Bynum's own reservations concerning the construction of "affective piety"

Given how other scholars have used her work to generalize about affective piety, it should be stressed that Caroline Walker Bynum voiced a clear warning in Jesus as Mother, writing:

We must be careful not to overemphasize the affective aspects of later medieval piety. Even in writers, like Marguerite of Oingt, who give the images very concrete development, the notion of Christ as mother, like that of Christ the bridegroom, remains allegorical. Moreover, the humanity of Christ is not as absent in early medieval devotion as many twelfth-century scholars have suggested, following Southern. Piety from the later Middle Ages is not as literal in its use of images or as filled with weeping and ecstasy as scholars since Huizinga have thought.

Moreover, in Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond, Bynum points out that "interpretations of late medieval spirituality need to disaggregate phenomena often telescoped under terms such as ‘affective,’ ‘devotional,’ ‘expressionist,’ or ‘violent.’"

Essentialism

Kathleen Biddick's article, "Genders, Bodies, Borders: Technologies of the Visible" (1993), brought to the fore concerns over how Holy Feast and Holy Fast essentialized "women" and "experience," reducing women to an "essential, ahistorical maternal."^[70] Biddick also wrote that in Bynum's book, "gender carries the more restricted sense of 'woman.'"^[71] Bynum discusses this controversy in an autobiographical essay of 2012, where she writes,

The study Holy Feast and Holy Fast, my most influential book, arose almost seamlessly from "Jesus as Mother." Having explored the pressures and opportunities that led certain groups of religious men to use explicitly gendered images for themselves and for the divine, I was curious about whether religious women did so. And I discovered, again to put it a bit simply, that what seemed distinctive about woman-authored texts and male accounts of women was not awareness of gender or complex and self-conscious use of gendered language, but food images and food practices. Although misunderstood by some critics as "essentializing" (this was a nasty charge in the 1990s) or as a glorification of female masochism, it was in fact neither. The argument that women's texts were characterized by specific metaphors and their lives by specific behaviors was not the imposition of modern assumptions about "woman." It was empirical, based on a careful comparison of female-authored texts about the divine, female-authored texts about women, and male-authored texts about women, with texts about men by religious men, such as St. Francis of Assisi or Heinrich Suso, who appeared to be closest in their spirituality to that of women.^[72]

David Aers, while deeply respectful of Bynum's work, writes of "Bynum's rather uncritical deployment of the term 'women'" and wonders "whether 'feminizing' the tortured body of Christ as material, for instance, may not actually reinforce some basic premises and fantasies in traditional patriarchal constitutions of 'women.'"^[73] In his article "Desire for the Past" (1999), Nicholas Watson discusses the controversy that erupted after the publication of Biddick's article (64 & 67), and subjects Biddick's piece itself to analysis (68–72). He also comments on and critiques Aers' reading of Bynum's work (66–68). In the end, however, Watson agrees that Holy Feast and Holy Fast should be "read with caution" (84). On his view it has "a tendency...to homogenize the devotional practices it considers, presenting a single mode of female spirituality" as well as finding "its closest point of identification in the past not with the feelings of holy women, but in those of the men who described them," thus resulting in "unintended identification with a medieval masculine viewpoint" (77).^[74]

