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Reforming the reader’s interior: defining emotional reform and affectivity in John of Fécamp’s Confessio theologica

To the best of our knowledge, John of Fécamp wrote only one major treatise in the course of his fifty-five years at the monastery of Fécamp. Unlike the expansive corpus of Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) or Lanfranc of Bec (1005–89), John revised a single work at different moments in his priorship and abbacy, choosing not to write new works.¹ This is a significant fact. Ultimately, as this book will show, John seemed to have felt that his Confessio theologica was the core of what he had to teach his monks, his noble female acquaintances, and the wider Anglo-Norman audience of his work.

The Confessio theologica’s central argument is the following: Christians desiring a connection to the divine needed to work to reform their devotional emotions, not just their devotional actions. John demands readers ‘enter into the interior of [their] mind[s]‌’.² For John, even the most devout Christian was in need of a conversio – a turning back to God – because even the most devout Christian relapsed into habitual behaviours, dulling his or her awareness of the divine. At the pinnacle of that divine awareness was the paradoxical experience of caritas – suffering that heals, pain that soothes, love that wounds. Each time it was read, John’s CT was meant to create such an awareness – and, thereby, an inward conversio – in its Christian reader.

John outlines a comprehensive theory of contemplative practice in his Confessio theologica; in its printed edition, the treatise includes over seventy pages of prose alongside four oft-excerpted prayers. To provide the foundation for the chapters that follow, this chapter will examine the CT in its entirety. I will analyse John’s theory of contemplative practice through a close reading of his text, defining terms, ideas, and devotional objectives which will lay the foundation for the rest of my book.

The Confessio theologica as a book for monks

When André Wilmart, Jean Leclercq, and Jean-Paul Bonnes wrote their pioneering studies of John of Fécamp, they postulated that John initially composed the Confessio theologica (Theological Confession) for his own spiritual edification when he was prior of Fécamp.³ They believed that John also revised the CT two more times before his death in 1078: two copies of a second recension, which a scribe called 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, hereafter Libellus), were sent first to an anonymous nun, c. 1030, and then thirty years later to the Empress Agnes of Poitou (1025–77), c. 1060. A third recension, called the Confessio fidei (Confession of Faith) by a scribe in its lone surviving manuscript, was written in response to the Berengar of Tours (c. 999–1088) Eucharistic controversy, around 1050.⁴

Before I jump into the content of John’s treatise, a brief discussion of the questions of recension and reception is important to our understanding of John’s text’s construction and, more importantly, of John’s audience. Few scholars since Wilmart, Leclercq, and Bonnes have examined the complete first recension of the CT in their work on John; most rely instead on his work’s more famous extracts, four prayers excerpted from the Libellus and published in the late medieval Pseudo-Augustinian collection of prayers called the Meditations of St Augustine.⁵ This selective reading of John obscures the meaning of John’s words and prevents an accurate identification of John’s contemporary audience.

Since the only published critical edition of the Confessio theologica dates to 1946, and since that edition only examines the so-called first recension, relying on only one manuscript and one manuscript fragment, it goes without saying that the recensions of John’s work demand further study (work that, admittedly, I will not do here).⁶ Leclercq and Bonnes relied on these two manuscripts for their edition because they were (and continue to be) the only identified surviving manuscripts of the earliest recension of the Confessio theologica: Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 3088 (fols 1–6v), an eleventh-century fragment of unknown origin and of only six folia,⁷ and Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 1919, a twelfth-century manuscript from a Cistercian or Premonstratensian abbey in Champagne, perhaps around Troyes.⁸ In contrast, second recension manuscripts of the Libellus version surviving from the later eleventh and twelfth centuries far outnumber those of the first and third – there are eleven in total – indicating that this was the version of John’s work most widely read by his contemporaries. Only one known manuscript of the third Confessio fidei recension survives, making that recension even harder to trace than the first, and also causing some scholars to doubt it to be authentically John’s at all.⁹

No matter the recension, though, John’s Confessio theologica was read extensively by, and was likely initially composed for, a male monastic audience. Wilmart argued that John of Fécamp’s writings were effusions de sa prière intime,¹⁰ sincere records of John’s own private prayer that were then disseminated to his monastic brethren once they got wind of the existence of such personal texts. To support this notion (and to support his dating of the CT to John’s priorship at Fécamp), Wilmart cited the passage below, where John refers to the need to be obedient to his own abbot in his daily life:

Grant, O Lord, that I always love my abbot, your servant, and all my seniors and brothers with sincere and humble charity [RB, ch. 71]; that from my heart I feel deep sorrow in their evils and sins and adversities; that from my heart I feel deep joy in their goods and virtues and advances; that I never set anything before your love, but love you in all things and above all things [RB, ch. 72]. Give me true humility and obedience, true submission and mortification, so that unrestrained judgment lives not in me, nor my own will to lead [cf. RB, ch. 5]. Give to me simplicity, innocence, and wholeness of mind, continuous custody of my heart and mouth, so that I condemn and despise no one, doubt the merits of no one, render evil for evil to no one, but walk in the simplicity of my heart before you always.¹¹

Wilmart takes John’s first-person supplications literally, and interprets them as biographical facts: John refers to his abbot, therefore he is composing this text when he was prior; John speaks in the first person, therefore the CT is a private confessional text written from John’s point of view. In 1946, Leclercq and Bonnes followed Wilmart’s lead, likewise claiming that John’s CT was ‘liée à sa vie personelle’ and was initially a product of his own monastic life.¹²

It is certainly likely that John wrote the Confessio theologica as Fécamp’s prior. It was not uncommon for a prior to write a manual of spiritual advice to his monks: Anselm of Canterbury wrote his Prayers and Meditations while he was prior at Bec, which served to model proper devotional behaviours to the monks in his care.¹³ But Wilmart, Leclercq, and Bonnes’s confidence that John wrote the CT for his own spiritual edification is problematic: the passage above merely shows that the Confessio theologica was initially written with a monastic audience in mind, long before John sent the manuscript to a nun or Agnes. The passage above constantly draws from the precepts of the Rule of St Benedict, as I indicate in brackets, both directly excerpting the RB’s prescriptions and indirectly reflecting them in original prayerful language. John also emphasises loving ‘all [his] seniors and all [his] brothers’, an explicit reference to the monastic community. These comments suggest that John certainly composed his first recension with fellow followers of the RB in mind.¹⁴ These and other RB-inspired passages from the CT are the principle passages that are omitted in the second Libellus recension, likely as part of an effort to make John’s text more accessible to a wider, non-monastic audience, chiefly of noble women.¹⁵

In addition, it is clear from manuscript evidence that all three of the recensions of John’s text, even the Libellus recension, were read by a substantial male monastic audience in John’s lifetime. The evidence for this conclusion is as follows: all three manuscripts of John’s complete text that survive from the eleventh century (two Libellus, one Confessio fidei¹⁶) are from male monastic houses; all nine (seven Libellus, one Confessio fidei, one Confessio theologica¹⁷) that survive from the twelfth century are too; and these numbers do not include the likely countless unidentified monastic manuscripts that feature unattributed excerpts of John’s prayers and other works (like Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 3088’s edition of the CT, mentioned above).¹⁸ Moreover, many of these early manuscripts survive from monasteries that were strongly connected to Fécamp’s monastic network, foundations that were either reformed by John’s mentor and Fécamp’s first abbot, William of Volpiano (962–1031), or whose abbots maintained strong connections with John himself during the eleventh century.¹⁹ Thus, while the Libellus sometimes circulated with a dedicatory letter to an empress or a nun,²⁰ John’s contemplative prescriptions were not targeted exclusively (or even primarily) at a female audience. John’s text was originally composed for monks, and, while later adapted to an expanded audience that included women, it was still read by and circulated among John’s male brethren.

