Digital Handbook of the History of Experience (HEX Handbook) is a peer-reviewed, open-access platform, to serve as a resource for historians and other scholars interested in developing the history of experience as an approach and as a field of study. HEX handbook will organize a distinguished lecture by Professor Corinne Saunders on Tuesday 30 September. The lecture will take place in Tampere University main building (2nd floor) auditorium A4 starting at 2pm sharp.
The HEX Handbook team would like to welcome all to join this exciting and intriguing lecture over a glass of sparkling. To join the event, please register please register by Friday 19th September with this form:
https://www.lyyti.in/HEX_Handbook_Distinguished_Lecture_0925
Love, Loss and Vision: Medieval Perspectives on Affective Experience
The pre-Cartesian thought world of the medieval period offers new perspectives on affective experience. It assumes the embodied nature of emotion, the role of affect in cognition, and a spiritual world view in which visionary experience is possible and desirable. This lecture turns first to medieval medical and philosophical understandings of psychology and physiology, and then to the insights into affective experience offered by the secular and religious writing of the period. The explorations of love and loss in the romance writings of Geoffrey Chaucer are complemented by the extraordinary accounts of mystical experience by Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, the earliest women writers in English. Across these works, imagination and revelation are shaped in memorable and creative ways by affective, often traumatic experience.
Professor Corinne Saunders
Corinne Saunders is Professor of Medieval Literature in the Department of English Studies and co-leads the Affective Experience Lab, part of the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities, at Durham University. She specialises in the history of ideas and in romance literature and visionary writing, with particular interests in the connections between mind, body and emotions. Her third monograph, Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance, was published in 2010. Recent co-edited books include Women and Medieval Literary Culture (2023), Middle English Manuscripts and their Legacies: A Volume in Honour of Ian Doyle (2022), The Life of Breath in Literature, Culture, and Medicine: Classical to Contemporary (2021) and Visions and Voice-Hearing in Medieval and Early Modern Contexts (2020). She is Editor for English Literature of the journal Medium Ævum.