“Premodern Affective Spaces” (Italian Studies)

The notion of “affective space” has resonance in a variety of fields, including architecture, philosophy, and geography. But along with affect studies more broadly, the study of affective space has been largely confined to scholarship of the modern and contemporary periods. For scholars of the premodern, thinking affectively can provide the means to better account for the shared nature of feeling that emerges from premodern texts. While modern emotions are understood to be internal and intimate to a single subject, medieval and early modern texts relate feelings that are untethered from individual bodies, that are mobile and plural, capable of holding crowds under their sway. This workshop asks how certain spaces might produce, nurture, hold, or contain affects as documented in premodern texts. These spaces could be architectural or “natural”, built or cultivated or attributed to the workings of nature or the divine. From the locus amoenus to the church, from the city square to the expanse of a poetic stanza, the workshop will interrogate the affective spaces, and the potentialities of this lens, in premodern texts in a variety of languages.