Differentiation between men's and women's spirituality

Amy Hollywood has shown that "when men's and women's religious writings are looked at together, we see that men and women engage in often intense relationships of mutual influence, debate, and appropriation. As a result, any clearly marked distinction between men's and women's spirituality almost immediately breaks down (although the tendency for men to want women's spirituality to take certain forms remains constant at least throughout the Middle Ages and no doubt well into the modern period)." Studies of Meister Eckhart by her and by Bernard McGinn "show a beguine influence" on him "which breaks down both older claims about women's affective spirituality versus men's speculative mysticism as well as Bynum's slightly different thesis."^[75][76][77] Hollywood also points to Watson's study of Richard Rolle, which "makes similar arguments."^[78][79] For example, Watson writes that Rolle's "images used to describe the four experiences [of the perfectly converted] are derived from all four senses: sight (Sight into Heaven), touch (fervor), smell or taste (dulcor), sound (canor).^[80] He also describes the highly emotional, "spiritually sexual," and sensual language of Rolle's early poem Canticum Amoris.^[81] Vincent Gillespie's work also undermines the idea that there was a clear distinction between men and women when it came to religious practice, for, he writes, in the fifteenth century, "texts written for the particular circumstances of female religious (which had achieved, somewhat earlier, extension of their audience into ranks of the pious noble and gentlewomen) were being addressed to or compiled for laymen."^[82] Nicole R. Rice's book Lay Piety and Religious Discipline in Middle English Literature shows even more amply how books for spiritual guidance and rules for the spiritual life written for female religious could, sometimes with little revision, be popular with the laity, both male and female.^[83] On this, see also Jennifer Bryan's Looking Inward: Devotional Reading and the Private Self in Late Medieval England, especially the section on "Women's Reading, Lay Reading."^[84]

The empowerment thesis

David Aers, in particular, has challenged the idea that women were "empowered" by imitation of Christ through self-inflicted suffering or by a "natural" association of women's bodies with food (due to lactation) or with a feminized Christ, whose body nurtured, even nursed, the hungry of spirit and who was imagined as birthing salvation on the cross. He characterizes the "empowerment thesis" as follows: "as the argument goes, as Christ's suffering humanity saved the world so suffering women, subjected by their culture in numerous ways, become the most powerful representatives of the powerless, bleeding, suffering, but salvific Christ" (30). Aers questions whether women's ascetic imitation of the "dominant figuration of Christ's humanity" really "empowered the subordinate" or "subverted the logic and religion of a patriarchal and profoundly mysoginistic [sic] culture" (34).

Alcuin Blamires provides a summary of the empowerment theory and its critique in his book chapter "Beneath the Pulpit":

What women might have gained from cultivating devotions such as these has recently become a contentious matter. According to one school of thought, here lay an empowerment of women, both because the period's cultural description of their bodies was preoccupied with blood and lactation and with nourishing in ways that implied a convergence between women and the salvific life-giving body of Christ (pouring out Eucharistic blood on the cross), and secondly because women were so constituted by their culture as subjected, powerless, suffering beings that they could ‘represent’ with particular force the suffering humanity of Christ.

According to a contrary school of thought, there lay not empowerment but disempowerment in the late-medieval promotion of affective piety. In this view the women and men who practised it were in effect taking a kind of drug (affective ecstasy, so to speak) which kept them fixated on a particular sentimental construction of the ‘humanity’ of Christ, and diverted attention from aspects of his ministry which could pose serious problems for the medieval Church. The argument is that alternative, more challenging, and hence institutionally marginalized delineation of what was important in Christ's ‘humanity’ and ministry remained visible in heterodox contexts, or lurked in otherwise orthodox writing such as Langland's.

In this latter view affective piety was less a ‘natural’ phenomenon than an instrument of control, one that subtly absorbed the religious energies of women in particular.^[85]

For another description of the Aers anti-empowerment thesis see Watson, "Desire for the Past." Watson warns, however, that he is uneasy about how Aers' theory may contrive a "collapse of Bynum's model of female resistance into generalized model of compliance to make space for a picture of Lollard heroism that seems as idealizing as what it replaces" (68).

