Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (review)

A friend of mine took her young son to a museum where he encountered a depiction of the crucifixion for the first time. Looking at the image of Mary weeping beside the bleeding body of her son, the boy said: "I don't understand. If she's his mother, why's she standing there crying? Why doesn't she climb up and take him down?" Behind this vignette lie two thousand years of the history of emotion, piety, and gender—changes so complex they would take many volumes to fully explore. McNamer's book is a good place to start.

Brilliant and lucid, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion argues that the iconic image of the Virgin extravagantly grieving for her crucified son is not only—as we have long known—a gendered response created in the late-eleventh and twelfth centuries but also a response created not so much by the male writers who authored the first such prayers and poems as by the female readers for whom they were written. In chapters that build one after the other in complexity, McNamer unfolds the ways in which this female-gendered compassion has become, by the fifteenth century, a locus of religious—especially female and lay male—creativity; a stance both men and women can inhabit; a restriction on women's agency and yet, simultaneously, a place of resistance; and finally even an expression of male anxiety over masculinity. Prepared for by her 2009 Speculum article with its presentation of a new textual history for the fourteenth-century Meditations on the Life of Christ (a major source of affective meditation), McNamer's book displays an originality and subtlety of reading to match the technical virtuosity of that earlier article.

This is in some ways the book of a young author. There is a bit too much positioning with relation to the arguments of others (sometimes hurriedly and carelessly summarized) and a bit too much arguing over points that are palpably true and would be better built upon than jousted around. If readers are really the authors of texts (and it is not, of course, that simple), one wonders whether the advisers and literary critics for whom McNamer writes may not have "authored" some of the overloading and positioning that the true author would at her best have omitted. Moreover, for a book that invokes "performance" so frequently, there is surprisingly little discussion here of actual prayer practice, either individual or communal, about which historians have recently discovered a great deal.

Nonetheless, this is a study that must henceforth be reckoned with not only by all medievalists but also by students of anthropology and psychology, who will find here material that deepens and makes more nuanced much of what we know about the relationship of religion, reading, gender, and affect. It has implications as well for how we should understand the coming of the reformation(s) of the sixteenth century as not only social and political events but also turning points in the history of gender and the emotions. Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion is a stunning book.