The Confessio theologica as a book for personal use

At the end of his Confessio theologica, John summarises the purpose of the text he has written:

Therefore not out of the temerity of presumption, but out of the great avidity of my desire for you [God] I have applied myself to this little compilation of readings for your praise, in order that I might always have a short and handy word about God with me, and from the fire of reading it, as many times as I grow cool, I may be reignited in your love. For since we are placed in the midst of snares, we easily grow cold in our heavenly longing. And so we lack a constant defence, so that, having been roused, we run back to you, our true and highest good, whenever we slide away. But pardon me, I ask, O Lord, pardon me, a most unworthy and unhappy slave speaking too long with you about you. Pardon me, a wretch, O Holy One. For I have opened my lips to you out of an excessive love of your name.²¹

This passage provides us with some clues about John’s envisioned use for his Confessio theologica: John wants his text to be for personal edification and prayer. Indeed, medieval copies of the CT and Libellus seem to conform to John’s stated purpose, usually circulating in small manuscripts that could easily have been carried on a person.²² Following the biblical injunction to always have a prayer on one’s lips, John’s CT thus aims to provide reflections and prayers to readers in handy, pocket-sized form.

The personal nature of the Confessio theologica is also seen in the tone John adopts for the book. The treatise is written entirely in the first person. However, the purpose of John’s text is not to tell the story of his own life – there are no biographical details in the text; nor is it to write for his own spiritual edification alone – shortly after its initial composition, he sends it out to a nun, in 1030. John’s retention of the first person ‘I’ in his Libellus recension – a treatise he specifically revised to send to a nun in 1030 and an empress in 1060 – is a clue for us. Neither a nun nor Agnes is the ‘I’ of Abbot John, and yet he retains the first-person speaker. Like so many prayerful medieval texts written in the first person, John’s text’s ‘I’ aims to provide a contemplative model for any reader to use in his or her own devotional practice.²³ This creates a ‘text … [that] does not so much express the inner thoughts of the author, but functions rhetorically by constructing a speaking exemplum that an audience can respond to or even model its conduct upon’.²⁴ John’s ‘I’ is a performative ‘I’, a means by which the reader could speak and appropriate John’s confessional words for him or herself.²⁵ The tone of the Confessio theologica is a private one: by reading John’s text in the first person, the individual reader could better rouse himself to an embrace of the contemplative method that John is prescribing. Like monks in a calefactorium, John’s readers would use the CT to warm up their prayer, thus better stirring, reawakening, and emotionally reforming their love for God.²⁶ While the RB regulates communal action, the CT is John’s attempt to regulate internal devotion – one reader at a time.

John believes that the chief way to ‘be reignited in [God’s] love’ is to make oneself aware of how, even in the regular prayerful actions of his life, one has not yet aligned right action with right feeling. John defines this problem explicitly in the CT, inviting his reader to speak along with the text:

Give me contrition of heart, even a font of tears, especially when I bring you my requests and my prayers, while I chant the psalmody of your praise, while I contemplate or make known the mystery of our redemption, the manifest judgment of your mercy [i.e. engage with doctrinal instruction] … while I, albeit unworthily, stand in attendance of your altars, desiring to offer that marvellous and heavenly sacrifice, worthy of all reverence and devotion [i.e. celebrate the Eucharist].²⁷

This is the CT’s chief purpose: the reader must work to reform his emotional palate, to feel as connected as possible to God in his own heart and with his own tears while performing pious actions. Fulfilling his monastic duties (singing the psalms, studying doctrine, celebrating the Eucharist) is not enough. In an article on medieval monastic prayer, Amy Hollywood has raised the very issues that John himself is grappling with in his treatise. She writes:

To many modern ears, the repetition of the Psalms [required by the RB] … will likely sound rote and deadening. Some modern Western conceptions of the mystical, spiritual, or religious life insist that it be an immediate and spontaneous engagement with the divine. From this perspective, one might well ask of the Rule: What of the immediacy of the monk’s relationship to God? What of his personal feelings in the face of the divine? What spontaneity can exist in the monk’s engagement with God within the context of such a regimented and uniform prayer life? If the monk is reciting another’s words rather than his own, how can the feelings engendered by these words be his own and so be sincere?²⁸

It is not just modern minds that wonder – eleventh-century minds did too. In spiritual practice, beyond right action, what is the right feeling an individual monk should have in relationship to the divine? And how can he instigate such feeling – such emotional reform – in such a regular existence of persistent, regimented prayer?

The Confessio theologica provides its answers to these questions – and prescribes proper devotional feeling – over the course of three untitled parts.²⁹ Like the beginning of Augustine’s Confessions, Part I of the CT is an extended opening invocation of God and a definition and glorification of each member of the Trinity, a warm-up of sorts. In this part especially, John often excerpts quotations from the liturgy, from the Bible and the Psalms, and from the Church Fathers in order to provide an orthodox definition and praise of the divine in the words of the authorities. (He claims at one point early on that ‘my words are the words of the Fathers’.³⁰) Having paid due homage to the divine in Part I, Part II proceeds to instruct the reader, reviewing the need for faith, prayer, and a neglect of earthly things in order to achieve God’s grace and eventual redemption. The longest and most original part of John’s CT is Part III, where the ideal affective state of the prayerful reader is defined. In this section, John in effect proposes a method for personal emotional reform that engenders a tearful, pleading, prayerful, emotional turmoil with the aid of the emotional examples of the crucified Christ, Mary Magdalene, and Hannah, and by modelling the performance of an intense, internal self-examination in the eyes of God. By the end of the work, John’s CT has not described a method for prayer to its readers, but has rather inflicted it upon them. One can imagine a reader, upon reaching the end of the CT, not feeling passively instructed but frenzied and weepy.

