Codierungen von Emotionen im Mittelalter/Emotions and Sensibilities in the Middle Ages. Herausgegeben von/Edited by C. Stephen Jaeger and Ingrid Kasten. Redaktionelle Mitarbeit/Editorial Assistance Hendrikje Haufe and Andrea Sieber. Trends in Medieval Philology, 1. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2003. Pp. xxviii + 313. €78.

Did medieval mystics observe a strict opposition between emotion and rationality? What role did anger, fear, grief, and love play in the literary worlds created by medieval authors? What lies at the heart of the enigma that is Kriemhild? How did increasing literary activity influence expressions of emotion? The innovative studies in the current volume pursue these and other intriguing questions by using traditional methods as well as theoretical approaches from a range of nonliterary disciplines. First assembled as conference participants inaugurating the new Medieval Studies Program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in the Fall of 2002, the contributors draw extensively on insights gleaned from recent findings in anthropology, psychology, sociology, and philosophy. Perhaps most notably, several scholars affiliated with the research initiative "Kulturen des Performativen" at the Freie Universit¯t Berlin (co-sponsors of the conference) profitably revisit familiar medieval texts by viewing them from the post-structuralist perspective of performativity, which holds that verbal and non-verbal discourses are acts that construct identities each time they are enacted. With time, such acts can also challenge a prevailing hegemony. The historical arena of gender tends to illustrate the emergence of identities and challenges to established culture most explicitly. Performativity is a lens through which one can examine the creation and negotiation of power in literary texts.

Elizabeth I. Wade-Sirabian
University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh