Seeing emotions as but one part of the larger, ongoing, historical flux of language, subjectivity and power.
By Dr. John H. Arnold
Professor of Medieval History
University of Cambridge
The historiography of medieval popular religion has recurrently drawn upon the language of emotions. Authors have talked of ‘the religious emotions of traditional Christianity’, of ‘deeply felt’ communitarian impulses, of the elevation of the Host being the ‘emotional peak’ of the mass, of the ‘desperate desire’ people had for intercessionary masses and the ‘great comfort’ they received from Christ’s sacrifice.1 The development of ‘affective piety’ in the late middle ages brings with it – in the source material itself, and in modern commentaries upon it – a rich vocabulary of love, fear, desire and the pull and sway of transcendent feelings. But historians of religion have not yet considered ‘emotion’ as an analytical category in its own right. Emotions have, rather, tended to be taken as transparent and transhistorical experiences shared by all human beings; and hence can be used to explain the need for religious beliefs and practices (in regard to the fear of disease and death, for example), or as a useful basis upon which to forge sympathetic connection with religious experiences from past cultures (in the case of ecstatic mystics, for instance).2 One potential exception to the rule – Jean Delumeau’s magisterial Sin and Fear – does place an emotion centre stage, but similarly assumes that the nature and meaning of the emotion itself remain static and unchanged, his analysis tracing instead the ways in which fear was evoked and aroused by developments in western religious culture.3
However, recent work in other fields has more closely questioned the nature of emotion, and explored the possibility of providing it with a history.4 In areas such as early medieval politics, high medieval spirituality, and late medieval law, historians have sought to demonstrate the importance of certain emotions in particular situations, the wider cultural meanings carried by the expression of emotions, and the historically- and culturally-specific ‘content’ of emotions such as friendship, anger and hatred.5 For medieval historians, an abiding concern has been to revise or refute the position of our period within the grand narrative of a ‘civilizing process’ famously propounded by Norbert Elias. Thus Daniel Smail’s study of the ‘consumption’ (as he nicely terms it) of law in Marseille emphasizes that the development of legal processes did not work to repress or discipline emotion, but rather the opposite: hatred (the key emotion here discussed) was a ‘social institution’ which could be amplified, shaped and elaborated through legal dispute. In a different fashion, Barbara Rosenwein has sought to emphasize, for the governing and literate elite of the early middle ages, a succession of variant ‘emotional communities’ with particular norms of behaviour and affect. There is, Rosenwein argues, no smooth upward curve from unfettered emotionality to disciplined, rational ‘civilization’, but rather a succession of different emotional ‘styles’ particular to successive groups. The contours of these emotional communities can be traced through their lexicons: the available set of ‘emotion words’, whether sincere or commonplace in any particular source, indicate the field of potential emotions, and social valuations attached to those emotions.6
These key works, and others following their lead, have taken their cues from anthropology, a discipline which for some decades has been arguing about the analysis of emotions and the consequent social, cultural, political, juridical, epistemological and ontological issues.7 Since the late nineteen-seventies, anthropologists have been exploring some core topics which map rather well onto historical study: whether emotions are innate or socially constructed, involuntary or strategically deployed; whether certain societies or groups (natives/medievals) are intrinsically more ‘emotional’ than others (westerners/moderns); and the methodological challenges presented by ‘reading’ emotion and emotional languages from the available data (fieldwork/historical texts). Given their disciplinary position as a social science, it is perhaps unsurprising to find that anthropologists are somewhat ahead of historians in considering how psychological studies might intersect with – and be critiqued by – fieldwork analysis. Some have also begun to consider whether a focus on language and culture can truly escape dealing with issues of embodiment and materiality, envisaging embodiment not as an alternative or rebuttal to language, but its necessary complement, ‘the existential ground of culture’.8
It is worth noting just how much conceptual and methodological apparatus anthropology already proffers in this field; historians need not reinvent all the theoretical wheels for this particular bandwagon. At the same time, however, historical work has attempted to grapple with an issue which anthropologists are often able to leave to one side: the question of change over time. Do emotions themselves – in the sense of the interior bodily affects experienced by individuals – change over time, or is it only the wider cultural systems, within which emotions are expressed and interpreted, that move diachronically? And do emotions (whether transhistorical or transitory) play a role in historical change? William Reddy, a historian of eighteenth-century France, has answered the latter question with a strong affirmative, arguing that the potential dissonance between individual emotional need and governing ‘emotional regimes’ (such as pertained at the royal court of the ancien régime) can in themselves provoke change: in this case, the French revolution.9 For Reddy, the expression of emotion constitutes a particular kind of speech act: ‘emotives’ (as he terms them) are, like the ‘performative utterances’ noted by the linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin, words which ‘do’ the thing they denote; but, going further than Austin’s sense of performatives, Reddy’s ‘emotives’ also change the thing they perform – ‘emotives are themselves instruments for directly changing, building, hiding, intensifying emotions’.10 For Reddy, this further means that the inner feeling can never fully be ‘represented’ by the emotive utterance; and that this, therefore, places a limit on the fluidity of cultural construction, because the sense of human interior affect clearly precedes and exceeds the available bounds of language. Without wanting to assert a genetic, programmed, unvarying emotional constitution for all human beings, Reddy nonetheless argues that a set of interior dispositions remain essentially constant across history. What changes are the emotional regimes which shape and encourage – or, more often, discourage – emotional expression.11
All of this is exciting and stimulating work. But in bringing some elements of the history of religion in conjunction with the history of emotions, I do not wish to use the latter simply as a template for interpreting the former. My aim is more critical and dialectical, and I want to conclude this introductory section by raising some questions and problems with regard to the current work on emotions, responses to which will be further explored below. Reddy, Rosenwein and Smail, albeit in slightly different fashions, all seek to assert or demonstrate some ‘core’ of transhistorical emotional stability: that, beyond language, something which nonetheless coheres to categories such as ‘hatred’ or ‘fear’ or ‘anger’ can be found across time and space.12 The claim is practically impossible fully to support or refute, but it brings with it a number of other claims – or assumptions – which can be pushed a little. One is that the nature of this inner affect is something which emanates from within the individual human subject. As Rosenwein puts it, ‘Let us recall the very definition of emotions: they have to do with appraisals of things affecting me’ (her emphasis).13 Emotion here is immanent and individual; as is similarly the case with Smail’s legal combatants and Reddy’s seekers of emotional liberty. But a key discovery in certain anthropological studies has been the intrasubjective nature of emotions: that not simply the expression but the very experience of certain emotional states can be collective rather than individual.14 I would like then to ask, what is the nature of emotional subjectivity? That is, in what kinds of situations and contexts (within what discourses) do what kinds of individuals or groups (subjectivities) experience and express emotion? A particular area of interest here is the relationship between the body and emotion: we may consider whether the body is simply that which ‘grounds’ emotion (the bit ‘beyond language’, from whence the essence of feeling arises), or whether there are other ways in which the relationship between body and feeling have been configured in the past. Another issue concerns language, for both anthropological and historiographical enquiries: can any researcher access emotions ‘beyond’ the cultural expression of the same? And, for that matter, can any person express emotions ‘outside’ or ‘prior to’ language and behaviour, or are such expressions, if not bounded by such constraints, always at the very least liable to (culturally-informed) interpretation by others?
To turn to a more specific methodological aspect of this latter question, how securely does a study of emotional lexicons (including their elisions and silences) in historical sources allow one to map an ‘emotional community’ or ‘regime’? There is a further issue here beyond the matter of genre-specific rhetoric (the stock language of amicitia in letters, for example) and ‘sincerity’.15 We may further need to consider at what points, and in what contexts, different discourses and their textual practices deem the expression and recording of emotional language to be necessary and appropriate; the reasons for so doing not necessarily being limited to emotional issues in and of themselves. Here is an example, from a body of sources I know well: inquisition trials. The registers of inquisition depositions from early fourteenth-century France contain intermittent mention of emotions, or emotionally-charged actions, ascribed both to deponents themselves and to others whose past deeds they narrate. But these aspects are almost non-existent in inquisitorial registers from the mid thirteenth century. What changed over that period was not, I would suggest, a shift in emotions themselves, nor ‘emotional community’ or ‘regime’, but an alteration in the textual practices of inquisition, with regard to the production and textualization of ‘truth’, legal verisimilitude, and the nature of the subject producing the confession.16 Writing down what was ‘true’ about a subject confessing in the early fourteenth century could, at some points, include writing down what they said about feelings; what changed was how a conception of ‘truth’ got textualized, not the emotions in and of themselves.
To explore further some of these issues, the remainder of this paper traces a path through some aspects of later medieval religion, concentrating upon two interconnected areas: the language of confession and penance developed in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries; and vernacular literature slanted towards the late medieval English laity – initially indirectly via the parish priest, but latterly directly to a (relatively elite) literate laity.17 As an initial foray, this makes no claim to completeness either empirically or conceptually, and some important aspects – such as the roots of penitential discourse prior to the twelfth century – have been left completely aside. Nonetheless, this smattering of sources provides a useful arena for the exploration of some aspects of lay religion and emotion. My aim is to note not only what emotions, but the wider discursive context within which such emotions are placed: what kind of subject, in what position, at what time, is supposed to experience them – and to what end? As this suggests, a key argument for this paper is that emotions need to be analysed in terms of the cultural discourses they inhabit, both because (as we shall see) there are good reasons for seeing particular emotional expressions arise, historically, within changing cultural demands; and because, as historians, any claim we make to move ‘beyond’ such realms is problematic.
A key aspect to medieval lay piety was its basis in collective action: the rituals of mass, processions, feasts, the marking of parish bounds, the corporate beneficence of guilds and confraternities, the journeys of groups of pilgrims, and so forth. These collective activities have, alongside other aspects, an emotional component: friendship, charity, peace, joy, and so forth. These are thus, within these contexts, sets of emotional ideals and performances which come only in collective expression – and, one might argue, are experienced only as part of that collectivity. If one reads the laity’s experience of the mass in line with John Bossy’s picture of a moment of communal transformation, this central Christian ritual is thus an ‘intrasubjective’ emotional ritual.18 And even if, to demur somewhat from Bossy’s perspective, one wishes to consider the minority of medieval people who avoided mass or looked critically or doubtfully at its central mystery,19 it is clear that their sense of ‘individual’ reaction (and whatever emotions this entailed) was nonetheless framed by their awareness of what they assumed to be the larger, collective experience of Eucharistic piety; this again constituting a different kind of ‘intrasubjective’ emotion.
The emotionality of the regular parish mass is perhaps more assumed than demonstrated, but it is clear that other aspects of liturgy addressed a sense of collective engagement, and implicitly sought to activate a collective emotional response. Take, for example, the Rogation days: having fasted for three days, the parish then went on procession and held a feast, in celebration of Christ’s Ascension. A sermon that the late fourteenth-century priest John Mirk wrote for the occasion emphasizes how important it was to join in, that failure to contribute was as sinful as absence from the mass. Moreover, he says, there are ‘fiends that float in the air’ who, when they hear the thunder of the spring storms, cause mischief upon the earth, attacking the fabric of the community in various ways. To ward off these effects, Mirk says, the parish fasts and then goes upon procession:
For just as when a king goes to battle, trumpets go before and the banner is displayed and comes after, then comes the king and his host following him; just so in Christ’s battalion the bells, that are God’s trumpets, ring, banners are unfurled and openly borne on high in the air. Then the cross in Christ’s likeness comes, as a king of Christian men, and His host, that is Christ’s people, follow him.20
Although not using any ‘emotion words’, Mirk’s rhetorical appeal is clearly predicated upon the prompting of audience affect, by evoking an excited, purposeful, communal effort against an external threat. Again, I would argue, the emotions which this seeks to activate assume a collective subjectivity and affect; one cannot, alone, feel part of a collective ‘host’. The argument could be similarly extended to other rituals, and there is indeed explicit discussion of, and injunction regarding, collective emotion in the case of guild records. The annual Easter feast of the Guild of Holy Cross (Stratford-upon-Avon), for example, was to be held ‘in such a manner that fraternal love shall be enriched between [its members] . . . and true amity upheld’.21 Once again, you cannot have ‘fraternal love’ without a fraternity; it is, in its very conception, intrasubjective. One might make a similar claim about that central Christian virtue, the very essence of Christian community: caritas. We often translate caritas as ‘charity’, which imbues it for modern readers with a sense of top-down beneficence. But this is the usage of a later age; within a medieval context it could more simply be rendered as ‘love’, and the most important form of love, one focused on spiritual amity between people. Caritas might again be seen as something which can only exist intrasubjectively, as its very essence is a sense of community.
In line with my introductory comments, I make no claim here one way or another regarding the ‘real’ experience of the emotions of those participating in such rituals. Nor am I arguing that medieval people could only feel emotions as part of corporate bodies. My point is that the particular discourses which attempt to prompt these affective responses are predicated upon a collective, rather than an individual, experience. One is further reminded that a long-held tenet of Christian piety (for all but the most extraordinary) was to ‘fit in’, to adhere to one’s place precisely as part of a collectivity. ‘It is pride which makes a man stand out among the common herd’, as the twelfth-century writer Alain de Lille put it.22 As Caroline Walker Bynum pointed out some time ago, medieval identity, and the appropriate spiritual (and hence emotional) states that accompanied it, was largely conceived as one’s location within an available set of collective models.23 The practice of annual confession has sometimes been seen as an exception to this pattern, or as a key element in a shift toward a more ‘modern’, individual and interiorized subjectivity. The remainder of this paper will focus on confessional discourse, and principally upon the advice given to the individual about to confess (or the confessor about to receive that confession). But it is important to note that this ‘individual’ was not an immanent historical presence ‘set free’ by the extension of confessional practices following the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. It is, rather, that confessional discourse constructs a particular kind of subjectivity, deems necessary a set of interior operations, demands and codifies some key emotional responses, and invites the narration of a certain ‘individuality’ – albeit always within the framework of the highly collective and universalized categories of sin.
Let us turn, then, to confession and emotion, and let us begin with an early text that maps appropriate modes of comportment, Robert of Flamborough’s Liber Poenitentialis (written c.1208). In the opening chapters of his treatise, Robert explains that the necessary starting points for penance are that one is Christian, and that one is penitent. By ‘penitent’, he explains, one must be feeling sorrow (dolor) for what has gone before, caution toward the future, one must make honest and naked confession, and one must be obedient. (Feeling and action are intrinsically conjoined – emotion is not simply about emotion, but also consequent reform.) An imaginary dialogue between confessor and penitent then amplifies the issue:
‘Are you frequently sorry for your sins?’
‘Sometimes’
‘One should indeed always apply oneself (studeas) to sorrow; because the essence of penance is sorrow and contrition . . .’24
The importance of emotion is similarly found in other texts on confession from the same period. See, from some time prior to 1236, the De Modo Confitendi of Cadwgan, bishop of Bangor (here copying from the Paris theologian Robert of Courçon’s Tota Celestis Philosophia, 1208 × 13):
He is penitent only if he grieves (dolet) and is ashamed for sin, and grieves for it, and humbles himself for that same sin, which is moreover of three grades. For all principal sins are of three kinds: pleasure, shamelessness, pride. And against this, because opposites cure opposites, penitence must be love, shame and humility.25
Three things can be noted. First, it is clear that this confessional discourse presents a kind of pedagogy – something which one studies, develops, applies oneself to. Hence, we are talking here about an ongoing process, a self-making or self-reforming; not the freeing or revelation of a prior individual self that was just awaiting the moment, but the production and continued development of a better and different identity from that held before. Second, this self-making is conducted within a wider system: most obviously the larger system of sin (usually depicted by medieval theologians as the tree of sin, with ever-subdividing branches), but also a system of complementary and balanced emotions. Thus, in Cadwgan/Courçon we have not only ‘sorrow’ but love, shame and humility. Third, it is clear that emotion is not merely a by-product of confession but an essential element, and indeed the guarantor of something: that grief, shame and so forth are indications of penitence. But as it asserts this claim, it simultaneously provides the grounds for doubt: is this particular claim of penitence emotionally correct? Does the inner disposition match the request for absolution? Emotion is simultaneously the mark of authenticity, and the measure against which a true comportment can be distinguished from a false, feigned or failed one.
These are discourses developed initially within a monastic setting (well before 1215), and there is some question over how quickly these ideas were disseminated at parish level, in terms of regular, lay, annual confession. But by the later thirteenth century, there are, at the very least, vernacular texts dealing with confession: most famously the much reproduced French texts Somme Le Roi and the Manuel des Peches, and also, to pick a contemporary English example, the South English Legendary (c.1280). Here, from the latter text’s discussion of Lent, we find familiar advice further amplified:
That man tells his sin with his mouth, and be sorry thereto
And that he be not in despair (wanhope). And that he carry out penance.
[. . .]
For without sorrow of heart, no sin is forgiven.
A man would be better off if he is sorry for his sin, but unconfessed,
Than make confession without sorrow; and better should be forgiven.26
Being sorry (sori) but in despair (wanhope), the text goes on to explain, is also no good – for that was the state into which Judas fell after betraying Christ. The penitent is thus confronted with a particular kind of task, requiring a particular kind of agency – circumscribed within the demands of confession, and with the possibility of failure. This is not, however, simply the failure to feel, but the possibility that one might feel wrongly.
Later texts provide further refinement of the emotional field demanded of the penitent, and its differentiations. John de Burgo’s fifteenth-century Pupilla Oculi (an influential adaptation and expansion of William of Pagula’s even more influential early fourteenth-century work of pastoral care, Oculis Sacerdotalis) explains that absolution cannot happen without the appropriate inner state: ‘contrition is moreover sorrow voluntarily taken up (dolor voluntarie assumptus) for sins, with the intention of making confession and satisfaction’; again, a little later: ‘and contrition is said to be voluntarily taken-up sorrow, to differentiate it from natural sorrow (dolor naturalis) which has neither merit nor demerit for sins’.27 The Book of Vices and Virtues (c.1375), a Middle English translation of Somme Le Roi, maps out a still wider emotional terrain. It emphasizes the necessity of ‘hating’ sin, another emotional disposition that can be learnt:
Forget your body once a day, and go into hell whilst you are alive, so that you do not go there when you are dead. And holy wise men often do thus. There you shall see all that the heart hates and flees: lack of all goodness, and a great plenty of all wickedness, burning fire, stinking brimstone, foul storms and tempests, rutting hideous devils, hunger, thirst that may never be staunched, all manner of torments, weepings, sorrows more than any heart may think of or any tongue may devise, and [all this] lasting evermore without end.28
These horrors are balanced by the ‘joy’ of Heaven, discussed in the following pages, full of the precise opposites to Hell’s various torments, namely feasts and so forth, ‘wiþ songes and ioye wiþ-outen ende’.29 The meaning, compass and mechanism of ‘hate’ is interesting here. While the penitent is being encouraged to foster it as a feeling toward sin, the depiction of Hell makes it clear that ‘hate’ is also an automatic and involuntary reaction toward certain external elements (fire, storms, hunger, etc.). The relationship between ‘body’ and ‘emotion’ is configured here in a notably different fashion from more modern discourses: ‘hating’ is an innate bodily affect with regard to certain external physical phenomena, but one which can be encouraged, tended and then harnessed in service of spiritual reform. In a similar fashion, in the Book of Vices and Virtues’ lengthy final section on ‘soberness’,30 the regimen for achieving this state of control is notably external, focused upon speech, clothes, eating and drinking – and is not about the kind of interior state of affect or humour that a later notion of ‘sobriety’ might assume.
These discourses on sin, penitence and confession thus map a complex emotional landscape which must be negotiated in order to achieve absolution. There may be a particular complication for the laity in this regard, owing to the way in which the system of confession and penance was presented. Cadwgan (again copying from Robert of Courçon) tells us that
true penance can be known by that which Augustine teaches in his book of penance, which establishes that there are fifteen worthy steps of penance ascending to the celestial Jerusalem. A step moreover, according to Augustine, is nothing other than progress; in truth, to ascend is nothing other than the act of making progress.31
Penance is, in other words, a skill to be mastered, as part of an ongoing discipline; as Cadwgan/Courçon present it, a reassuring programme of self-development. In contrast, one can compare the later (c.1434) instructions on confession, written by a cleric from Beccles for children he was schooling in Latin:
In every man’s heart, dwelling in a wretched vale of tears, it is necessary to make spiritual labour and work (gostly labour & trauayle) in relating his conscience at this holy time of Lent, which is deputed and ordained for the reformation of souls. For, following the proverbs of old men, whosoever is not holy in Lent or busy in harvest is not likely to thrive. Every man therefore, beating his breast in compunction, should rise up mightily to spiritual works.32
The notion of labour & trauayle lies at the heart of other vernacular treatises, and provides the governing central metaphors of the confessional texts Handlyng Synne (c.1303) and Jacob’s Well (c.1440): the former tells one to ‘handle’ (that is, work with) sin in all that one does, the latter presents the metaphor of a ‘foul pit’ (the body) which must constantly be excavated in search of spiritual cleanness. The Book of Vices and Virtues, following Somme Le Roi, presents the possibility of spiritual work to the laity, but repeatedly references the ‘wise holy man’ who can really do it properly; the assumed subject position of the reader is to be in proximate relationship with this figure, not to inhabit the holy man’s transcendent status. Thus, while one strand – an originary, monastic strand – of confessional discourse presents it as a skill to be mastered (or, at least, developed with some proficiency), as this becomes vernacularized, the reader or auditor is often presented instead with a continuation of labour, and never-ending labour at that. This would suggest (though it can only be suppositional) that the emotional disposition of the lay penitent toward his or her ‘labour’ is likely to be of a different order from that of an assured, intellectual, Latinate penitent.
It is clear that all of the aspects discussed above – the act of confession, the emotional dispositions it requires, the relationship between body and affect it works through – are taught rather than innate. Confessional discourse is a pedagogy, with all the issues of power relations that pedagogy involves. As noted above, emotion (sorrow, principally) is positioned as the key marker of authenticity. It permits a kind of diagnostic knowledge on the part of the confessor; and the relationship between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ is therefore not a binary choice, but a necessarily dualistic system. John de Burgo explains that contrition can be so great as to completely remit sin, but:
nevertheless, it is required that confession be made and the enjoined penance be completed, because of the precepts of the church and moreover because of uncertainty, because no one can be certain that his contrition was sufficient to lift his guilt [my emphasis].33
Furthermore, as a thirteenth-century text (attributed to Robert Grosseteste) enjoins, the priest should be aware that any circumlocution on the part of a penitent may indicate the presence of a hidden sin. Similarly, an anonymous confessors’ manual from the same period warns that if the priest ‘see[s] the penitent stumbling and doubtful and going along as if feeling the way’, he should encourage him to speak openly, as something important is being hidden.34 Thus an essential part of the confessor’s task is the interpretation of the emotional state and actions of the confessing penitent.
The genre of confessional discourse flowered in late medieval Europe, extending itself well beyond the fairly concise and practical advice of early thirteenth-century confessors’ manuals. One direction this took was the call, directed toward the literate laity, for individual reflection upon their interior selves. Here, for example, is the so-called Goodman of Paris, in a text purportedly written for his young wife c.1393:
The third article [of this book] says that you should love God and keep yourself in His grace. On which, I counsel you that immediately and laying aside all other tasks, you refrain from drinking or eating at night or vespers, even a very little bit, and you remove all earthly and worldly thoughts, and while coming and going you put and hold yourself in a secret place, alone and far from people, and think of nothing but hearing your mass early the next morning, and after that giving account to your confessor of all your sins by a good, full and thoughtful confession.35
While there is no specific emotional instruction involved in this passage, the idea of an individual, interior response – this ‘secret place, alone and far from people’ that one sustains while ‘coming and going’ – is clearly drawn. The sense of having to make a spiritual ‘space’ within the demands of domestic duty may strike some chords across time; but such resonances should not make us collapse culture into nature. The Goodman’s text is quite clearly instruction: he is here explaining how, and in what way, to construct an ‘interior’, and to what end it should be put.
Medieval interiority is, in other words, not simply the revelation of an innate human condition, long-hidden by ‘the dark ages’ or awaiting a coming Renaissance. There are, rather, medieval interiorities, constructed within different discourses for different functions. One interior, which intersects both the language of confession and certain aspects of emotional response, is the interior from whence ‘affective piety’ may be seen to spring. This ‘interior’ is individual, relatively private (though, as in the case of the highly-visible mystic Margery Kempe, prone to dramatic self-publicization), founded upon emotional responses – but also an ‘interior’ strongly connected to the exterior plenitude of Christ and the Virgin Mary; or, in a different inflection, to the coming Judgement and inescapability of death. It is, in other words, an individual interior notably aware of, and connected to, certain exterior elements. A brief example, extracted from an early sixteenth-century manuscript of poems, can stand in for a much larger field: ‘To see þe maydyn wepe her sonnes passion / It entrid my hart full depe with gret compassion’.36 What is important here, with regard to the argument of this article, is the connection between bodies, interiors and emotions. The Virgin’s emotion is apprehended through outward bodily display; it ‘enters’ the body of the auditor; and through entering, it provokes affect which is always, to some degree, bodily. Take another Marian example, again drawn from John Mirk’s sermon collection. Mirk’s sermon for the salutation of the Blessed Virgin Mary tells the story of a nun who every day said as many Ave Maria prayers as there are psalms in the psalter. The Virgin appears to her one day, thanks her for her worship, but then tells her that she can please Mary better: leave aside half of the number of Aves and say the remaining half ‘in trete’ – meaning something like ‘in full thought’ or ‘all sincerity’. Mary continues her advice:
and when you come to the words ‘God is with thee’, then say that with all thy heart and in full thought (and all in trete). For there is no tongue that may tell the joy that I have in my heart, when that word is said to me devoutly; for I think that I feel my son Jesus with that word playing in my body, and that is so high a joy that it pleases me beyond all other joys.37
Mirk invites a dazzling combination of emotional and bodily empathy here (and one more clearly appropriate for the expected experiences of a lay audience than a nun). It is once again notable that what might be first seen as a text describing or encouraging innate feeling, in fact works through the conjunction of bodily experience and exterior prompt. Indeed, much like the way the hatefulness of Hell was figured in the Book of Vices and Virtues as an inevitable response to exterior conditions, for Mirk’s Mary the fact of the child playing in her womb is joy – not a prompt to joy, but joy itself. But it comes from an exterior source (the prayer); and in Mary’s visitation to the nun (and in Mirk’s performance of the exemplum to a parish audience) it is once again, and necessarily, externalized.
