Cultivating the Heart: Feeling and Emotion in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Religious Texts

RELIGION AND CULTURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Cultivating the Heart

Series Editors

Denis Renevey (Université de Lausanne)

Diane Watt (University of Surrey)

Editorial Board

Miri Rubin (Queen Mary University of London)

Jean-Claude Schmitt (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris)

Fiona Somerset (Duke University)

Christiania Whitehead (University of Warwick)

RELIGION AND CULTURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Cultivating the Heart

FEELING AND EMOTION IN TWELFTH- AND THIRTEENTH-CENTURY RELIGIOUS TEXTS

A. S. LAZIKANI

© A. S. Lazikani, 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library CIP Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The right of Ayoush Sarmada Lazikani to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

CONTENTS

Series Editors’ Preface

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations

Note on Editions and Translations

Introduction: Feeling in the High Middle Ages

1 Upon a Spiritual Cross: Feeling in the Lambeth and Trinity Homilies

2 The Gnawed Hand: Presence and Absence of Feeling in the Early South

English Legendaries

3 Co-feeling: Compassion in Ancrene Wisse and the Wooing Group

4 Call Me Bitter: Feeling and Sensing in Passion Lyrics

Conclusion

Notes

Select Bibliography

SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages aims to explore the interface between medieval religion and culture, with as broad an understanding of those terms as possible. It puts to the forefront studies which engage with works that significantly contributed to the shaping of medieval culture. However, it also gives attention to studies dealing with works that reflect and highlight aspects of medieval culture that have been neglected in the past by scholars of the medieval disciplines. For example, devotional works and the practice they infer illuminate our understanding of the medieval subject and its culture in remarkable ways, while studies of the material space designed and inhabited by medieval subjects yield new evidence on the period and the people who shaped it and lived in it. In the larger field of religion and culture, we also want to explore further the roles played by women as authors, readers and owners of books, thereby defining them more precisely as actors in the cultural field. The series as a whole investigates the European Middle Ages, from c.500 to c.1500. Our aim is to explore medieval religion and culture with the tools belonging to such disciplines as, among others, art history, philosophy, theology, history, musicology, the history of medicine, and literature. In particular, we would like to promote interdisciplinary studies, as we believe strongly that our modern understanding of the term applies fascinatingly well to a cultural period marked by a less tight confinement and categorization of its disciplines than the modern period. However, our only criterion is academic excellence, with the belief that the use of a large diversity of critical tools and theoretical approaches enables a deeper understanding of medieval culture. We want the series to reflect this diversity, as we believe that, as a collection of outstanding contributions, it offers a more subtle representation of a period that is marked by paradoxes and contradictions and which necessarily reflects diversity and difference, however difficult it may sometimes have proved for medieval culture to accept these notions.

ILLUSTRATIONS

1 Passion Cycle on East Wall in St Mary’s Church, Brook, Kent (c.1260–80)

2 Passion sequence on South Wall in St Michael’s Church, Great Tew, Oxfordshire (c.1290)

3 Passion sequence on South Wall of the nave of St Mary’s Church, West Chiltington, Sussex (c.1250–75)

4 Detail of the Passion sequence in St Michael’s Church, Great Tew, Oxfordshire (c.1290): ‘Noli me tangere’

All photographs are the author’s own. The approximate dates follow those given by Anne Marshall in her ‘Painted Church’ project: <www.paintedchurch.org/> (accessed June 2013).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am very grateful to many eminent scholars and editors for their generous interest in and feedback on this book as it has developed.

Most of all, I am very grateful to Dr Annie Sutherland for investing a great deal of her time reading through my work and offering so much invaluable feedback, both as my doctoral supervisor and in subsequent years. No student could have had a more caring or inspiring supervisor.

Professor Vincent Gillespie and Professor Elizabeth Robertson also invested much of their time as my doctoral examiners reading and correcting material that is now in this book. I very much appreciate the wealth of feedback they have given me, and all their kindness and encouragement both as my examiners and in subsequent years.

I am grateful to Professor Denis Renevey for his generous interest in this project and for all his many stimulating suggestions, and to Dr Helen Barr for her supportive and thoughtful comments on my work. Professor Bella Millett has taken the time to kindly answer my many queries on homilies, and I thank also the anonymous reader of my manuscript at the University of Wales Press for her valuable suggestions.

Dr Liz Herbert McAvoy and Dr Catherine Innes-Parker have, as always, shown me great kindness, and Dr Alexandra Da Costa and Dr Aditi Nafde have been so encouraging. I would also like to thank Dr Tony Hunt and Dr Jane Bliss for their very useful input on Anglo-Norman texts.

