Introduction

Through those saving wounds which you suffered on the cross for our salvation and from which flowed precious and vivifying blood … wound this sinful soul of mine for which you were willing even to die; wound it with the fiery and powerful dart of your excessive compassion. You are the living Word of God, efficacious and more piercing than every sharpest sword. You, double-edged sword, cleave my hardness of heart and wound this sinful soul, and pierce more deeply into the inmost parts with your powerful virtue. Give me an abundant source of water and pour into my eyes a true font of tears running day and night out of excessive feeling and desire for the vision of your beauty, so that I may grieve constantly all the days of my life, taking no consolation in the present life, until I merit to see you, my God and my Lord, as a beloved and beautiful spouse in your heavenly chamber.¹

For many years, scholars believed that this prayer excerpt was written in the fourteenth century.² The misattribution is understandable. First, the prayer was transmitted with the Pseudo-Augustinian collection of the Meditations of St Augustine, which enjoyed a formidable circulation in the Late Middle Ages.³ Second, the prayer approaches God in a way commonly associated with late medieval devotion to the crucified Christ: a more human God, suffering on the cross, body wounded and bloody.⁴ The dramatic presentation of the crucified body was typical of late medieval Christian prayer, as was the tearful compassion prescribed.⁵ As a result, this prayer has been regularly used to uphold the narrative that a so-called ‘affective’ approach to God was an artefact of the post-twelfth-century, post-Anselm of Canterbury period, that is, of the Cistercian, Franciscan, lay, and female devotional contexts of the High and Late Middle Ages.⁶

In the 1930s, however, André Wilmart identified this prayer as the work of John of Fécamp, the second abbot of the newly reformed Norman monastery of Fécamp, who lived between c. 990 and 1078.⁷ In fact, Wilmart attributed four prayers from the Meditations of St Augustine to John, noting that they were part of a much larger treatise, posthumously called John’s Confessio theologica (Theological Confession), which was likely written between 1023 and 1028, fifty years before Anselm of Canterbury’s more famous affective prayers.⁸ Since Wilmart’s reattribution, several scholars have characterised John as the earliest medieval writer prescribing ‘affective’ devotion.⁹ And so while John’s interest in the graphic, suffering body of Christ in his Confessio theologica, and his commitment to drawing parallels between the sufferings of the sinner and his God, resonated tremendously with the late medieval audience (an audience hungry for the affective writings of Anselm, Aelred of Rievaulx, Francis, Thomas à Kempis, and Ludolphus of Saxony), John did not compose his prayers with that late medieval audience in mind. He instead wrote his treatise for an audience of traditional, eleventh-century monks, whose use for such affective piety remains heretofore unexplored.¹⁰

This book examines the role of affective devotion in the eleventh-century male monastic context through the lens of John of Fécamp and the devotional culture of his monastery. It also works to understand John’s ideas, his ingenuity, his reception among his peers, and the use, application, and legacy of his kind of emotional devotion. It will fill four lacunae in the scholarship. First, John of Fécamp was an important eleventh-century abbot – it was from his monastery that William the Conqueror launched his ships in 1066 – and yet this will be the first book since the Confessio theologica’s 1946 edition to systematically examine his work, and the only full-length study ever to situate his writings in a wider devotional and historical context. Second, John is part of a lineage of famous tenth- and eleventh-century reform abbots, including several from the Ravenna, Cluniac, and Gorze reform movements. Yet few scholars have reflected on the reform aspects of John’s agenda, and none have discussed the contemplative, affective, interior components of these eleventh-century monastic reform movements; this study will reveal how, alongside regulating observance, customs, and liturgy, eleventh-century monastic reformers attempted to transform the inner emotional lives of their brethren. Third, on a broader level, this book will offer one of the only in-depth expositions of the affective devotional lives of traditional, often called ‘Benedictine’,¹¹ monks, known more for their presumed adherence to unfeeling, blind, communal ritual than for their emphasis on an individual, affective relationship with God. And finally, on its broadest level, as a study of the earliest manifestations of affective piety, this book will recalibrate our understanding of the roots of later medieval spirituality.

John and his monastery of Fécamp

The monastery of Fécamp had been originally established in 658, but was refounded as the Holy Trinity Abbey of Fécamp (Abbaye de la Trinité de Fécamp or Monasterium Sanctae Trinitatis Fiscannensis) in 1001 by an Italian reforming abbot named William of Volpiano at the behest of Duke Richard II of Normandy.¹² John of Fécamp was born between 990 and 995 in Ravenna, Italy, and lived there until he followed his teacher, William of Volpiano, to the Burgundian monastery of Saint-Bénigne de Dijon (where John was a monk under William) and then to the newly reformed monastery of Fécamp (where John was prior under William).¹³ While prior at Fécamp, John wrote his Confessio theologica sometime between 1023 and 1028. Once he became abbot at Fécamp in 1028, John revised this treatise two times: once, by 1030, creating the Libellus de scripturis et verbis patrum collectus ad eorum presertim utilitatem qui contemplativae vitae sunt amatores (Little Book of Extracts from the Scriptures and Words of the Fathers, Especially Useful for Those Who are Lovers of Contemplation) recension, and once, around 1050, creating the so-called Confessio fidei (Confession of Faith) recension. Thus, instead of writing diverse works over the course of his life (like his Norman colleague Anselm of Canterbury), John created a single major life’s work, the Confessio theologica, and revisited it over the course of his abbacy. During his time as abbot, John built up the library of Fécamp by eighty volumes or more; he travelled to Rome around 1050, perhaps as legate to Pope Leo IX; he served as abbot of Saint-Bénigne de Dijon from 1052 to 1044 simultaneously with his abbacy at Fécamp; he visited Fécamp’s possessions in England in 1054, likely bringing his brand of piety to that region;¹⁴ he allowed Fécamp to serve as the launch site for William the Conqueror’s ships in 1066;¹⁵ and he substantially increased the economic prosperity of his monastery and its ties to the noble families around Normandy.¹⁶ John died on 22 February 1078, having served as Fécamp’s prior and abbot for fifty-five combined years, and having left behind substantial evidence of the life of his monastery under his leadership.

John of Fécamp provides us with an unparalleled case study of the earliest moments of affective devotion in the eleventh-century monastic context. Along with three recensions of John’s Confessio theologica and additional fragments of writings from John, there survive from his fifty-five years as prior and abbot of the monastery of Fécamp library lists, charters, letters, liturgical texts, and over eighty other manuscripts. The Fécamp charters have been compiled;¹⁷ the monastery’s proposed exemption has been interrogated;¹⁸ its manuscripts have been identified;¹⁹ their palaeography has been studied;²⁰ the liturgical texts have been partially edited;²¹ the Fécamp relics, archaeology, and church space have been examined;²² and John’s Confessio theologica has been analysed.²³ But this study is the first to use the wealth of the Fécamp sources to create a holistic picture of the production, the reception, the use, and the immediate legacy of John of Fécamp’s landmark work, the Confessio theologica.²⁴

Fécamp as evidence of emotional monasticism

A study of John of Fécamp’s Confessio theologica and its place in his monastery’s devotional culture provides information about the oft-forgotten emotional, interior aspects of monastic reform in traditional monastic houses in the central medieval period. Historically, scholarship on monastic reform in the central Middle Ages (sometimes called the ‘Gregorian Reform’ or ‘Benedictine Reform’) has characterised reform as stemming from an externally regulating spirit: a desire to reform economic organisation, liturgical readings, ecclesiastical organisation, legislation, monastic customs and routine, and the monastery’s dealings with property and relationship with its patrons.²⁵ In the last few years, scholars have rightly been reconsidering what we mean by ‘reform’.²⁶ But this reassessment has yet to question the internal character of eleventh-century ‘Benedictine’ monastic reform. Reform to these scholars remains an external process, while the internal and spiritual dimensions of these reforms remain unexplored.²⁷

While John, like William, enforced orthodox external practices and combated unorthodox behaviours in the Norman monastic world, he also elaborated on these ideas of orthodoxy by extending his attentions into the inner workings of a monk’s mind and soul.²⁸ His was an emotional, spiritual reform. The characterisation of John as an emotional reformer thus works to erode the lingering idea that a ‘crisis of coenobitism’ overtook the medieval monastic landscape in the eleventh century, in need of an affective dimension.²⁹ While this idea has long been refuted, the residue of that past remains.³⁰ Scholarship on Bernard of Clairvaux, for instance, continues to emphasise the revolutionary nature of Bernard’s reforms, distinguishing him from the monks who came before by highlighting the ‘originality’ of his regard for the inner heart and emotion.³¹ Even studies of traditional monasticism in the earlier Middle Ages largely neglect focusing on monks as contemplatives interested in interior investigations,³² more interested in the monks’ lay and religious networks, or in their concerns for their lay patron’s soul, than in the devotional practices of the monastic worshippers themselves.³³ Scholars persist in characterising charismatic monks who fostered a direct connection with God as violators of monastic ritual behaviour, implying that traditional monastic life was antithetical to such an affective connection.³⁴ This book will banish this old idea of traditional monastic devotion as mechanised and communal as opposed to heart-felt and interior; it will instead argue that even ritual repetition at the monastery served to cultivate an embodied disposition (a habitus) that attempted to engender more sincere feeling.³⁵ John of Fécamp’s writings, monastic context, and students prove that an interior connection with God was desired by and intended for traditional monks in the eleventh century.

When the picture of traditional monasticism transforms into a more emotionally alive one, where monks sought emotional connection with God by many different and innovative means, the narrative of the development of medieval Christianity is transformed. Such emotional inwardness has been habitually characterised by medievalists of all kinds (historians, art historians, and literary scholars alike) as a ‘self-awareness’ or ‘individuality’ only cultivated in the world outside of the monastery or after the eleventh century. It has been traditionally seen as a feature of the later Middle Ages, the world of chivalric vernacular literature, of dialectical arguments in the cathedral schools and universities, of romance and autobiography.³⁶ Part of this is because of an anachronistic conception of individuality: to certain scholars, individual religious quests seemed to be possible only outside of a community’s control; on the monastic spectrum, therefore, individualism could only be found in eremitic monasticism, which critiqued the coenobitic ‘ritualism, the rigidity for the sake of unity, and the interminable laus perennis (perennial praise)’.³⁷ Blinded by modern conceptions of the self,³⁸ scholars have been resistant to the notion that inner penance could have been located in the mechanisms and structures of coenobitic life, apparently antithetical to introspection.³⁹ According to this line of thinking, in order to be truly ‘passionate and introspective’, monastic prayers needed to be ‘outside the framework of the established liturgy’, because only then could they ‘become more personal’.⁴⁰