In the same year that Aers published his arguments, Thomas H. Bestul also sounded a note of caution about identifying "oppositional readings in texts that seem to reproduce the dominant ideology." In his comprehensive study of Latin devotional literature focused on the Passion, he says that it is difficult to really say who might react to any text in a particular way. Furthermore, Bestul points out that

males are the authors of most of the texts dealt with in [his] study. The perspective on women and women's roles formed in the Passion narratives is, it can be argued, a deeply masculine one, even in the many cases where their intended audience is female. That perspective tends to affirm the rightness of the subordinate position of women in medieval society by constructing an image of the Virgin Mary that largely conforms to male expectations of female behavior and male understandings of female personality, psychology, and appropriate demeanor.^[86]

He argues that these types of Passion meditations show " a male fascination with a woman tormented, passive, and frequently...literally immobilized by suffering,"^[87] and he goes as far as to speculate that texts like the Quis dabit lament^[88] even function to control "excessive female devotion to Christ's crucified body."^[89]

Gender as the category of difference

Biddick complained that "The model of gender in Holy Feast and Holy Fast assumes that gender is an essence that appears prior to other categories and informs them, that the feminine mirrors, indeed reduces to, the female reproductive function, that the female body is the originary, foundational site of gender."^[70] Furthermore (as mentioned above in the "essentialism" section) Biddick observes "Bynum calls this sexual difference 'gender,' but for her gender carries the more restricted sense of "woman,"^[71] and she argues that a true "historical study of medieval gender interrupts this foundational category of Christianitas by asking how a historical construction of gender in medieval Christendom was simultaneously a construction of other differences."^[90] Taking account of these other differences would, for example, include Jews (and the scandal of the Blood Libel), prostitutes, and homosexuals.^[91]

Hollywood likewise emphasizes that "gender is not the only – and at times not the most salient – category of difference operative within the Christian Middle Ages or any other society."^[92] Hollywood draws attention to scholarship on social class, writing, for example, that "[Sharon] Farmer finds that 'poor men, as well as poor women, were very much associated with the body.' Without denying that "'at various points along the hierarchy of social status' we do find 'that medieval clerical authors . . . make statements that drew stronger associations between women and the body than between men and the body,' Farmer convincingly demonstrates that attention to the differences between servants and elites renders easy generalizations about gender difficult."^[92][93]

New questions about the concept of "movements"

As noted above in the section on "Feminism, Gender, and the Body: The 'Bynum Thesis,'" Caroline Walker Bynum's thinking on religious movements and women's roles in them was influenced by Herbert Grundmann's work. Studies of German historiography from the 1930s to the 1950s or 60s have shown how Grundmann's concept of "movements" was shaped by a scholarly climate imbued with Nietzschean ideas about how history should "serve life." In this context, "'life' meant growth and expansion, dynamism, and the kind of creativeness which does not remain fixed in the ideas of the past but painfully transforms itself and gives birth to the new."^[94] Study of "great men" like Charlemagne or Frederick II who were considered to have shifted the course of history was the mode. Others wrote history to "glorify man's creative achievements."^[95] Grundmann, however, "sought to attribute to groups what [others] attributed to individuals-productive vitality, movement, and the urge to create."^[96] In doing so, as Jan Gerchow and Susan Marti have written, Grundmann "seized on" the idea of religious movements as described by Herman Haupt, a Protestant church historian of the previous generation. Haupt, whose scholarship was colored by his Protestantism, regarded the religious movements he described as "movement[s] 'from below' against the 'paternalism' of the official (Catholic) church." Gerchow and Marti also speculate that the idea "was probably enhanced for Grundmann by the National Socialists having seized power through their own "movement" (Bewegung).^[97] The German Wikipedia page on Grundmann discusses his affiliation with the National Socialist Party.

Some German scholars have suggested that the concept of "religious women's movement" should be avoided "at least insofar as it is not clearly distinguished and differentiated from women's movements in modernity, whether the popular evangelical movement against the official church or nationalistic movements of any kind." Yet, Gerchow and Marti write, "Complete avoidance of the term...can hardly be expected, as a certain tendentious militancy has been a part of the concept of a "women's movement" from the very beginning."^[98]

Fulton and Saxon Devotion to Christ

Rachel Fulton's book, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200, addresses the question of

how to understand not only how but why this [imaginative, empathetic] devotion to Christ came into being both when and where it did, along with its corollary devotions to the Eucharist and to Mary; how to understand, in other words, both the making and the meaning of this new thing—if, in fact, it was a new thing and not simply a becoming visible of something already there (as Southern suggested it might be).^[103]