For all its focus upon interior response, the externalization of affective piety – whether joyful or sorrowful – is an intrinsic part of its system. Take, for example, the advice given to an unknown ‘devout and literate lay man’, in a late fourteenth-century text:
At the door when you go out say: ‘All the men of this city or town from the greater to the lesser are pleasing to God, and only I am worthy of hell. Woe is me. Welawey.’ Let this be said from all your heart so that the tears run; you need not always say it with your mouth; it is sufficient to say it with a groan.38
Here, as elsewhere, interiorized emotion is undoubtedly present. But it is produced in concert with a spiritual adviser, and making the inner feeling visible or audible is essential, because it undergirds the key role of the confessor. The body and emotion (explicit and implicit) play a key role here too. As an early manual explains, once the penitent has confessed everything that they are able,
one begins to censure, namely by showing the magnitude and enormity and badness of what they have confessed, and the goodness of God that should lead them to penance. Warn the confessant and say ‘Brother, do you regret this crime you have perpetrated . . . ?39
Bishop Cadwgan explains that the manner in which one confesses should include confessing ‘cheerfully’ (hillaris); that is,
not done with sorrow and only fear of punishment, but from a greater love of virtue; … and scrupulously (morose), not in saying everything in a never-ending line – I committed this sin, and this, and this … – but as one sharply pricked and greatly crushed [by sin], when with great diligence and scrupulousity he vomits [them up].40
Thus one’s bodily and emotional experiences – and it is again unclear whether there is any meaningful difference between ‘bodily’ and ‘emotional’ here – are key elements in bringing forth full confession and contrition. The Book of Vices and Virtues further elucidates:
Repentance requires great sorrow and great regret in [one’s] heart of that [deed through which] we have made Our Maker wrathful . . . You must say ‘well away’ with truly deep heart, so that the heart will melt and bring forth all thy tears with great sorrow, and with great weeping and deep sighing [you] shall cry God’s mercy, as His thief, His manslaughterer and murderer, that deserves to be hanged in Hell . . . Such tears drive away the devil, just as scalding hot water makes a hound flee the kitchen.41
Once again, we see a complex interplay between exterior and interior: the words which must be said in order to soften the heart, so that sorrow can be felt; that sorrow itself being expressed through the external sign of tears; those tears acting to drive away the exterior threat of the devil. The body is hence not simply the inner seat of emotion, nor emotion an innate affect; learning how to confess and be penitent requires a kind of ‘work’ involving body, emotion, interior and exterior. All are necessary elements, and none is dominant.
Perhaps most importantly, because of these factors, the body is an important sign for the confessor, a means of reading and identifying emotion, devotion, and hence penitential diligence. Thomas of Chobham, another very influential thirteenth-century writer, explains the matter through a common metaphor:
Just as a doctor of the body examines many signs and indications of a patient’s illness to see whether he can be cured or not, so a doctor of the soul should consider many signs around a penitent, of whether he is truly penitent or not, for example if he sighs, if he cries, if he blushes, and does other such things. Or if he laughs or denies that he has sinned or defends his sin or similar things.42
The emotional displays of the body are a kind of simple language, which the confessor must decode. Contrition is an inner state – but its only guarantee, within a system of confession and penance imposed from without, is its external, bodily affect. Yet another thirteenth-century manual explains that ‘If [the penitent] appears strenuous in penance, by the grace of the bishop a milder penance can be given’.43 The specific case discussed here is parricide – a serious crime – but the principle of potential leniency extends throughout the penitential system. Indeed, the Goodman of Paris explains the very nature and necessity of contrition to his young wife via the model of a condemned man begging his judge for mercy: ‘how he would implore him in good heart with great tearfulness, with moaning and great grindings of heart, without thought to anything else’.44 So too should one implore God (and His earthly representatives, the clergy), via these external signs, for clemency. How well, or otherwise, these emotions are externalized – or, perhaps we should say, how these emotions, constituted as externalizations, are interpreted – will affect both the spiritual fate of the sinner, and, more immediately, his or her treatment by those who wield power.
I began this paper by invoking the somewhat unexamined importance of emotions to the historiography of lay religion. The material cited above traces a path – not, I think, too idiosyncratic or unrepresentative a path – through a very much wider terrain. It has demonstrated the presence of explicit discussion of emotion, notably in the sacrament of confession and penance, and has suggested the implied presence of emotion, particularly as a desired affect on the part of an audience or readership, in other areas as well. At the same time, I have sought to show that these emotional performances are not simply innate, unchanging, ahistorical experiences. Expectations of lay emotion change over time, and the degree to which emotion is understood to underpin lay spirituality depends upon both the historical moment and the genre of spiritual experience. To take the most prominent example, affective piety was not a ‘discovery’ of previously unseen or ignored emotionality; it very clearly seeks to prompt, develop and nurture a particular kind of emotional response. In other words, emotions are called forth within particular discursive contexts, which provide disciplines and maps for the experience of affect. Take the example of Marian poems and stories, many more of which could be cited than the sparse evidence given above: it is perfectly possible, indeed likely, that some medieval laypeople would have felt an automatic empathy for Mary, focusing perhaps on the shared experiences of motherhood and loss. But the texts to which we, as historians, have access clearly sought to teach and disseminate such an empathetic reaction, and to mould the emotional expression into its correct shape. There is no unmediated access available to us. Similarly, it is perfectly possible that one might innately feel bad about anti-social things that one has done; but the process of feeling the right kind of sorrow for what is recognized as sin depends upon a particular penitential pedagogy. In each case, the shaping of human experience should not be collapsed back into something innate, ‘beyond’ culture and politics; for it is precisely in these operations of penitential and spiritual reform that we see ‘history turned into nature’, as the anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu would put it.45
For these reasons and more, it is not clear to me that there is any possibility of accessing something other than cultural constructions. The issue has a further inflection for historians: our access to any of this comes only through surviving textual sources. On what basis, other than our individual sympathy and whimsy, do we claim to reach ‘beyond’ those sources to past suffering or joy? I would further argue that there is no clear point to such a project, even if one wishes, for political and humanistic reasons, to hold that cultural construction is not ‘all there is’. Were we to transcend culture, bypass language and plunge ourselves somehow into the raw emotional maw of a singular historical individual – what would we then do with what we found? It would certainly not explain that individual within her or his historic circumstances, since those circumstances would entail a return to the cultural and linguistic constructions from which we are somehow fantasizing our escape. And at any moment in which we begin to talk or write about our imagined experience of the unmediated individual, we once more rejoin the games of language, culture and mediation.
