Abstract
Devotional practices in the later European Middle Ages were highly somatic, and they utilized the human sensorium to convey, incite, and engender knowledge and experiences of the divine. Reading does not normally stand out as one of the more somatic devotional practices, but as demonstrated by the example of the Legatus divinae pietatis, a devotional text written at the convent of Helfta around the end of the thirteenth century, reading was indeed imagined as a somatic, devotional experience that engaged the senses. In this article, I argue that the Legatus portrays a form of devotional reading that invokes all the senses in an effort to unite the book, the reader, and her community with the divine. Drawing on medieval conceptualizations of the human sensorium and theories of reading, my analyses of the Legatus’s sensual language, evocative imagery, and scenes of reading elucidate the embodied reading practices that the Legatus’s writers portrayed as fundamental to their communal, devotional lives.
Highlights
Devotional practices in the later European Middle Ages were highly somatic, and they utilized the human sensorium to convey, incite, and engender knowledge and experiences of the divine
The Legatus divinae pietatis (Herald of Divine Love), a devotional text written by Gertrude of Helfta (c. 1256–1302) and other women at the convent of Helfta, sought to incite direct sensory experience with and intimate knowledge of God
By the end of the thirteenth century, when the Herald was composed, devotional practices had widely embraced the physical senses as vehicles to
Summary
Since the Herald portrays the book as a physical body that holds the divine essence and is to be tasted, touched, sniffed, and seen, it follows that it portrays a method of reading that foregrounds physical interaction and sensory perception. We can see this mystical power, for example, in the scenes of reading that use imagery of breath and breathing to depict a close connection between the inner and outer bodies as well as human and divine bodies One such scene occurs already in the prologue when Gertrude presents the first part of the text to Christ, who reassures her: When a person in humble devotion desires to read in this book for the sake of spiritual progress, I will draw him toward me so that he will read in the book as if between my hands, with him I will join myself in this work, as it happens when two people read off of the same page: one senses the breath of the other.. Reading is presented as an act of bodily consumption and sensation that brings the reader together with Christ.
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