When Fulton explains the high medieval origins of "devotion to Christ in his suffering, historical humanity and to his mother in her compassion" she does not dispute the Southern Thesis. Rather, she writes, "at no point in the current scholarly discussion is it, in fact, made clear what the historical catalysts may have been for this 'surge of pious devotion,' only the prevailing conditions for that change (monastic tradition, growth of towns, reform of the Church, the status of the laity or of women), some of which themselves were contingent upon that change (new liturgical practices, new artistic representations of Christ and his mother, new theological arguments, the Crusades)(61)." Fulton's thesis is that the catalyst was the passing of the millennium and the year 1033 (1000 years after the death of Jesus) without the Second Coming of Christ (63–64). Her book studies the effects of this

on the life and thought of some of the most prominent (and influential) reformers and intellectuals of the century: Peter Damian (circa 1007–1072), Berengar of Tours (circa 1000–1088), Lanfranc of Bec (circa 1005–1089), John of Fécamp (abbot, 1028–1078), and Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109). As we shall see, the emphasis they placed on, for example, the celibacy of the clergy or the action effected in the sacrament, was itself intricately bound up with their expectations of judgment. To understand the development of the devotion to Christ in his suffering humanity of which these reforms were a part, we must first understand what was at stake in that devotion: the placation—and repayment—of the all-powerful, all-seeing crucified Judge. (64)

In the words of one reviewer, "millennial disappointment in the early mid-eleventh century unleashed a flood of religious, theological, and liturgical responses that helped to shape patterns of devotional response."^[104][105]

Heliand-Fragment P [German Historical Museum, Berlin]

The place where Fulton's findings do put real pressure on the Southern Thesis is in her opening chapter, "History, Conversion, and the Saxon Christ." In it, Fulton makes a case for how new doctrines of the Real Presence in the Eucharist and new and affectively charged retellings of Bible stories were intrinsic to the ninth century conversion of the Saxons. She focuses in on the Old Saxon historical epic poem, the Heliand ("Savior"). Written "in the alliterative verse traditionally used for vernacular heroic epics," it uses secular oral formulas (Christ is a "mead-giver" [medomgebon] and the apostles gisiði ["warrior-companions, retainers"], etc.)^[106] These cultural and linguistic translations serve to make the story "experientially viable" for the Saxon audience (30). The story, however, needed to be not "only comprehensible, but urgent," something in which the audience "is now compelled to recognize itself" (41). But on Fulton's reading, Christ, across the range of Saxon and Anglo-Saxon translations,

was not a Christ for whom sinners were expected themselves to have compassion; this was a Christ in whose presence they could do nothing but pray. Moreover—as Paschasius himself suggested in his emphasis on the reality of Christ's presence at the altar and of the judgment effected in eating unworthily of his flesh—the more imminent the moment of judgment, the more impassioned must their prayers become. (59)

Implicit here, but not fully articulated, is the suggestion that there was a type of affective devotion and an effort to craft or shock an emotional response, but that the emotions were different than those that would be evoked in later affective devotional practice.

Anglo-Saxon affective devotion

Likewise in support of pushing the timeline back is the fact that over the years there have been a number or articles on Anglo-Saxon literature that show how many of the features of later medieval affective piety are also found in Anglo-Saxon religious texts.

