Toward a Mediterranean Erotics of Grief

This chapter examines what the author characterizes as a kind of Mediterranean elite-affective diaspora, in which emotional exceptionalism goes hand in hand with the construction of elite communities, privileging elite status over geo-cultural specificity. It focuses not only on ancient Mediterranean texts, but also on contemporaneous romances written in Medieval Greek, Middle English, and Old French. The chapter highlights one of the best known and most widely reproduced travel narratives — John of Mandeville's Travels, a fictionalized and highly popular early-fourteenth-century account of an Englishman's travels during the Crusades, transmitted in several versions and languages in over seventy-five manuscripts. The chapter reviews Mandeville's judgments of foreign practices — and specifically of interest to us, the emotions these practices produce — as delineating the contours of the privileged self. The chapter proposes that medieval narratives of encounter deploy an erotics of grief that rely on an emotional intertextuality with an elite, Mediterranean past in order to figure elite practices of power in an interwoven, Mediterranean present. It argues that the erotics of grief that course throughout medieval literature are a deeply Mediterranean, intertextual, and intercultural negotiation of status and community through emotion.