Some studies on lectio divina (divine reading) in the monastery have worked against this anachronism, following the idea that, since Augustine, medieval Christianity and monasticism cultivated ‘self-conscious reader[s]‌’.⁴¹ To Augustine and others, the medieval ‘self’ was contingent upon knowledge of God – as Augustine says in his soliloquies, ‘Noverim me, noverim te’ (‘[To] let me know myself [is to] let me know you [God]’).⁴² But despite this newfound openness to the potential ‘individualism’ inherent in monastic practices of reading, many scholars maintain that traditional monasticism was ‘constricting’ to the individual⁴³ and insist the notion of ‘inner life’ is a phenomenon still best associated with later medieval private devotion.⁴⁴ Even John of Fécamp’s interiority is seen by some scholars as a precocious exception rather than a part of a larger emotional culture in traditional monasticism.⁴⁵ This book will work to correct the record, showing how, a generation before Anselm, John, his brethren at Fécamp, and Christians under John’s influence around Europe were striving to cultivate introspective prayer and an affective connection with God, fostering inner lives in their lived religious experience while simultaneously remaining members of an eleventh-century monastic community.⁴⁶

Affective piety in the eleventh-century male monastery

In addition to changing the way we understand monastic interiority, John of Fécamp’s example will complete our understanding of the development of medieval affective devotion. ‘Affective piety’ is a term that scholars often use without fully defining, usually in cases where devotion to the suffering Christ is involved, especially in cases of highly emotive piety from the post-twelfth-century period.⁴⁷ Generally considered one of the first medievalists to draw attention to this trend, R.W. Southern, in his classic work The Making of the Middle Ages, characterised this type of devotion in the following way: ‘The theme of tenderness and compassion for the sufferings and helplessness of the Saviour … opened up a new world of ardent emotion and piety.’⁴⁸ For Southern, this ‘new world’ began with Anselm of Canterbury. Others have followed Southern’s model, locating the ‘newness’ of emotionality with various movements and people, usually all in the twelfth century, and usually all revolving around ‘the pathos of Christ’s suffering’, ‘the body of [the] tortured son … [with] graphic depictions of the suffering body, depictions which are designed to stimulate an emotional response … [which are] majestic [and yet] disfigured’.⁴⁹

John’s trailblazing affectivity does not conform to this definition, however. John’s tearful, compassionate use of the suffering Christ was merely a part of his larger programme for proper contemplation of God. John confronts his reader with affective images of the crucified Christ only at a certain stage of his devotional process; they are not the only things that make John’s contemplative method affective or unique. John is instead primarily concerned with affecting emotional devotion in his reader, using various tools, the suffering Christ merely one among them, to do so. Moreover, John does not embrace the image of the crucified Christ because he is showing his humanity, but instead because Christ’s suffering allows him to be the best avatar for the suffering sinner. In this book, therefore, I will refer to John’s type of devotion as ‘affective’, allowing my narrative to fit into the wider scholarly discourse; but, when I do, I will be referring to a kind of piety that does not neatly fit into ‘affective piety’ as it is commonly defined. Instead, I will define it as John did – as a programme of emotional openness in prayer not necessarily centred on the crucified Christ, but in fact on the Christian’s awareness of his sinful self.

John spent his whole life defining his brand of piety through three recensions of the Confessio theologica. In this book, and Chapter 1 especially, I will focus on the affective terminology that John created, and on the mechanisms of affective experience that John laid out. In so doing, I have largely chosen to leave modern affect theory by the wayside. This is a conscious decision. Several scholars of medieval religion have embraced William Reddy’s formulation of ‘emotives’⁵⁰ as an appropriate label for the process of medieval contemplation, showing how medieval devotional emotion, when articulated, is both descriptive and performative, both encapsulating the emotion of religious experience and instigating it. Some medievalists, like Robert Glenn Davis, have rightly noted that this formulation is reductive, being ‘in danger of collapsing into a simple notion of performance, wherein emotions become the means of exercising rational agency towards a determinate goal … for managing individual, collective, and political life’.⁵¹ These medievalist-critics have found it helpful to instead engage instead with affect theory, which, following Gilles Deleuze and Brian Massumi, among others, distinguishes affect (feeling that is subliminal, visceral, intense, pre-personal, and beyond the limits of the cognitive) from emotion (affect that has been named, rationalised, signified, and made subjective).⁵² There is an extent to which these theorists’ privileging of affect is more appropriate to later medieval mystical contemplation, which aims to ‘disrupt and transform’ the ‘cognizing and volitional self’.⁵³ In the case of John of Fécamp, however, feeling is very much cultivated both cognitively and emotionally, used as a tool to approach the divine in prayer. In fact, John does not believe that he is able to feel on his own – instead, he believes that God affects the deepest love and feelings he desires, and that the only way he can come close to earning God’s most instinctual and ‘pre-personal’ affect (affectus) is if he forces himself to initiate emotional introspection. The distinction which affect theorists draw between cognition and intense visceral feeling, therefore, does not accurately represent John’s understanding, nor does it represent the affective practices of his monastic context, which encouraged the use of intellectual engagement, ritual praxis, and emotional modelling to cultivate feeling.⁵⁴ Plus, John does not consistently use vocabulary that distinguishes ‘affect’ (affectus) from the ‘passions’ (passiones), or emotion from feeling.⁵⁵ In these ways, John certainly shows, as Barbara Rosenwein has noted repeatedly elsewhere, that the Middle Ages was not an unenlightened age of unbridled emotion, but was instead an age where emotion was very intentionally employed and cultivated, and where, at least in the monastery, it was seen as the highest virtue, a gift of God’s grace.⁵⁶ But the best way to explain how John understood affectivity is to rely on his words, and not the words of modern affect theorists or historians of emotion, to describe the methodology for devotional feeling that he hoped to nurture in his Confessio theologica.