John reminds his readers throughout the Confessio theologica that ‘in this present life, saturated with miseries and errors, the perfection of the contemplative life is not achievable’.³¹ John’s CT promises, therefore, no divine union or ultimate peace as a result of the prayer it prescribes – that is not its use, after all.³² Rather, John’s CT attempts to awaken the reader to his own imperfect self, shaking him from rote devotion and prompting within him impassioned excitations of prayer. By speaking directly as and for the individual, the CT works to perform its method on each single reader, awakening in him the proper affective state of prayer. John (after Augustine) calls this a conversio in his text: a turning (or returning) towards God. Just how the CT does this, what the contours of its method for emotional reform is, and what this ‘conversion’ attempts to achieve, will be the focus of the remainder of this chapter.³³

Reforming the interior at the site of the heart

In his work In Isaiam, Richard of Saint-Victor (1110–73), writing about a hundred years after John of Fécamp’s death, praised Jerome (347–420) for his diligence at digging for the truth in things. Richard says that Jerome ‘knew how obscure truth is, how deep it lies buried … by how much work it is reached, how practically no one ever succeeds, how it is dug out with difficulty and then only bit by bit’.³⁴ John, like Jerome before him and Richard after him, believed that the true method for efficacious prayer was buried deep inside the emotional core of his readers, and he wrote his whole Confessio theologica as an attempt to create a contemplative process by which it could be teased out of them.

For John, the first step in this process is for the reader to move from exterior praise of God to interior feeling,³⁵ to heighten the ‘interior senses of [one’s own] soul’.³⁶ To love God and truly connect to him in prayer, John says, one must not just perform the right words publicly, but rather use those words to open up an ‘inmost’ vision.³⁷ It is that inner vision, that interior, that is judged by God after all – the intentions behind the words, and not the words, are what matters in prayer.³⁸ Public professions of faith performed by rote are the empty things of earth, but inner vision and feeling is the substance of God.³⁹ This idea of interior/exterior in fact mirrors a monastic plan, where the area outside the monastery’s walls (extra terminos) is an area where non-monastics can visit, and the area inside the walls (infra terminos or interior domus) is the space where the individual monk’s real soulful work occurs, the cloister of the soul (claustrum animae).⁴⁰ When defining these exterior and interior spaces in the CT, John himself even alludes to walled space, imagining metaphorical walls within the contemplative self that serve to stop up earthly influence and protect the soul when it is in silent retreat.⁴¹

John’s instruction to his reader to go inside himself follows his idea that, though God is found inside every single being,⁴² human beings are too often outside of themselves.⁴³ The goal of contemplation according to the Confessio theologica’s method is to recognise the presence of God that is already inside the human soul. This recognition, to John, is actually an act of recall, of unforgetting the seal of God that was always set on the reader’s heart.⁴⁴ This effort of memory works to call God into the reader’s soul and to have him ‘penetrate more deeply to the inmost parts by [his] powerful virtue’.⁴⁵ By calling God into the self, the reader will create a revulsion for the self that neglected God for so long,⁴⁶ replacing it with an inner hunger for God,⁴⁷ a hunger that will never fully be sated while the reader is alive.⁴⁸

Once the necessity of this interior journey is established, John quotes Augustine’s Confessions, asking: ‘in what place do you dwell in me, God?’.⁴⁹ God’s place, it turns out, is the human heart;⁵⁰ and it is the heart that is the site of the contemplative reform in the reader. Following Augustine’s description of Ambrose in the Confessions, John’s reader will also ‘[seek] out the meaning’:⁵¹

Give me a contrite heart, a pure heart, a sincere heart, a devout heart, a chaste heart, a sober heart, a mild heart, a gentle heart, a calm heart, a most serene heart, a heart full of desire for you … Cleave the hardness of my heart in order that that font may flow out for which my soul exceedingly seethes with desire … in order that my tears may become to me bread day and night … Free me from the quarrels and contentions that my wretched mind suffers there where the squabbling multitude of men is found … in order that loosed from all cares, I may freely sit at the feet of the Lord Jesus Christ and may listen intently to what heavenly wisdom teaches.⁵²

The main obstacle to allowing God to dwell within, for John, is a hardened heart.⁵³ John notes that in heaven where there is an eternal vision of God, there is no place for any ‘sharpness of gall’.⁵⁴ A hard heart prevents divine vision, and prevents God’s mercy from penetrating ‘deep within (intus) the sinner’.⁵⁵ In order to attain a true connection with God through prayer, the heart first needs to be broken with repentance (contritum), ‘torn’ (scinde) and un-‘hardened’ (duritiam cordis mei). Only then can God ‘pour [himself] from heaven into [one’s] heart’.⁵⁶

With this heartfelt embrace of God, John’s reader would finally be able to match his external recitations with an authentically fervent, internal feeling; he would finally be able to say ‘This I confess with my mouth, this I believe in my heart, and for this I give you thanks.’⁵⁷ John not only instructs his reader to open his heart to God in the CT, but, more tellingly, he invites the reader to inscribe the love and commandments of God onto his heart ‘so that [he] will never forget and can never erase it’.⁵⁸ Once opened, the reader will finally be ‘delivered from the noise that [otherwise] seizes the heart of man’.⁵⁹ Surprisingly, this longed-for openness is not a blissful, calm state. John explains that a truly open-hearted man is actually in a constant state of suffering, broken by constant repentance,⁶⁰ crushed by constant ‘sacrifice’.⁶¹ Real ‘misery’, to John, is that of a ‘sinful soul’ whose heart is ‘unfeeling’ (insensibilis)⁶² and distant from God; but, perhaps ironically, once the heart is broken and God is let in, there is still only ‘plaintive notes and excessive wailings and deep sighs of the heart’.⁶³ This miserable state of suffering, however, brings the sinner closest to God. Suffering, tears, and despair are signs of a contemplative practice that is effective. John cries repeatedly in the CT for interior tears – tears stemming from the heart, tears that extend from feeling.⁶⁴ Such suffering opens the heart to senses that can point the sinner towards God: smells, sounds, sights, and tastes are discovered, and the heart develops eyes, ears, and a mouth through which the reader can receive the divine.⁶⁵ Such openness comes with an intense feeling of suffering. But this, John believes, is much less painful than the ultimate consequences of a life of hard-hearted exterior living. John writes that his CT is ultimately written ‘so that with the very palate of my heart I may feel’.⁶⁶

The use of feeling, emotion, and affectus in John’s devotional programme

Contrary to the image of the unfeeling monk, endlessly repeating rote verses of prayer, John’s programme called for intense emotion on the part of the devotee. For while heaven is a place of serenity, both for God – ‘You [God] love, without passion; are jealous, without anxiety; repent, yet grieve not; are angry, yet serene’⁶⁷ – and for Christians – ‘They see and desire to see: without anxiety they desire, without disgust they are sated’⁶⁸ – the temporal realm was a place so apt to harden the heart of the sinner that only intense feeling could break it open to God’s love: ‘With the penalty of sin, moreover, the hardened mind tolerates this, that it is able to see its own sins, [but] it is not able to weep.’⁶⁹ This inability to feel and suffer while on this earth, John reasons, makes the devotee blind to the true consequence of his sin. As in the model of Christ’s suffering on the cross, only suffering and feeling can truly propel the devotee towards the divine in John’s view. So, once the devotee has moved into his own heart, he must now break that heart so that it can feel.

