UC Riverside

“‘Odd Feelings About Books’: Affective Attachments to Middle English Literature” examines how and why certain Middle English texts and textual objects come to be associated with extra-institutional forms of intellectual production and ‘amateurish’ modes of readerly response. I examine how Middle English authors and scribes, and the modern scholars who study them, respond materially to the literary work of the period and express feelings for their objects they study. Specifically, I consider relationalities between an individual and their object of study that are largely deemed by others to be modern criticism incongruous, inappropriate, curious, or “queer.” My dissertation examines the role of affective attachment––and its opposite, affective aversion––in the creation, alteration, and use of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English manuscripts, codices, and textual objects. Rather than being antithetical to the study of medieval literature, I argue that the kinds of attachments detailed in this project represent, in fact, deeply medieval modes of knowing and being. In the vein of scholars such as Lauren Berlant, Rita Felski, Carolyn Dinshaw, and Stephanie Trigg, my work theorizes attachment to objects as both a relational state of being and an emotionally invested interpretive practice. In a field such as medieval book history, commonly known for its philological disinterest and technical, scientific objectivity, to what extent has feeling and emotion played an invisible yet vital role? As a concept, attachment thus asks us to consider not only how individuals imagine themselves in relation to art objects and their creators, but how that affective relationality often meaningfully alters one’s understanding of the object to which one is attached. Following Sianne Ngai’s work on ugly feelings and negative affect, I examine a variety of modern reactions to medieval manuscripts, Middle English authors, and early editors of medieval works that have been overwhelmingly criticized for their aesthetic peculiarities. This dissertation thus demonstrates how this well-attested tendency to upset, disturb, and unsettle readerly expectations provides a fruitful site of critical engagement with both the perceived eccentricities of the medieval past and the hegemonic aesthetics of our present.