Defamiliarizing Desire: Affect and Ambivalence in Late Medieval English Literature

“Defamiliarizing Desire: Affect and Ambivalence in Late Medieval English Literature” examines Middle English imaginaries of divine encounter between the late thirteenth century and early fifteenth century where affect, or feeling, becomes a source of indeterminacy rather than of spiritual transformation. Analyzing Middle English literary forms that occlude and subvert the potentially transformative moment of encountering God, I foreground the period’s ambivalence toward the idea that both literature and the body could serve as tools for identity construction. As a medium that is formally crafted yet capable of producing spontaneous effects, late medieval English literature not only indexes debates in religious culture around the proper way to apprehend God, but frequently becomes a venue for grappling, experimenting, and even playing with the belief that sin distorts the human capacity to feel and know the divine.

As the competing discourses of poets, playwrights, theologians, mystics, heretics, and everyday people transformed affect into a site of epistemological instability, medieval subjects voiced increasingly resistant attitudes toward “affective piety”—a highly emotional style of devotion centered around developing compassion for Christ’s humanity and suffering, and a predominant lens through which the field of medieval studies approaches affect. This interpretive tradition encouraged readers to build their own spiritual identities by internalizing the feelings of holy figures represented in literature. The texts I examine invite a different kind of readerly engagement, “defamiliarizing desire” for efficacious spiritual experience by crafting divine personae and religious narratives that are too complex to operate as straightforward sites for emotional assimilation and pious instruction. I illuminate an archive of Middle English poetry, contemplative literature, and drama that champions ambiguous feelings, protean bodies, and equivocal conclusions in its imaginaries of encountering Christ. I ultimately argue that these texts challenge the notion that literature and the affects it produces are simply vehicles for devotional practice and the consolidation of identity. Instead, these texts were highly ambivalent forms invested in the dissolution of identity. In turn, I contend that medieval audiences conceptualized identity as an intrinsically unstable marker of personal, social, and spiritual legibility, especially when that identity is constructed through something as ephemeral and opaque as feelings. 

Chapter 1, “The Limits of Compassion: Scripting Ambivalence in Stond Wel, Moder, Ounder Rode,” examines the thirteenth-century poem Stond Wel, a lyric dialogue between Christ and Mary that juxtaposes clashing emotional responses to the Crucifixion. As a sorrowful Mary cultivates pathos around her dying son, an equanimous Christ expresses aversion to his mother’s emotionalism, subverting the compassionate attachments valued in affective piety. Through close reading and formal analysis, I show that the poem addresses several interlocking socio-religious and hermeneutic issues around affect’s unintelligibility upon the body, its erratic mutability, and its inability to fix identity into place. By considering Stond Wel’s manuscript history, this chapter also uncovers how medieval audiences between the late thirteenth and early fifteenth centuries were drawn to the lyric’s lack of closure as writers reproduced the poem with slight alterations to dilate its disconsolate ending.

Chapter 2, “Divine Anticlimax: Genre Distortion and Apophatic Feelings in Piers Plowman,” turns to the fourteenth-century poet William Langland, who renders Christ’s body into obscure and inapprehensible forms in his allegorical dream-vision Piers Plowman. Focusing on the Sixth Vision’s portrayal of Christ as a jouster, I argue that Langland shores up the anticipation of affective intensity during divine encounter only to dilute its epistemological payoff. As such, Langland transforms affect from an efficacious vehicle for spiritual transformation (à la affective piety) to a disorienting experience that draws from the medieval apophatic tradition. This chapter traces how Langland imports the generic language of aventure, which emphasizes human nature as a condition of limited knowing, to generate “apophatic feelings”— the experiences of dissatisfaction, disorientation, and non-knowing.

Chapter 3, “Anxieties of Discernment: ‘Felyng’ in The Scale of Perfection and The Book of Margery Kempe,” takes up the issue of discretio, or discernment, that motivates the spiritual writers Walter Hilton and Margery Kempe. In their repeated efforts to differentiate between the divine and sinful registers of “felyng,” these writers contribute to a devotional tradition centered around the difficulty of distinguishing between affective experiences that belong to the soul and those that belong to the body. I first chart the staggering lexical range of the word “felyng,” which undergoes semantic broadening in the transition from Old English to Middle English. By the end of the fourteenth century, “felyng” could refer to specific emotions, corporeal senses, cognitive understanding, divine revelations, and even imperceivable states of the soul. I argue that Hilton and Kempe utilize the semantic ambiguity of “felyng” to both index and prolong the troubling indiscernibility of corporeal affects, reflecting the period’s ambivalence toward affective experience as a secure site of spiritual identity construction.

Finally, Chapter 4, “See It to Believe It? Ocular Play and Comedic Estrangement in The Croxton Play of the Sacrament of the Sacrament,” examines the eccentric representation of Christ’s body as a bleeding eucharistic cake in the fifteenth-century Play of the Sacrament. From its figuration of both Jewish and divine bodies as fungible to its campy deployment of eucharistic props and special effects, this play estranges the efficacy of divine encounter by making identities comical, mechanical, and indeterminate. Analyzing the interplay between the perceptible and imperceptible in both the playscript and the material conditions of its performance, I argue that Play of the Sacrament generates a mode of indeterminacy that capitalizes on the blurred lines between reality and performance, truth and fiction, and mimesis and mimicry. In this chapter, I treat ambivalence as both a mode of enjoyment engendered by the play’s humor and a tension produced by its punitive politics of conversion, in which the figure of the non-Christian heretic ruptures the fantasy of Christian dominion due to the text’s very own representations of identity’s instability.