This book does not intend to provide a unicausal explanation for the emergence of affective piety in the medieval Christian landscape. I am not claiming that John or the traditional medieval monastery were originators of affective piety, nor am I claiming that John’s monastery was unique in its affective practices. By showing how John’s affective devotion was defined, what inspired it, how it was employed and disseminated, and what particularly monastic uses it had, I explore how affective piety worked in one of its earliest historical moments and contexts. This, in turn, may help us to better understand the motivations for its later medieval transformations, in addition, of course, to being of intrinsic interest in and of itself.

Chapter outline

To achieve the loftiest aims of this study, we must venture through the nitty-gritty details of John of Fécamp’s text, of his monastic context, and of his devotional legacy.

The first chapter of this book provides the foundation for the subsequent ones. In it, I analyse John’s Confessio theologica. I sketch out the stages of John’s devotional prescriptions, defining his goals for his monastic reader, his requirements for achieving inwardness, his use of affectivity and emotion, and his reliance on the models of the suffering Christ, the crying Mary Magdalene, and the prayerful Hannah. Along with providing this exposition, valuable in and of itself in how it clarifies John of Fécamp’s ideas and reveals the full scope of a text – his Confessio theologica – that has been principally understood through its excerpts elsewhere, Chapter 1 also provides the battery of themes, metaphors, and vocabulary that John uses, defining the ideas that then undergird the rest of my study.

In the second chapter, I address what about John’s Confessio theologica is new and innovative, and what about it was drawn from traditional (or earlier but not so traditional) sources. To better establish John’s inheritance, I survey the eleventh-century library at Fécamp, and I focus on John’s childhood influences from Ravenna, from Cluny (via Ravenna and Saint-Bénigne de Dijon), and from John’s mentor, William of Volpiano. I work to show that classic texts, such as those by Gregory the Great, use affective devotion, demonstrating that affective prayer was never quite as foreign to the early monastic mind as some medievalists might believe. Establishing John’s sources will show the extent to which the Confessio theologica emanates from the larger monastic context as well as from his own personal history, and also how much was new about John and his work – his interest in the affective parallels between the crucified Christ and the suffering Christian, the committed intensity of his longing for the divine, and his codifying and reforming of the emotional process of a Christian’s prayerful approach to God.

Chapter 3 explores how John’s devotional philosophy in the Confessio theologica – particularly its emotional reform priorities – was present in the religious culture at his monastery. I will show that John’s affective ideas were present in the liturgical ceremonies, homilies, books, and letters that comprised his monastery’s devotional culture. I will then explore the complex relationship between emotional reform and monastic discipline, as such affective rhetoric seems to have played this dual role at Fécamp.

In the fourth chapter, I demonstrate that John’s teachings on emotional reform were not confined to his monastic community at Fécamp; they also motivated his involvement with church-wide reform initiatives led by the papacy, and, perhaps surprisingly, coloured his interactions with the secular world. As the abbot of the most prominent abbey in Normandy, John wrote against heresy at the behest of the pope, criticised bishops’ infringement on abbatial rights, wrote letters of spiritual advice to fellow monks and holy women, and regularly interacted with the lay lords and dukes of Normandy. This chapter shows how John’s prayerful efforts were not restricted to contemplation inside the monastery, but were also connected by John to his wider institutional responsibilities, thereby influencing his use and experience of his political, social, and economic actions as abbot.

The final chapter examines John’s legacy after his death, both at Fécamp and in the wider medieval landscape. I first show how John’s students and direct inheritors elaborated on the devotional seeds that John’s Confessio theologica planted: a cult to the Precious Blood of Christ was established at Fécamp; John’s students Maurilius of Rouen and Gerbert of Saint-Wandrille wrote affective prayers to a crucified Christ; Guibert of Nogent, a Norman monk, wrote his own memoir in the style of Augustine’s Confessions after John; and, most famously, Anselm of Bec wrote his prayers and meditations, following in the steps of the greatest Norman abbot of the generation before him, John of Fécamp. The chapter moves on to examine how certain concepts embraced by John changed in the hands of Cistercians. It concludes by discussing how John’s Confessio theologica circulated in the later Middle Ages, often attributed in manuscripts to Anselm or Bernard or Augustine, and considered by later medievals to be a part of their type of affective devotion.

Through the lens of a single abbot whose life spanned the course of the eleventh century, and a single monastic foundation whose devotional culture evidenced some of the earliest instances of affective piety, we will see how traditional monks embraced emotional devotion a generation before Anselm of Canterbury. We will observe the inner workings of eleventh-century monastic prayer practices and note their implications. We will witness how monastic reform slowly transformed monks’ livelihood through both external regulations and internal devotional practices. We will understand the extent to which monks actively shaped their religious emotions through their worldly actions so that they could have fuller, more intimate relationships with their God. And, hopefully, we will alter the scholarly narrative, reclaiming the monk as a feeling, prayerful creature, affective piety as an early medieval monastic practice, and John of Fécamp as one of the most important touchstones for eleventh-century monasticism and Christian devotion.