In 1977, Thomas H. Bestul pointed out that "there is a significant body of private devotional prayers written in England from about 950 to the end of the eleventh century which anticipates, and occasionally shares in, Anselm's innovations."^[107] These prayers "share a similar emotionalism in style and a new subjectivity in treating the common penitential themes," Bestul wrote.^[108] Bestul has written similarly of continuities between Anselmian prayer and the Irish Tradition.^[109] In 1980, John C. Shields published an article on "The Seafarer as a Meditatio." Although previous scholars had long thought that The Seafarer is a "religious lyric" or an "elegy" (both being genres that rely on emotional expression), Shields argued that the poem "may profitably be understood as a meditatio, that is, a literary spiritual exercise whose author aspires to the perfection of the soul."^[110] In the same year, Christopher L. Chase published on "‘Christ III,’ ‘The Dream of the Rood,’ and Early Christian Passion Piety."^[111] Ann Savage pushed this thesis further in 1987 and explicitly aligned poems such as The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and The Dream of the Rood with later affective devotional practice.^[112] Christina M. Heckman has written of the imitatio and identification with the Rood (the cross) in The Dream of the Rood along the same lines.^[113]

Allen J. Frantzen's article, "Spirituality and Devotion in the Anglo-Saxon Penitentials" (2005), openly questions a tradition of scholarship that has all but ignored Anglo-Saxon religious texts and practices, and he broadens the view out from lyric and elegiac vernacular poetry to include Penitentials, or handbooks listing sins, penances, and prayers. The Penitentials, he points out, emphasize weeping, guilt, and mercy, and

The penitent is the subject rather than the object of this discourse. Contrition is not something that happens to the penitent but is rather an affect he or she creates, as the focus on humility and on the weeping voice suggests. Affectivity is the translation of idea into expressive gesture, and this moment is surely an affective one. If the genuineness of a late-medieval spiritual experience is confirmed by its external signs—by its affectivity, in other words—we should extend the same criterion to the early evidence, where we find that it works just as well.^[114]

Even the "lists or catalogues [of sins]" Frantzen writes," would have situated the penitent physically and psychologically at the center of a reflective, meditative, and indeed affective process" (125).

Scott DeGregorio engages in similar polemic in "Affective Spirituality: Theory and Practice in Bede and Alfred the Great." In it, he aims "to highlight some of the ways these writers anticipate the currents of thought and practice commonly said to mark later medieval devotional literature, and to argue thereby for a more integrated approach to the study of medieval English spirituality."^[115] DeGregorio says of Bede's commentary on the Song of Songs that its

language, and more so the range of emotional experiences it seeks to trigger in the individual believer, should be all too familiar to scholars of later medieval devotion, who, bypassing Anglo-Saxon England, rush to make the eleventh and twelfth centuries the terminus post quem for the emergence of affective elements in western devotional literature. (131)

Furthermore, DeGregorio writes, "a good three centuries before Anselm, Bede saw in Christ's crucified body the ultimate "text" upon which such devotional practice [i.e., meditative reading] should be focused" (132). He goes on to argue that not only does Asser's Life of King Alfred describe how Alfred used a private prayerbook for private prayer and meditation, but that Alfred's own writings show that he understood that "Reading...is about the construction—or rather the transformation—of the individual, a process of internalizing what has been read, of making it one's own, such as happens in meditative or spirituality [sic] forms of reading" (135). Alfred was, DeGregorio sums up, after "a lnd of reading experience that would move him, as an individual, to deeper forms of piety and self-knowledge" (135).

Increased attention to the forms of affective devotional content in pre-Conquest English literature appears in Jennifer A. Lorden's work. In Forms of Devotion in Early English Poetry, Lorden argues that the combination of devotional forms with vernacular poetic topoi and type scenes created a hybrid aesthetic evoking the affective associations those forms had accrued in other contexts.^[116]

The Byzantine and late antique evidence

In 1988, Sandro Sticca connected the development of conceptions of the Virgin Mary's compassion for her son's sufferings to Byzantine traditions, something that Jaroslav Pelikan also argued in 1996.^[117][118] And in From Judgment to Passion, Rachel Fulton also indicated Byzantine antecedents to Marian devotion.^[119]

Jean de Beaumetz. Christ on the Cross with a Praying Carthusian Monk. (ca. 1335) [Museum of Art, Cleveland] "The picture is one of the 26 panels that once adorned the cells of the Carthusian monastery at Champmol near Dijon."^[120]

