Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion . By Sarah McNamer. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. viii + 312 pp. $59.95 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)This is a spellbinding book. McNamer has taken on one of the biggest questions there is in medieval studies: why the shift from worshipping a triumphant Christ to meditating on a suffering savior? The only other person ambitious enough to attempt to answer this question directly in recent years is Rachel Fulton, who memorably argued in From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800-1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003) that it was a theological response to anxiety incurred by the millennium of Christ's passion. For Fulton, as for most scholars, the key instigators of the change were male theologians, spurred by their own fear. By contrast, McNamer argues that the change was instead motivated by women, and by society's changing conceptions of marriage in particular. It is a stark contrast, and a classic case of what Joan Scott long ago proclaimed gender history could do: enable us to see old problems in a new light, and to demonstrate that gender can make all the difference. Not coincidentally, this study also rids marriage of its mustiness, presenting the hoary institution as both catalyst and register of complex cultural change.If McNamer puts more emphasis on culture and gender than theology, it is in part because she, like John Corrigan, believes that religionists have too readily conflated religious emotions with theological ideas. McNamer redresses this problem by starting with the assumption that emotions, including religious emotions, are habits produced through cultural scripts. Scripts change as cultures change, and thus the history of emotions requires cultural analysis. But McNamer's own mode of analysis yields original conclusions because she pursues her historical argument not only by analyzing context but also form. It is in and through her attention to genre--here the broadly conceived genre of affective meditations and, in the last chapter, the more specific form of devotional lyrics--that McNamer shifts the focus from theological sources to textual effects. Given what these texts do, what might we conclude about why they were written?What McNamer finds is that, above all, these texts provide readers with proof that their love for Christ is real. She takes seriously, then, that in many devotional texts the reader is presented as a bride betrothed to Christ, seeking assurance that this promise of marriage will be fulfilled. In the legal parlance of the time, the fulfillment of the promise was contingent on proofs of love. McNamer persuasively demonstrates that this bridal language was not solely or even primarily allegorical. Because these texts were written for and, in some cases, by nuns and recluses who were ritually and legally betrothed to Christ as sponsae Christi , it is important to recognize that much of the language addressed a literal situation. The Song of Songs is not the only, and often not the dominant, source. As McNamer puts it in a characteristically deft description of her methodological assumptions, sometimes marital discourse was literalized because "sometimes bodies do make a semiotic difference." While the identity of sponsa might be a "provisional persona" for men, "female religious--precisely because they were female--could participate in another signifying system, this one social and historical: if the standard rituals were enacted, chastity observed, and, crucially, the fitting feelings repeatedly performed, female religious could become literally, by which I mean legally, married to Christ--not only in this life but for all eternity" (28). This claim to literalism may sound naive to those of us accustomed to insisting upon the allegorical nature of all bridal motifs in Christianity (and Judaism), but McNamer's sophisticated textual analysis should assuage most doubts. …