An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Kate Ash-Irisarri (Sabbatical Fellow, 2026)
Looking for Joy in Late Medieval Scotland
Joy is perhaps not a word associated with Scottish literature, and certainly not with medieval literature. Scholarship on medieval emotions has tended to look at feelings that might be considered negative – anger, shame, grief – or more prevalent in the period: love. Nevertheless, medieval European writers and thinkers did not necessarily separate ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ emotions in ways that resonate in the twenty-first century, nor did they assume that any emotion existed in isolation. This work in progress talk presents some of my early findings from my project, Feeling Joy in Late Medieval Scottish Literature, which follows from my work on grief, melancholy, and nationhood in fourteenth and fifteenth-century Scotland. My new project seeks to investigate the representation and textual performance of joy and its associated emotions, such as mirth, delight, solace, and wonder. I am interested in the emotional vocabularies of late medieval Scottish joy and how these were shaped, expressed, and performed across a variety of forms and genres. My work in progress talk will consider the foundations of this project and introduce a number of texts that think about joy in myriad ways to examine the role and function of literary feeling in late medieval Scotland.
Meeting ID: 384 971 962 716 1
Passcode: nV6Rg79e