Notes

1‘per illa salutifera vulnera tua, quae passus es in cruce pro salute nostra, ex quibus emanavit ille pretiosus et vivificus sanguis … vulnera hanc animam peccatricem, pro qua etiam mori dignatus es; vulnera eam igneo et potentissimo telo tuae nimiae charitatis. Vivus es, sermo Dei, et efficax et penetrabilior omni acutissimo gladio. Tu gladius bis acute cordis duritiam scinde, et vulnera hanc animam peccatricem, atque altius penetra ad intima potenti virtute, et sic da capiti meo aquam immensam, oculisque meis verum lacrimarum fontem nocte ac die currentem infunde ex nimio affectu et desiderio visionis pulchritudinis tuae, ut lugeam iugiter cunctis diebus vitae meae, nullam in praesenti vita recipiens consolationem, donec te in caelesti thalamo merear videre dilectum et pulcherrimum sponsum Deum et Dominum meum’ (CT, pp. 180–1).

2Meditations of Saint Augustine, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (Villanova, PA: Augustinian Press, 1995), pp. 9–20; André Wilmart, Auteurs spirituels et textes dévots du moyen âge latin (Paris: Librarie Bloud et Gay, 1932), pp. 173, 175, 178; André Wilmart, ‘Formes successives ou parallèles des “Meditations de Saint Augustin”’, Revue d’ascétique et de mystique 68 (1936), 337–57; Jean Leclercq and Jean-Paul Bonnes, Un maître de la vie spirituelle au XIe siècle (Paris: Vrin, 1946), pp. 13–50; Thomas H. Bestul (ed.), A Durham Book of Devotions (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1987), pp. 1–18.

3For more on John’s circulation in the Late Middle Ages, see Stephen A. Hurlbut, The Picture of the Heavenly Jerusalem in the Writings of Johannes of Fécamp, De Contemplativa Vita, and in the Elizabethan Hymns (Washington, DC: St. Alban’s Press, 1943); see also Chapter 5, below.

4Thomas H. Bestul, Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), pp. 26–38; Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 1–192; Ewert Cousins, ‘The Humanity and Passion of Christ’, in Jill Raitt, Bernard McGuinn, and John Meyendorff (eds), Christian Spirituality: High Middle Ages and Reformation (New York: Crossroad, 1987), pp. 375–91.

5Marlene Villalobos Hennessy, ‘Passion Devotion, Penitential Reading, and the Manuscript Page: “The Hours of the Cross” in London, British Library Additional 37049’, Mediaeval Studies 66 (2004), 216; Bestul, Texts of the Passion, p. 37.

6Bestul, Texts of the Passion, pp. 36–8; Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), pp. 58–85; Anne Derbes, Picturing the Passion in Late Medieval Italy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 1–11; A.S. Lazikani, Cultivating the Heart: Feeling and Emotion in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Religious Texts (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2015), pp. 1–24; Nicole Rice, Lay Piety and Religious Discipline in Middle English Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 1–16.

7André Wilmart, ‘Deux préfaces spirituelles de Jean de Fécamp’, Revue d’ascétique et de mystique 69 (1937), 3–44; Wilmart, Auteurs spirituels, pp. 125–35.

8The four prayers of John of Fécamp that I refer to here often are cited by their numbering in the Meditations of St Augustine as collected in the PL: Liber meditationum, c. XXXV, PL 40, cols 928–30; Liber meditationum, c. XXXVI, PL 40, cols 930–2; Liber meditationum, c. XXXVII, PL 40, cols 933–4, and Liber meditationum, c. XXXVII, PL 40, cols 934–6. The Confessio theologica was likely written during John’s priorship; for more on this, see Chapter 1. Stéphane Lecouteux has recently revised the date of the start of John’s priorship, changing it from 1016 to 1023: Stéphane Lecouteux, ‘Réseaux de confraternité et histoire des bibliothèques: L’exemple de l’abbaye bénédictine de la Trinité de Fécamp’ (PhD dissertation, Université de Caen Normandie/École Pratique des Hautes Études, 2015), vol. I, p. 71.

9McNamer, Affective Meditation; Gerard Sitwell, Spiritual Writers of the Middle Ages (New York: Hawthorne Books, 1961), pp. 25–42; Brian Patrick McGuire, ‘John of Fécamp and Anselm of Bec: A New Language of Prayer’, in Santha Bhattacharji, Rowan Williams, and Dominic Mattos (eds), Prayer and Thought in Monastic Tradition: Essays in Honour of Benedicta Ward SLG (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 153–66.

10In this book, I will use the phrases ‘affective piety’ and ‘affective devotion’ in order to better dialogue with previously written scholarship.

11Alison Beach, as co-editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Medieval Monasticism in the Latin World, has called for an end to the use of the anachronistic term ‘Benedictine’ to describe monasticism before the twelfth century. I will embrace this idea here, but will occasionally use the term in order to speak to the scholarly narrative that has characterised traditional monasticism as ‘Benedictine’.

12Véronique Gazeau and Monique Goullet, Guillaume de Volpiano: Un réformateur en son temps (962–1031) (Caen: CRAHM, 2008), pp. 1–16.

