Imagining septentrional etymology: a first theorisation of the role of experience in early modern philology on words of the north European past
- Editor(s):
- Melion, W.S.; Pieper, C.; Smith, P.J.; Traninger, A.
Abstract
This chapter presents a first theorisation of the vital role that affective, experiential understandings play in septentrional etymology, early modern scholarly word studies of medieval North European literatures. The chapter’s theoretical underpinnings include philosophy of animation, enactive approaches to cognition, and cognitive criticism on the neuroaesthetic, sensory-kinesic effects of images and imagery in a
reader-beholder. Involving these theories, it explores how to conceive of septentrional etymologies as experiential images that actualise as live moments via an experiential philological process, conceptualised here as “etymological rhyme”. Etymological rhyme strikes a scholar affectively, offering the reward of pleasure at its experience. A scholar’s experience is constitutive of a word’s etymology. The chapter envisions early
modern etymological practice as an ongoing conversation that plays out live as it is read and reflected on. We must evaluate it for its significance as a live event. As scholars, we, too, are implicated and thus have a responsibility for how our experiencing shapes our studies. By performing a reading of ‘pearl’ in Francis Junius’s Etymologicum anglicanum (1743; composed 1650s–1670s), the chapter offers possibilities for including experiential dimensions in early modern studies. For a felt understanding of ‘pearl’’s expressive force, we must enter its entangled dimensions of signification. Septentrional etymology is an affective, experiential scholarship.