In its earlier stages as a doctoral thesis, this project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and I am grateful to the AHRC for making this initial research possible.

Thank you very much to Bertie and Bissan for advice about photographing church wall paintings. I am so grateful to Maria for reading over parts of this book carefully, and for all her warm encouragement over the past years. And thank you so much to Sabina for all her support and friendship through this project’s development.

This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Amal, and to my father, Muhydin – for everything they have done, and for which no words could ever be sufficient.

ABBREVIATIONS

NOTE ON EDITIONS AND TRANSLATIONS

Biblical References

Due to considerations of space, biblical references in most cases are to the Douay-Rheims translation, and not to the original Latin Vulgate (The Holy Bible, Douay Version: Translated from the Latin Vulgate (Douay, AD 1609: Rheims, AD 1582). London: Catholic Truth Society, 1956).

Editions of Middle English

All quotations are taken from the following editions:

I The Lambeth and Trinity Homilies

Lambeth homilies:

Old English Homilies, First Series, ed. Richard Morris, EETS O. S. 29, 34 (London, 1867–8).

Trinity homilies:

Old English Homilies, Second Series, ed. Richard Morris, EETS O. S. 53 (London, 1873).

Punctuation has been modernized.

II South English Legendaries

The Early South-English Legendary, or, Lives of Saints, ed. Carl Horstmann, EETS O. S. 87 (London, 1887).

III Ancrene Wisse and the Wooing Group

Ancrene Wisse: A Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402 with Variants from Other Manuscripts, ed. Bella Millett, 2 vols, EETS O. S. 325 and 326 (Oxford, 2005–6).

Þe Wohunge of ure Lauerd, etc., ed. W. Meredith Thompson, EETS O. S. 241 (London, 1958).

Given the heavily diplomatic nature of Thompson’s edition, the texts have been re-edited from the manuscripts, but page numbers to Thompson’s edition are given for the reader’s convenience. Abbreviations (with the exception of the Tironian nota) are expanded, Word-spacing is modernized, ‘wynn’ is rendered ‘w’, and interlinear or marginal insertions in the manuscripts are also made silently. Obvious scribal errors – typically eth for ‘d’, and thorn for ‘b’ – are corrected without comment. Semicolons stand for the punctus elevatus.

IV Middle English Lyrics

English Lyrics of the Thirteenth Century, ed. Carleton Brown (Oxford, 1932). ‘Wynn’ in Brown’s edition is reproduced as ‘w’, but ‘thorn’ and ‘eth’ are preserved.

Other editions have been consulted in conjunction with Brown’s work, as will be referenced in the book.

Translations

In order to maintain consistency in terminology for affective stirrings, I have provided my own translations of medieval Latin, Anglo-Norman and modern French, unless otherwise stated. Translations of key Middle English terms are available in table 2 in the introduction.

Introduction:

Feeling in the High Middle Ages

Affective Farmlands

In Part VII of the thirteenth-century guide Ancrene Wisse, the author encourages the anchoress to ‘cultivate’ her heart. It is an image based on the sayings of the Ethiopian Abba Moses in Cassian’s (c.360–435) Collationes:1

For as þe hali abbat Moyses seide, al þet wa ant al et heard þet we þolieð o flesch, ant al þet god þet we eauer doð, alle swucche þinges ne beoð nawt bute as lomen to tilie wið þe heorte.

(145:12–15)

A human heart is figured as tillable land, receptive to the intricate tools put to work on it. The anchoritic reader problematizes any scholarly misapprehension that medieval figures were ‘benighted, insentient, too brutalized or primitive to have a subtle emotional life’.2 As this book demonstrates, medieval authors, readers and audiences were far from unfeeling, brute-like creatures ‘enveloped in a cowl’, cowering behind a ‘thick veil’, or lurking inside a ‘dungeon’ of crudity and miscomprehension.3 Rather, they were cultivators of the heart’s terrain. The present monograph is dedicated to tracing the processes of such cultivation, through studying the nurturance of affective pain – especially in the form of the intertwined stirrings of compassion, love and sorrow – in a range of religious texts of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

This book can be defined as a cartography of affective pain: it studies closely these religious texts to trace the ways in which affective stirrings of sorrow, love and compassion are shaped, expressed and evoked for the audiences and readerships. There has been significant attention paid to the language of ‘affectivity’ in the Latin writings of twelfth-and thirteenth-century monastic writers such as William of Saint-Thierry (c.1075–1147/8) and Richard of Saint-Victor (d.1173), most especially in earlier chapters of Denis Renevey’s (2001) monograph.4 Insular, vernacular texts of the High Middle Ages, on the other hand, remain neglected in work on the history of emotions, with the exception of a section of Sarah McNamer’s monograph (2009). To this date, there has been no book-length study on affective stirrings in English texts of the High Middle Ages. The present monograph aims to meet this need.

