Megan Moore - The Erotics of Grief: Emotions and the Construction of Privilege in the Medieval Mediterranean

My interest in emotions and how they shape our realities was first nurtured in a biology class with Sara Vispoel, who made it possible for a group of high schoolers to attend the thirtieth annual Nobel Conference on Neuroscience in 1994, at which both Oliver Sacks and Antonio Damasio spoke of their (then) recent research on the relation between perception and the biological construction of reality. Saras exceptional work to create such an opportunity not only inspired my continued interest in the neurobiology of emotions but also made me skeptical of received notions delineating certain reactions as inherently biological and others as exclusively cultural.

Conversations with, critical questions posed by, and feedback from Christine Chism, Deborah McGrady, Anna Watz, Simon Gaunt, Peggy McCracken, Ingela Nilsson, Stavroula Constantinou, Anthony Kaldellis, Ryan Milov-Crdoba, Marla Segol, Christopher Davis, David Rollo, Romain Brthes, and David Konstan have challenged my thinking in this project. My continued discussions of medieval affect with Emma Lipton, Johanna Kramer, Anne Stanton, and Rabia Gregory have proven invaluable. Invitations to present parts of this work by Stephanie Trigg, Claire Gilbert, Lynn Ramey, Adam Goldwyn, Aglae Pizzone, and Dimitrios Krallis have provided space for me to test and refine many of the ideas presented here.

Stimulating conversations during meetings of the Mediterranean Seminar, a wonderful gathering of thoughtful, generous scholars, proved invaluable to this project. The seminar dedicated to Emotions, Passions, and Feelings, which was organized by Marianne Kupin-Lisbinat and Thomas Devaney, at which I workshopped the fourth chapter, was integral to shaping this book. I am so grateful to Sharon Kinoshita and Brian Catlos, the founders of the seminar, for the many ways their work continues to shape our field of inquiry as well as enhance the collegiality of and connections between our work, and to Sharon in particular for her feedback.

I offer my thanks to the libraries and institutions whose support changed the trajectory of this book, above all to the staff of the manuscript reading room at the Bibliothque Nationale for their time and energy in helping me find and identify pertinent manuscripts; I am grateful to the Bibliothque Municipale in Lyon, the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, the Getty Museum, the Pierpont-Morgan Museum, and the Newberry Library. Likewise, the attentiveness and support of the students, faculty, and staff during my brief residency at the Center for the History of Emotion in Melbourne helped me refine the kinds of questions I wanted to address in the project in its nascent stages. I thank the Australian Research Council for facilitating my stay and especially Stephanie Trigg for her feedback on emotions and performance.

I am grateful to the University of Missouri Research Board for sponsoring the researching and writing of this project, and to many of my colleagues for their feedback over several years. Without the enthusiasm and support of Flore Zphir this project would not have been possible, and I am so grateful to Daniel Sipe for the many conversations we have had about the relation between emotion and human experience. I also thank my colleagues Kristy Bowers, Lee Manion, Phong Nguyen, and John Evelev for ideas and suggestions as I have begun to think forward from this project, as well as Myles Freborg and Veronica Mohesky for their help in conducting research.

Thanks also to Jessie Aucoin, Emilia Yasamin, Amy Newbrough, Andrew Donnelley, Erica Titus, and Christine Livingston for offering readings of the erotics of death in modern culture. Special thanks to my mother, Wendy Chappelear, who as a psychologist piqued my interest in the brains responses to feelings, and to David Palit, whose discussions of emotions always resolutely returned to stoicism and the suppression of emotion as a sign of refinement; to Marie Lerchner, whose spirit and constant care made my writing that much easier; and to Alicia Platte, whose smiles filled our home with joy while I wrote. Lastly, I am grateful to Toby Oshiro for his wonderful, critical ear and his love for words, what they can do, and the richness they can convey.