And what, exactly, must the heart feel? A complex of emotions that can be neatly summed up by one of the most frequently used terms in the John’s treatise: caritas.⁷⁰ John defines caritas as when ‘the soul of the devout mind, burning with an excessive love for Christ, gaping for Christ, sighing for Christ, desiring to see Christ his lone love, possesses nothing sweet except for moaning and crying’.⁷¹ John’s Confessio theologica often speaks of the paradox of caritas, calling it a wounding love, a healing pain, a tender agony. Caritas pierces the heart like an arrow of love; its affection causes torment:⁷²

Come, tears, I beseech you, in the name of Jesus Christ my Lord, come; fill my heart, wet my eyes, moisten my cheeks, sprinkle me with crying, flow over my face, give me bitter wailing, generate sweet pardon … He who brought forth water from the rock⁷³ and mercifully infused the sinful woman inwardly,⁷⁴ at the same time as kindly took her up outwardly, may he himself by his own most holy command speak to you, delayed tears, in order that you may so make drunk my heart with your inundation, desiring you and seeking you, so [the heart] cannot keep itself from crying. As long as it is salutary to weep, as long as it is salutary to repent, hasten, O tears that I wish for, that with my whole mind I seek, in order that I may cry bitterly day and night unceasingly from the wounds of my soul: lest the times granted to repentance pass away, lest the days granted to living well flow by without cause, let the Spirit of God, good teacher and illuminator of Mother Church, who from a hard heart produces tears and gives to penitents fruits worthy of repentance, descend into my heart in order that he may strike streams from above and below [the heart], made as it is of stone and iron.⁷⁵

Given today’s popular conception of crying and love as less ‘rational’ and more ‘spontaneous’ emotion, John’s evocation of them may seem contrived. With our modern sensibilities, we might be sceptical of any crying monk who had been reading the CT, suspecting that, by crying, the monk was merely following orders for right action, and not necessarily feeling John’s prescribed suffering. But, for John’s eleventh-century monastic readers, such deliberate crafting of affective experience was common, and no less genuine than an unprompted bout of tears. The RB describes the process of monastic learning as a process of internalisation, where repetition means deeper understanding and not (as a modern audience might suspect) rote memorisation. Through reiteration of John’s contemplative prescriptions, a monk would come ‘to observe without effort, as though naturally, from habit, no longer out of fear of hell, but out of love for Christ, good habit, and delight in virtue’.⁷⁶ The process of lectio divina in the monastery was also derived from the belief that genuine knowledge followed repetitive behaviour:⁷⁷ repetitive behaviour could indeed yield more sincere feeling in its participants.⁷⁸ The Confessio theologica’s prescriptions may seem contrived to a modern reader – but they may well have been effective in fostering genuinely emotional prayer in John’s monastic audience.

John did not believe, however, that a human could cultivate right emotion without divine help, no matter how hard he might try. Ever since John Cassian, monks had believed that right emotion in prayer was performed (or rather affected) on them by God (afficio); the resulting affective experience was therefore passively received by a Christian who allowed God to bestow the emotion, or affect, upon him (affectus).⁷⁹ John’s Confessio theologica embraces this point, its first-person speaker pleading with or even ordering God in the imperative to affect such feeling in the devotee’s self. ‘Do [this for me] (Fac)’, ‘Give [this to] me (Da mihi)’, and ‘I beg you (Rogo)’ are the commands used by the CT’s speaker to plead with God that he afficit the grace of emotional affectus.⁸⁰ John shares this age-old notion that emotion is granted to the devotee through the largesse of God.⁸¹ Prayerful emotion is experienced, not wholly created, by John’s readers – it is affected on them by God.⁸² As he writes in the passage above: ‘Let the Spirit of God … who from a hard heart produces tears, and gives to penitents fruits worthy of repentance, descend into my heart.’⁸³ Still, while only God can provide the right feeling, Christians are expected to try to cultivate caritas, all the while begging for God’s help.

The word affectus is important in the history of Christian devotion, and plays an outsize role now in its scholarship thanks to the term ‘affective piety’, so its appearance in the CT merits a brief note. John’s CT only explicitly uses the word affectus twice. The first time, John quotes Augustine on the state of heavenly bliss, where devotees finally come face to face with God: in heaven, inhabitants are always the recipients of the right affection (affectu) from God, which streams like rays from God’s sunlike presence.⁸⁴ In the second mention, which will be discussed more extensively below, John shows his reader how the right longing for God (affectu) can be cultivated on this earth with the help of the image of the crucified Christ. In each of these cases, the CT reminds its readers how praying for the proper affectus in turn could make devotees more receptive to these emotions and stronger combatants in the fight for refuge ‘away from the turmoil of the thoughts of this age’.⁸⁵ Moreover, these efforts, John says, will cause the memory of a specific affectus to live on in the devotee, by being more easily revivable in the future.⁸⁶

John’s use of the model of the crucified Christ

To bolster his specific prescriptions for suffering, tears, and emotional devotion to God, John provides the readers of the CT with three biblical exemplars for right devotion and right feeling: Christ on the cross (Matthew 27:27–44; Mark 15:16–32; Luke 23:26–43; John 19:16–27), Mary Magdalene crying over Jesus’s empty tomb (John 20:11), and Hannah tearfully praying for a child (1 Samuel 1–2). John envisions each of these biblical figures in order to better induce a proper emotional reformation in his readers. He invites his readers to empathise with all three characters and to adopt these characters’ emotional states for themselves.

John’s use of the vision of the crucified Christ is the model for devotion most frequently invoked in the CT, and the model that is most embraced by later medieval ‘affective piety’. John’s CT defines caritas as the right emotion for the devotee to feel when praying – an experience of divine love through suffering. No other model embodies caritas more powerfully than the obedient Son’s torture and death for the sake of love. Fittingly, most of John’s explicit mentions of the word ‘caritas’ are made in connection with Jesus’s crucifixion.⁸⁷ By peppering his CT with images of the suffering Christ, John shows that ‘it is by [Christ’s] blood that we have access to [God]’.⁸⁸ Here, John acknowledges both that Jesus’s atonement literally allows Christians ‘access’ to heaven after death, and that Jesus’s blood – the material proof of his suffering – allows Christians to feel emotionally in contemplation, granting them interior access to God while they are on this earth.

