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Chapter 14 - The Affective Community of Romance

Love, Privilege and the Erotics of Death in the Mediterranean

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2018

By
Megan Moore
Edited by
Adam J. Goldwyn  and
Ingela Nilsson
Adam J. Goldwyn
Affiliation:
North Dakota State University
Ingela Nilsson
Affiliation:
Uppsala Universitet, Sweden
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Summary

Though we traditionally read romance as predicated on love, this chapter explores an alternate affective undergirding for Byzantine romance specifically and texts of medieval Mediterranean love encounters more widely: grief and death. It examines how narratives sustain medieval noble emotional culture by imagining their relation to a broader, longer Mediterranean tradition linking noble love and death. The chapter thus examines the emotional geography of death through travel narratives from the Odyssey to Digenis Akritis and the Komnenian novels as well as French works such as Cligès, Aucassin et Nicolette and Floire et Blancheflor. This chapter thus not only offers a new understanding of medieval emotional communities, it also invites readers to consider the functioning of the Palaiologan romance in a larger cultural, historical, and intertextual context. Furthermore, it invites scholars interested in affect studies to consider both class and cultural context as fundamental to the framing of emotion, rather than insisting that emotions be uniquely considered within either one temporal or geographic framework.
Type
Chapter
Information
Reading the Late Byzantine Romance
A Handbook
 , pp. 299 - 320
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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