These indications were followed upon in Stephen J. Shoemaker's article on Maximus the Confessor's seventh-century Life of the Virgin. Shoemaker argues that the text offers

a prolonged reflection on Mary's role in the events of the crucifixion that relates her boundless grief and envisions her participation in the suffering of her son. Accordingly this text raises significant questions about the development of ‘affective’ modes of piety and the concept of Marian compassion, both of which are closely linked with meditations on Mary's presence at the cross in the later Christian tradition. In particular, this new evidence invites us to rethink certain explanations of these phenomena that would link their genesis to the end of iconoclasm in the East (the ninth century) and the beginnings of the High Middle Ages in the West (the eleventh century). In the case of the Christian East, the importance of this early Life of the Virgin for understanding the emergence of new styles of Marian devotion is unmistakably clear. Yet its potential influence on similar developments in the Christian West is somewhat less certain and difficult to ascertain. Nevertheless, even if it may ultimately prove impossible to connect all of the dots between this late ancient text and the piety of the Western High Middle Ages, it seems increasingly clear that we have to reckon with the initial emergence of Marian lament and compassion and affective devotion in rather different historical circumstances than have traditionally been envisaged.^[121]

Double-sided icon with the Crucifixion and the Virgin Hodegitria (9th Century with additions and overpainting of the 10th and 13th centuries) The Byzantine and Christian Museum, Athens.

Shoemaker advances the hypothesis that Western monks could have learned affective devotion to the Virgin Mary from the significant interactions between Western and Byzantine monastic communities, not to mention the interest of reform movements in Eastern ascetic practices. For example, before he became abbot of Fécamp, William of Volpiano had been a reforming abbot at St. Benignus in Dijon, where "he received a Greek bishop, Barnabas, into the community, and there were several other Greek monks"; and John of Fécamp received his monastic formation under his uncle at St. Begninus ("Mary at the Cross" 598). In the end, though "we cannot be certain that the affective piety and Marian compassion of the High Middle Ages were Eastern imports, we nonetheless must begin to reckon with fact that the emergence of these themes in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was not quite as unprecedented as some have assumed" (Shoemaker, "Mary at the Cross" 606).

Arma Christi on Pew Back, Church of St. Valentine (completed in 1493), Kiedrich, Germany

In an article on the Late Antique and Patristic antecedents to Arma Christi imagery, Mary Agnes Edsall has demonstrated that visual images of the Arma have antecedents in the rhetoric of Late Antique sermons.^[122] Bishops, especially during Lent and Easter Week, would preach on the Passion and would use the resources of their training in rhetoric to craft ekphrases (vivid word-pictures) of the Passion and Crucifixion. In the late-first/early-second century AD, Plutarch described ekphrasis when he wrote of Thucydides' skill as an author:

Thucydides is always striving for this vivdness (enargeia) in his writing, as he eagerly desires to make the listener a spectator, as it were, and to produce in the minds of his readers the feelings of astonishment and consternation which were experienced by those who witnessed the events.^[123]

One figure of speech good for creating "vividness" was asyndeton: "the omission of conjunctions between clauses, often resulting in a hurried rhythm or vehement effect."^[124]

Edsall argues that these kinds of ekphrases "were ways of knowing, as if having been present at, the suffering and death of Jesus.... their compressed form sharpens the depiction of pain and suffering into an effective instrument of compunction: the piercing realization of personal sin and fear of Hell, or of the grace of Salvation, or even both."^[125]

Mary Carruthers

Mary Carruthers' trio of books, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (1990),^[126] The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images (1998),^[127] and The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages (2013),^[128] have driven home the complexity of the blend of theories (medieval and ancient) that described the functions of vision and the emotions in knowledge—in other words, "sense-derived understanding."^[129] The following section will summarize those parts of her scholarship that have particular relevance for understanding affective devotional texts and art.