The Confessio theologica’s most distinctive use of the crucifixion, however, does not merely present an image of Jesus’s suffering caritas. It also attempts to crucify the reader, shaping the reader into Christ himself so that he can better feel the painful lengths Christ went for the sake of godly love. John uses the following image to spark in his reader the same affective experience of the crucified Christ:

Through those saving wounds which you suffered on the cross for our salvation and from which flowed the precious and vivifying blood by which we have been redeemed with propitious graciousness … 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 caritas. 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 to 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 [affectu] 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.⁸⁹

This passage distils the essence of John’s distinctive use of the crucifixion in his CT.⁹⁰ Here, the prayerful speaker of the CT asks that the image of the wounded Christ in turn work to wound the sinner and penetrate the tough shield of the human heart so that the sinner can weep day and night. This notion of wounding and penetrating the heart is an image common in the Bible, particularly in the Song of Songs, and thus common also to both contemporary monastic literature and later medieval mystical writings.⁹¹ But beyond making biblical references and speaking in rhetorical tropes, John is doing something very specific here: as John’s devotee looks at Christ’s bleeding wounds in his mind’s eye, the vision of those wounds (and the caritas that they signify) affect a wound in the devotee’s own soul.⁹² The soul becomes wounded as Christ’s body is wounded; and instead of bleeding from the wound, the soul cries abundant tears from the wound – its wounds weep. The devotee’s very act of engaging with this crucified image is a painful one – the image ‘pierces’, ‘cleaves’, ‘wounds’, and it is not consoling. The image of the crucified affects an emotional crucifixion of the devotee. But it is a crucified suffering that is a sign of caritas – it is a ‘dart of love’ – and, as a result, it is the most effective (efficax) technique that John offers to his reader to receive the feeling (affectu) of weeping for closeness to God. The passage invites its reader to engage in an empathy so extreme he longs to become the crucified Christ and to make the ultimate sacrifice – at least, emotionally.⁹³ This is as close to God as a human can get.

John even emphasises the connection between the tears that pour from the wounded heart of the sinner and the blood that gushes from the wounds of Christ by using parallel language throughout his work;⁹⁴ John’s devotee-speaker longs to be a ‘holocaust’ and a ‘sacrifice of a broken spirit’.⁹⁵ John thus bombards his reader with the model of Christ.

Another passage from the CT expands the scope of John’s use of the crucified Christ as a model for his reader to follow:⁹⁶

Dearest one, I beseech you through your passion and cross, fill my heart with your inextinguishable love, with your constant remembrance, so that like a burning flame I may entirely blaze in the sweetness of your love … write with your finger in my heart the sweet memory of your mellifluous name, a memory never erased by any forgetfulness. Write on the tablets of my heart your commandments and will, your laws and right doing, so that I may always and everywhere have you, Lord of immense sweetness, and your precepts before my eyes. How sweet are your words to my throat. Grant me a tenacious memory, so that I forget them not.⁹⁷

Where is the reader’s crucifixion in this passage? Rachel Fulton has argued that medieval people would have seen this ‘writing’ on the heart as a kind of ‘inscriptive wounding’; much as a stylus would wound the skin of parchment during the act of writing.⁹⁸ ‘Writing’ here, then, becomes parallel to the earlier wounding of the heart, whose tough shield the devotee asks Christ to penetrate with his two-edged sword; John calls for Christ to help pierce the sinner in a new way.⁹⁹ The devotee wants his heart – now unhardened – to be wounded continuously (‘always and everywhere’) by the ‘memory’ of Christ’s own passion. There is a kind of self-perpetuating circularity here: the devotee asks for the vision and memory of the wounded Christ to create a wounding of his own heart, and these wounds in turn will serve as a constant reminder for him of the model of Christ’s passion and caritas, which will continue to wound him.

John’s use of the models of Mary Magdalene and Hannah

Perhaps because Jesus’s human life is less important to John than the emotional model of the crucifixion, John is not interested in devotion to the Virgin Mary in his Confessio theologica, unlike many of the affective writers who come after him. The Virgin, in fact, is mentioned only once, obliquely, in the whole treatise.¹⁰⁰ Alongside the crucified Christ, however, John refers the Confessio theologica’s readers to two other biblical models: Mary Magdalene and Hannah. This is unusual before the twelfth century, particularly the use of Hannah.¹⁰¹ Nonetheless, both the Magdalene and Hannah are showcased by John in the same way that the crucified Christ is: in all three recensions of John’s work, they serve as archetypes for right emotional devotion and behaviour for John’s readers, whether male or female.

Mary Magdalene appears several times in the Confessio theologica, primarily as a model for tearfulness.¹⁰² In fact, in the Confessio theologica, John highlights how the Magdalene went through all of the stages that John’s treatise prescribes. He mentions Mary Magdalene as a model for his first stage of prayer – interiority – saying that God ‘mercifully infused the sinful woman inwardly, at the same time that he kindly took her up outwardly’.¹⁰³ Mary Magdalene thus serves as a model of someone who reformed her exterior actions and her interior connection to God. John mentions Mary Magdalene again after he has established the desirability of tears in Part III of the CT, showing her to be a relevant emotional model as well, exemplifying a persistent, tearful, loving, caritas-filled devotion to God. In John’s formulation, Mary Magdalene returns again and again to the action of seeking God; through her, John relates another virtue to his reader’s practice of prayer – the virtue of persistence. Since John acknowledges that the reader’s prayer will never be satisfied with a heavenly vision on this earth, patience and persistence are important.¹⁰⁴

John’s most involved depiction of Mary Magdalene’s spiritual persistence is the following:

Let my eyes, O Lord, bring down allotments of waters, with you, for whom all things are possible and nothing difficult, merciful and forgiving. But just like that woman who was seeking you, O Lord, while you were lying in the tomb, had been inundated with so many tears, and had desired to see you whom she loved with such great fervour of mind, that although others were receding that woman did not recede, who, full of your excessive love, approached to visit the place of burial again and again. She stood, she persevered, she found finally what she desired. For to that one loving you above the rest, and seeking you more zealously than all, you deigned to appear first of all, since the power of such great perseverance was love. Therefore with what zeal, with what tears, or with what constancy of holy longing must we seek, fear, and love you, night and day through all the days of our life, the Lord of all things now reigning in heaven and holding all things under your command?¹⁰⁵

Christ shows right caritas and inspires proper suffering in the viewer. Mary Magdalene’s example helps to cultivate continual suffering once it is achieved; she shows the stamina required. With the aid of such persistence, the devotee can then say: ‘so that my tears become to me bread day and night … give me the best part, which Mary chose and which I myself have chosen formerly and preferred through the inspiration of your grace, in order that I, absolved from all my cares, may freely sit at the feet of the Lord Jesus Christ and may listen intently to what heavenly wisdom teaches’.¹⁰⁶ In this image, John alludes to Mary sitting at Jesus’s feet, tearful and devoted, while Martha busies herself about the house.¹⁰⁷ It is no coincidence, then, that the monks of Fécamp had a relic of Mary Magdalene, who was such a potent exemplar from their abbot’s CT.¹⁰⁸

