Cultivating the Heart: Feeling and Emotion in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Religious Texts

Abstract

A. S. Lazikani's Cultivating the Heart: Feeling and Emotion in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Religious Texts is the first book-length study of emotion in high medieval English literature. Lazikani's book examines the affective language of the Lambeth and Trinity Homilies (London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 487 and Cambridge, Trinity College, MS 335 [B. 14. 52]), selected saints' lives from the pre-1300 version of the South English Legendaries (SEL; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Miscellany 108), Ancrene Wisse, Wooing Group, and Passion lyrics. In her introduction, Lazikani notes the inherent difficulty of studying emotion in English texts of this period since “there are no ready made categories of feeling available” (12). A fascinating table on page 20 identifies equivalent terms for emotions in Middle English, Anglo-Norman, and Latin texts, along with Modern English translations for these words. Lazikani argues, “Feeling is inexpressible yet also shaped by the language through which it is written and spoken” (4). While she does not highlight a set of key terms in the introduction, Lazikani does identify a shared and thus unified understanding of emotion based in sense perception. While there is “no simplified taxonomy,” she explains, “There remains … an awareness across the texts of an affective sentience, imaged as movement or touch—a sensitivity or malleability that enables feeling in the heart and/or soul” (19). To explore the affective language of these early Middle English texts, Lazikani does not apply recent affect theory, but she does incorporate well-respected works on the history of emotions in the medieval period, including Barbara Rosenwein's concept of “emotional communities,” Sarah McNamer's “scripts for the performance of feeling,” and Mark Amsler's “affective literacies.”Lazikani's book unearths the language of emotion in a varied collection of high medieval English religious literature. The introduction, “Feeling in the High Middle Ages,” places early Middle English texts alongside their Latin and Anglo-Norman counterparts while also situating them in relation to concepts from the history of emotions. The first chapter, “Upon a Spiritual Cross: Presence and Absence in the Lambeth and Trinity Homilies,” describes how preachers used emotional language to make listeners “powerfully present” (26) and employed Augustinian models of “affective alignment” (27). Titled “The Gnawed Hand: Presence and Absence of Feeling in the Early South English Legendaries,” the second chapter reads the saints' lives of Clement, Mary Magdalene, Francis, King Edmund, Edmund the Confessor, Vincent, Agatha, George, and Lawrence in the pre-1300 version of the SEL. Lazikani opens with an anecdote of Saint Clement's mother, who gnaws the flesh from her own hands, as a frame for exploring the presence and absence of affect, along with the numbness resulting from excessive feeling. The third chapter, “Co-feeling: Compassion in Ancrene Wisse and the Wooing Group,” considers the original anchoritic audience of Ancrene Wisse and Wooing Group and the concept of “co-feeling” adapted from Milan Kundera's 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. This chapter offers a thorough exploration of the etymologies and range of meanings for many words for emotion, including reuþe and pite. The fourth chapter, “Call Me Bitter: Feeling and Sensing in Passion Lyrics,” explores high medieval Passion lyrics in their multilingual context with reference to Latin, Anglo-Norman, and Middle Welsh lyrics as well as English ones. Lazikani analyzes the lyrics' use of a variety of voices, including those of biblical characters, to engage the emotions and senses of the reader or listener. In the paragraphs that follow, I will discuss Lazikani's critical framework as well as several strengths of Cultivating the Heart, which include her discussion of the English lexicon of emotion, her “cartography” of affect, and her comparative studies of religious literature and wall paintings.In the introduction, Lazikani uses Latin and Anglo-Norman literature frequently cited in studies of the history of emotions, including works by Aelred of Rievaulx, Anselm of Canterbury, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, to frame her discussion of emotion in English texts. She argues, “It would be too far a leap to claim that any of the texts, with the exception of the SEL, have nationalistic agendas in their use of English” (4). Her study, however, would benefit from further discussion of the political and cultural motivations for using English in this period. As Elaine Treharne contends, the choice to write in English in the two centuries after the Norman Conquest was a deliberate one, an assertion of a distinctly English literary and linguistic identity.1 In agreement, Christopher Cannon explains, “Before 1290, the decision to use English was a mode of differentiation, a method a particular writer chose should he or she wish to deviate from every general trend and practice.”2 Describing the emotional language of these early Middle English texts, Lazikani rightly notes correspondences with Latin and Anglo-Norman literature, and she makes the claim, “It can be stated with some confidence that any preference for English vocabulary for affective stirring … is for the sake of the composite clerical-lay audience” (4). This would have been an opportune moment to enter a conversation about whether early Middle English religious literature fits within or disrupts scholarly arguments about the political dimension of writing in English during this period.Throughout the book, Lazikani highlights English expressions for emotion, including the words affectiun, armhertnesse, reuþe, and pine. She notes that affectiun first appears in English in Ancrene Wisse, but this word “narrowly defines a step in the movement of the soul towards sin,” rather than the more common Latin usage as “the movement of the soul … towards that which it loves” (Pourrat, quoted on 13). What might seem to be well-defined terms for emotions from Anglo-Norman and Latin, then, are “less streamlined” in early Middle English. It is thus more difficult to unearth a taxonomy of feeling for early Middle English literature. As Lazikani explains, “There is also no uniformity in the texts' distinction between love, compassion and sorrow” (13). Lazikani discusses several particularly evocative or commonly used words for emotion. In Trinity 16, the preacher employs the term armhertnesse to evoke sorrow and contrition as a way to prepare for the sacraments of Eucharist and confession. Lazikani follows Richard Morris's translation of armhertnesse as “tender-heartedness,” describing how “the homilist attempts to provoke a softening or tenderness of affect in the audience, to facilitate genuine sorrow for sin” (41). In Ancrene Wisse, Lazikani notes, “compassion is labelled with the native term ‘rewðe,’ deriving from the Old Icelandic word hrygð and influenced by the Old English ‘hreow’ (‘repentance’)” (72). Reuþe (or reuthe) appears frequently in these early Middle English texts, with the Middle English Dictionary showing its earliest usage as “pity, compassion, sympathy” in the Lambeth Homilies. The dictionary gives the third definition of reuþe as “an occasion or cause of pity or sorrow,” with its first appearance in the Trinity Homilies. Lazikani explains that the Ancrene Wisse author seems to see a general equivalence among the terms reoufulnesse, merci, and pite of heorte (77). She highlights the multiple ways in which early Middle English authors applied some of these terms. For example, in the SEL, she notes that pine refers to both “the act of torture” and “the saint's sensation” (67), thus demonstrating the difficulty of reading emotion in these texts.Lazikani's close readings explore the spatial aspect of affective language and devotional practice, and she describes the “space of affective pain” as including “hearts, souls, minds, breasts, chests, and ‘insides’” (15). Referring to Lambeth 15/Trinity 32, Lazikani illustrates how “Christ's various sufferings … are now mapped onto the affective pain of the contrite heart” (33). The preacher engages the audience in imitation of Christ by mapping Christ's suffering onto the penitent's heart. In Lambeth 7, Lazikani highlights the sermon's medical language, which provides the audience with “an image of the healing wounds charted onto each toxic sense” (39). In addition to charting Christ's pain onto the heart and senses, these early Middle English texts employ additional metaphorical imagery for the interior space of the body, including “the ears of the heart,” “heart-as-home” (both in Lambeth 12), and the “Doomsday courtroom within the soul” (in Ancrene Wisse V, 42–44). In her reading of Ancrene Wisse, Lazikani describes the anchoress's heart as a “‘nest’ … in which sophisticated affective movements are hatched and reared” (71). The concept of co-feeling likewise relates to Lazikani's “cartography of affective pain,” in that “co-feeling suggests a sharing of affective space” (72). The spatial element of affective language demonstrates how authors or preachers utilized these images to engage the emotions of the devotee or listener.Lazikani places these early Middle English texts alongside high to late medieval wall paintings to consider the affective elements of each. She provides descriptions of the emotionally engaging facial expressions and gestures in paintings, with particular reference to four Passion sequences from Kent, Oxfordshire, and Sussex reproduced in color in the center of the book. Especially in chapters 3 and 4, Lazikani notes correspondences between the affective strategies of religious poetry, including Wooing Group texts and Passion lyrics, and high to late medieval wall paintings. For example, she writes, “Lofsong of ure Lefdi creates a series of textual tableaux for the anchoress to view and appropriate,” which Lazikani describes as “photographic, static images … comparable with … Passion cycles on thirteenth-century church walls” (83). These poetic religious meditations, then, provide stable images for meditative devotional practice in a way similar to the narrative flexibility of medieval wall paintings that allow “a viewer to move in more than one direction … without strict adherence to the narrative sequence” (84). The correspondences between visual imagery and verbal imagery are particularly interesting in the context of the original anchoritic audience, which is Lazikani's focus, of the Wooing Group texts, since anchoresses could see paintings above and behind the altar from the window in the anchorhold. Cultivating the Heart highlights the value of scholarly work that examines multiple medieval media alongside one another.The volume includes only a “Select Bibliography” and endnotes, making the book difficult to utilize for a serious reader interested in examining Lazikani's writing alongside the scholarship she cites. A longer and more detailed index would make this book a more useful reference tool, especially by directing readers to her careful close readings of individual texts (especially the homilies and Passion lyrics) and key terms employed throughout the book. Translations for Latin and Anglo-Norman texts are included, but early Middle English is left untranslated. If the early Middle English had been translated, the book would be more accessible to scholars who study other medieval languages.Lazikani's book highlights the value of scholarship on the history of emotions, particularly in this period of English literature. She reasserts the “sophistication of feeling in medieval texts” (4), which unfortunately still seems to be a necessary point for scholars of early Middle English to make. Lazikani's careful readings of the spatial and sensorial aspects of affective engagement bring much-needed attention to understudied and often undervalued early Middle English literature. With its numerous citations of previous scholarship on these texts, the book provides a bibliography for students interested in working on the Lambeth and Trinity Homilies, SEL, Ancrene Wisse, Wooing Group, and high medieval Passion lyrics. Lazikani's Cultivating the Heart will be useful to scholars and students of British medieval literature and those interested in the history of emotions in a broader context.