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

我的论文探讨了与高度情绪化的、以激情为中心的中世纪虔诚传统有关的情感失败，这一传统被称为“情感虔诚”。虽然中世纪晚期的虔诚经文经常通过情感冥想和情绪化的修辞来激发奉献者的同情心，但我们也发现，奉献者没有感受到他们应该感受到的，不是用眼泪来回应神的苦难，而是用冷漠、冷漠甚至冷酷。我聚焦在这些铁石心肠的奉献者身上，问：根据中世纪虔诚经文的情感逻辑，情感的挑战是什么？与你的情感社区的主导情感范式隔绝的感觉会有什么后果？对这些情感范式的抵制最终可能会导致什么？我的研究为解读中世纪情感虔诚传统中的张力开辟了新的天地。它不仅代表着对中世纪研究的重大贡献，也代表着对边缘、困难和颠覆性(Un)感觉的更广泛历史的贡献。情感虔诚的传统已经引起了巨大的学术兴趣。最近的几本专著(McNamer 2009；Karnes 2011；Lazikani 2015；Mancia 2019)，以及关于前现代情绪的新散文集的贡献(Burger和Crocker(编辑)2019；Ruys和Monagle(编辑)2019)，探索情感冥想的受众、谱系和哲学基础。然而，除了一些例外(Hamm 2004；Westphall 2015)，几乎没有人考虑到这样一种可能性，即这些虔诚的“情感产生机制”可能并不总是像预期的那样发挥作用(McNamer 2009，26)；要求苛刻的冥想程序可能会让读者筋疲力尽或感到寒冷；甚至在某些情况下，不像这样的经文所要求的感觉可能是一种可取的或具有伦理教育意义的体验。“情感虔诚”一词强调的是受到影响，以心脏的反应能力为中心，促使人们悔改、同情、流泪。我的项目是问中世纪的奉献者会发生什么，他在以强烈情感为中心的虔诚文化中保持不受影响。这种关注挑战了许多现有学术对中世纪感觉的向心性和规范性关注。引用芭芭拉·罗森韦恩(Barbara Rosenwein)有影响力的短语(2002)，我将阅读在宗教结构边缘进行异常情感练习的时刻，以促进“正确的”情感，寻找中世纪“情感社区”边缘的冷酷无情的人物。我的结论将来自对1200-1500年间写成的英文文本的阅读，同时也涉及到拉丁语和大陆方言模式，许多模式都是从这些模式中衍生出来的。我将文本分为三大类。第一部分包括将铁石心肠的奉献者作为外部人物进行教育以培养正义感的文本。这包括广受欢迎的拉丁文虔诚手册及其方言翻译，比如13世纪关于米兰13世纪刺激性阿莫里斯的伪波纳文图拉《冥想》(Meditationes Vitae Christi)和詹姆斯(James)，这些手册直接针对那些未能按照提示同情和流泪的读者。第二类文本呈现了铁石心肠的奉献者以第一人称说话，比如贝尔纳丁和玛丽安·奎斯·达比特的对话或玛格丽·肯佩的书，以及这经常带来的所有焦虑和孤立的表达。第三类文本中的人物根据中世纪晚期虔诚文化的主导情感经济积极抗拒情感，如加文诗人的耐心，其中心是约拿一贯努力体验麻木而不是同情，或皮尔斯·普洛曼，它似乎质疑以激情为中心的情感虔诚的伦理。对中世纪晚期宗教文化中一些最有影响力的文本进行语境化和细读，以寻找其边缘闪现的情感破裂和抵抗，构成了我研究的核心

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