Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion

Description

"Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion" advances a new narrative for this broad cultural change and the meditative writings that both generated and reflected it. Sarah McNamer locates women as agents in the creation of the earliest and most influential texts in the genre, from John of Fécamp's "Libellus to the Meditationes Vitae Christi", thus challenging current paradigms that cast the compassionate affective mode as Anselmian or Franciscan in origin. The early development of the genre in women's practices had a powerful and lasting legacy. With special attention to Middle English texts, including Nicholas Love's "Mirror" and a wide range of Passion lyrics and laments, "Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion" illuminates how these scripts for the performance of prayer served to construct compassion itself as an intimate and feminine emotion. To feel compassion for Christ, in the private drama of the heart that these texts stage, was to feel like a woman. This was an assumption about emotion that proved historically consequential, McNamer demonstrates, as she traces some of its legal, ethical, and social functions in late medieval England. Introduction: Intimate Scripts in the History of Emotion 1 PART I. The Origins of an Affective Mode 1. Compassion and the Making of a True "Sponsa Christi" 25 2. The Genealogy of a Genre 58 3. Franciscan Meditation Reconsidered 86 PART II. Performing Compassion in Late Medieval England 4. Feeling Like a Woman 119 5. Marian Lament and the Rise of a Vernacular Ethics 150 6. "Kyndenesse" and Resistance in the Middle English Passion Lyric 174 Notes 207 Works Cited 271 Index of Manuscripts 299 Index 300 Acknowledgments 307