From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary (review)

The subject of this book—the origin and development of medieval European devotion to the crucified Christ and to his grieving mother—should make it indispensable to intellectual historians and to students of medieval Christianity. Its provocative and elegant argument about the reasons that that development took place when it did and the contribution it made to human feeling invite readers to join its author in interpretation and evaluation of the evidence. Rachel Fulton's clarity of thought and thoroughness of explication make her study as compelling as it is challenging; her graceful authorial voice, which combines scholarly authority with colloquial crispness, makes the book also unusually accessible.

Fulton, associate professor of history at the University of Chicago, explores and quotes extensively from the principal authors of doctrinal and devotional texts from the ninth through the thirteenth centuries. While the book adheres to the chronological and thematic outline suggested by the title, its structure embodies the two primary aspects of the question: the development of devotion to Christ ("Christus Patiens") and to his mother ("Maria Compatiens"). The first portion has three chapters ("History, Conversion, and the Saxon Christ," "Apocalypse, Reform, and the Suffering Savior," and "Praying to the Crucified Christ"); the second follows a brief introduction with five chapters ("Praying to the Mother of the Crucified Judge," "The Seal of the Mother Bride," "The Voice of my Beloved, Knocking," "Once upon a Time," and "Commoriens, Commortua, Consepulta"). These chapter titles signal the major themes of the book: language, instruction, and interpretation; disappointed millennial anticipation when Christ the Judge did not appear in 1033; Mary's dual roles as mother and bride; the role of story in creating relationship between believer/devotee and Christ and his mother, and the centuries-long movement from imitative propitiation of Christ the crucified judge to compassion for his suffering.

A focus on the linguistic nature of the Incarnation runs as a golden thread through the book, whose first line enunciates the point: "For medieval Christians, the great mystery of the Incarnation was first and foremost linguistic: 'And the Word became flesh and lived among us' (John 1:14)" (p. xv). This is Fulton's principal subtext, that not only is medieval devotion to Christ and Mary revealed in language but that that language is imbricated with such devotion, that devotion translates doctrine, and that medieval devotion was understood to inscribe on the believer's flesh a corporeal memory of Christ's loving sacrifice. Finally Fulton identifies Christian devotion with the search to understand the story of the faith: "the exegete's art itself recapitulates the art of devotion; . . . the effort to become one in understanding with a text (Scripture, the Word of God) itself recapitulates the effort to become one with the object of devotion" (p. 468).

In her study of the medieval growth of empathy within the narrative of the life and Passion of Jesus, Fulton relies on empathy as an essential tool. She begins the book with the story of her response to a crucifix in Salzburg: "a feeling of sweetness, and of sorrow, of longing to be closer to the beauty of the man depicted so dying . . ." (p. 1). She then enters her exploration of the past with a long paragraph rejecting the caution that denies scholars the ability to understand people of the past: "to refuse the interpretive leap into the past . . . is to presume that human beings of the historical past are (were) so irredeemably 'Other' that there is no possibility of empathy in our encounter with them other than of the mostly reductive kind . . ." (pp. 2–3).

Fulton's insistence that it is not only possible to understand people of other times through shared human experience but vital to do so shapes the book. It is of course a method that would be perilous if employed by a less thorough and disciplined scholar, one relying simply on personal instinct. It...