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 visualization and concentration on vivid images of scenes from the Bible, Saints' Lives, Virgin Mary, Christ and religious symbols, feeling from the result. 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.
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: Ah, Lord, your sorrow—why was it not my death? Now they lead you forth as naked as a worm, with torturers around you and armed knights. The press of the crowd was incredibly intense as they threw things and harried you so shamefully, kicking at you as if you had been a dog. I see in my soul how ruefully you walk, your body so bloody, so raw and blistered. The crown on your head is so sharp, and your hair, blown in the wind, is all matted with blood. Your lovely face is so pale and swollen with the blows and the beatings, and covered with spittle and phlegm. And down runs your blood; it horrifies me to see it.
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: Sche had many an holy thowt of owr Lordys passyon and beheld hym in hir gostly syght as verily as he had ben aforn hir in hir bodily syght. Therfor myth sche not wythstondyn wepyng and sobbyng, but sche must nedys wepyn, cryin, and sobbyn whan sche beheld hir Savyowr suffyr so gret peynys for hir lofe. 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.
Summary Affective piety can be described as a type of highly emotional devotion, focused on the humanity of Jesus, which developed during the High Middle Ages. Anselm of Canterbury, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Francis of Assisi each played a key role in the development of this approach to spirituality. Traces of an affective sensitivity can be found in Late Antiquity, when clergymen preached sermons with vivid descriptions of the Passion. One example of this is an Eastertide sermon by St. Augustine: The Passion of the Lord signifies our time, in which we now weep. Whips, fetters, mockings, spit, crown of thorns, embittered wine, vinegar in a sponge, insults, taunts, finally the cross itself, the holy limbs hanging on the wood, what does this signify to us, if not the time in which we act, the time of mourning, the time of mortality, the time of temptation?
The origins and functions of affective piety: the current scholarly consensus
The "Southern Thesis" 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."
On Southern's view, both Anselm and the Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux gave form in their writings to a "theme of tenderness and compassion for the sufferings and helplessness of the Saviour of the world." Anselm, he wrote, "dwelt with passionate intensity on the details of Christ's sufferings," and his prayers "opened up a new world of ardent emotion and piety." Southern attributed this "new feeling about the humanity of the Saviour" to a shift in soteriology, the doctrine concerning how humanity comes to be "saved from the consequences of sin." Southern claimed that the "Devil's Rights", or Ransom Theory, left little room for human action, for according to it salvation was brought about in a "cosmic struggle" in which Satan had to be brought "to break the rules under which he held mankind in fee." Anselm (according to Southern) rejected this theory for one theologians call the Satisfaction Theory of Atonement, in which "Christ suffered as a substitute on behalf of humankind satisfying the demands of God's honor by his infinite merit." This allowed for a "fresh appreciation of the human sufferings of the Redeemer." Anselm's Orationes sive meditationes (Prayers and Meditations) signalled something that Southern (in his 1990 biography of Anselm) called "The Anselmian Transformation": a shift from the brief, simple, corporate prayers of the Carolingian period to more introspective, private "prolonged ourpourings" spoken in "a language of self-revelation" infused with "theological insight." Anselm, Southern wrote, "added the discipline of exact thought and the warmth of exuberant feeling to the religious impulses of his day." Anselm's prayers work on the emotions; he "strains every resource of language to express and stimulate in his reader both the mental excitation and humiliation necessary for the double activity of self-examination and abasement in the presence of holiness."
In a later generation, Southern argued, Bernard of Clairvaux refined and built on this, and the "imaginative following of the details of the earthly life of Jesus, and especially of the sufferings of the Cross, became part of that programme of progress from carnal to spiritual love which we have called the Cistercian programme." Then, with "St. Francis and his followers, the fruits of the experiences of St. Anselm and St. Bernard were brought to the market place, and became the common property of the lay and clerical world alike." Concerning later affective piety, Southern writes that "the somewhat hectic piety of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries" resulted from a weakening of the intellectual structure that gave rise to the "surge of pious devotion" of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
Other scholars repeated this story over the next thirty years, either drawing on Southern's work or from the same sources. Notable among them are Louis L. Martz [The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (1954)], William A. Pantin [The English Church in the Fourteenth Century (1955)], Rosemary Woolf [The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (1968)], Douglas Gray [Themes and Images in the Medieval English Lyric (1972)], and Elizabeth Salter [Nicholas Love's "Myrrour of the blessed lyf of Jesu Christ" (1974)]. The Southern Thesis also informs Richard Kieckhefer's book, Unquiet Souls (1984), even taking on explanatory force in his chapter on "Devotion to the Passion."
The Southern Thesis remains the basis of the standard definition of affective piety, as, for example, in this definition from an anthology of devotional literature: The twelfth century is marked by the growth of affective piety, or a form of spirituality that differed from that of the previous centuries by placing much greater emphasis on self-examination, the inner emotions, and the cultivation of an interior life. This form of piety was typically anchored in devotion to Christ in his human form, with special attention to the events of the Passion. The movement was led first by the Cistercians Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) and Aelred of Rievaulx (d. 1167); by the thirteenth century the movement came to be closely identified with Franciscan religiosity, especially as shaped by Francis of Assisi (d. 1226) and Bonaventure (d. 1274). The flamboyant piety of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries developed from these roots. Although it would be a mistake to view late medieval piety as homogeneous, its dominant expressions were notable for heightened degrees of emotionalism and a preoccupation with the tortured body of Christ and the grief of the Virgin Mary.
The same general outline is followed by Thomas H. Bestul in Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society (1996), in his entry on "Devotional and Mystical Literature" in Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide (1999), and in his chapter "Meditatio/Meditation" in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism (2012).
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: ...follow her [the Virgin Mary] as she goes to Bethlehem, and turning away from the inn with her, help and humor her during the birth; and when the little child is placed in the manger, burst out words of exultation, crying out with Isaiah: A child is born to us, a son is given to us (Is. 9.6). Embrace that sweet manger, let love conquer bashfulness, and emotion drive out fear so that you fix your lips on those most sacred feet and repeat the kisses.
The Franciscan popularization thesis One common variation on the Southern Thesis describes affective piety from the thirteenth century on as essentially Franciscan. One early and still widely cited source for this opinion is F.J.E. Raby's A History of Christian-Latin Poetry. While David L. Jeffrey's book The Early English Lyric & Franciscan Spirituality (1975) did not study affective piety per se, the book followed on previous histories of spirituality (such as the Leclercq, Vandenbrouke, and Bouyer volume, The Spirituality of the Middle Ages) that describe "tender and affective meditation on Christ and especially on those mysteries of his life that are most apt to touch the heart—his birth, childhood, passion, and death," as being particularly "characteristic" of Franciscan piety. [Note that there were mixed reviews of Jeffrey's book.] Clarissa Atkinson's study Mystic and Pilgrim: the Book and World of Margery Kempe (1983), follows the "Southern Thesis" in the fifth chapter, In the Likeness of a Man': The Tradition of Affective Piety.. But she adds, "Of all the forces that helped to shape popular devotion in the Middle Ages, none was more significant than the Franciscans."" She elaborates on how Bernard of Clairvaux's devotion to and "adoration of the sacred humanity...was adapted by the Franciscans, who transformed it into a popular passion focused on the details of Christ's birth and death and used it to preach penitence to large numbers of lay as well as religious people."