Medieval and Early Modern Studies Spring School 2025: History of Emotions (24-28 March, Groningen)
Report by Estel van den Berg
DAY 1:
On the 24th of March we gathered at the monumental Academy building of Groningen University, for the start of a week of insightful and exciting lectures, workshops and pitches. Lucas van der Deijl of Groningen University first provided attendants of the course with a short introduction. Afterwards, we were guided by Renée Vulto of Utrecht University through Groningen on a tour of the city. During this tour Renée Vulto guided us past locations in Groningen where in 1795 festivities were held celebrating the Dutch French alliance after the so-called Batavian Revolution. During the tour she showed us the importance of song and sound in the attempts to solidify the new regime by evoking shared feelings in the masses. Through practical examples she demonstrated the importance of sound for the politics of feeling in a tumultuous time-period of political conflict and revolution. The tour of Groningen also helped us to orient ourselves in what for many of us was a new environment. This would prove helpful for the final course of the workshop, nature writing. To celebrate the beginning of the course, we had drinks at Café Wolthoorn to end the day.
DAY 2:
The second day of the Spring School started with a lecture by Francesco Buscemi of the University of Groningen. During the lecture, Bus
cemi revisited some of the core concepts in the field of the history of emotions including William Reddy’s emotive and emotional regimes, Barbara Rosenwein’s emotional community, and Scheer’s emotions as a practice. He then connected current theoretical and methodological debates and current categories of analysis with his own research on the emotional templates for French civil servants during the revolutionary period. In the afternoon Lucas van der Deijl provided us with a workshop on sentiment mining in historical texts. He began with an introduction on different methods for sentiment mining, beginning with lexicon-based approaches and ending with approaches using Large Language models and Transformer models. Afterwards, he encouraged us to run a script for sentiment mining ourselves, giving us an example of the possibilities of research that can be done with these digital based approaches.
In the afternoon, four participants of the course presented four five-to-ten-minute pitches. Santiago García started with his pitch on the function of emotions in the correspondence of Hildegard von Bingen, connecting it to Monique Scheer’s theory of emotions as a practice. Guilia Coppi pitched next on the emotions in spectator periodicals, and the strategies authors of the periodicals employed to represent themselves and convey moralistic ideas. Afterwards, Estel van den Berg pitched on the possibilities of emotion mining for research into 17th century Dutch poetics, focusing on the distribution of emotions in the comedies of literary society Nil Volentibus Arduum and comparing them with the distribution in the comedies of Antwerp author Willem Ogier. For the final pitch of the day, Jaro Demetter presented on the emotional framing of Indian thugs in 19th century Dutch media, using news coverage as a source. After each pitch, participants asked questions about the research presented and gave feedback, resulting in productive sessions.
DAY 3:
The theme of Wednesday’s lectures was the importance of rhetoric in the study of early modern emotions. Janne Lindqvist of the University of Uppsala started the day off with a lecture on emotions in Aristotle’s rhetorical techniques in Antiquity and the importance of emotion in the techniques of rhetoricians in the Middle Ages, who favoured Roman rhetoricians including Cicero and Quintilian instead. Steven Vanderputte from the University of Antwerp followed with a lecture on the use of techniques from ancient rhetoric in history writing in early medieval religious communities. Using the Histories of Richer of the Archdiocese of Saint-Remi as a case study, Vanderputte demonstrated that ancient rhetorical techniques were used to create social distinctions between communities, creating stricter social and moral behavioural norms for monks.
During the pitches in the afternoon, the participants connected their research with the topic of rhetoric and emotion. Ian MacKay presented first on the affective rhetorical functions in Antwerp Kunstkamers. He argued that the discursive space of the Kunstkamer, both real and virtual, steered the mind and heart of the viewer through the use of objects imbued with rhetorical meaning, shaping the morality of the viewer. Claudia Renzi followed with her pitch on the strategic emotional appeal in Bernardino da Siena’s Ars Predicandi and how the effectiveness of his techniques contributed to the severity of the witch-hunts in 15th century Italy. The final pitch of the day was held by Guiseppe Paternicò, who presented on didactic preaching and the rhetoric of emotions in the corpus of sermons of Frederico Visconti, the Archbishop of Pisa medio 13th century.
