Rebecca F McNamara
Westmont College, English, Faculty Member
- Baylor University, English, AlumnusThe Huntington Library, The Huntington Library, Department Member, and 3 moreadd
- My research focuses on the literature and language of medieval England and the history of emotions in medieval Europe... moreMy research focuses on the literature and language of medieval England and the history of emotions in medieval Europe. I am currently a Lecturer of medieval literature in the Department of English at UCLA. I am also an Honorary Research Associate with the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (CHE), and in 2016 I was a Mayers Research Fellow at The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. I completed a Master of Studies and Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford, where I also worked as Junior Dean of Exeter College and a College Tutor in English literature. From 2011-2014 I held a postdoctoral fellowship with the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (CHE), and in 2014 I was an Associate Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Sydney.
My current research on the suicidal impulse in medieval English literature and culture and the history of emotions builds on my interest in medieval legal and government texts by identifying and theorizing emotions related to suicide in England c. 1200-1500. I examine portrayals of self-murder (including suicide attempts) in English legal records, chronicles, and literary works, tracing a trajectory of emotions related to the suicidal impulse from c. 1200-1500. As part of this project I am interested in connecting with scholars in neuroscience and psychology, as well as medical practitioners, social workers, and counselors in order to consider links in the history of emotions related to suicide in the medieval past and the present.
I am also interested in the effects of language on literary form and meaning, and, more broadly, the impact of historical change upon language. These core ideas shaped my doctorate, ‘Code-Switching in Medieval England: Register Variety in the Literature of Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Usk, and Thomas Hoccleve’ (2010, University of Oxford). I examined the ways in which Chaucer, Usk, and Hoccleve’s professional textual environments in law, London guilds, factional politics, and bureaucracy influenced their literary writing. I reconsidered the identifications of what kinds of language these men considered appropriate for literature, and I maintained that the variety of linguistic register in their works challenges our retrospectively created boundaries of England’s late medieval vernacular language.edit
In this article, I will first make a brief case for why the history of emotions is relevant for teaching the Middle Ages and how it can be introduced to students, and then I will outline three lesson plans that can be integrated into an... more
In this article, I will first make a brief case for why the history of emotions is relevant for teaching the Middle Ages and how it can be introduced to students, and then I will outline three lesson plans that can be integrated into an undergraduate syllabus that includes medieval literature and culture. Scholarship on the history of emotions has grown over the last decade from a field dominated by historians to one in which scholars from faculties across the humanities participate. It is an area that is rich in interdisciplinary collaboration, with researchers in literature, linguistics, history of science and medicine, social history, art, theatre, music, and psychology sharing findings and adapting and building upon each other's methods. Given the push in many universities (especially in the U.S.) to engage students in both interdisciplinary learning and innovative research, the history of emotions is an ideal subject area to bring into the classroom, and the growing scholarship on emotions in the Middle Ages provides learning support for teachers and students. Furthermore, the history of emotions provides scaffolding in critical thinking for students about how we interpret the past, and emotions can also serve as a hook to pique students' interest in studying the Middle Ages.
Research Interests:
Critics have long addressed questions of affect, feeling and emotional expression in Middle English literature , but only in recent years has their interest begun to take theoretical form under the rubric of the 'history of emotions'.... more
Critics have long addressed questions of affect, feeling and emotional expression in Middle English literature , but only in recent years has their interest begun to take theoretical form under the rubric of the 'history of emotions'. Current critical attitudes to the study of emotions in the past have been shaped substantially by the work of historians, whose focus on emotion in documentary sources has been inf luenced in turn by research in the fields of sociology, anthropology, psychology, linguistics and, increasingly, the cognitive sciences. How might existing methodologies situating emotions historically drive new approaches in Middle English literary studies? This article contends that existing analyses of Middle English literature relating to affective discourses might fruitfully be brought into conversation with new multidisciplinary forms of research into past emotions. We survey current critical trends in both the history of emotions and in Middle English literature. Case studies of two late Middle English literary texts, the anonymous Sir Orfeo and Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, show how the last fifty years of scholarship has addressed emotions in Middle English literature. We conclude by suggesting future directions that might be taken up by critics of medieval English literary texts and genres to develop further the relationship between literary studies and the history of emotions.