What we can do instead is look at how different discourses, in different cultural contexts and at different points in time, make use of emotions. In this respect, there are some specific aspects to the ways in which medieval religious culture constructs emotion that have interesting implications for the wider history of emotions. The extent to which emotions, within this field, could be ‘individual’ is dependent on a historical shift: the amplification and refinement of penitential discourse, with regard to the laity, which first flowered in the late twelfth century, and found its fullest expression only by the late fourteenth. At the same time, this move did not constitute a simple shift from corporatism to individuality, as some later historians and critics still tend to imagine. The collective experience of emotion – which one might see as intrasubjective affect – continued to play an essential part of lay religious life (as it still did, of course, after the Reformation). The conceptual tools used by the current historians of emotion are predicated upon a bedrock of individual, interior affect; what does the possibility of collective subjectivity do to their arguments?
A particular contribution that medievalists can make to the history of emotions is to remind ourselves that much of the vocabulary of western emotion is drawn from the language of sin, confession and penance. As the sketch that I provide above attempts to demonstrate, some important implications follow from this. One is that emotion, within this confessional discourse, even while being carved into some interior place, must be exteriorized, because of issues of legibility and control. A frequently recorded preaching exemplum tells of a priest who was granted the ability to discern the state of men’s souls by their faces. As his parishioners came up to receive the Host, he could see the nature of their sin: lecherers had blackened faces, those with red faces were full of ire, those in charity shone brightly like the sun.46 The tale does not simply illustrate a medieval belief in the exteriority of interiors, but more the unfulfilled desire that lay at the heart of confessional processes; an inescapable lacuna that is the very engine of that discourse. No priest could see the interior person written so clearly upon the body. Hence the necessity of schooling penitential subjects in how they should externalize their inner feelings, and of schooling their confessors to inspect and interpret those external signs they could discern.
A further implication is thus that the emotions studied in this paper were but one element within a wider system: a regime of spiritual discipline. ‘Regime’ is used here not in as strong a fashion as that evoked by Michel Foucault for later discourses of sexuality and medicine; nor in William Reddy’s sense of a system of governance focused upon the emotions; but a regime – a spiritual regimen perhaps – nonetheless, one making relatively strong claims upon the individual subject (within a medieval context), and one that sits at the intersection of several overlapping discourses (confession, medicine, governance, and so forth). What is important here is that these discourses are not primarily about emotion. Emotion is, rather, but one element within a number of wider fields. Confessional discourse maps a variety of potential emotional responses, but it is not interested in discussing all emotion, only those particular to its terrain; and it is also concerned to interpret and prescribe other elements of public and private behaviour, and further modes of speech and comportment. The emotions it does discuss are thus linked to other matters, of social and self-discipline, reputation and scandal, salvation and damnation, clerical and lay identity, and so forth. Prioritizing ‘emotion’ among these issues is to distort the shape of the discursive field.
It seems to me, then, that while we surely cannot ‘get at’ the past emotional experience of individuals in an unmediated fashion – we can never meaningfully say whether a particular person really, truly felt an emotion, even if we have managed to decide what precisely we mean by all those terms – we can instead explore the conditions of possibility for all such experiences, and the variety of experience contained within such regimes. Such cultural constructions are thus never ‘mere’; they are the very structures of individual experience. We might further recognize that asking what someone ‘really truly felt’ carries with it very strong echoes of confessional discourse and its desire for legibility. Finally, we might further ask whether a ‘new history of the emotions’, as a delimited sub-field of historiography, is actually the best way of studying and understanding the conditions within which human affect is experienced and expressed. Do we actually need histories of individual emotions, or emotional regimes? Or would we be better served by seeing emotions as but one part of the larger, ongoing, historical flux of language, subjectivity and power – and hence always best studied in the wider contexts of those other factors?
Endnotes
- J. Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1985), p. 75; E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven, Conn., 1992), p. 92; R. N. Swanson, Religion and Devotion in Europe, 1215–1515 (Cambridge 1995), p. 141; C. Harper-Bill, The Pre-Reformation Church in England (Harlow, 1989), pp. 70, 66.
- This is implicit, e.g., in Barbara Newman’s methodological statement of intent in her From Virile Woman to Woman Christ: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia, Pa., 1995), pp. 16–17; it similarly informs various contributions to History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person, ed. R. Fulton and B. W. Holsinger(New York, 2007).
- Jean Delumeau, Le peche et la peur: la culpabilisation en occident entre XIIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1983); English translation, Sin and Fear: Western Guilt Culture, 13th to 18th Centuries, trans. E. Nicholson (New York, 1990).
- For a detailed overview, see B. H. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about emotions in history’, American Historical Review, cvii (2002), 921–45.
- E.g., Anger’s Past: the Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages, ed. B. H. Rosenwein (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998); D. Boquet, L’ordre de l’affect au moyen âge: autour de l’anthropologie affective d’Aelred de Rievaulx (Caen, 2005); Emotions and Material Culture, ed. G. Jaritz (Vienna, 2003), particularly the essays by Daniel Smail, Gabor Klaniczay, Michael Goodich and Piroska Nagy; P. Hyams, Rancor and Reconciliation in Medieval England (Ithaca, N.Y., 2003). It is worth noting that ‘love’ has long been analysed from a broadly ‘culturalist’ perspective (C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford, 1936); D. de Rougemont, Passion and Society, trans. M. Belgion (2nd edn., 1956)).
- D. L. Smail, The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264–1423 (Ithaca, N.Y., 2003), particularly pp. 244–5; B. H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y., 2006), particularly pp. 191–203.
- A helpful overview of past work is given in the introduction to Mixed Emotions: Anthropological Studies of Feeling, ed. K. Milton and M. Svašek (Oxford, 2005), upon which the following remarks are largely dependent.
- T. J. Csordas, ‘Embodiment as a paradigm for anthropology’, Ethos, xviii (1990), 5–47, at p. 23; see also T. J. Csordas, ‘Somatic modes of attention’, Cultural Anthropology, viii (1993), 135–56.
- W. M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: a Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge, 2001).
- W. M. Reddy, ‘Against constructionism: the historical ethnography of emotions’, Current Anthropology, xxxviii (1997), 327–52, at p. 331. See J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (2nd edn., Oxford, 1975).
- See further W. M. Reddy, ‘Emotional liberty: politics and history in the anthropology of emotions’, Cultural Anthropology, xiv (1999), 256–88; W. M. Reddy, ‘The logic of action: indeterminacy, emotion, and historical narrative’, History and Theory,xl (2001), 10–33. At the heart of Reddy’s critique of constructionist perspectives is a desire for a universal ontological basis for political action: to put it crudely, a desire that one be allowed to intervene in a situation arising within a different cultural context, on the basis of a universally shared need for ‘emotional liberty’. I recognize some of the force of this desire, but Reddy’s assumption that politics primarily consists of those from ‘liberal’ emotional regimes (i.e., westerners) diagnosing and intervening in the suffering of those from ‘repressive’ emotional regimes (i.e., everyone else), does strike me as problematic.
