The recent development of the methodological framework of medical humanities has produced a wide array of innovative studies of literary texts from diverse periods and places that examine how these are intertwined with wide-ranging aspects of the biomedical sciences. Thanks to the endorsement and financial support of academic institutions, funding bodies and charitable organizations such as the Wellcome Trust, the field of medical humanities has flourished and expanded notably in the last decade. The pioneering work produced by the researchers affiliated with the medical humanities centres at a significant number of British universities is noteworthy. Within this field, a significant number of research projects have been devoted to the study of emotions and affect within literary, cultural and historical contexts. Such is the work promoted by the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary, University of London; the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions; and the international organisation the Society for the History of Emotions whose organ is the new biannual journal Emotions: History, Culture, Society. The journal's aim is to publish multidisciplinary research exploring the way the psychological phenomenon of emotion has been theorized diachronically and across different geographical settings, the role of emotion as an agent of change, and the way the history of emotional experiences and their representations influences present sociopolitical and cultural practices.

The edited collection of highly original essays Emotions in Medieval Arthurian Literature is shaped by the above methodological concerns in scholarship. In fact, some of the contributors to this volume have even been involved in the development of the fields of medical humanities and of the history of emotions at international level. For instance, Corinne Saunders, one of the editors of Emotions in Medieval Arthurian Literature, is co-director of the Centre for Medical Humanities at Durham University, while Andrew Lynch is the director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions and one of the editors of the journal Emotions: History, Culture, Society. Thanks to such backgrounds, and combined with their expertise in Arthurian literature, the writers of the essays included in this volume offer groundbreaking interpretations of medieval representations of emotion.

The wide appeal of this volume owes much to the elucidating way that the introduction and the essays bring together theoretical and biomedical examinations of the concept of emotion to analyse writings from the Middle Ages. The editors’ introduction historicizes the term ‘emotion’ and explains how it was examined by a number of thinkers: from Descartes's dualism, the split between body and mind, to subsequent distinctions between affect and emotion as explored by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri in A Thousand Plateaus (1987). By drawing on a long lineage of writings about affect from Spinoza to Henri Bergson's emphasis on the physicality of affection, Deleuze and Guatarri explored the corporeal, instinctive aspect of the affect. This section of the introduction culminates in a discussion of the significance of current research findings by neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio who have investigated, among other things, the role of emotion in cognitive processes, a departure from earlier understandings of emotion as being non-cognitive. This latter observation is key in Corinne Saunders's essay, which points out that medieval romances ‘engage with suffering and conflicted psyches, writing the experience of affect on the lived-body … [and] with the processes of thinking and feeling, demonstrating the crucial interplay of affective and cognitive elements in emotion’ (p. 31). Saunders historicizes the ‘affective turn’ in literary studies and notes the impact that the school of phenomenology had on the understanding and subsequent investigation of ‘body and mind, self and world, thinking and feeling’ in the later part of the twentieth century (p. 31). Further, she stresses the fact that such perspectives were common among medieval thinkers who, in turn, had based their understanding of emotion on ancient Greek interpretations. Specifically, Hippocrates’ theory of humours and Aristotle's association of the soul with rational activity and of the heart with the senses and cognition were further evolved and became central in medieval thought while concepts such as soul, mind, thought and affect were intertwined in much more complex ways than in the Cartesian system. In contrast to Cartesian dualism, twentieth-century German philosophers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, much indebted to Aristotelian thought, set out to analyse human experience as being-in-the-world, a strand of enquiry that shaped also Jean-Paul Sartre's early writings on emotion which Jane Gilbert's essay deploys alongside Martin Jay's concept of ‘magical nominalism’ to examine the prose Lancelot, a text from the early thirteenth century.

The essays accomplish a thorough examination of the manifestations of affect and emotions in medieval Arthurian literature by proposing three research strands: body, mind, voice. The contributors deploy a wide range of strategies: they juxtapose indicative extracts from the original medieval texts with their exemplary translation into English, offer close readings of the selected texts, and analyse the composition history of these texts by comparing different manuscripts – often in different languages (Middle English, French, Dutch, Icelandic). In addition, the analysis of the linguistic tropes and lexical choices of these medieval romances is placed within their historical and cultural contexts. A significant number of the essays pay particular attention to the public expression of emotion and the emotional communities the texts depict. Andrew Lynch compares current popular ideas about emotional literacy which are ‘mainly driven by an unexamined desire for productive labour’ with the ‘Arthurian emotional project’ and the inherently political nature of Arthurian narratives of action (pp. 47–48). The politics of medieval romances are also a focal point in the contributions by Raluca L. Radulescu and Anne Baden-Daintree. Helen Cooper's concluding essay functions as a response to the arguments and approaches of all the other contributors to the book. She particularly engages with Carolyne Larrington's essay and her ‘critical division between the emotions elicited by the artefact, the artistry of the writer, and those inherent in or elicited by the fiction’ (p. 187) and focuses on the role of smile and the collective experience of laughter in Malory and in the Arthurian literature of the period, which, nonetheless, ‘tends to take itself seriously’ (p. 184). The centrality of the concepts of body, mind and voice, and their examination in relation to the wider research fields of the history of emotions and medieval literature, make this volume of essays a landmark in scholarship. It is an invaluable source and a model of interdisciplinary methodology not only for those researching the cultural history and scientific world view of the Middle Ages, but also for those specializing in subsequent periods.