In providing an insight into the intricate affective pain of medieval authors, readers and audiences, this book seeks to make a contribution to the ‘history of emotions’, as the field is now known – a burgeoning research area. It should not be forgotten, however, that the recent growth in scholarship on medieval emotion was born from long-standing work into medieval affectivity, most especially in major essays of the 1980s and 1990s on the later Middle Ages by Vincent Gillespie, William F. Pollard and A. J. Minnis.5 Recent research has worked to ‘rehabilitate the emotions’, to use Thomas Dixon’s phrase, and in the past decade key critical narratives on medieval emotion have emerged.6 In 2006, Barbara H. Rosenwein challenged the assumption that medieval emotion is puerile and unsophisticated, with a study that investigates ‘emotional communities’ in a range of texts in the early Middle Ages, ending in the seventh century. Expanding Brian Stock’s ‘textual communities’, Rosenwein defines emotional communities as ‘groups in which people adhere to the same norms of emotional expression and value – or devalue – the same or related emotions’.7 According to Rosenwein’s model, ‘[e]motional communities are not constituted by one or two emotions but rather by constellations – or sets – of emotions’. Her work is informed by close literary analysis, ‘noting all the words, gestures, and cries that signify feelings’, in order to trace patterns and narratives of feeling both present and absent.8

In her 2009 monograph, McNamer casts affective meditations, c.1050–1530, as ‘intimate scripts’: ‘they are quite literally scripts for the performance of feeling – scripts that often explicitly aspire to performative efficacy’. As she observes, ‘[m]any are scripted as first-person, present-tense utterances, designed to be enacted by the reader’. Within her identification of these ‘scripts for the performance of feeling’, she also characterizes affective meditations as ‘mechanisms for the production of emotion’, aligning them with William Reddy’s conception of ‘emotives’.9 Central to McNamer’s work is gender performance. For McNamer, ‘to perform compassion is to feel like a woman’. She disrupts the standard genealogy of Passion meditation to foreground the role of female readers: ‘Compassionate devotion to the Passion was most certainly an affective practice central to the lives of religious women before its adoption by the Franciscans’.10 As she herself acknowledges, however, it is more fruitful to view the history of compassion as a collaborative effort between the famous male authors of ‘affective meditation’ – notably Bernard of Clairvaux († 1153), Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) and John of Fécamp († 1078) – and their female readers.11

Affective reader response has also been brought to the fore by Mark Amsler. In his major book of 2011, developing an earlier article, he writes on ‘affective literacy’. This term is employed ‘to denote a range of emotional, spiritual, physiological, somatic responses readers have when reading or perceiving a text, such as crying, laughing, imagining, or becoming aroused’. The coinage ‘also entails the temporality and traces of reading, reading as marking which then transforms the book’s material object-ness and produces a variant object for later readers’.12 Although his work assesses a large body of material across the medieval centuries, a pivotal point in his book rests on Ancrene Wisse. On this text, he observes: ‘reading is active rather than passive, especially when a religious reader creates images and affects of devotion while engaged with the text or listening to or contemplating it’.13 Amsler has called attention to affective reading as a profoundly active, profoundly formative, process. Further to these key critical narratives by Rosenwein, McNamer and Amsler are two notable monographs. Michelle Karnes demonstrates the ‘cognitive work’ of the imagination, linked closely with affective stirrings, in Aristotelian philosophy, meditations on Christ, and Piers Plowman (2011); and Jennifer Bryan shows how English devotional texts ‘sought to shape the hidden selves of their readers’ (2008).14

This Book

The first chapter of this present book studies the Lambeth and Trinity homilies, two of three surviving early Middle English homiletic collections.15 It examines the management and provocation of feeling in these texts – the homilies’ drive towards categorizing as well as stimulating feeling for their composite audiences through each performance.16 Contrition and the twofold love of caritas are the affective crux of the texts. Centred on the biblical exhortation to deny the self and take up the Cross (Luke 9:23; Mark 8:36; Matthew 16:24), Lambeth 15/Trinity 32 asserts that there are two forms of crosses, bodily and spiritual, encapsulating the physical-affective pain that defines correct penitence during this period. The spiritual crosses signify ‘heorte sar’ for sin, and compassion (‘rowðe’) for fellow Christians (pp. 207–9, 149): the homiletic heart of the collections. Drawing on Quintillian and Augustinian models of affective presence and alignment, chapter 1 contends that the texts form an ‘emotional community’ through their attempt to structure and stimulate affective pain, strengthened by the congregational context.

