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Scholars of the Middle Ages have long taught that highly emotional Christian
devotion, often called ‘affective piety’, originated in Europe after the twelfth
century, and was primarily practised by late medieval communities of mendicants,
lay people, and women. As the first study of affective piety in an
eleventh-century monastic context, this book revises our understanding of
affective spirituality’s origins, characteristics, and uses in medieval
Christianity.
Emotional monasticism: Affective piety at the eleventh-century
monastery of John of Fécamp traces the early monastic history of affective
devotion through the life and works of the earliest-known writer of emotional
prayers, John of Fécamp, abbot of the Norman monastery of Fécamp from 1028 to
1078. The book examines John’s major work, the Confessio theologica; John’s
early influences and educational background in Ravenna and Dijon; the
emotion-filled devotional programme of Fécamp’s liturgical, manuscript, and
intellectual culture, and its relation to the monastery’s efforts at reform; the
cultivation of affective principles in the monastery’s work beyond the
monastery’s walls; and John’s later medieval legacy at Fécamp, throughout
Normandy, and beyond. Emotional monasticism will appeal to scholars of
monasticism, of the history of emotion, and of medieval Christianity. The book
exposes the early medieval monastic roots of later medieval affective piety,
re-examines the importance of John of Fécamp’s prayers for the first time since
his work was discovered, casts a new light on the devotional life of monks in
medieval Europe before the twelfth century, and redefines how we should
understand the history of Christianity.
Ever since André Wilmart published his study of John of Fécamp in the 1930s, medievalists have slowly begun to acknowledge that so-called ‘Anselmian spirituality’ did not, in fact, originate with Anselm, and that ‘affective piety’ was not an invention of the later Middle Ages. My study of John of Fécamp builds on that trend, both by giving the details of his full-length Confessio theologica and by placing John’s devotional method in his wider monastic context, showing just how proper to eleventh-century Benedictine monasticism
sinner and his God, resonated tremendously with the late medieval audience (an audience hungry for the affective writings of Anselm, Aelred of Rievaulx, Francis, Thomas à Kempis, and Ludolphus of Saxony), John did not compose his prayers with that late medieval audience in mind. He instead wrote his treatise for an audience of traditional, eleventh-century monks, whose use for such affective piety remains heretofore unexplored. 10 This book examines the role of affective devotion in the eleventh-century male monastic context through the lens
conservative while still being innovative enough to reinvigorate devotional culture at the monastery. His reform is incremental while still being particularly directed towards emotional, interior transformation. After all, to him, his words are merely the words of the Fathers ( dicta me sunt dicta patrum ). These investigations are significant for scholars of affective piety who have often in the late medieval context attributed the devotee’s focus on Christ’s suffering to his God’s relatable humanity. With this chapter’s investigations, we can add
now in its scholarship thanks to the term ‘affective piety’, so its appearance in the CT merits a brief note. John’s CT only explicitly uses the word affectus twice. The first time, John quotes Augustine on the state of heavenly bliss, where devotees finally come face to face with God: in heaven, inhabitants are always the recipients of the right affection ( affectu ) from God, which streams like rays from God’s sunlike presence. 84 In the second mention, which will be discussed more extensively below, John shows his reader how the right longing for God
any scholarly characterisation of affective piety as ‘anti-intellectual, unthinking “thinking”’. 26 It is no accident that, in her discussion of the epistemological dimensions of affectivity in a later text, Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ , Valerie Allen can comment, ‘the intensity of affective piety that Love exhorts can be read as an indication of knowing in a different mode, of a change of direction from what is known to how it is known, and in this reorientation, the will comes into play’. 27 Voluntas having finally submitted to
demonstrates his kindness to humankind. The qualifier ‘glykytate’ for Jesus, in its vocative form, is used in the first line of the first six stanzas of the poem, and is repeated once again in stanza fourteen, line two. 18 The evidence provided by Mary Carruthers on the use of ‘dulcis’ as a significant term for the history of affective piety, which translates Greek ‘chrestos’, may need a slight readjustment in the light of the use of the less ambiguous, more sensuous ‘glykytatos’ to qualify ‘Jesus’ in the Greek office. 19 Situated temporally
connections between Margery’s devotional practices and kink, this chapter considers Margery’s performances as examples of queer performativity and futurity, 1 and, finally, explains her queer affective piety as a form of empowering masochism. BDSM could stand for bondage and discipline (BD), domination and submission (D/S), and sadism and masochism (SM). It functions as an umbrella term for a wide variety of sexual practices and identities; acts or desires that can be classified as kinky all
medieval Christian affective piety. John’s legacy among his own students (from 1063 to 1089) John was mentor to several monks at Fécamp who went on to write devotional works themselves, some even during John’s lifetime. One was Durandus ( c. 1012–89), John’s cross-bearer (later abbot of the monastery of Troarn), who, in the vein of John’s Confessio fidei , wrote a treatise about the Eucharist against Berengar of Tours. 1 John of Reims (fl. c. 1100), later a monk at Saint-Evroult, composed a treatise, now lost, on
was a not infrequent concomitant of Good Friday devotions, and Jews were often banned from leaving their homes on that day, partly so as not to offend pious Christians, partly for their own safety. It was one of the most palpable effects of affective piety. Lutherans and Reformed preachers, on the other hand, tended to play down the culpability of the Jews, according to Karant