Research Interests:
Geoffrey Chaucer frequently depicts the emotions of his characters via the outward physical signs of the body, and he often does so using a discourse that draws on Galenic theories. A striking example of Chaucer’s medicalized descriptions... more
Geoffrey Chaucer frequently depicts the emotions of his characters via the outward physical signs of the body, and he often does so using a discourse that draws on Galenic theories. A striking example of Chaucer’s medicalized descriptions of emotion is his adaptation of the suicidal impulse associated with lovesickness. Chaucer reconstructs this motif in “The Knight’s Tale” and "The Book of the Duchess" by altering his sources (Boccaccio, and Froissart and Machaut) to anatomize the emotional body of the suffering knight. Through the medicalized language of bodily health describing emotional upheavals, other characters and the reader are prompted to feel with and begin to understand and appropriately respond to the suffering individual. This reading shows Chaucer using moments of embodied emotional examination to teach his audience how to read, interpret, and respond to literature.
Research Interests:
Infirmity played an important role in the history of emotions related to suicide in the Middle Ages. Scholars have previously dismissed or overlooked infirmity in suicide cases, and have rarely focused on emotions related to suicide. An... more
Infirmity played an important role in the history of emotions related to suicide in the Middle Ages. Scholars have previously dismissed or overlooked infirmity in suicide cases, and have rarely focused on emotions related to suicide. An analysis of medieval English court rolls and Crown writs demonstrates that infirmity was an emotionally meaningful way of explaining and responding to suicide. The discourse of suffering and sickness provided a conduit for emotions in a bureaucratic medium for which explicit reference to emotions was inappropriate. This is especially evident in responses to petitions for the return of suicides’ confiscated goods and chattels during the reign of Edward I.
Research Interests:
Emotions were intrinsic to how people in medieval and early modern Europe prepared for death, said goodbye to loved ones, commemorated their dead, and meditated on life after death. But although death is universal and inescapable, can we... more
Emotions were intrinsic to how people in medieval and early modern Europe prepared for death, said goodbye to loved ones, commemorated their dead, and meditated on life after death. But although death is universal and inescapable, can we say that these are the same emotions we expect to find today in situations of death and bereavement? Which emotions were foregrounded in the past, and how were they expressed and contextualised in historical moments? How did these emotive responses shape literature, art, popular opinion, the press, bonds between community members, the state? The field of the history of emotions is well placed to address these affective issues by situating such questions in the context of historical understandings and practices of emotions related to death and dying. This special issue of Parergon brings together a range of disciplinary approaches to show how the lens of emotion contributes to our understanding of death in the premodern world and, also, how processes and rituals of death and dying shaped emotional practice in the past. Arranged chronologically from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and drawing contributions from social and cultural historians and literary scholars, this range of articles allows case studies to portray the great variety of historically contextualised emotional responses to death and dying. Under investigation are topics that appear firmly rooted in a Europe of the past, such as the didactic ars moriendi ('Art of Dying') genre, and others that are still perceived as problematic issues today, such as suicide, chronic illness, and appropriate public and private comportment around death. The articles collectively demonstrate how emotional responses to death and dying were formative for the self, family relations and community structures, didactic and artistic media, and government policy in medieval and early modern Europe.
Research Interests:
What emotions did people in the Middle Ages associate with suicide, and how did they react emotionally to the possibility or act of suicide? Although pre-modern Europe did not have a dedicated word to signify the concept of self-inflicted... more
What emotions did people in the Middle Ages associate with suicide, and how did they react emotionally to the possibility or act of suicide? Although pre-modern Europe did not have a dedicated word to signify the concept of self-inflicted death, and although there is no evidence of suicide notes until the seventeenth century, we find in a range of medieval texts an interest in the act and attendant emotions of suicide. In this essay, we demonstrate how scholars might discover emotions related to suicide in two genres: English legal records and first-person life narratives. Through close attention to textual detail and recourse to wider cultural implications of emotionally meaningful contexts, we show that even the unlikeliest of texts can provide inroads to emotions related to medieval suicide. With these models we hope to encourage scholars to seek other genres and ways of reading that will help to unlock the silences of the self-murdered.
