Affective meditation and the invention of medieval compassion / Sarah McNamer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

McNamer, Sarah.

Contributor:

University of Pennsylvania. Press.

Series:

Middle Ages series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Jesus Christ.

Femininity--Religious aspects--Christianity--History--To 1500.

Femininity.

Emotions--Religious aspects--Christianity--History--To 1500.

Emotions.

Compassion--Religious aspects--Christianity--History--To 1500.

Compassion.

Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Devotion to--England--History--To 1500.

Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Devotion to.

Devotional literature, Latin (Medieval and modern)--History and criticism.

Devotional literature, Latin (Medieval and modern).

Devotional literature, Italian--History and criticism.

Devotional literature, Italian.

Devotional literature, English (Middle)--History and criticism.

Devotional literature, English (Middle).

Jesus Christ--Passion--Prayers and devotions--History and criticism.

Prayers and devotions.

Passion of Jesus Christ.

History.

Compassion--Religious aspects--Christianity.

Emotions--Religious aspects--Christianity.

Femininity--Religious aspects--Christianity.

England.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Dictionaries.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (viii, 309 pages :) : illustrations

Other Title:

Penn Press e-books.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2010]

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

text file

Summary:

Affective meditation on the Passion was one of the most popular literary genres of the high and later Middle Ages. Proliferating in a rich variety of forms, these lyrical, impassioned, script-like texts in Latin and the vernacular had a deceptively simple goal: to teach their readers how to feel. They were thus instrumental in shaping and sustaining the wide-scale shift in medieval Christian sensibility from fear of God to compassion for the suffering Christ. 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.

Contents:

Intimate scripts in the history of emotion

Compassion and the making of a true Sponsa Christi

The genealogy of a genre

Franciscan meditation reconsidered

Feeling like a woman

Marian lament and the rise of a vernacular ethics

Kyndenesse and resistance in the Middle English passion lyric.

Notes:

OldControl:muse9780812202786.

Multi-User.

Includes bibliographical references (pages [271]-297) and indexes.

Description based on print version record.

Other Format:

Print version: McNamer, Sarah. Affective meditation and the invention of medieval compassion.

ISBN:

9780812202786

0812202783

OCLC:

794700575

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.