“Betuix pyne and faith”: The Poetics of Compassion in Walter Kennedy’s Passioun of Crist

Walter Kennedy’s Passioun of Crist, the only surviving vernacular work in the tradition of the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditations of the Life of Christ to be composed in rhyme royal stanzas, is a more significant artistic achievement in the history of Middle Scots poetry and of late medieval devotional writing than has been previously recognized. Combining historicist and formalist methods of analysis, the article describes in detail the cultural locations of the text. The carefully crafted poem reveals a remarkable cooperation between specific material practices of medieval affective devotion and a high courtly mode of medieval literary aesthetics.