consider, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• how the heart is represented in art and culture;
• how ideas of the heart effect experience and feeling;
• the heart as a site of feeling, cognition, and being, and how such dimensions interact;
• the relationship between the heart as a physical organ and its metaphorical dimensions;
• the heart in interaction with other organs (the liver, the brain);
• the religious or spiritual heart; the loving heart; or the heart as soul.

Presenters will be asked to give a short paper of 10-15 minutes, and then lead a discussion based on pre-circulated material such as the texts, images, or other media that their presentation draws on. It is intended that the papers presented at this study day will be published as a special edition of a journal.

Abstracts of no more than 200 words, and a short bio, should be emailed to both Katie Barclay, (katie.barclay@adelaide.edu.au) and Bronwyn Reddan (b.reddan@student.unimelb.edu.au) by 30 November, 2015. Questions or queries can also be addressed to the above.