Emotion and Devotion: The Meaning of Mary in Medieval Religious Cultures

Chapter 3: Emotions and Selves

Emotions and Selves Following the footsteps of Natalie Zemon Davis, and very much in her honor, the previous two chapters traced the possibilities of a global history and the creation of terrains of polemic and encounter within the vast and important culture field that developed around Mary in medieval Europe. In this chapter we will continue the enterprise of identifying Tasks and Themes in the Study of European Culture, by studying the emergence of a European style of emotive devotion. For in the centuries that followed the year one thousand, the Mary of prayer, the lady of intercession, became increasingly an enabling site for reflection on the expression of emotion. It began with the exploration of the happy motherhood of birth and nurture, and later also came to encompass 79 Chapter 3 the tragic motherhood of loss and mourning. I suggest that these images—the tender mother and child, the tragic pietà—produced in medieval Europe and later spread the world wide are still part of a European language of affect, part of what may make Europeans at some moments into an emotional community. I use the term emotional community, recently developed by the American scholar Barbara Rosenwein, in the book of 2006 which carries that name. She defines such a community as “groups in which people adhere to the same notions of emotional expression and value—or devalue—the same or related emotions .” This idea suggests something like the discursive frame of Foucault, and even more the habitus of Bourdieu , that is a frame of action and reflection which also privileges the body and its habits, space of performance and interaction between individuals. Rosenwein builds much on the work of Martha Nussbaum who talks of emotion as an “upheaval of thought” common to all people, deeply engrained in the mind. Rosenwein emphasizes more than Nussbaum does the cultural specificity of the articulation of emotion—which according to the Oxford English Dictionary describes “joy, love, anger, fear, happiness, guilt, sadness, embarrassment , hope.” It is a word that has only appeared 80 quite recently in Anglophone usage, replacing the word Passion. She dismisses the evolutionary frame offered by Norbert Elias, who has had a great renaissance of late, and identifies variety in the practices of early medieval Europe—her own scholarly terrain— between many different frames of emotional propriety that defy a single diachronic progression. How can we know about emotions? How can we touch the private and the personal, how can we reach it within the public and collective spheres? Medieval historians do not expect to come across revealing egodocuments , though some noted autobiographies have survived, and other genres were also used—poetry, devotional writing—to convey explicit reflections on the self. When using such sources we must be attuned to the influence of genre and rhetoric, two associated resources available to educate people. It is also useful to think of ways in which people could express their identity and feelings in public and shared sphere: devotional behavior and comportment offered a whole array of prompts and opportunities for expression. Devotional images are resources which offered identifications, somewhat specular—prompting the question “could that be me?”—directive, alluring, and 81 for us abundant. Images of Mary were particularly rich in offering opportunities for identification. So much of what was said of Mary, even more than is the case with her son, was expressed in the language of mimesis, an emotional register of communication. Example, imitation , and compassion were the emotional lessons taught by devotional writings. Moments for reflection on motherhood, conjugality, virginity, nurture, and bereavement, were all offered up around the wellknown and loved figure of Mary. * * * The centers of discussion and production of ideas, rituals and artifacts related to Mary were monastic houses that maintained elaborate systems of liturgy and prayer. Monks and nuns devoted to the struggle against sin and immersion in devotional work were particularly aware of the precarious balance between human striving and human frailty. The eleventh and twelfth centuries saw the development of ideas and practices that offered believers avenues for penance and atonement. The idea of purgatory matured in the twelfth century; it became a place where believers suffered for minor sins after death, and for a limited period of time. Purgatory offered hope, but also the knowledge of pain, for 82 all but the saints and the damned were expected to spend a period of purgation, cleansing, suffering in the middle...