Subtheme:
Joyous Movement: Celebratory Motion and Affect

Jubilee is often joined by joyous movements as people celebrate and commemorate milestones with performance. In our modern digital context, most people recognize joyous movement when they see it, from TikTok dances to end zone celebrations, wedding processions to Pride parades. These activities embody emotion through movement within shared cultural markers and boundaries, marking celebrations and powerfully conveying emotions to both performers and witnesses. Across premodern contexts, joyous movement could be individualized or communal, political or religious, planned or spontaneous. It took many forms, but the embodied celebration remained clear, at least to medieval audiences.

 

If medieval movement is difficult to capture and reconstruct, joyous medieval movement is doubly so, for the scholar must attempt to understand not just the ephemeral bodily movements but the fleeting emotions accompanying them. While we cannot join premodern jubilee processions, we can glimpse into these joyous events through the material traces used to construct them. We cannot join ring dances, but can only read about their steps in literature and, through the steps, try to recover the emotions. 

 

Recent scholarship on emotion has explored new ways for finding, understanding, and interpreting emotion in premodern sources; Barbara H. Rosenwein and Sarah McNamer  have provided foundational  frameworks that have opened up the possibilities for scholars to better engage the affective performances of the past. Likewise, the work of Seeta Chaganti and Kathryn Dickason on movement has stepped beyond simply reconstructing historical dances or processions, expanding definitions of movement to include careful observation of bodies and their meanings through kinesic, rhetorical, and poetic analysis. Both bodies of scholarship provide opportunities to join in the joyful movements of the past: to understand what the expression of embodied joy might look like, to examine how movement might have shaped affect, and to grapple with the differences in the emotive experience and causes of celebration in various contexts, groups, and genres.

Bringing together the studies of emotion and movement expands our perspective on jubilees. What was the embodied experience of jubilee for medieval individuals, in varied contexts and occasions? When did movement develop the emotive atmosphere of jubilee (and vice versa)? How was joyous movement an individual or a communal experience? What roles did sexuality, race, or status play in communal emotive responses? Do modern expressions of joy mirror their medieval predecessors? How do the differences make both the emotion and performance of joyful movement more difficult to recognize?