engleski

Coded non-verbal communication in the Middle Ages

Medievalists studying medieval emotions have lately been pointing out that the descriptions of non-verbal emotional manifestations in medieval texts are far more frequent than the direct naming of the emotional subjects' inner states. Therefore, the study of emotions in the Middle Ages is mostly focused on reconstruction and semantization of coded descriptions of non-verbal communication, gestures and other bodily reactions being the most important signs of emotional states. Unlike detection, classification and basic description of such signs, which are the usual methods in medievistics, this paper will, based on the data from the two medieval corpora (Old-Croatian corpus composed of non-liturgical medieval texts and Church-Slavonic corpus predominantly composed of liturgical medieval texts), explore the connection between the description of non-verbal communication and the embodiment of the mind. Namely, the concept of emotion is inseparable from the physical experience and the majority of spontaneous and voluntary bodily movements can be associated with conceptual metaphors such as orientational metaphor GOOD IS UP, BAD IS DOWN. Since it largely comes down to diachronically stable (primary) metaphorical concepts, it can be concluded that the majority of medieval forms of physical communication was essentially based on the same - probably universal - principles. However, since anthropologists and historians gathered ample material showing that non-verbal communication is not based solely on universal principles, but is also culturally standardized, the second part of the paper will focus on the context in which certain conceptual metaphors appear and will contain more elaborate descriptions of bodily reactions. Thus we will explore the social acceptability, i.e. desirability of certain bodily reactions given the context and status of the participants in emotional communication and the logic on which the performances of certain types of consciously controlled bodily communication acts may have been based.

non-verbal communication; medieval Croatian literature; embodiment of the mind; conceptual metaphor; body; emotions; social norms

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