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Research Interests:
Research Interests:
The language of Thomas Usk’s 'Testament of Love' is profoundly influenced by his professional linguistic environments, notably his work for John Northampton’s political party and as scribe for the Goldsmiths’ guild. Usk uses technical... more
The language of Thomas Usk’s 'Testament of Love' is profoundly influenced by his professional linguistic environments, notably his work for John Northampton’s political party and as scribe for the Goldsmiths’ guild. Usk uses technical terms and stylistic features which are typically relegated to political and bureaucratic Anglo-Norman French texts. Gathering these examples and contextualizing them within the Goldsmiths’ Minute Books and Usk’s Appeal Against John Northampton, this essay shows that Usk’s creative use of language is an important strategy for his aims in writing the 'Testament', and that it is a provocative tool for the construction of identity and authority in London at the end of the fourteenth century. That the ‘vernacular’ language of the 'Testament' includes the Anglo-French terminology of Usk’s professional background should prompt us to reconsider the significance of technical bureaucratic and political registers for the communication of experience.
Research Interests:
This thesis analyses the use of register variety in the literature of Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Usk and Thomas Hoccleve. I use the ‘marked model’ of linguistic code-switching to identify and explain uses in their literature of technical... more
This thesis analyses the use of register variety in the literature of Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Usk and Thomas Hoccleve. I use the ‘marked model’ of linguistic code-switching to identify and explain uses in their literature of technical terms from their professional bureaucratic environments. I find the motivations for such uses to be located in the complex language situation of late medieval England, the influence of classical rhetorical instruction on the use of variety and the professional textual environments which influenced each writer’s ‘verbal repertoire’. Chaucer’s professional textual environments are shown to have great impact on three of his short poems and four selections from the Canterbury Tales. The Testament of Love by Usk exhibits linguistic patterns influenced by his scribal work in the political spheres of late fourteenth-century London. The traditional critical assumptions of Hoccleve’s work in the Privy Seal and its influence on his writing are challenged through an analysis of four of his poems, including the Regiment of Princes. I reconsider the identifications of what kinds of language these men considered appropriate for literature and I argue that the variety of register in their works challenges our retrospectively-created boundaries of England’s late medieval vernacular language.
This marked up text of an article I published in 2014 accompanies a talk I gave at “Medieval Emotions and Contemporary Methodologies: A Research Workshop”, hosted by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of... more
This marked up text of an article I published in 2014 accompanies a talk I gave at “Medieval Emotions and Contemporary Methodologies: A Research Workshop”, hosted by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (CHE) and Birkbeck, University of London in London on 8 July 2016. A recording of that talk can be found on the CHE’s “Emotions Make History” podcast:
https://soundcloud.com/emotions_make_history
The article originally appeared as "The Sorrow of Soreness: Infirmity and Suicide in Medieval England," Parergon 31.2 (2014), 11-34.
https://soundcloud.com/emotions_make_history
The article originally appeared as "The Sorrow of Soreness: Infirmity and Suicide in Medieval England," Parergon 31.2 (2014), 11-34.
Research Interests:
These lesson plan ideas for integrating the history of emotions into the classroom were developed through teaching Middle English literature to lower- and upper-level undergraduates and masters-level graduate students. With each plan is... more
These lesson plan ideas for integrating the history of emotions into the classroom were developed through teaching Middle English literature to lower- and upper-level undergraduates and masters-level graduate students. With each plan is included some of the teaching goals I have for that particular focus. I have included a selected bibliography with some key texts for the history of emotions and medieval studies (with a slant towards Middle English literature). Feel free to use these ideas and adapt them to your own classroom, and get in touch if you have any questions or would like to share how you’ve integrated the history of emotions into your teaching (at rebecca.mcnamara@sydney.edu.au).