DAY 4:
The topics of Thursday’s lectures were the relation between emotion and art, mind, and well-being. Jacomien Prins of the University of Utrecht started with her lecture on the importance of music in medieval and early modern thought on emotions, the soul and well-being. She argued that music has historically helped and affected people to improve their well-being. She focused on changing attitudes towards the healing benefits of music from the Middle Ages to the 17th century, using examples from art history and music history combined: Themes like David playing harp for Saul or the vanitas imagery of the homo bulla. This was followed by the shared lecture of Nicole Ruta of the University of Leuven and Gemma Schino of the University of Groningen, on the emotional and visual perception of both medieval and contemporary art, and the use of Bodily Sensation Maps (BSM) to chart the emotional and bodily response of the viewers. Gemma Schino argued that the benefit of using BSM to have visitors self-report their bodily and emotional resonance to the art is to better chart how art affects people. Nicole Ruta presented her research on the visual response of visitors to medieval art, and how altering the perspective in medieval art changed the visual response of the visitors highlighting their visual preference. She used the visual response of the visitors, gathered from both questionnaires and eye-tracking movement technology, to discover the artistic benefits in medieval art to depict some figures larger than others.
In the afternoon, Yixue Ma pitched her research on the health benefits of visual art displays in public hospitals. She gave an introduction as to how public hospitals began to collect art, and how the concerns for the well-being of the patients and staff shaped the part of the collection that is on display. Marissa Griffioen provided the second pitch of the day on encountering maps in the Early Modern Dutch Republic. She is researching map-reading behaviours in the past to discover the emotional response people had when encountered with a map to research the significance of maps in the early modern worldview. The third pitch was given by Diedelot Denessen, who presented on the phenomenon of lovesickness in art, literature, and theatre in the early modern low Countries. She showed that lovesickness was considered both an illness of the mind and body in early modern medicine, and the role of art and literature in portraying this sickness. Berber Kommerij gave the final pitch of the day on the role of the Good Thief in De Spiegel om wel te sterven (1694) in the prints by Romeyn de Hooghe, demonstrating how art can help people to teach to live and die well.
DAY 5:
The topic of the final day of the course was the relation between emotion, nature and decoloniality. We started the final day of our course with a lecture by Marrigje Paijmans of the University of Amsterdam on the cultural representation of colonial affect from a postcolonial perspective, using Bredero’s Moortje as a case-study. We reflected not only on the emotions and the regulation of affect in Bredero’s Moortje, but also on our own, complex emotions towards the colonial past. Following Paijmans lecture was a workshop on nature writing, taught by Femke Kramer of the University of Groningen. We began with an orientation exercise in which we were to locate the north, the nearest body of water, and the nearest animals, wild and domesticated. This caused us to connect our perception of the landscape better to our own personal experience. Taking inspiration from the ancient concept of Enargia (vividness), we each drafted a short poem on our preferred garden, region or landscape, by using concrete, precise, ‘particularising’ language. We then shared some of the poems resulting from this exercise to gain an understanding that even our particularising language was full of emotions, even with no emotion words used.
Louise Ruby and Ciǧdem Mirol gave the final pitches of the course. Louise Ruby pitched her research on John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Year Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Suriname (1795), focusing on how paratextual elements could change the empathetic feelings of readers towards enslaved peoples in colonial Surinam. The final presentation of the Spring School was given by Ciǧdem Mirol, who began a book performance for her project Book performance: Body and Sound of I and Eye. After final feedback was given to the participants on their pitch or performance, the spring school of 2025 came to an end.