The third biblical model invoked by John in the CT is one from the Hebrew Bible: Hannah.¹⁰⁹ While scholars have previously examined Mary Magdalene as a sometime feature of affective piety, Hannah has not been discussed, and her presence seems to be one of John’s unique contributions.¹¹⁰ In 1 Samuel 1, Hannah is a barren woman. Like Mary Magdalene, Hannah is persistent and tearful (in Hannah’s case, it is because she longs for a baby); and yet, though God is silent in her repeated request for a child, she never stops praying, and she persists in her tearful prayers (1 Samuel 1:10). For John’s monks, Hannah likely served as a poignant model. It was Hannah whom the priest Eli accused of being drunk when, tearfully praying, she ‘spoke in her heart,¹¹¹ and only her lips moved’ (‘loquebatur in corde suo, tantumque labia illius movebantur’; 1 Samuel 1:13–14); Hannah’s interior plea, then, would have resonated with John of Fécamp’s own prescription that prayer come from an open heart.

When John mentions Hannah, he emphasises all of these points: her tears, her persistence, and her special, internal, self-altering prayer:

I recall, O Lord, I recall, holy one, that holy woman who came to the tabernacle intending to ask, who sought with many tears a son to be given to her, concerning whom the Scripture reports that her countenances after her tears and prayers were no more changed into different things. I recall, I say, such great faith and such great constancy, and I am twisted with pain and confounded with shame, because I most wretchedly do no such thing.¹¹²

John continues:

For if the woman who was seeking a son wept in this way, and in weeping persevered, how ought the soul who seeks God to wail and in wailing to persist? Let my soul, I beseech, wail, O my God, let it wail and let it not cease from wailing, having been pierced by a heavenly visitation.¹¹³

The image of Hannah praying allows John to remind his reader of the intent behind his entire CT project: to teach his reader how to pray. For it is not just John’s wish to turn his reader towards the experience of caritas, or to get his reader to cry continual tears; it is John’s intent to teach his reader how to pray correctly, with the right internal connection, with an open heart, and with catalysed, reformed feeling. Hannah, then, serves as a means for tying all of John’s observations together and bringing his monk-reader back to the main goal of his CT: to create ‘this little compilation of readings for [God’s] praise’ to incite proper, fervent, emotional prayerful activity in his monastic readers so that they ‘may be reignited in [God’s] love’.¹¹⁴

Conclusion

John of Fécamp’s Confessio theologica has often been called the beginning of medieval affective piety; but this chapter attempts to move beyond John’s current status as the beginning of a devotional trend and instead to locate the role of emotion in John’s larger devotional purpose. The mere fact that John calls to mind a crucified body is not a sufficient evidence of his ‘affectivity’; and, in view of his larger treatise, his chief interest is not in Jesus’s humanity. To understand what John’s affective piety is, we must look to the larger programme of his CT. In doing so, we learn that he is reaching for the example of Christ alongside other examples of Mary Magdalene and Hannah; we learn that his chief interest in all of these exemplars is the perfected emotional devotion that they model for his reader. Moreover, we learn that these characters and their lives are not the focus for John, but rather that they serve as vehicles carrying the devotee towards a greater goal, as the means to an end. John asks, how can a monk stay emotionally awake in his prayerful actions? How can a devotee know that he is doing the right thing while he is praying, when prayer, as a task, is never satisfied with a heavenly vision or reassurance from God? How can a monk improve and reform his devotion? Look at these biblical models, John says. Are you really suffering in your love for God, as Christ did on the cross? Are you really persistent in your tearful emotion, as Mary Magdalene was at the tomb? Are you really heartfelt and constant in your prayer, as Hannah was in the sanctuary, even though you have no assurance that God is listening? If you are really doing all of these things, John says, then, monk-reader, you are fully engaged in the act of true prayer.

John’s Confessio theologica’s attention to the reform of the inner emotion of its readers’ prayer seems remarkable for his eleventh-century context. Monastic leaders in the beginning of the eleventh century have traditionally been viewed as less concerned with how one prayed and more concerned that one prayed, more concerned with right external action than right internal emotion. But John’s attention to exactly the reverse persists throughout his CT and throughout all of his actions as abbot of Fécamp. So where did his idea for an internal, emotional reform of prayer come from? And just how innovative was it in the wider context of European monasticism? Those are the questions of the next chapter.

Notes

1John’s writings are notoriously difficult to identify today because they circulated anonymously. I acknowledge therefore that he could have written more than has been identified.

2‘Ingrediar in interiore mentis meae’ (CT, p. 167).

3Note that John did not title his own work ‘Confessio theologica’. The name is a variation from a twelfth-century manuscript of John’s work (Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 1919), where the book is called ‘liber confessionum’ in the titular rubric (see fol. 1 of that manuscript). The word ‘theologica’ was added in the sixteenth-century printed edition entitled Confessio theologica tribus partibus absoluta (Paris: M. Vascovanum, 1539). Stéphane Lecouteux has recently revised the date of the start of John’s priorship, changing it from 1016 to 1023 (until 1028) in ‘Réseaux’, I, p. 71.

4Leclercq and Bonnes, Un maître, pp. 37–44. For more on these recensions, their manuscripts, and their readership, see Lauren Mancia, ‘Affective Devotion and Emotional Reform at the Eleventh-Century Monastery of John of Fécamp’ (PhD dissertation, Yale University, 2013), pp. 88–162.

5The differences between the Confessio theologica and the Libellus recensions are less significant to the larger meaning of John’s text than earlier scholars have believed. Both versions cover roughly the same content, and are divided into three parts, though the Libellus is reordered and a little shorter; and, while the Libellus recension presents John’s four prayers extracted as separate meditations, the texts of those prayers exist in full as integrated parts of the prose of the first recension, Confessio theologica. For example, John’s most famous prayer, so-called Meditations of St Augustine prayer 37b, occurs at the end of the CT, on pp. 180–1. Moreover, the themes and phrases of these prayers are found in the larger text of the Confessio theologica. Meditations of St Augustine prayer 37a’s metaphors of the ‘fountain of life’ and the ‘thirsty soul’ and its desire for the gift of tears, reoccur throughout the CT. The differences between the Confessio theologica and Confessio fidei, on the other hand, are more significant, and will be discussed in Chapter 4.

6The only translation of John’s work exists in French: La Confession théologique, trans. Philippe de Vial (Paris: Cerf, 1992).

7Where they overlap, both Paris 1919 and Paris 3088 have texts of the Confessio theologica that align almost perfectly, and both contain the same explicits and the same subsequent Lamentation text following the CT (a text edited in Leclercq and Bonnes, Un maître, pp. 166–83). That Paris 3088’s leaves are from the end of the CT is helpful because it confirms that the manuscript is indeed a copy of the first recension of John’s work: it does not contain the separately enumerated prayers (which would make it part of the Libellus recension) or a fourth part on the Eucharist (which would make it part of the Confessio fidei recension).

