Affective piety

Affective piety is most commonly described as a style of highly emotional devotion to the humanity of Jesus, particularly in his infancy and his death, and to the joys and sorrows of the Virgin Mary. It was a major influence on many varieties of devotional literature in late-medieval Europe, both in Latin and in the vernaculars.: This practice of prayer, reading, and meditation was often cultivated through concentration on vivid images of scenes from the Bible, Saints' Lives, and other religious material. These images could be either conjured up in people's minds when they read or heard poetry and other pieces of religious literature, or they could gaze on manuscript illuminations and other pieces of art as they prayed and meditated on the scenes depicted. In either case, this style of affective meditation asked the "viewer" to engage with the scene as if she or he were physically present and to stir up feelings of love, fear, grief, and/or repentance for sin.

A classic textual model for affective meditation is found in the De institutione inclusarum, or The Rule for Recluses, a text written by Aelred of Rievaulx for his sister, who was living as an anchoress (a female religious recluse). In the section of the text devoted to the Nativity of Jesus, Aelred wrote:

While the texts and art of Affective Piety could focus on a variety of subjects, they are particularly noted for their gory and violent depictions of the Passion and Crucifixion, as in Richard Rolle's Meditation on the Passion:

Margery Kempe is often used to demonstrate the practice of late-medieval affective piety. In the autobiographical book she dictated to two different scribes, Margery describes her imaginative and emotional reaction during Palm Sunday services:

The Isenheim Altarpiece provides a good, late instance of a piece of art meant to engage the emotions. Images for more intimate, private use can be found in Books of Hours and other manuscripts.

In the chapter on high medieval spirituality in his book The Making of the Middle Ages, the medievalist Richard W. Southern was building on the work of scholars such as André Wilmart and Étienne Gilson. Nevertheless, he is generally credited with having drawn attention to what he (and others) understood to be a shift in devotional practice at the start of the High Middle Ages. He described a "mood of emotional tenderness which runs through the literature of the twelfth century" and considered Anselm of Canterbury to be the quintessential example of an eleventh-century "urge towards a greater measure of solitude, of introspection, and self-knowledge," an urge that "ran like fire through Europe in the generation after his death and produced an outburst of meditations and spiritual soliloquies." Southern, who would go on to write two different biographies of Anselm, argued that "Anselm was the founder of the new type of ardent and effusive self-disclosure," but that "it was the Cistercians who produced the greatest volume, and, as it were, set the fashion in this type of literature."

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