Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion Robert Davis (bio) Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion. By Sarah McNamer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. 309 pp. $59.95 Beginning in the eleventh century, a new kind of Christian devotional literature began to appear, focusing on Jesus' human, bodily suffering, and encouraging the reader's affective, imaginative participation in that suffering. Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion, forcefully argued and gracefully written, seeks not only to describe the character of this literature (and the practices it involves) but also to give a historical account, as the title promises, of its "invention." Taking up the task of diachronic history with the tools of literary analysis, Sarah McNamer seeks to elucidate some of the reasons why affective Passion meditation arose in European Christianity in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, why it was associated especially with women, and how it waned in the fifteenth century even as its forms were ostensibly proliferating. The first chapter begins in the thirteenth century with the anchoritic prayer The Wooing of Our Lord. Here McNamer lays the foundation of the book's larger argument that affective Passion meditation developed in the context of women's spiritual practices. Specifically, Chapter 1 argues that the context for affective meditation was a practice of legal marriage between Christ and medieval nuns for which the Wooing provides evidence. The figure of the sponsa Christi in the text, McNamer argues, may have had a literal sense, in addition to the allegorical allusions to the Song of Songs it also certainly carried. One of the great virtues of McNamer's reading here, as in the other readings of the book, is the recognition that multiple registers of meaning may be operative in a single text. Thus she advocates a scholarly practice of "listening for the literal" (35) amidst a devotional language saturated with biblical allegory. In this case, a literal register for the term sponsa may help explain the concern of anchoresses to secure the legitimacy of their marriages through the presence of compassionate identification with their Bridegroom. If so, she argues, then legal marriage belongs to the "generative matrix" of late medieval affective meditation, and so, in turn, does gender. Grounding compassion in a legal and spiritual institution available exclusively to women provides a historical explanation for the gendering of compassion as feminine. This genealogy of medieval compassion in the practices of nuns lays the foundation for Chapters 2 and 3, which argue further for the generative role of women in affective Passion literature. Accounts of medieval affective meditation have repeatedly centered on a handful of male figures (Anselm, Bernard of Clairvaux, Francis and Bonaventure), she claims, not simply because of gender bias but because of a deeper misunderstanding of the genre. McNamer argues (drawing on John Corrigan's work on religion and emotion) that emotion in the affective devotional writings of the later Middle Ages has been undertheorized and under-historicized, especially by historians of religion and spirituality. The concern to avoid "reductionism" in these fields has inhibited attempts to explain emotion as anything other than a deeply felt religious sentiment on the part of the authors. The tools of literary analysis, however, can illuminate the performative functions of emotives and first-person confessions (in, for example, Anselm's Prayers and Meditations and in John of Fécamp's Libellus, analyzed in Chapter 2). In McNamer's phrases, such literary devices should be understood not as authorial self-expression [End Page 254] but as "intimate scripts" (12) for the reader's "iterative affective practice" (77) aimed at cultivating particular emotional dispositions. The implications of this analytical shift are far-reaching, especially in the reading of the Libellus in Chapter 2 (as when, for example, McNamer suggests that reading the first-person as performative rather than expressive may have implications for the chronology of John's writings). More to the larger point, if, as McNamer argues, the Libellus was written specifically for the recently veiled widow of Henry III, Agnes of Poitou, then it provides early evidence of an anchoress's need to cultivate compassion as a sign that she was a true (legitimate) sponsa...