Research Interests:
This presentation on pedagogy and strategy for teaching the history of emotions is part of a panel on teaching emotions in the Middle Ages, organized by Thomas Goodmann and sponsored by TEAMS: The Consortium for Teaching the Middle Ages.... more
This presentation on pedagogy and strategy for teaching the history of emotions is part of a panel on teaching emotions in the Middle Ages, organized by Thomas Goodmann and sponsored by TEAMS: The Consortium for Teaching the Middle Ages. The panel will take place at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Research Interests:
Geoffrey Chaucer frequently depicts the emotions of his characters via the outward physical signs of the body, and he often does so using a discourse that draws on Galenic theories. A striking example of Chaucer’s medicalized descriptions... more
Geoffrey Chaucer frequently depicts the emotions of his characters via the outward physical signs of the body, and he often does so using a discourse that draws on Galenic theories. A striking example of Chaucer’s medicalized descriptions of emotion is his adaptation of the suicidal impulse associated with lovesickness. Chaucer reconstructs this motif in "The Knight’s Tale" and "The Book of the Duchess" by altering his sources (Boccaccio, and Froissart and Machaut) to anatomize the emotional body of the suffering knight. Through the medicalized language of bodily health describing emotional upheavals, other characters and the reader are prompted to feel with and begin to understand and appropriately respond to the suffering individual. This reading shows Chaucer using moments of embodied emotional examination to teach his audience how to read, interpret, and respond to literature.
Research Interests:
This paper will consider how emotions were used to govern in the age of Chaucer, focusing on uses of emotion in English statutes while drawing from other late medieval legal texts. Before they became crystalized into formulaic language,... more
This paper will consider how emotions were used to govern in the age of Chaucer, focusing on uses of emotion in English statutes while drawing from other late medieval legal texts. Before they became crystalized into formulaic language, particular emotion terms were used in legal and bureaucratic documents for marked resonance as a way of attempting to control events and groups of people that were perceived as particularly volatile in later medieval England.
This presentation will focus on just a few examples of uses of emotion within the law that seem to precede formulaic constructions of those emotions in later medieval legal and administrative documents. These examples will include: the use of the verb ‘to feel’, showing that ‘to feel’ seems to crystalize into a formulaic usage just following its use in statutes concerning the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt; and the use of ‘fear’ in statutes passed in the reigns of Henry IV and Henry V to legislate against the threat of Lollardry (and the subsequent crystalization of ‘fear’ as formulaic in statutes promulgated from the reign of Henry VI onward). Where time allows, I will also touch on uses of these emotion terms within documents related to legal cases, drawing excerpts from Eyre and Assize Rolls, Coroners’ Rolls, and writs from the crown in the Calendar of Close Rolls.
These uses of emotion within the statutes prompt us to ask how the language of medieval governance drew from and contributed to the rhetoric surrounding two notoriously volatile events/ groups of people of late medieval England. More broadly, this short analysis seeks to open up for discussion the place of emotional language within the law: were emotions appropriate for governance in late medieval England?
This presentation will focus on just a few examples of uses of emotion within the law that seem to precede formulaic constructions of those emotions in later medieval legal and administrative documents. These examples will include: the use of the verb ‘to feel’, showing that ‘to feel’ seems to crystalize into a formulaic usage just following its use in statutes concerning the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt; and the use of ‘fear’ in statutes passed in the reigns of Henry IV and Henry V to legislate against the threat of Lollardry (and the subsequent crystalization of ‘fear’ as formulaic in statutes promulgated from the reign of Henry VI onward). Where time allows, I will also touch on uses of these emotion terms within documents related to legal cases, drawing excerpts from Eyre and Assize Rolls, Coroners’ Rolls, and writs from the crown in the Calendar of Close Rolls.
These uses of emotion within the statutes prompt us to ask how the language of medieval governance drew from and contributed to the rhetoric surrounding two notoriously volatile events/ groups of people of late medieval England. More broadly, this short analysis seeks to open up for discussion the place of emotional language within the law: were emotions appropriate for governance in late medieval England?
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
These lesson plan ideas for integrating the history of emotions in the classroom were developed through teaching Middle English literature to lower- and upper-level undergraduates and masters-level graduate students. With each plan is... more
These lesson plan ideas for integrating the history of emotions in the classroom were developed through teaching Middle English literature to lower- and upper-level undergraduates and masters-level graduate students. With each plan is included some of the teaching goals I have for that particular focus. I have included a selected bibliography with some key texts for the history of emotions and medieval studies (with a slant towards Middle English literature). Feel free to use these ideas and adapt them to your own classroom, and get in touch if you have any questions or would like to share how you’ve integrated the history of emotions into your teaching (at rebecca.mcnamara@sydney.edu.au). This document is designed as a virtual handout to accompany session 243 at the 2015 ICMS at Kalamazoo.