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  • Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion
  • Barbara Newman
Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion. By Sarah McNamer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Pp. viii + 309; 10 illustrations. $59.95.

In the long history of religions, human beings have come before their gods with a full gamut of emotions, from terror and wonder to gratitude and guilt. Rarely, however, has a religion prevailed on its devotees to pity their God. The emotional regime that we label “affective piety” may be stranger than we think. For some four hundred years, medieval Christians yearned to have “mind of the Passion,” to gaze on the Crucifix with the emotions for which Julian of Norwich prayed: “the three wounds of contrition, compassion, and longing for God.” Yet this attitude would have seemed as strange to Syriac Christians of the second century, Byzantines of the tenth, or Protestants of the eighteenth as it does to most believers today. The religious emotions that now prevail for an hour or two on Good Friday once defined the spirituality of whole populations.

Where did this long-running emotional regime come from, what sustained it, and how did it end? The questions themselves are not new, but in her rich and provocative study, Sarah McNamer provides some novel, sometimes polemical answers. Medievalists have most often looked to a version of what McNamer calls the “great man” theory (p. 84). Three eloquent, charismatic saints—Anselm of Canterbury, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Francis of Assisi—are said to have spurred the rise of affective piety by modeling a new devotion to the humanity of Christ, which came increasingly to focus on his Passion. With only a polite bow to these men, McNamer tells a different story. For her, it is not so much the writers of affective texts as their readers who shaped the new mode, thereby “inventing” medieval compassion—and those readers were overwhelmingly women. In six chapters, three devoted to “The Origins of an Affective Mode” and three to “Performing Compassion in Late Medieval England,” McNamer makes a persuasive case for religious compassion as a historically contingent, feminized emotion.

In the introduction, which positions her work at the crossroads of gender studies, performance theory, and the history of emotions, McNamer states her central thesis. Affective meditations, she asserts, were meant to function as “intimate scripts” enabling readers to perform—and thereby produce—the appropriate religious feelings. As her starting point she takes The Wooing of Our Lord, an early Middle English text for anchoresses. The Wooing consists of two loosely related parts: the first offers rational arguments for choosing Christ as husband, while the second presents an erotic meditation on his Passion. One might say that Christ woos the anchoress in the first part, while she woos him in the second. But why should this be necessary? After all, she was his legal bride already, wed by the same rituals that established worldly marriage: joining of hands, bestowal of ring and crown, swearing of vows. In a worldly marriage, however, the promises made at betrothal were sealed by consummation, which in the anchoress’s case must be deferred until the hereafter. Though solemn and binding, therefore, her marriage retained a provisional character. Before she could be welcomed into heaven, she had to prove her fidelity by cultivating the emotion canonists defined as maritalis affectio. The best way for Christ’s bride to earn her heavenly nuptials was to lie with her beloved on the bed of the Cross. Hence only “pain—pain experienced affectively as love”—could show her to be a true and loyal wife (p. 51).

In Chapter 2, “The Genealogy of a Genre,” McNamer takes issue with Rachel Fulton’s landmark book From Judgment to Passion. Fulton asked why spiritual attitudes [End Page 523] began to shift soon after the year 1000 from penitential dread to compassion, proposing disappointment at the deferred Second Coming as a key factor. Writing as a literary scholar, McNamer maintains instead that we must question the addressees, not the authors, of affective texts. She marshals an impressive list: John of Fécamp wrote for Agnes of Poitou, Anselm for Matilda of Tuscany and the recluse...

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