Professor Lauren Mancia will present "Affective Piety in the Eleventh-Century Monastery." Lauren Mancia is an Assistant Professor of History at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. She specializes in the devotional culture of medieval monasteries in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Apart from several articles on this subject, she recently published her first monograph, Emotional Monasticism: Affective Piety at the Eleventh-Century Monastery of John of Fécamp (Manchester University Press, 2019). The abstract for her talk is below.
"Scholars of the Middle Ages have long taught that highly emotional Christian devotion to a suffering crucified Christ, often called ‘affective piety’, originated in Europe after the twelfth century, and was primarily practiced by late medieval communities of mendicants, lay people, and/or women. Stemming from Mancia’s new book, Emotional Monasticism: Affective Piety at the Eleventh-Century Monastery of John of Fécamp (Manchester, 2019), this talk will trace the early Benedictine monastic history of affective devotion through the life and work of the earliest-known writer of emotional prayers, John of Fécamp, abbot of the Norman monastery of Fécamp from 1028-1078 C.E.. The talk will first examine John’s major work, the Confessio theologica (written ca. 1023-1028), defining the type of affective devotion contained therein. It will then trace the kind of emotional piety found in John’s writing throughout the emotion-filled devotional program of Fécamp’s wider liturgical, homiletic, and intellectual culture. The talk will then briefly address John’s later medieval legacy in famous late medieval examples beyond Fécamp and Normandy, and will ultimately conclude with some thoughts on why we as scholars might be reluctant to place affective piety in the earlier period and in the central medieval Benedictine monastery, and what happens when we neglect to do so."
