Affective piety

[1] This practice of prayer, reading, and meditation was often cultivated through visualization and concentration on vivid images of scenes from the Bible, Saints' Lives, Virgin Mary, Christ and religious symbols, feeling from the result.

In either case, this style of affective meditation asked the "viewer" to engage with the scene as if she or he were physically present and to stir up feelings of love, fear, grief, and/or repentance for sin.

One example of this is an Eastertide sermon by St. Augustine: In the chapter on high medieval spirituality in his book The Making of the Middle Ages, the medievalist Richard W. Southern[5] was building on the work of scholars such as André Wilmart and Étienne Gilson.

"[9] On Southern's view, both Anselm and the Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux gave form in their writings to a "theme of tenderness and compassion for the sufferings and helplessness of the Saviour of the world.

"[14] Anselm's prayers work on the emotions; he "strains every resource of language to express and stimulate in his reader both the mental excitation and humiliation necessary for the double activity of self-examination and abasement in the presence of holiness.

In the section of the text devoted to the Nativity of Jesus, Aelred wrote: One common variation on the Southern Thesis describes affective piety from the thirteenth century on as essentially Franciscan.

][33][34] Clarissa Atkinson's study Mystic and Pilgrim: the Book and World of Margery Kempe (1983), follows the "Southern Thesis" in the fifth chapter, "'In the Likeness of a Man': The Tradition of Affective Piety."

""[35] She elaborates on how Bernard of Clairvaux's devotion to and "adoration of the sacred humanity...was adapted by the Franciscans, who transformed it into a popular passion focused on the details of Christ's birth and death and used it to preach penitence to large numbers of lay as well as religious people.

"[36] In an article on "The Humanity and Passion of Christ" (1987), Ewert Cousins (drawing on Wilmart) lays out the trajectory from the Patristics, to monasticism, to Peter Damian, John of Fécamp and Anselm, to the Cistercians.

"[44] The recent studies she refers to include Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars, which, in a section on Passion devotions, reproduces the Southern Thesis with emphasis on the Franciscans and Sarah Beckwith's Christ's Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings.

[50] Yet Caroline Walker Bynum could write in 1982 that "the spirituality of women...has been surprisingly neglected when we consider that the most important book on twelfth and thirteenth-century religion in the past fifty years has been Grundmann's study of the beguines.

"[51] Herbert Grundmann's 1935 book, Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter (Religious Movements in the Middle Ages), had been republished in 1961 and 1975, and it did end up having a great influence on the study of medieval women.

Subsequent research has continued to build upon Bynum's characterization, even as it questions the dichotomy of a somatic and ecstatic female spirituality versus an educated and intellectualized male religiosity.

Studies of Meister Eckhart by her and by Bernard McGinn "show a beguine influence" on him "which breaks down both older claims about women's affective spirituality versus men's speculative mysticism as well as Bynum's slightly different thesis.

Aers questions whether women's ascetic imitation of the "dominant figuration of Christ's humanity" really "empowered the subordinate" or "subverted the logic and religion of a patriarchal and profoundly mysoginistic [sic] culture" (34).

Alcuin Blamires provides a summary of the empowerment theory and its critique in his book chapter "Beneath the Pulpit": For another description of the Aers anti-empowerment thesis see Watson, "Desire for the Past."

Furthermore, Bestul points out that He argues that these types of Passion meditations show " a male fascination with a woman tormented, passive, and frequently...literally immobilized by suffering,"[87] and he goes as far as to speculate that texts like the Quis dabit lament[88] even function to control "excessive female devotion to Christ's crucified body.

"[92][93] As noted above in the section on "Feminism, Gender, and the Body: The 'Bynum Thesis,'" Caroline Walker Bynum's thinking on religious movements and women's roles in them was influenced by Herbert Grundmann's work.

Studies of German historiography from the 1930s to the 1950s or 60s have shown how Grundmann's concept of "movements" was shaped by a scholarly climate imbued with Nietzschean ideas about how history should "serve life."

"[96] In doing so, as Jan Gerchow and Susan Marti have written, Grundmann "seized on" the idea of religious movements as described by Herman Haupt, a Protestant church historian of the previous generation.

In it, Fulton makes a case for how new doctrines of the Real Presence in the Eucharist and new and affectively charged retellings of Bible stories were intrinsic to the ninth century conversion of the Saxons.

Written "in the alliterative verse traditionally used for vernacular heroic epics," it uses secular oral formulas (Christ is a "mead-giver" [medomgebon] and the apostles gisiði ["warrior-companions, retainers"], etc.

In 1977, Thomas H. Bestul pointed out that "there is a significant body of private devotional prayers written in England from about 950 to the end of the eleventh century which anticipates, and occasionally shares in, Anselm's innovations.

Although previous scholars had long thought that The Seafarer is a "religious lyric" or an "elegy" (both being genres that rely on emotional expression), Shields argued that the poem "may profitably be understood as a meditatio, that is, a literary spiritual exercise whose author aspires to the perfection of the soul.

The Penitentials, he points out, emphasize weeping, guilt, and mercy, and Even the "lists or catalogues [of sins]" Frantzen writes," would have situated the penitent physically and psychologically at the center of a reflective, meditative, and indeed affective process" (125).

In the end, though "we cannot be certain that the affective piety and Marian compassion of the High Middle Ages were Eastern imports, we nonetheless must begin to reckon with fact that the emergence of these themes in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was not quite as unprecedented as some have assumed" (Shoemaker, "Mary at the Cross" 606).

In the late-first/early-second century AD, Plutarch described ekphrasis when he wrote of Thucydides' skill as an author: One figure of speech good for creating "vividness" was asyndeton: "the omission of conjunctions between clauses, often resulting in a hurried rhythm or vehement effect.

"The particular power of medieval imagination that Bonaventure identified," Karnes writes, "arose not from the simple importing of Aristotelian philosophy into the Latin West but from its application to Augustinian theology.

As Karnes puts it, Rather than inventing gospel meditations or this way of thinking about their aims, Bonaventure provided them with theoretical underpinnings and a method, or "mechanism," for making the journey to God (112–113).

"[141] It breaks ground in using "the history of emotion as an additional framework" and presents Whether scholars agree or not with the idea that, over time and place, cultures have "forg[ed] and nourish[ed]" links between women and compassion or with the idea that affective piety was primarily associated with the feminine and femininity, McNamer's book offers a new methodology for understanding what affective devotional practices sought to foster in their users: they were "mechanisms for the production of feeling."