13Over the last thousand years, several myths about John have been perpetuated. He has been called nephew of William of Volpiano, a doctor, a scribe, a musician, a writer of prayers unconfirmed to be his own. While I do not directly address these myths in this book, I have identified sources in the Fécamp manuscript evidence that could be parlayed for the purpose; for example, Rouen, BM, ms. 978 (I57) might link John to his medical identity, and Rouen, BM, ms. 477 (A191) might provide clues as to whether John was a scribe.

14Tom License, Hermits and Recluses in English Society, 950–1200 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 32–4.

15Véronique Gazeau, Normannia monastica: Prosopographie des abbés bénédictines (Caen: CRAHM, 2007), pp. 105–10; Elisabeth van Houts, ‘The Ship List of William the Conquerer’, in History and Family Traditions in England and the Continent, 1000–1200 (Brookfield, VT: Varorium, 1999), pp. 159–83.

16Lucien Musset, ‘La vie économique de l’abbaye de Fécamp sous l’abbatiat de Jean de Ravenne (1028–1078)’, in L’abbaye bénédictine de Fécamp: Ouvrage scientifique du XIIIe centenaire (658–1958) (Fécamp: EMTN, 1959), vol. I, pp. 67–79, 345–9.

17Marie Fauroux, Recueil des actes des ducs de Normandie (911–1066) (Caen: Société d’Impressions CARON 1961); Michaël Bloche, ‘Le chartrier de l’abbaye de la Trinité de Fécamp: étude et édition critique, 928/929–1190’ (PhD dissertation, École nationale des chartes, 2012).

18Jean-François LeMarignier, ‘L’exemption de Fécamp au début du XIe siècle’, in Étude sur les privilèges d’exemption et de juridiction ecclésiastique des abbayes Normandes depuis les origines jusqu’en 1140 (Paris: Archives de la France Monastique, 1937), pp. 288–340; Benjamin Pohl and Steven Vanderputten, ‘Fécamp, Cluny, and the Invention of Traditions in the Later Eleventh Century’, Journal of Medieval Monastic Studies 5 (2016), 1–41.

19François Avril, ‘Notes sur quelques manuscrits bénédictins normands du XIe et du XIIe siècle’, Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire 77 (1965), 209–48; François Avril, ‘Notes sur quelques manuscrits bénédictins normands du XIe et du XIIe siècle’, Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire 76 (1964), 491–525; Geneviève Nortier, Les bibliothèques médiévales des abbayes bénédictines de Normandie: Fécamp, Le Bec, Le Mont Saint-Michel, Saint-Évroul, Jumièges, Saint-Wandrille, Saint-Ouen (Paris: Paul Lethielleux, 1971); J.J.G. Alexander, Norman Illumination at Mont St. Michel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970); Stéphane Lecouteux, ‘Sur la dispersion de la bibliothèque bénédictine de Fécamp. Partie 1: Identification des principales vagues de démembrement des fonds’, Tabularia 7 (2007), 1–50.

20Betty Branch, ‘The Development of Script in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Manuscripts of the Norman Abbey of Fécamp’ (PhD dissertation, Duke University, 1974); Betty Branch, ‘Inventories of the Library of Fécamp from the Eleventh- and Twelfth-Centuries’, Manuscripta 23 (1979), 159–72; Betty Branch, ‘William Peccator et les manuscrits de Fécamp 1100–1150’, Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 26 (1983), 195–207.

21David Chadd (ed.), The Ordinal of the Abbey of the Holy Trinity Fécamp (Fécamp, Musée de la Bénédictine, Ms 186), 2 vols (London: Henry Bradshaw Society, 1999).

22Karin Brockhaus, L’abbatiale de la Trinité de Fécamp et l’architecture normande au moyen âge (Caen: Société des Antiquaires de Normandie, 2009); Lindy Grant, ‘Fécamp et l’architecture en Normandie’, Tabularia 2 (2002), 83–94; Lucile Tran-Duc, ‘Les princes normands et les reliques (Xe–XIe siècles): Contribution du culte des saints à la formation territoriale et identitaire d’une principauté’, in Jean-Luc Deuffie (ed.), Reliques et sainteté dans l’espace médiéval (Paris: PECIA, 2005), pp. 525–64; Lucile Tran-Duc, ‘De l’usage politique du Précieux Sang dans l’Europe médiévale’, Tabularia 8 (2008), 89–106; Jacques Le Maho, ‘Aux sources d’un grand pèlerinage normand: L’origine des reliques fécampoises du Précieux Sang’, in Catherine Vincent (ed.), Identités pèlerines (Rouen: Publications de l’Université de Caen, 2004), pp. 45–66; Annie Renoux, Fécamp: Du palais ducal au palais de dieu (Paris: CNRS, 1991).

23See works by Wilmart and: Gérard Mathon, ‘Jean de Fécamp, théologien monastique?’, in Louis Gaillard (ed.), La Normandie bénédictine au temps de Guillaume le Conquérant (XIe siècle) (Lille: Facultés Catholiques, 1967), pp. 485–500; Gillian Evans, ‘Mens devota: The Literary Community of the Devotional Works of John of Fécamp and St. Anselm’, Medium Aevum 43.2 (1974), 105–15; Fay Anne Martineau, ‘Envisioning Heaven with Faith, Imagination, and Historical Relevance: Selected Writings from Early and Medieval Christianity’ (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2007); Martine Pastor, ‘Jean de Fécamp, “Un auteur sans amour-propre”’, Annales du patrimoine de Fécamp 2 (1995), 36–41; Hugh Feiss, ‘John of Fécamp’s Longing for Heaven’, in Jan Swango Emerson and Hugh Feiss (eds), Imagining Heaven in the Middle Ages (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), pp. 65–81.