- Reddy and Smail turn, at certain points, to psychological and neurophysiological studies in order to undergird this. One cannot reject these out of hand, but it is not clear to me how one avoids a circularity of argument here, if wishing to project the empirical findings of brain- and body-response back into the past. We cannot study the brain of a fourteenth-century litigant to see which parts respond in what ways to what situations; and given that neuropsychological studies suggest that there is considerable ‘feedback’ between external (cultural) stimuli and interior (biological) affect, this leaves us begging further questions. On the latter point, see A. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (New York, 1994), quoted by Smail, p.244, n. 1; and for an interesting appraisal of the general issues, G. E. R. Lloyd, Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the Human Mind (Oxford, 2007).
- Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, p. 166.
- One might view the experience of ‘grief ’ within early modern Iroquois society in this light, as the emotion is experienced as a wound to the ‘household’ and tribe, bringing practical and affective reactions from the group rather than just the individual. See D. K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: the Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992), particularly pp. 32–6. In general, see further Milton and Svašek.
- Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, pp. 26–9, 193–6.
- See J. H. Arnold, Inquisition and Power: Catharism and the Confessing Subject in Medieval Languedoc (Philadelphia, Pa., 2001), particularly ch. 3. Readers of Mark Gregory Pegg’s sparkling monograph The Corruption of Angels: the Great Inquisition of 1245–6 (Princeton, N.J., 2001) may be led to believe that mid thirteenth-century records were full of emotional expression; a glance at the Latin sources, however, reveals the extent to which this is Pegg’s imaginative and engaging reconstruction of what lies ‘beyond the text’.
- Given my present purposes, I will not rehearse here the wider historical picture of these devotional developments, attempt to describe the full range of confessional literature, or map the precise relations between thirteenth-century Latin texts and fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English ones. For an introduction to issues of this kind, see L. E. Boyle, ‘The fourth Lateran Council and manuals of popular theology’, in The Popular Literature of Medieval England, ed. T. Heffernan (Knoxville, Tenn. 1985), pp. 30–43.
- J. Bossy, ‘The mass as a social institution, 1200–1700’, Past & Present, c (1983), 29–61.
- On such reactions, see J. H. Arnold, ‘The materiality of unbelief in late medieval England’, in The Unorthodox Imagination in Medieval England, ed. S. Page (Manchester, forthcoming).
- John Mirk, Festial: a Collection of Homilies, ed. T. Urbe (English Early Text Soc., extra ser., xcvi, 1905), p. 150: For ry3t as a kyng, when he goþe to batayle, trompes gon before, þe baner ys desplayde and comyþ aftyr, þen comyþ þe kyng and his ost aftyr sewyng hym; ryght so in Cristys batagyle þe belles, þat ben Godys trompes, ryngen, baners byn unfolden, and openly born on hegh yn þe ayre. Then þe cros yn Cristys lykenes comyth as a kyng of cristen men, and his ost, þat ys Cristys pepull, sewyþe hym.
- English Gilds, ed. T. Smith and others (English Early Text Soc., old ser., xl, 1870), pp. 216–17.
- Alain de Lille, The Art of Preaching, trans. G. R. Evans (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1981), p. 54.
- C. W. Bynum, ‘Did the twelfth century discover the individual?’, in C. W. Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, Calif., 1982), pp. 82–109.
- Robert of Flamborough, Liber Poentientialis, ed. J. J. F. Firth (Toronto, 1971), i. 5–8 (58–61): Sacerdos: Frequenter doles de peccatis tuis? Poenitens: Aliquando. Sacerdos: Immo semper studeas ad dolendum; quia summa poenitentia est dolor et contritio.
- J. Goering and H. Pryce, ‘The De modo confitendi of Cadwgan, bishop of Bangor’, Mediaeval Studies, lxii (2000), 1–27, at p. 16: Ille siquidem penitens qui dolet pro peccato et uerecundatur, et dolet pro eo, et se humiliat pro eodem peccato, iam est in tribus gradibus. Nam in omni peccato precipue sunt tria: delectatio, inpudentia, supervia. Et contra hec, quia contraria contrariis curantur, debet penitentia esse amara, uerecunda, et humilis.
- South English Legendary, ed. C. d’Evelyn and A. J. Mill (Early English Text Soc., ccxxxv–ccxxxvi, 1956), i. 131: Þat man telle is sunne mid is mouþ. & be[o] sori þerto / And þat he in wanhope ne be[o] no3t. & þat he penance lede [. . .] / For wiþoute sorwe of heorte. no sunne nis for3ive /A mon were betere for is sunne be[o]. sori and vnssriue / Þan issriue wiþoute sorinesse. & bet ssolde be[o] forgive.
- John de Burgo, Pupilla Oculi (n.p., 1510), fo. 27v(b): Est autem contritio dolor voluntarie assumptus pro peccatis cum proposito confitendiae satisfaciendi . . . Et dicitur contritio dolor voluntarie assumptus: ad differentiam doloris naturalis qui nec meritoris nec demeritoris pro peccatis.
- The Book of Vices and Virtues, ed. W. Nelson Francis (Early English Text Soc., old ser., ccxvii, Oxford, 1942), p. 71: Forget þi body ones a day, and go in-to helle while þou lyvest, þat þou come not þere what þou art ded. And þus doþ ofte the holy wise men. Þere þou schalt see al þat herte hateþ and fleeþ: defaute of al goodnesse, and gret plente of al wikkednesse, brennynge fier, stynkynge brymston, foule stormes & tempestes, routynge ydousedeueles, hunger, þryst þat may neuere be staunched, many manere of turmentrye, wepynges, sorwes more þan any herte may þenke or any tunge may deuyse, and euere-more wiþ-outen ende lastynge. The Middle English text closely parallels the original French: Oublie ton cors une fois le iour, va enfer a ton vivant que tu in wises en mourut. Ce sont souvent li saint home e li sage. Illec verras tu quanques cuers het et fuit. Sante de tous o biens plete de tous maus [. . . etc. . .] divers tourmens pleurs et doleurs plus que cuers ne porroit penser de langue deviser et tous iours duiront sans fin (British Library, MS. Royal 19 C ii fo. 28r(a), Somme le Roi).
- Vices and Virtues, p. 73.
- Vices and Virtues, pp. 275–90.
- Cadwgan, De Modo Confitendi, p. 16: Notandum quod uere penitentes possunt agnosci per hoc quod docet Augustinus in libro de penitentia, quibus elicitur quod xv gradibus dingne [sic] penitentie ascenditur in Ierusalem celestem.Gradus autem, secundum Augustinum, nichil aliud est quam profectus; ascendere vero nichil nisi proficere.
