Hearts of Stone: Failures of Feeling in Medieval Devotional Culture 1200-1500

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My thesis explores failures of feeling in relation to the tradition of highly emotive, Passion-centred medieval devotion known as 'affective piety'. While late medieval devotional texts often work to stimulate the devotee's compassion through affective meditation and emotive rhetoric, we also find references to devotees failing to feel as they ought, responding to divine suffering not with tears, but with apathy, frigidity or even callousness. I focus on these 'stony-hearted' devotees to ask: what are the challenges of feeling according to the affective logic of medieval devotional texts? What are the consequences of feeling isolated from your emotional community's dominant affective paradigms? Where might resistance to those affective paradigms ultimately lead? My research breaks new ground in reading for strains in medieval affective piety traditions. It represents a significant contribution not only to medieval studies, but to wider histories of marginal, difficult, and disruptive (un)feeling. Affective piety traditions have generated significant scholarly interest. Several recent monographs (McNamer 2009; Karnes 2011; Lazikani 2015; Mancia 2019), and contributions to new essay collections on premodern emotions (Burger and Crocker (eds) 2019; Ruys and Monagle (eds) 2019), explore affective meditation's audiences, genealogies, and philosophical underpinnings. Yet, with some exceptions (Hamm 2004; Westphall 2015), there has been almost no consideration of the possibility that these devotional 'mechanisms for the production of emotion' (McNamer 2009, 26) might not always function as intended; that demanding programmes for meditation might leave readers exhausted or cold; that there might even be situations in which not feeling as such texts demand could be a desirable or ethically instructive experience. The term 'affective piety' emphasises being affected, centring the heart's responsive capacity to be prompted to contrition, compassion, tears. My project asks what happens to the medieval devotee who remains unaffected in the midst of a devotional culture that centres intense emotionality. This focus challenges the centripetal, normative focus of much existing scholarship on medieval feeling. I will read for moments of aberrant affective practice at the fringes of devotional structures promoting 'correct' affects, seeking the unfeeling figures at the margins of medieval 'emotional communities', to use Barbara Rosenwein's influential phrase (2002). My conclusions will derive from readings of English texts written between 1200-1500, while also engaging with the Latin and continental vernacular models from which many derive. I group the texts into three main categories. The first comprises texts that address the stony-hearted devotee as an external figure to be educated into right-feeling. This includes popular Latin devotional manuals and their vernacular translations, like the thirteenth-century Pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes vitae Christi and James of Milan's thirteenth-century Stimulus amoris, that directly address 'dry-', 'hard-' or 'stony-hearted' readers failing to follow prompts to compassion and tears. The second category comprises texts that present the stony-hearted devotee speaking in the first person, like the Bernardine-Marian Quis dabit dialogue or the Book of Margery Kempe, with all the expressions of anxiety and isolation this often entails. The third category comprises texts in which characters actively resist feeling according to late medieval devotional culture's dominant affective economies, like the Gawain-poet's Patience, which centres a Jonah consistently striving to experience numbness rather than compassion, or Piers Plowman, which appears to interrogate the ethics of Passion-focused affective piety. Contextualising and close-reading some of the most influential texts of late medieval devotional culture for the flashes of affective rupture and resistance at their margins forms the core of my resea