The Book of Memory (among many other topics) describes Aristotle's theory of how "emotions and even judgements are in some sense physiological processes, although they are more than just that. Memory images produced in the emotional (sensitive) part of the soul, are 'physiological affections (meaning both "a change" and "a disposition to change in a certain way).'"^[130] "Our senses produce 'affects' in us," she writes, "physical changes such as emotions, and one of those 'affects' is memory itself....Our memories store 'likenesses' of things as they were when they appeared to and affected us. This analysis...requires that all memory-images have an emotional component, acquired during the process of their formation."^[131]

The Craft of Thought, focused in on the use (or "craft") of meditative images, and in this book Carruthers added to the mix the concept of ductus, defined in a later essay as "the way (s) that a composition, realizing the plan(s) set within its arrangements, guides a person to its various goals, both in its parts and overall."^[132] While on one hand ductus applied to the direction and goal of a whole work, there were places or stages along the way (like the places and images that organized the memory of a speech or a complex idea); and "What marks out the variation in route(s) of the overall ductus are figures, modes and colors of the journey." These terms overlap in meaning, having to do with "ornaments of rhetoric." These not only introduce variety and interest, they are also related to presentation, emotion, and persuasion. Carruthers writes,

Cicero describes how a successful orator uses ornament abundantly but carefully, each word chosen well. Especially often he should use metaphors "because such figures by virtue of the comparisons [they make] transport our thoughts (animos [also the feelings, affections, or passions]),^[133] then bring them back, and move them about here and there, and this rapidly changing movement of thought (cogitationes) in itself pleases" (Orator, 134).^[134]

A ductus would, hopefully, move people, intellectually and emotionally, through the places of a text to its end, or its intention (intentio) to persuade them one way or another.

In The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages, Carruthers deepens the analysis of intentio that was also part of the other two books, and lays out three ways that the term is used. These are the interrelated intentiones of the writer/speaker, of the text/speech, and of the reader/auditor. Carruthers summarizes:

Intention is primarily a matter of movement, and the initial artisan's intentions (as a set of chosen movements) are conveyed within his artifact through its planned ductus. One experiencing the work does so through and among the various elements of its ductus, namely its formal and stylistic choices or intentiones. That experience is led (ductus) in the first instance not by moral ideas but by pleasure and delight, the desires (which Augustine called intentiones) of the perceiver responding to the "intentions" (movements) of the style imparted to it by the "intentions" (choices) of the artist.^[135]

To employ Carruthers' insights, an affective meditation, prayer, or piece of art is intended by the author, artist, or compositor to persuade those who read, hear, or behold it by means of the "formal and stylistic choices" he or she makes. The affective meditation, prayer, or piece of art transmits the intentions inscribed within it— in a way it has these intentions. The perceiver's intentiones (his or her set of desires shaped by individual memory and social/psychological disposition) respond to the design of the ductus, leading to the perceiver's feeling, knowing, and believing what the text, speech, or piece of art intends.

Michelle Karnes

Michelle Karnes' book Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages (2011) addresses the "cognitive work that medieval imagination performs, both in Aristotelian philosophy and in meditations on Christ."^[136] She writes that

Creating vivid mental images of Christ's sacrifice of himself for humankind heightens affection for him ... I argue that gospel meditations have another, cognitive purpose that becomes visible only when we study the meditations’ references to "imagination" in concert with medieval philosophical thought about imagination.^[137]

In other words, "such meditations have a theoretical basis...One that will allow us to "better understand why imagining Christ's life was considered an especially useful thing to do."^[138]

Vittorio Crivelli (1450–1502), Saint Bonaventure Holding the Tree of Life (Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris). The Tree of Life (or Lignum vitae) was Bonaventure's most popular meditation on Christ.

