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

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

McNamer, Sarah.

Series:

Middle Ages series.

The Middle Ages series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

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

Jesus Christ.

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

Compassion.

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

Devotional literature, English (Middle).

Devotional literature, Italian--History and criticism.

Devotional literature, Italian.

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

Devotional literature, Latin (Medieval and modern).

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

Emotions.

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

Femininity.

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

Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Devotion to.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (318 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, c2010.

Language Note:

English

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:

Front matter

Contents

Introduction. Intimate Scripts in the History of Emotion

PART I. The Origins of an Affective Mode

1. Compassion and the Making of a True Sponsa Christi

2. The Genealogy of a Genre

3. Franciscan Meditation Reconsidered

PART II. Performing Compassion in Late Medieval England

4. Feeling Like a Woman

5. Marian Lament and the Rise of a Vernacular Ethics

6. Kyndenesse and Resistance in the Middle English Passion Lyric

Notes

Works Cited

Index of Manuscripts

Index

Acknowledgments

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

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

ISBN:

9781283890922

1283890925

9780812202786

0812202783

OCLC:

794700575