Chapter 2 moves from homiletic to hagiographical modes, assessing the ‘collection’ of the South English Legendaries. It argues that there is a concern with the presence and absence of feeling in these texts: hagiographical performance enables the lay audience to both engage and withdraw affectively from the physical and affective pain in the legends. While the audience can move closer to the smarting flesh and hearts, it is also confronted by a figurative reliquary: a barrier in performance that prevents affective engagement with saintly pain. This chapter differs from the others of this book in that the affective pain it explores is not consistently of a redemptive kind. It does not focus solely on the love, sorrow and compassion that enables the purification of the soul for its entrance into Heaven. Audiences are invited to engage affectively both with redemptive and non-redemptive sorrow.

Chapter 3 turns to a more specialized audience: thirteenth-century anchoresses, readers with high levels of affective literacy.17 It examines the anchoritic guidance text Ancrene Wisse and the associated meditations known collectively as the Wooing Group, affirming that the anchoress’s compassion – her ‘rewðe’ – is a central affective stirring in the anchorhold. A distanced, superficial pity is not the anchoress’s goal. She does not ‘pity’: she ‘co-feels’, to use Milan Kundera’s term (1984),18 participating in an affective space shared with other selves. Her heart is opened to external invasion, and she attempts to reach the pain of Mother and Son. Christ stimulates Compassion in the anchoress, and also emanates compassion for her. compassion is most skillfully modelled and nurtured by the Virgin Mary, who aids the anchoress in becoming a co-feeler.

Following on from its examination of the lyrical Wooing Group, the fourth and final chapter of this book examines thirteenth-century ‘English’ Passion lyrics, now resituated in their multilingual context by Ardis Butterfield (2011). It builds on the findings of the previous chapters to argue that the lyrics, far from being affectively simple texts, encourage the evocation and attempted expression of sophisticated affective stirrings. The human voice coupled with senses and organs (sight, taste, touch, and dance-based movement) are used to inspire and apprehend rich affective responses. Chapter 4 contends that the multilingual and multisensorial typography of these Passion lyrics is crucial in the texts’ stimulation of affective pain for both clerical and lay audiences. The sensorial potency of lyrics has been an undercurrent in scholarship – with Rosemary Greentree and Theodore Silverstein even employing a taste-based critical vocabulary – but its affective significance has not yet been brought to the surface.19

Situated within the long-standing and more recent work on medieval emotion, this book supports existing scholarship to re-assert the sophistication of feeling in medieval texts, and within this to re-assert the important cognitive aspect of medieval feeling that has been foregrounded by Pollard, Karnes and Geoffrey Shepherd (1972). The present book employs but also modifies the influential narratives of ‘emotional communities’ and ‘scripts for the performance of feeling’. It puts a spotlight on texts as attempted expressions and stimulators of feeling, enriched by the existing affective literacy brought to each text by authors, readers and audiences. Reading is a nurturance of affective literacy, but it is also itself enhanced by the affective-literate behaviours brought to it. As such, emotional communities can be strengthened by the congregational bonds imagined in homiletics, and emotional communities can also reach a level of intensity where participants do not only value the same feeling, but also co-feel – as can be found in the thirteenth-century anchorhold.

And while the homiletic, hagiographical, guidance, and meditative texts of this book all enable the performance of feeling, it is difficult to substantiate a claim that they are all literal, in-depth ‘scripts’. The texts are more than mere ‘mechanisms for the production of emotion’: they do enable the attempted expression, stimulation and performance of feeling, but are dependent on the affective capacities of readers and audiences. The present book avoids the terminology of texts ‘producing’ or ‘creating’ feeling, referring instead to language stimulating, nurturing or shaping affective pain. Texts may introduce new modes of feeling, awaken feeling that is latent, enable expression of affective pain when it is otherwise inexpressible, and intensify sensation. But they cannot ‘produce’ feeling in a vacuum.

