In the quiet, well-lit comfort of the modern British Library, with its clean architectural lines so conducive to attentive study, it is possible to examine a thirteenth-century manuscript made for a group of anchoresses living in the borderlands between England and Wales. Small in size, this manuscript (British Library MS Cotton Titus D.xviii) invites easy handling and use, as befits its content, for its texts—Ancrene Wisse and four related Middle English works—concern the daily practices that can make the self worthy of the beloved, Jesus. The script is clear and easy to read throughout, with the curious exception...

“How did it happen,” Émile Mâle asked in his early and influential study of religious art, “that, in the fourteenth century, Christians wished to see their God suffer and die? . . . Who had released this gushing spring? Who had thus struck the Church in its very heart? This problem, one of the most interesting presented by the history of Christianity, has never been resolved, nor, to tell the truth, has it ever been clearly posed.”¹ The problem is one of the most interesting not only in the history of Christianity but also in the history of emotion. For...

In 1207, after sixteen years spent serving lepers in Liège while begging alms for her sustenance, Marie d’Oignies retired to the priory of Saint-Nicholas at Oignies-sur-Sambre, in what is now Belgium. Fame had become too great a burden: the example she had set, living in poverty because Christ had lived in poverty, serving lepers because she saw Christ in them, had attracted many to come and work with her and the loosely affiliated group of women known as the mulieres sanctae, or beguines. In 1207, she was above all seeking the solitude needed for prayer—prayer of an intensely affective...

Around the time the anonymous author in Italy sat down to write the original version of the Meditations, another momentous event took place across the English Channel: Richard Rolle quit his course of study at Oxford and ran off to the woods to become a hermit, wearing a patchwork garment hastily assembled from two of his sister’s dresses. “My brother’s gone mad,” his appalled sister is said to have declared.¹ It was not shame, however, but lasting honor that was to accrue to the family name. Rolle is typically regarded as a key figure in the development of affective piety...

Compassion is not only an emotion but also potentially the foundation for an ethic. The cultivation of compassion in the devotional realm, then, clearly had the potential to effect ethical thinking and behavior on a wider scale, and the rare autobiographical writings that survive from late medieval England reveal that in some cases meditation on the Passion did indeed produce this effect. Julian of Norwich describes how her visions of the suffering Christ—visions in part generated by the practice of affective meditation and feminized “beholding”—deepened her pity for her fellow Christians: “Right as I was before in the...

Late in the history of the Middle English Passion lyric, an intriguing figure enters the scene: dancing Besse. She does so in a carol with the refrain,

Come over the burne Besse

Thou lytyll, praty Besse,

Com over the burne, Besse,

Thou lytell praty Besse

Com over the burne, Besse, to me.¹

Although “Come over the burne” circulated mostly as a secular song and was printed as such, two allegorized versions survive. The shorter of these appears in the Ritson manuscript (British Library Additional MS 5665), where it is scored for three male voices. The single stanza recorded here lays...