On May 3rd, 2008 graduate students, faculty, and a brave group of actors gathered at UCSB for the Medieval Studies Emotion and Environment Conference. Participants from the departments of English, French, History, Theater, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and the History of Art and Architecture presented their knowledge and offered their questions on the conference theme. Together we explored the ways in which medieval people’s social, natural, and built environments colored and shaped their states of mind in a process of dynamic exchange and mutual inflection. Conference papers addressed questions of how people invested their environments with emotional value and how they framed their responses to the spaces, both literal and figurative, in which they circulated. Over the course of an extraordinarily interdisciplinary day, a diverse group of graduate students presented their research and opened their questions to scholars and students of Medieval Studies across the Humanities.

In the day’s first panel, Space and Spectacle, Valerie Cullen presented her research on “Eve’s Starry Nightmare: Temptation in Paradise Lost.” This literary historian from UCLA was followed by art historian Noa Turel of UCSB, who presented her paper “Tracing Spectacle? The Prints of Master WA and the 1468 Wedding of Charles the Bold and Margaret of York.” Jeroen Vandommele, a visiting scholar from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, gave a formal response and posed questions to each presenter. The second panel of the day, Violence and Faith, highlighted a much different approach to the conference theme. Nicole Archambeau’s presentation “Resisting Revenge in Fourteenth-Century Provence” broached a serious topic with a touch of humor, eliciting laughs from the audience at the same time as she explored nuances of the impact of emotional suffering. Catherine Zusky presented a dynamic eco-critical reading in “Hybrid Spirituality in the Dream of the Rood.” These two presentations were expertly connected by Megan Palmer, who offered insightful observations on the strengths of each paper.

An afternoon of architecture began with the keynote lecture by Yale University’s Professor Jacqueline Jung, entitled “From Motion to Emotion: the Wise and Foolish Virgins in the Urban Environments of Gothic Germany.” Professors C. Edson Armi and Richard Wittman from the History of Art and Architecture framed the discussion, which took the audience on a groundbreaking visual tour of German Gothic spaces. The lecture was followed by the third panel of the day, Architecture and Emotion. Brigit Ferguson’s paper “The Viewer in the Screen: Emotion and Identification in the West Choirscreen at Naumburg Cathedral” and Shannon Meyer’s “‘ye wote wele that I haue ben affrayd there’: Reading Gender in Margaret Paston’s Architectural Environment” engaged architecture’s ability to shape its inhabitants’ emotional responses and behavior. Christine Bolli brought these two presentations together, posing challenging questions to each panelist.

The conference culminated in a vibrant performance of “The Farce of the Fart,” a French medieval play directed by UCSB’s own Andrew Henkes and translated by Professor Jody Enders. For the first time, our conference audience was brought out into the open air to see a live theatrical performance that left everyone laughing. Afterwards the director, the actors and the translator joined the audience for a discussion of the careful steps each person took in creating the performance. Finally Professor Carol Pasternack, the Director of the Medieval Studies Program, offered her thoughtful observations at the day’s conclusion.