Swooning occurs so frequently in many medieval narratives, and so extravagantly in some, as to pass for almost commonplace behaviour that prompts puzzlingly little comment or explanation by medieval authors, or reaction from bystanding characters within the texts. Such swooning belongs to a convention-governed lexicon of medieval body language, with its own rules, patterns and expectations, and swooning often characterizes the accretions to medieval narratives typically added by the embellishing imaginations of subsequent translators and adaptors of earlier texts. It is this ubiquity and clustering of swoons in medieval literature that is the focus of this essay, together with the pointers emerging from such swooning for continuity and change in reception and interpretation of body language and behaviour.

One modern response to such ubiquitous medieval swooning might be to caution that ‘a swoon is not a swoon’, warning against taking these swoons literally, rather than as rhetorical flourishes and generalized tokens of responsiveness. Yet the many references in medieval texts to swooning characters lying long on the ground, or as if dead, tend to indicate that their swoon is indeed a swoon, unlikely to be intrinsically different from modern understanding of a swoon as an abrupt loss of consciousness (and with that, usually, a physical collapse) brought on by psychological and physiological factors.