24The only attempts at synthesising the various aspects of Fécamp’s devotional practices with its political and economic cultures have been undertaken by French historians writing sweeping histories of the abbey for a popular audience, some from as long ago as 1663 and others as recently as 1987: Robert Soulignac, Fécamp et sa campagne à l’époque des ducs de Normandie: 911–1204 (Fécamp: EMTN, 1987); Gourdon de Genouillac, Histoire de l’abbaye de Fécamp et ses abbés (Fécamp: A. Marinier, 1875); A.-J.-V. Leroux de Lincy, Essai historique et littéraire sur l’abbaye de Fécamp (Rouen: Librarie de la Bibliothèque de la Ville, 1840); Arthur Lângfors, ‘Histoire de l’abbaye de Fécamp: En vers français du XIIIe siècle’, Annales academiae scientiarum Fennicae B 22 (1928), 7–208; Guillaume Le Hule, Le thresor ou abbrégé de l’histoire de la noble et royalle abbaye de Fescamp (Fécamp: Banse Fils, 1684); Arthur Du Monstier, Neustria pia, seu de omnibus et singuilis abbatiis et prioratibus totius normaniae (Rouen: Joannem Berthelin, 1663).

25For a useful survey of this historiography, see Tjamke Snijders, Manuscript Communication: Visual and Textual Communication in Hagiographical Texts from the Southern Low Countries, 900–1200 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), pp. 18–32. Classic studies on monastic reform include Giles Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Gerhart B. Ladner, The Idea of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1967); Giles Constable, ‘Renewal and Reform in Religious Life: Concepts and Realities’, in Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable (eds), Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century (Toronto: Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching, 1991), pp. 37–67.

26Maureen Miller, ‘Reconsidering Reform: A Roman Example’, in David C. Mengel and Lisa Wolverton (eds), Christianity and Culture in the Middle Ages: Essays to Honor John Van Engen (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), pp. 123–40; Julia Barrow, ‘Ideas and Applications of Reform’, in Thomas F.X. Noble and Julia M.H. Smith (eds), The Cambridge History of Christianity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), vol. III, pp. 345–62; Steven Vanderputten, Monastic Reform as Process: Realities and Representations in Medieval Flanders, 900–1100 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).

27Snijders, Manuscript Communication, p. 27. They do not remain unexplored for the slightly later context, however. See, for example, Barbara Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 88–113; Damien Boquet and Pirsoka Nagy, Medieval Sensibilities: A History of Emotions in the Middle Ages, trans. Robert Shaw (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), pp. 69–103.

28Damien Boquet, ‘Affectivity in the Spiritual Writings of Aelred of Rievaulx’, in Marsha L. Dutton (ed.), A Companion to Aelred of Rievaulx (1110–1167) (Boston: Brill, 2017), p. 168.

29Bede K. Lackner, The Eleventh-Century Background of Cîteaux (Washington, DC: Cistercian Publications, 1972), pp. 92–112; Jean Leclercq, ‘The Monastic Crisis of the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’, in Noreen Hunt (ed.), Cluniac Monasticism in the Central Middle Ages (New York: Macmillan, 1971), pp. 217–37; Norman F. Cantor, ‘The Crisis of Western Monasticism, 1050–1130’, American Historical Review 66 (1960), 47–67; John Van Engen, ‘The “Crisis of Coenobitism” Reconsidered: Benedictine Monasticism in the Years 1050–1150’, Speculum 61.2 (1986), 269–304.

30For an example of the persistence of this narrative, see Gert Melville, The World of Medieval Monasticism: Its History and Forms of Life (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2016), p. 90.

31M.B. Pranger, ‘Bernard the Writer’, in Brian Patrick McGuire (ed.), A Companion to Bernard of Clairvaux (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2011), pp. 220–48.

32Exceptions include Renie S. Choy, Intercessory Prayer and the Monastic Ideal in the Time of the Carolingian Reforms (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 8–10; Susan Boynton, ‘Prayer as Liturgical Performance in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Monastic Psalters’, Speculum 82 (2007), 896–931; Adam Cohen, ‘Art, Exegesis, and Affective Piety in Twelfth-Century German Manuscripts’, in Alison I. Beach (ed.), Manuscripts and Monastic Culture: Reform and Renewal in Twelfth-Century Germany (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), pp. 45–68; Isabelle Cochelin, ‘Obedience or Agency?’, in Sébastien Baret and Gert Melville (eds), Oboedientia: zu Formen und Grenzen von Macht und Unterordnung im mittelalterlichen Religiosentum (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2005), pp. 229–54.

33Cassandra Potts, Monastic Revival and Regional Identity in Early Normandy (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1997), pp. 36–80; Barbara Rosenwein, To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter: The Social Meaning of Cluny’s Property, 909–1049 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 109–43.

34Jörg Sonntag, ‘Obedience in High Medieval Monastic Sources: Some Brief Remarks in Light of Ritual’, in Mirko Breitenstein, Julia Burkhardt, Stefan Burkhardt, and Jens Röhrkasten (eds), Rules and Observance: Devising Forms of Communal Life (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2014), pp. 253–63.

35Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (And is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bordieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory 51 (2012), 193–220.

36Classic studies include Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955); Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual, 1050–1200 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987); Richard Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 219–57.

37Lackner, The Eleventh-Century Background of Cîteaux, p. 145. This opposition between community and individual is the kind of statement critiqued by Susan Boynton in her discussion of public vs. private prayer (see n. 32 above), and in Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?’, in Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 82–109; Suzanne Verbender, The Medieval Fold: Power, Repression, and the Emergence of the Individual (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 25–60.

38For a critique of claims that medieval people did not have a sense of self akin to the modern or twentieth-century sense, see Ronald J. Ganze, ‘The Medieval Sense of Self’, in Stephen J. Harris and Bryon L. Grigsby (eds), Misconceptions About the Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 103–16 and John Jeffries Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

39The ‘radical individualism’ and the ‘mystical anarchism’ that comes with later medieval mysticism is troubled in Sara S. Poor and Nigel Smith (eds), Mysticism and Reform, 1400–1750 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), pp. 1–9; and Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Hildegard Elisabeth Keller’s ‘A Battle for Hearts and Minds: The Heart in Reformation Polemic’, in Sarah S. Poor and Nigel Smith (eds), Mysticism and Reform (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), p. 338.

40Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century, p. 274.

41Brian Stock, After Augustine: The Meditative Reader and the Text (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), p. 13; Duncan Robertson, Lectio Divina: The Medieval Experience of Reading (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2011).

42Stock, After Augustine, pp. 20, 58–9; Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Jesus as Mother and Abbot as Mother’, in Jesus as Mother, p. 130; Bynum, ‘Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?’, p. 88.

43Phyllis G. Jestice, Wayward Monks and the Religious Revolution of the Eleventh Century (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1997), p. 14.

44Jennifer Bryan, Looking Inward: Devotional Reading and the Private Self in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Ben Morgan, On Becoming God: Late Medieval Mysticism and the Modern Western Self (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). Certain studies, however, do not ignore the cultivation of the ‘interior’ during the early Middle Ages, such as Piroska Zombory-Nagy, ‘Les larmes du Christ dans l’exégèse médiévale’, Médiévales 27 (1994), 37–49; Piroska Nagy, Le don des larmes au moyen âge. Un instrument en quête d’institution (Ve–XIIIe siècle) (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000); Sandra J. McEntire, The Doctrine of Compunction in Medieval England: Holy Tears (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991).

45Ineke van ’t Spijker, Fictions of the Inner Life: Religious Literature and Formation of the Self in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), pp. 21, 39, 55; Bestul, Texts of the Passion, pp. 36–8; Stock, After Augustine, p. 63.

46For more on the idea of lived religious experience vs. religious discourse, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), pp. 19–21; Andrew J. Romig, Be a Perfect Man: Christian Masculinity and the Carolingian Aristocracy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), pp. 1–12.

47Scholars have repeatedly ignored work on early, particularly Anglo-Saxon, affectivity; examples of that work include: Frances McCormack, ‘Those Bloody Trees: The Affectivity of Christ’, in Alice Jorgensen, Frances McCormack, and Jonathan Wilcox (eds), Anglo-Saxon Emotions: Reading the Heart in Old English Language, Literature, and Culture (New York: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 143–61; Scott DeGregorio, ‘Affective Spirituality: Theory and Practice in Bede and Alfred the Great’, Essays in Medieval Studies 22 (2005), 129–39, at 131; Barbara C. Raw, Anglo-Saxon Crucifixion Iconography and the Art of Monastic Revival (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Celia Chazelle, The Crucified God in the Carolingian Era: Theology and Art of Christ’s Passion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Juliet Mullins, Jenifer Ní Ghrádaigh and Richard Hawtree (eds), Envisioning Christ on the Cross: Ireland and the Early Medieval West (Portland, OR: Four Courts Press, 2013).

48Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages, p. 232.

49Bestul, Texts of the Passion, p. 37.

50William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 125–6; Both Sarah McNamer and Niklaus Largier agree with Reddy’s assessment; McNamer, Affective Meditation, p. 12–13; Niklaus Largier, ‘Inner Senses–Outer Senses: The Practice of Emotions in Medieval Mysticism’, in C. Stephen Jaeger and Ingrid Kasten (eds), Codierung von Emotionen im Mittelalter/Emotions and Sensibilities in the Middle Ages (New York: De Gruyter, 2003), pp. 3–15.

51Robert Glenn Davis, The Weight of Love: Affect, Ecstacy, and Union in the Theology of Bonaventure (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), pp. 21, 23.

52Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).

53Davis, The Weight of Love, p. 26.

54Ruth Leys, ‘The Turn to Affect: A Critique’, Critical Inquiry 37.3 (2011), 434–72 and The Ascent of Affect: Geneology and Critique (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2017).

55The word ‘emotion’ is really an invention of the nineteenth century – see Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotion: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 1–25. In this study, therefore, I will use the word(s) ‘emotion(al)’ only to allow my narrative to fit into the wider scholarly discourse of the history of emotions; but, when I do, I am not referring to the nineteenth-century secularised meaning of the word ‘emotion’; see Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 38.

56Barbara Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’, American Historical Review 107.3 (2002), 821–45.