- S. B. Meech, ‘John Drury and his English writings’, Speculum, ix (1934), 70–83, at p. 76: In every manys herte dwellyng in wrecchid vale of teris is nedful to ben foundyn gostly labour & trauayle in telying of his concyens þis holy tyme of Lent, deputid and ordeynyd to reformacion of soule. For after þe prouerbe of olde men, ho so is not holy in Lente or besi in hervest is not lykly to thryve. Every man þerfore knowyng his bryst in compunccion rise vp mytyly to gostly werkis.
- John de Burgo, Pupilla Oculi, fo. 28r (b): Nihilominus tamen requiritur confessio et penitentie iniuncte expletio proter preceptus ecclesie et etiam propter incertitudine quia non est quis certitudine quod sua contritio fuerat sufficiens ad totum reatum tollendum.
- ‘Robert Grosseteste’s treatise on confession Deus est ’, ed. S. Wenzel, Franciscan Studies, xxx (1970), 218–93, at p. 247; ‘The Summa Penitentie Fratrum Predicatorum: a thirteenth-century confessional formulary’, ed. J. Goering and P. J. Payer, Mediaeval Studies, lv (1993), 1–50, at p. 27.
- Le Menagier de Paris, ed. G. E. Brereton and J. M. Ferrier (Oxford, 1981) (hereafter Menagier), p. 12: Le tier article di que vous devez amer Dieu et vous tenir en sa grace. Surquoy je vous conseille que incontinent et toutes euvres laissies vous vous desistez de boire ou mengier a nuyt ou vespre, se trespetit non, et vous ostez de toutes pensees terriennes et mondainnes, et vous mectez et tenez alant et venant un ung lieu secret, solitaire et loing de gens, et ne pensez a riens fors a demain bien matin oyr vostre messe et aprez ce rendre compte a vostre confesseur de tous voz pechiez par bonne, meure et actrempee confession.
- Songs, Carols and other Miscellaneous Poems, ed. R. Dyboski (Early English Text Soc., extra ser., ci, Oxford, 1908), pp. 41–2 (no. 51); see similarly various other Marian poems in these extracts from Richard Hill’s commonplace book.
- Mirk, Festial, pp. 299–300: and whan þou comyst to þis worde ‘God is syth þe’ þan say þat wyth alle þine herte and all in trete. For þer is no tong þat may telle þe ioy þat I haue in myn herte, whan þat worde is sayde to me deuoutely; for me thynkeþe þat I fele my son Ihesu wyth þat worde pleying in my body, and so þat is so hegh a ioye þat it gladuth me passing alle othur ioyes.
- ‘Instructions for a devout and literate layman’, ed. and trans. W. A. Pantin in Medieval Learning and Literature, ed. J. G. Alexander and M. T. Gibson (Oxford, 1976), pp. 398–422, at pp. 398–9, 420: Ad hostium <exeundo dicatur>: Omnes homines huius civitatis <vel ville> a maiori ad minorem placent Deo, et ego solus dignus sum inferno. Ve michi. Welawey: dicatur ex toto corde, ita ut lacrime currant; non semper proferatur ore: sufficit quod gemendo.
- ‘Summa penitentie’, ed. Goering and Payer, p. 39.
- Cadwgan, De Modo Confitendi, pp. 16–17: Hillaris, ne fiat cum tristitia et solum timore pene, set magis uirtutis amore; tristitia enim seculi mortem operatur, ut dicit Augustinus, contritio uero salutem. Morosa, ne in transcursu fiat sic: ‘Ego commisi hoc peccatum, et hoc, et hoc,’ ad modum combinatorum numero per innumeras numero; ut acutius pungant et cum magis tereant, cum maxima diligentia et morositate euomantur.
- Vices and Virtues, p. 172: Repetaunce askeþ grete sorwe and grete ofþenkynge in herte of þat þat we have wraþþed our maker … þei schulle seye ‘weil-awey’ wiþ ri3t deep herte, so þat þe herte mowe melte and brynge forþ ale þe teeres wiþ grete sorwe, and wiþ grete wepynge and sore sy3hing schal crie God mercy as his þef, as his mansleer and murþerour, þat þat haþ deserued to be honged in helle … Suche teeres dryuen awey þe deuel, ri3t as þe scolde hot watre makeþ an hound flee þe kychene. This again follows the source text, including the final domestic metaphor, but with some slight amplification (such as, like the ‘Devout and literate layman’, sighing ‘weil-awey’): Repentance requiert grant doleur et grans gemissemens de cuer de ce que leu a courucie son creatour … Eu qui a dieu couroucie par pechie mortel u doit gemir du parfont du cuer si que li cuers li fonde tous en lermes. Et a grans pleurs et agrans lour pirs doit crier a dieu merci come son larron, son murtrier, son tiruteur, qui a desserui le gibet denfer…Teles lermes chacent le dyable hors du cuer comme lyave chaude chace le chien de la cuisine (Somme le Roi, fo. 68v). The word gemissemens, translated by the Vices and Virtues author as ofþenkynge (regret), could be rendered as ‘moaning’, which further emphasizes the externalizing aspect here (see Dictionnaire de l’ancien français, jusqu’au milieu du XIVe siècle, ed. A. J. Greimas (2nd edn., Paris, 1968)).
- Thomas of Chobham, Summa Confessorum, ed. F. Broomfield (Analecta Namurcensia, xxv, Louvain, 1968), pp. 240–1: Et sicut medicus corporalis multa signa et indicia inquirit de morbo patientis utrum possit curari vel non, ita medicus spiritualis per multa signa debet considerare circa penitentem si vere peniteat vel non, veluti si gemat, si ploret, si erubescat, et cetera talia faciat. Vel si rideat vel se peccasse neget vel peccata sua defendat et similia.
- ‘The Summa de Penitentia of Magister Serlo’, ed. J. Goering, Mediaeval Studies, xxxviii (1976), 1–53, at p. 17.
- Menagier, p. 15: il le prieroit de bon cuer en grans pleurs, en gemissemens et grans contrictions de cuer sans penser autre part.
- P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge, 1977), p. 78..
- Robert Mannyng of Brunne, Handlyng Synne, ed. I. Sullens (Binghampton, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1983), pp. 253–5, ll. 10165–256. The tale probably originates in the Vitae Fratrum, and the power was originally ascribed to an abbot or a bishop; Mannyng’s translation of the gift down the ecclesiastical scale to the parish may indicate something of the changes in expectation of lay spirituality (see F. C. Tubach, Index Exemplorum: a Handbook of Medieval Religious Tales (Helsinki, 1969), nos. 1959, 1960).
Contribution (105-127) from European Religious Cultures: Essays Offered to Christopher Brooke on the Occasion of His Eightieth Birthday, edited by Miri Rubin (University of London, 08.05.2020), published by OAPEN under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.