Bonaventure is a key figure in this study. "The particular power of medieval imagination that Bonaventure identified," Karnes writes, "arose not from the simple importing of Aristotelian philosophy into the Latin West but from its application to Augustinian theology."^[139] Bonaventure, in "[r]elying on a newly powerful faculty of imagination...made more powerful the act of imagining the life of Christ, both in his own meditations and, through their influence, in many of those that followed."^[139]
The "Aristotelian imagination,"as Karnes calls it, "connects the senses to the intellect, providing a certain mechanism for knowledge experience" (35). In one reviewer's summary, "Imagination is the bridge between the senses and the intellect, a key link between the apprehension of sense data and the comprehension of it through a process of gradual abstraction, refinement and intellectual generalization, a movement from particular observations and the experience of specific sensations to universalizing knowledge, from sensibilia to intelligibilia.^[140] The devotional imagination as described by Bonaventure would likewise be a mediator, but "between earthly meditation on Christ's humanity and spiritual contemplation of his divinity," and it could do so "because it utilized the considerable cognitive and spiritual potential of imagination"(61).
As Karnes puts it,

in Bonaventure's gospel meditations, imagination harnesses its cognitive power to enable the meditant to conform to Christ in both his natures. The work of meditation is therefore cognitive, as well as affective. Imagination helps the meditant to imagine scenes vividly and feel appropriate emotion, but it also uses the light that shines on it when engaged in the act of knowing in order to lift the meditant to Christ. Bonaventure wants the meditant to love Christ, but also to know him. (112)

Rather than inventing gospel meditations or this way of thinking about their aims, Bonaventure provided them with theoretical underpinnings and a method, or "mechanism," for making the journey to God (112–113). They became a means of contemplative, even mystical, ascent in ways that they had not been before (119–120). For example, in Bonaventure's own meditative texts, such as the Tree of Life (or Lignum vitae), "ascent to God in heaven proceeds through the mind and through Christ crucified" (130). In it, "It is imagination that affords the meditant special presence within gospel scenes and provides the mechanism of the meditant's ascent" (131). In Bonaventure's words in the Vitis mystica (as quoted by Karnes),

"Let us be bound with the bonds of the passion of the good and most loving Jesus, so that we may also share with Him the bonds of love. For, made fast by these latter, He was drawn down from heaven to earth in order to suffer the former. Conversely, we who desire to be drawn from earth into heaven must bind ourselves to the Head with the bonds of the passion, through which we will attain the bonds of love and thus become one with him. (135–136)

Karnes reveals, in the end, the deeply intellectual, philosophical influences on a range of later medieval meditative texts, among other things calling into question the common characterization of meditation on the life of Christ as a genre for the unlettered and the layperson.

Sarah McNamer

Sarah McNamer's book Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion focuses on affective meditations on the Passion as "richly emotional, script-like texts that ask their readers to imagine themselves present at scenes of Christ's suffering and to perform compassion for that suffering victim in a private drama of the heart."^[141] It breaks ground in using "the history of emotion as an additional framework" and presents

a new reading of medieval Christian compassion as a historically contingent, ideologically charged, and performatively constituted emotion--and one that was in the broad period considered...(ca. 1050–1530) one that was insistently gendered as feminine....to perform compassion--in the private drama of the heart that these texts stage--is to feel like a woman, in particular medieval iterations of that identity.^[142]

Whether scholars agree or not with the idea that, over time and place, cultures have "forg[ed] and nourish[ed]" links between women and compassion or with the idea that affective piety was primarily associated with the feminine and femininity, McNamer's book offers a new methodology for understanding what affective devotional practices sought to foster in their users: they were "mechanisms for the production of feeling." Building on work by Barbara Rosenwein and William Reddy, she argues that affective prayers and meditations "are, quite literally, scripts for the performance of feeling—scripts that often explicitly aspire to performative efficacy."^[143] McNamer writes that these scripts are much like William M. Reddy's category of "Emotives." In the passage from Reddy as quoted by McNamer, emotives are "'first person, present tense emotion claims' that potentially, but not always, function as performatives; they are 'similar to performatives (and differ from constatives) in that emotives do things to the world. Emotives are themselves instruments for directly changing, building, hiding, intensifying emotions, instruments that may be more or less successful.'"^[144][145]