Rebecca McNamara is a lecturer in medieval literature at UCLA. She studies the history of emotions related to the suicidal impulse in medieval English literature and culture, a project she began as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. This paper was delivered at a research workshop on ‘Medieval Emotions and Contemporary Methodologies’ at Birkbeck, University of London, on 8 July 2016. In the paper, Rebecca analyses her article ‘The Sorrow of Soreness: Infirmity and Suicide in Medieval England’ (Parergon 31.2 (2014), pp. 11-34) in order to unpack how she uses language as an intellectual inroad for uncovering how emotional habits and practices were established and how they evolved.