8Stéphane Lecouteux has traced the connections between Fécamp and the Cistercian houses in Champagne (of which community Paris 1919 is a part). He has shown that Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 5318 (a collection of saints’ lives from Fécamp) was a model for a Cistercian compilation of saints’ lives at Clairvaux and diffused to other Cistercian abbeys under the name Liber de natalitis. Lecouteux also suspects that books from Saint-Bénigne (for instance, Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Ottob. lat. 120) were likewise associated with this lineage of hagiographical manuscripts stemming from Fécamp. ‘Réseaux’, I, pp. 139–43.

9On the dispute over the Confessio fidei’s authenticity, see Vincent Serralda, ‘Étude comparée de la “Confessio Fidei” attribuée à Alcuin et de la “Confessio Theologica” de Jean de Fécamp’, in Walter Beschin (ed.), Mittellatinisches Jahrbuch (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1988), pp. 7–27; Warren Pezé, ‘Aux origines de la Confession de Saint Martin’, Revue Mabillon 86 (25 n.s.) (2014), 5–44.

10Wilmart, ‘Deux préfaces spirituelles’, p. 25, n. 11.

11‘Praesta, Domine, ut famulum tuum abbatam meum et omnes seniores fratresque meos sincere et humili caritate semper diligam malis et peccatis atque adversitatibus eorum ex corde condoleam, bonis et virtutibus atque profectibus eorum ex corde congaudeam, amori tuo nunquam aliquid praeponam, sed te in omnibus et super omnia diligam. Da mihi veram humilitatem et oboedientiam, veram subiectionem atque mortificationem, ut liberum arbitrium non vivat in me neque propria voluntas ducat me. Da mihi simplicitatem, innocentiam et integritatem mentis, iugem custodiam cordis atque oris, ut nullum damnem aut respuam, de nullius meritis diffidam, nulli malum reddam pro malo, sed ambulem in simplicitate cordis mei coram te semper’ (CT, pp. 133–4).

12Leclercq and Bonnes, Un maître, p. 28.

13Teresa Webber, ‘Cantor, Sacrist, or Prior? The Provision of Books in Anglo-Norman England’, in Katie Bugyis, Margot Fassler, and Andrew Kraebel (eds), Medieval Cantors and their Craft: Music, Liturgy, and the Shaping of History, 800–1500 (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press/Boydell & Brewer, 2017), pp. 172–89.

14Mancia, ‘Affective Devotion and Emotional Reform’, pp. 88–162; Fulton, From Judgment to Passion, p. 166.

15This, in combination with the fact that the majority of the eleventh- and twelfth-century manuscripts that circulated in John’s lifetime were Libellus manuscripts prefaced by dedicatory letters to women, has caused some to argue that an audience of women chiefly consumed John’s work, namely McNamer, Affective Meditation, 60. McNamer here refers specifically to the Libellus recension. However, because most of the Libellus manuscripts enjoyed a circulation at male monastic houses, it is unlikely that John wrote his texts solely for women; see also Davis, The Weight of Love, p. 131.

16Of the Libellus: Metz, Médiathèque de Metz, ms. 245 and Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 13593. Of the Confessio fidei: Montpellier, Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Montpellier, ms. H309.

17Of the Libellus: Zwettl, Zisterzienserstift Zwettl, Cod. 164 and Cod. 225; Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 1580 and Cod. 1582; Barcelona, Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, Ripoll 214; Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm. 11352 and Clm. 12607. Of the Confessio theologica: Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 1919. Of the Confessio fidei: Troyes, Bibl. mun., ms. 2142 (fols 180v–189r).

18For more on this, see Chapter 5.

19Among the eleventh-century manuscripts: Metz, Médiathèque, ms. 245 was from Saint-Arnoul de Metz, a monastery that was reformed by John’s mentor William of Volpiano in 996/7, and that maintained a correspondence with John of Fécamp in the 1050s (see Chapter 3); Montpellier, Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Montpellier, ms. H309 is from Saint-Bénigne de Dijon, William of Volpiano’s monastery, John’s alma mater, and a monastery of which John was abbot from 1052 to 1054; Paris 13593 has a possible Bec origin (and Fécamp connection thereby – see Lauren Mancia, ‘Praying with an Eleventh-Century Manuscript: A Case Study of the Engimatic Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 13593’, in Thomas Barton, Susan McDonough, Sara McDougall, and Matthew Wranovix (eds), Boundaries in the Medieval and Wider World (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), pp. 153–77). Among the twelfth-century manuscripts: Ripoll 214 is from the monastery of Santa Maria de Ripoll in Catalonia, a monastery that has William of Volpiano listed in its necrology, likely because of its connection with Cuxa (see Stéphane Lecouteux’s ‘Deux fragments d’un nécrologe de la Trinité de Fécamp (XIe–XIIe siècles). Étude et édition critique d’un document mémoriel exceptionnel’, Tabularia 16 (2016), 1–89. Note that there is no surviving Confessio theologica manuscript from Fécamp itself, although the unattributed Paris 3088 might be.

20The existence of a dedicatory letter does not necessarily have anything to do with the readership of the particular manuscript, since dedicatory letters often circulated with their texts as a kind of foreword to attract attention, regularly having no bearing on the audience of the manuscripts themselves: Giles Constable, Letters and Letter Collections, Typologie des sources du moyen âge occidental 17 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1976); Christian Høgel and Elisabetta Bartoli (eds), Medieval Letters: Between Fiction and Document (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015).

21‘Idcirco non praesumptionis temeritate, sed magna tui desiderii auiditate huic defloratiunculae ad laudem tuam operam dedi, ut breve et manuale verbum de Deo mecum semper haberem, ex cuius lectionis igne, quoties tepefio, in tuum reaccendar amorem. Quoniam enim in medio laqueorum positi sumus, facile a caelesti desiderio frigescimus. Assiduo itaque indigemus munimento, ut expergefacti ad te nostrum verum et summum bonum, cum defluximus, recurramus. Sed ignosce, rogo, Domine, ignosce mihi indignissimo et infelici tecum de te divtius colloquenti servo. Ignosce, pie, mihi misero. Amore enim tui nominis nimio labia mea tibi aperui’ (CT, p. 182).

22There are several such cases in the eleventh- and twelfth-century examples. Pages from Paris 3088, the earliest fragment of the CT, measure long and narrow at 26 cm × 17.5 cm. The same is true for its Libellus editions: Metz, Médiathèque, ms. 245, for instance, is even longer and narrower, measuring 31.8 cm × 17.3 cm; Paris, BnF, ms lat. 13593, an edition of John’s Libellus prayers, is as small as a book of hours, measuring 20.3 cm × 15.2 cm.

