The 2nd HEX Handbook Distinguished Lecture

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 (Durham University) Saunders on Tuesday 30 September. The HEX Handbook team would like to welcome all to join this exciting and intriguing lecture over a glass of sparkling.

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.

Organiser

Research Council of Finland's Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences (HEX)

Further information

mikko.kemppainen@tuni.fi