ABSTRACT
Like most historiographic terms, ‘affective piety’ is difficult to define due to the fact that its exact meaning has never been absolutely agreed upon by the scholars who use it. The fact that ‘affective piety’ lacks a totally stable definition does not prevent us from outlining what scholars generally mean by the term. For these purposes, Anne Clark Bartlett and Thomas H. Bestul offer a helpful definition of ‘affective piety’ as ‘a form of spirituality [ascendant in twelfth-century Europe] that differed from that of previous centuries by placing much greater emphasis on self-examination, the inner emotions, and the cultivation of an interior life’. 1 More specifically Bartlett and Bestul relate that ‘[t]his form of piety was typically anchored in devotion to Christ in his human form, with special attention to the events of the Passion’. 2 This definition is deeply indebted to R.W. Southern’s foundational thesis that the twelfth century saw a shift to an emotional mode of devotion to Christ’s suffering, quintessentially represented by the work of Anselm of Canterbury. 3 Although still influential, Southern’s narrative hardly reflects a scholarly consensus. For one thing, many scholars focusing on earlier time periods have found examples of intense devotion to Christ’s suffering in texts composed well before the twelfth century. 4 Other scholars, like Sarah McNamer, have rejected Anselm as the founding father of affective piety, arguing importantly that ‘women were instrumental to this shift in sensibility at the very beginning’. 5 Nevertheless, most scholars continue to consider affective piety an emotional mode of devotion to Christ’s human form and particularly his Passion. On the one hand, doing so furnishes us with a helpful key-term to discuss something that we all agree is present in medieval Europe: a deeply emotional mode of Christian spirituality. On the other hand, the label can be deceptive. After all, taken at face value, affective piety can generally be taken to mean any mode of spirituality, Christian or otherwise, that involves emotion and/or emotional display. Of course, no one culture invented emotional devotion and, when traversing the archive, we certainly need not wait until twelfth-century Europe to find plenty of examples thereof. I would not go so far as to argue that we should entirely abandon the more culturally contingent understanding of affective piety for the less localized one. I would, however, argue that the common practice of defining ‘affective piety’ as a mode of devotion particularly obsessed with Christ’s suffering has yielded a rich and nuanced scholarly discussion of compassion’s role in a variety of premodern 73Christian cultures and substantially less scholarly attention to the role played by other emotions in those same devotional communities.
