ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions lecture
“Getting Emotional About Shame in Middle English Literature”, Dr Mary Flannery (University of Lausanne, Switzerland)

Date: Wednesday 14 August,
Time: 5:30pm-7:00pm
Venue: Woolley Common Room, University of Sydney

All welcome.

A burning blush, a wave of self-loathing, a powerful urge to cringe–all of these are recognizable symptoms of shame. Shame overlaps with and inspires a host of responses and emotions, from anger and annoyance to fear and frustration. This was as much the case in the Middle Ages as it is today; indeed, one scholar has suggested that ‘we might even call shame the primal medieval emotion, so
ubiquitous and various are its implications’. This paper endeavours to unpack some of the emotionality surrounding shame in medieval English literature by focusing on the concepts of
shamefastness and shamelessness, as well as their close involvement in the construction of medieval gender.

——

Mary Flannery is a scholar of medieval literature and cultural history. A maître assistante (lecturer) at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, her work focuses on the history of emotion and on fame, gossip, and deviant speech in late-medieval literature and culture (c. 1300-1500). Her first book, John Lydgate and the Poetics of Fame (Boydell & Brewer, 2012), identifies the subject of
fame as key to understanding the poetics of fifteenth-century England’s most important author, arguing that Lydgate conceived of the poet as someone in a unique position to aid his patrons not only by responding to the political pressures of fame, but by generating good fame for his employers and, ultimately, for himself.