Nor can the feeling exist in a no-man’s-land, somewhere both outside and inside a text. It is one of the great paradoxes in the history of emotions that feeling is inexpressible yet also shaped by the language through which it is written and spoken.20 Readers and audiences of these texts do not only read or hear in English: they also feel in English. The ‘Englishness’ of the attempted expression and evocation of feeling cannot be overlooked. At the same time, however, it would be too far a leap to claim that any of the texts, with the exception of the South English Legendaries, have nationalistic agendas in their use of English. Philological work on the Lambeth and Trinity homilies continues, but it can be stated with some confidence that any preference for English vocabulary for affective stirring (such as ‘armheortnesse’, to be studied in chapter 1) is for the sake of the composite, clerical-lay audience.21 Much work has been undertaken on the nationalistic impulse of the South English Legendaries, tied intimately to a ‘lack of self-conscious acknowledgement of its status as an English text’.22 Keeping its nationalistic impulse in mind, it must not be forgotten that the SEL shows a mixture of French and English lexis.23

The authors of Ancrene Wisse and the Wooing Group overwhelmingly privilege English terms for the affections, demonstrated most clearly with the term ‘luue’, stemming from Old English ‘lufu’.24 There are only seven instances of ‘chearite’ and one of ‘chearitable’ in Ancrene Wisse, but there are no fewer than 158 instances of ‘luue’ in Ancrene Wisse, along with numerous occurrences of its related verbs, adjectives, adverbs and compound nouns.25 In the Wooing Group, ‘chearite’ is never used. ‘Luue’, on the other hand, has a higher frequency than any of the Middle English terms listed in table 2 below.26 Such a decision can again be explained by the intended audience, unfamiliar with Latin terms. After all, the Ancrene Wisse-author uses a higher proportion of French-derived words than previously recorded anywhere in English, and he is the first recorded author to use certain Latin- or French-derived terms, such as ‘conscience’, ‘trinite’ and ‘affectiun’.27

Finally, the Passion lyrics, long exalted for their insularity, have now been more correctly placed in their multilingual milieux. With all these contexts in mind, the present book will maintain focus on the English language that shapes and triggers feeling, without claiming that all texts are self-consciously or purely ‘English’.

Texts, Readers and Audiences

The Lambeth and Trinity Homilies

The homilies studied in chapter 1 are found in two manuscripts: London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 487 (L) and Cambridge, Trinity College, MS 335 (B. 14. 52) (T). T has been dated to the second half of the twelfth century, and L is datable to the first quarter of the thirteenth.28 L contains seventeen homilies (fols 1r–59v) and a copy of the Poema Morale (fols 59v–65r): all are by one scribe. The manuscript also has an unfinished copy of Ureisun of God appended to it, on fols 65v–67r, by a mid-thirteenth-century scribe.29 L’s complex textual history has been disentangled by Ralph Hanna: it is ‘pieced together’ from at least two ‘existing books’, though ‘[n]either appears to have been continuously available to the scribe’.30 T contains thirty-four sermons.31 Five of the L homilies as well as the Poema Morale are also found in T. These shared homilies are Lambeth 7/Trinity 4, Lambeth 13/Trinity 26, Lambeth 15/Trinity 32, Lambeth 16/Trinity 30, and Lambeth 17/Trinity 25. A new edition of the homilies is in preparation by Bella Millett, the first since Richard Morris’s two-volume work (1867–8 and 1873).

The hand of the homilies and Poema Morale in L has been localized to the West Midlands area: Margaret Laing and Angus McIntosh state that the L texts show a ‘language of a clearly western type, quite different from those of T[rinity], and belonging somewhere near the border of Herefordshire and south Shropshire’.32 In personal communication with Millett, Laing has further suggested that L can be localized to ‘anywhere’ in the north Herefordshire/north Worcestershire/south Shropshire ‘intersection’.33 This localization of L excitingly places it, as Millett observes, ‘in the same West Midlands area as the early manuscripts of the Ancrene Wisse group’.34 Millett proposes a compelling ‘unified theory’, viewing the texts of the Ancrene Wisse group as part of post-1215 pastoral reform in the West Midlands.35

Bella Millett’s findings have shed light on the complexity of the pastoral contexts and users of the Lambeth and Trinity homilies, revealing a rich diocesan pastoral milieu for the two collections. As Millett demonstrates, the homilies are ‘unlikely to be typical of the parish preaching of the time’.36 She argues that the nature of the homilies indicate ‘supra-catechetical’ preaching, which in the early thirteenth century is ‘more likely to have taken place, or at least been initiated, at diocesan than at parish level’.37 This allows for a varied audience,