Affective meditation on the Passionwas one of the most popular literary genres of the high and later Middle Ages. Proliferating in a rich variety of forms, these lyrical, impassioned, script-like ...texts in Latin and the vernacular had a deceptively simple goal: to teach their readers how to feel. They were thus instrumental in shaping and sustaining the wide-scale shift in medieval Christian sensibility from fear of God to compassion for the suffering Christ.Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassionadvances a new narrative for this broad cultural change and the meditative writings that both generated and reflected it. Sarah McNamer locates women as agents in the creation of the earliest and most influential texts in the genre, from John of Fécamp'sLibellusto theMeditationes vitae Christi, thus challenging current paradigms that cast the compassionate affective mode as Anselmian or Franciscan in origin. The early development of the genre in women's practices had a powerful and lasting legacy. With special attention to Middle English texts, including Nicholas Love'sMirrorand a wide range of Passion lyrics and laments,Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassionilluminates how these scripts for the performance of prayer served to construct compassion itself as an intimate and feminine emotion. To feel compassion for Christ, in the private drama of the heart that these texts stage, was to feel like a woman. This was an assumption about emotion that proved historically consequential, McNamer demonstrates, as she traces some of its legal, ethical, and social functions in late medieval England.
The Meditations on the Life of Christ was the most popular and influential devotional work of the later Middle Ages. With its lively dialogue and narrative realism, its poignant and moving depictions ...of the Nativity and Passion, and its direct appeals to the reader to feel love and compassion, the Meditations had a major impact on devotional practices, religious art, meditative literature, vernacular drama, and the cultivation of affective experience. This volume is a critical edition, with English translation and commentary, of a hitherto-unpublished Italian text that McNamer argues is likely to be the original version of this influential masterpiece. Livelier and far more compact than the Latin text, the Italian "short text" possesses a stylistic and textual integrity that appears to testify to its primacy among early versions of the Meditations. The evidence also suggests that it was composed by a woman, a Poor Clare from Pisa—an author whose work McNamer contends was obscured by the anonymous Franciscan friar who subsequently altered and expanded the text. In bringing to light this unique Italian version and building a case for its origins and importance, this book will encourage a fresh look at the Meditations and serve as a foundation for further scholarship and debate concerning some of the most compelling subjects in Italian and European literary and cultural history, including the role of women in the invention of new genres and spiritual practices, the early development of Italian prose narrative, the rise of vernacular theology, and the history of emotion. McNamer's volume will be of significant interest to medievalists, especially those who study medieval women, devotional literature, manuscript studies, and textual criticism. The linguistic analysis expands that audience to include those of a philological bent.
It is widely agreed that the work now known as the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes vitae Christi (MVC) was the single most influential devotional text written in the later Middle Ages. Composed in ...Tuscany in the middle of the fourteenth century (between about 1336 and 1364), it was rapidly disseminated in Latin and translated into all of the major European vernaculars, including English, French, German, Irish, Spanish, Catalan, and Swedish; well over two hundred manuscripts survive.
In 1207, after sixteen years spent serving lepers in Liège while begging alms for her sustenance, Marie d’Oignies retired to the priory of Saint-Nicholas at Oignies-sur-Sambre, in what is now ...Belgium. Fame had become too great a burden: the example she had set, living in poverty because Christ had lived in poverty, serving lepers because she saw Christ in them, had attracted many to come and work with her and the loosely affiliated group of women known as the mulieres sanctae, or beguines. In 1207, she was above all seeking the solitude needed for prayer—prayer of an intensely affective
Compassion is not only an emotion but also potentially the foundation for an ethic. The cultivation of compassion in the devotional realm, then, clearly had the potential to effect ethical thinking ...and behavior on a wider scale, and the rare autobiographical writings that survive from late medieval England reveal that in some cases meditation on the Passion did indeed produce this effect. Julian of Norwich describes how her visions of the suffering Christ—visions in part generated by the practice of affective meditation and feminized “beholding”—deepened her pity for her fellow Christians: “Right as I was before in the
The Genealogy of a Genre McNamer, Sarah
Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion,
01/2011
Book Chapter
“How did it happen,” Émile Mâle asked in his early and influential study of religious art, “that, in the fourteenth century, Christians wished to see their God suffer and die? . . . Who had released ...this gushing spring? Who had thus struck the Church in its very heart? This problem, one of the most interesting presented by the history of Christianity, has never been resolved, nor, to tell the truth, has it ever been clearly posed.”¹ The problem is one of the most interesting not only in the history of Christianity but also in the history of emotion. For
Feeling Like a Woman McNamer, Sarah
Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion,
01/2011
Book Chapter
Around the time the anonymous author in Italy sat down to write the original version of the Meditations, another momentous event took place across the English Channel: Richard Rolle quit his course ...of study at Oxford and ran off to the woods to become a hermit, wearing a patchwork garment hastily assembled from two of his sister’s dresses. “My brother’s gone mad,” his appalled sister is said to have declared.¹ It was not shame, however, but lasting honor that was to accrue to the family name. Rolle is typically regarded as a key figure in the development of affective piety
INTRODUCTION McNamer, Sarah
Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion,
01/2011
Book Chapter
At the center of medieval Christian culture, there was a human figure—male, once beautiful, dying on a cross. This book is about the feelings elicited toward that suffering figure through one of the ...most popular and influential literary genres of the high and later Middle Ages: affective meditations on the Passion—richly emotional, script-like texts that ask their readers to imagine themselves present at scenes of Christ’s suffering and to perform compassion for that suffering victim in a private drama of the heart.¹ The first texts of this kind emerged in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries as short
Emotion McNamer, Sarah
A New Companion to Chaucer,
04/2019
Book Chapter
Chaucer's works offer an exceptionally rich trove for thinking about emotion, prompting readers to consider more critically what it is, how it is produced, its place in structures of power, its ...relation to reason, its ethical valence. This essay summarizes the state of play in research on Chaucer and emotion, describes theories and lexicons of emotion circulating in Chaucer's day, and calls for greater attention to how Chaucer's poetry generates affective effects, including the experience of what this essay terms ‘critical feeling’. Original readings of the Book of the Duchess and the Legend of Good Women round out the essay.
