Emotions and somatic gestures in medieval narratives -: The case of 'Raoul de Cambrai'

Old French literature is particularly rich in words and expressions indicating emotions. In many cases, emotions like anger or sorrow are merely attributed to characters. In other cases, however, readers are invited to << read >> emotions conveyed by means of somatic gestures, such as weeping, flushing, pallor, or sweating. Understood to be involuntary, these actions constitute an unusual class of gesture generally overlooked in studies of gesture. Through a study of the somatic complex found in the Old French epic Raoul de Cambrai, this article seeks to illustrate how involuntary emotions occupy a central position in the poem's theme and story-line, and suggests how appreciating the poem in its own historical context can illuminate the process of aristocratic emotional self-fashioning in late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century France.