Translating Emotions in Medieval Europe: Modes, Models, and Cultural Strategies

In recent decades, the upsurge of emotion studies within the field of Medieval Studies has contributed to reshaping its borders, revealing that medieval affectivity is a dynamic cultural construct that invites cross-cultural and comparative approaches. At the same time, translation in the Middle Ages was rarely a literal, word-for-word process; rather, it functioned as an act of cultural adaptation, political appropriation, and linguistic innovation.

This conference aims to explore the intersection of these two fields by examining how emotions were translated, reshaped, and renegotiated across the diverse linguistic and cultural landscapes of medieval Europe. When a text crossed borders – moving from Latin to the vernaculars, or between different vernacular traditions (such as Romance, Germanic, Celtic, or Slavic) – how did the vocabulary and conceptualization of affect change? To what extent did the changes in the encoding of emotions expressed through translation reflect a shift in cultural values?

We welcome papers that investigate how translators grappled with the challenge of rendering the emotional experiences (such as grief, desire, fear, anger, or spiritual joy) for new audiences in both literary and non-literary texts.

Suggested Topics for Submission

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• The lexical and semantic evolution of emotional terminology in medieval translations.
• The translation of emotions between Latin and vernacular traditions.
• Cross-vernacular adaptations of affect (e.g., French sources in Middle English or Old Norse contexts).
• The role of genre (such as romance, hagiography, epic, lyric) in shifting emotional registers during translation.
• Somatic versus psychological expressions of emotion in translated texts.

• The use of metaphor and symbolism in the translation of emotional experiences.
• The influence of historical and social contexts on the translation of emotions.
• The representation of emotions across different artistic forms, such as visual arts and music, in relation to translation.

• Gendered emotions and their transformation in cross-cultural transmission.
• The impact of theological and philosophical concepts of affect on secular translations.

• Theoretical frameworks that combine Translation Studies with the History of Emotions.

Abstracts of no more than 250 words with a short bibliography should be submitted via email to medievaltranslator.lett@unitn.it. Further details will be shared in the second circular, to be sent out at the beginning of January 2027.