“Good to Feel With, Good to Think With”? Troubling the Affective Encounter in Medieval Bernardine and Anselmian Marian Dialogues

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article focuses on medieval dialogues in which the Virgin Mary relates the Crucifixion story to an interlocutor, particularly the traditions surrounding Sts. Bernard and Anselm deriving from the twelfth-century Quis dabit and the thirteenth-century Dialogus beatae Mariae et Anselmi. Mary often figures as the supreme medieval model for compassion, and modern critics often position these dialogues as influential models for broader medieval affective piety traditions. A closer reading, however, reveals the dialogues’ affective tensions, undermining the idea that they seamlessly generate compassion for devoted readers. Mary appears alternately impassive and impassioned, detached and sunk anew in unspeakable sorrow; her interlocutors often compassionate her inadequately and flounder in the knowledge of that affective failure. This article explores such tensions, emphasizing the texts’ troubled temporality, Mary’s traumatic experience, and the interlocutor’s affective deficiencies. It directs attention to the troubling failures of feeling at the heart of several seemingly “affecting” medieval texts.