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、以激情为中心的中世纪奉献传统（即“情感虔诚”）相关的情感失败。虽然中世纪晚期的虔诚文本经常通过情感冥想和情感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，对神圣的痛苦的反应不是眼泪，而是冷漠，冷漠甚至冷酷。我关注这些“铁石心肠”的奉献者，想问：根据中世纪虔诚文本的情感逻辑，感受的挑战是什么？感觉被你的情感社区的主导情感范式孤立的后果是什么？对这些情感范式的抵制最终会导致什么后果呢？我的研究在中世纪情感虔诚传统的阅读中开辟了新的领域。它不仅对中世纪研究做出了重大贡献，而且对边缘、困难和破坏性（非）情感的更广泛的历史也做出了重大贡献。情感虔诚传统产生了重要的学术兴趣。最近的几部专著（McNamer 2009; Karnes 2011; Lazikani 2015; Mancia 2019），以及对前现代情感的新文集的贡献(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些虔诚的“情感产生机制”（McNamer 2009, 26）可能并不总是如预期的那样起作用；要求很高的冥想课程可能会让读者感到疲惫或冷漠；甚至可能在某些情况下，不像文本所要求的那样感觉可能是一种可取的或具有道德指导意义的体验。“情感虔诚”一词强调的是受影响，集中于心灵的反应能力，从而促使人们忏悔、同情和流泪。我的项目是问中世纪的奉献者会发生什么，他们在以强烈情感为中心的奉献者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情感的向心性、规范性关注。我会在虔诚结构的边缘寻找异常的情感实践的时刻，促进“正确”的情感，在中世纪“情感社区”的边缘寻找无情的人物，用芭芭拉罗森韦恩的有影响力的短语（2002）。我的结论将来自于对1200-1500年间的英语文本的阅读，同时也涉及到拉丁语和大陆白话模式，其中许多都来源于此。我把这些文本分成三大类。第一种是将铁石心肠的奉献者作为一个外部人物来接受正确情感的教育。这包括流行的拉丁祈祷手册和它们的白话翻译，比如13世纪的伪波纳文图伦冥想vitae Christi和米兰的詹姆斯的13世纪刺激的爱，直接针对“干”，“硬”或“铁石心肠”的读者，他们没有按照提示去同情和流泪。第二类包括以第一人称呈现铁石心肠的奉献者的文本，如伯纳丁-玛丽安·奎斯·达比特对话或玛杰里·肯普之书，以及这通常需要的所有焦虑和孤立的表达。第三类是根据中世纪晚期虔诚文化中占主导地位的情感经济，人物积极抵制情感的文本，比如高文诗人的《耐心》，主人公约拿一直在努力体验麻木，而不是同情，或者皮尔斯·普劳曼，似乎在质疑以激情为中心的情感虔诚的伦理。我研究的核心是将中世纪晚期灵修文化的一些最有影响力的文本置于语境中，并仔细阅读它们的边缘，以寻找情感破裂和抵抗的闪光

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