23This kind of performative ‘I’ is common in medieval writing according to A.C. Spearing, Medieval Autographies: The ‘I’ of the Text (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012).

24Italics my emphasis. See Chapter 5; Thomas H. Bestul, ‘Self and Subjectivity in the Prayers and Meditations of Anselm of Canterbury’, in Roman Majeran and Edward Iwo Zielinski (eds), Saint Anselm: Bishop and Thinker: Papers Read at a Conference Held in the Catholic University of Lublin on 24–26 September 1996 (Lublin: University Press of the Catholic University of Lublin, 1999), p. 151.

25The CT has thus been called a monumental moment for the development of silent reading, see Paul Saenger, Space between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 202. Sarah McNamer agrees, calling this an ‘impassioned “I”’: McNamer, Affective Meditation, pp. 67–73.

26This performative instigation of emotions is akin to the ‘emotives’ described in Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling (see Introduction, above). The idea that emotion is performative and performable is also discussed in Davis, The Weight of Love, pp. 6, 19.

27‘Da mihi cordis contritionem, et lacrimarum fontem, praecipue dum preces et orationes meas tibi affero, dum tuae laudis psalmodiam decanto, dum mysterium nostrae redemptionis manifestum misericordiae tuae iudicium recolo vel profero, dum sacris altaribus, licet indignus, assisto, cupiens offerre illud mirabile et caeleste sacrificium omni reverentia et devotione dignum’ (CT, p. 173).

28Amy Hollywood, ‘Song, Experience, and the Book in Benedictine Monasticism’, in Amy Hollywood and Patricia Z. Beckman (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 65.

29The idea that prescribed feelings of the past can be recovered by historians is discussed by Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 196.

30‘Dicta mea dicta sunt patrum’ (CT, p. 121). There is more on this in Chapter 2.

31‘In hac quidem vita miseriis erroribusque plenissima haberi non potest contemplativae perfectio vitae’ (CT, p. 174).

32For more on how this contrasts with the writings of Anselm of Canterbury and others, see Chapter 5.

33For more about ‘conversion’ or ‘confession’ being an act of understanding and recognition of God by Christians, see Elizabeth C. Parker and Charles T. Little, The Cloisters Cross: Its Art and Meaning (New York: Abrams, 1994), pp. 72–5, 175–95; see also Chapter 2, below.

34As quoted in M.D. Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), p. 313.

35The process of moving from the exterior to the interior also mirrors the process of lectio divina. See, for instance, Jean-François Cottier, Anima mea: Prières privées et textes de dévotion du moyen âge latin (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), p. 110.

36‘interioribus sensibus animae meae’ (CT, p. 179). This idea is also found elsewhere in medieval texts; for instance, Piroska Nagy, ‘Religious Weeping as Ritual in the Medieval West’, Social Analysis 48.2 (2004), 123.

37‘intimae visionis’ (CT, p. 172).

38CT, p. 124.

39CT, p. 156.

40Phillip C. Adamo, New Monks in Old Habits: The Formation of the Caulite Monastic Order, 1193–1267 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2014), p. 183. On the interior domus, see Melville, The World of Medieval Monasticism, pp. 189–90. Melville also discusses like images of the ‘inner household’ and ‘soul’s cloister’ (claustrum animae) on pp. 318–20.

41Cf. CT, pp. 137, 158.

42CT, p. 114.

43This is an intentional paraphrase from Augustine’s Confessions 10.27.38.

44CT, p. 172.

45‘Atque altius penetra ad intima potenti virtute’ (CT, p. 181).

46For more on how both Augustine and Anselm do this, see Karl F. Morrison, ‘Framing the Subject: Humanity and the Wounds of Love’, in Karl F. Morrison and Rudolph M. Bell (eds), Studies on Medieval Empathies (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), p. 10.

47CT, p. 144.

48CT, pp. 159, 173.

49‘Et quis locus in me est, quo veniat in me, Deus meus?’ (CT, p. 110).

50This focus on the heart and on inscription on the heart is biblical: cf. Jeremiah 31:33, ‘But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.’ Thanks to Travis Stevens for pointing this out.

51Augustine, Confessions 6.3: ‘When [Ambrose] read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still.’

52‘Da mihi cor contritum, cor purum, cor sincerum, cor deuotum, cor castum, cor sobrium, cor mite, cor mansuetum, cor tranquillum, cor serenissimum, cor tui desiderio plenum … scinde duritiam cordis mei ut emanet fons iste cuius desiderio nimis aestuat anima mea … ut lacrimae meae fiant mihi panis die ac nocte. Libera me iurgiis et contentionibus quas ibi patitur misera mens, ubi est litigans hominum multitudo … ut a cunctis absolutus curis liber ad pedes Domini Iesu Christi sedeam et intente audiam quid caelestis sapientia doceat’ (CT, pp. 133, 136).

53The obsession with the heart (the ‘palate of the heart’, a ‘hardened heart’) is akin to Augustine’s obsession with the heart in his Confessions. For instance, CT, pp. 144, 172 is parallel to Confessions 5.13.23 and Confessions 7.16.22; see Lauren Mancia, ‘Reading Augustine’s Confessions in Normandy in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’, Tabularia 14 (2014), 195–233.

54‘Amaritudo et omnis fellis asperitas in regione tua locum non habet’ (CT, p. 156).

55‘et peccatricem mulierem intus misericorditer infundit’ (CT, p. 152).

56‘tu infunde caelitus cordibus nostris’ (CT, p. 127).

57‘Hoc ore confiteor, hoc corde credo, et pro hoc tibi gratias ago’ (CT, p. 141).

58‘in pectore meo dulcem memoriam tui melliflui nominis nulla unquam oblivione delendam’ (CT, p. 172). Mary Carruthers has spoken about this idea of the memory as a writing tablet upon which to inscribe thoughts in The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 102.

59‘Confugiat mens mea sub umbram alarum tuarum ab aestibus cogitationum huius saeculi’ (CT, p. 143).

60‘Da mihi cor contritum, cor purum, cor sincerum, cor devotum, cor castum, cor sobrium, cor mite, cor mansuetum, cor tranquillum’ (CT, p. 133).

61‘ut sacrificium spiritus contribulati et cordis contriti’ (CT, p. 172).

62‘Desiderat desiderio magno divisiones aquarum, peccatrix anima mea: sed obriguit misera, insensibilis facta est’ (CT, p. 151).

63‘Et inter has quarerelas nimiosque ploratus ac profunda cordis suspiria, assumis maestam et anxiam mentem super alta iuga montium’ (CT, p. 160).

64CT, p. 136.

65CT, pp. 157, 176–7. For more on the divine awakening of the senses in monastic writing, see R. Hale, “‘Taste and See, for God is Sweet”: Sensory Perception and Memory in Medieval Christian Mystical Experience’, in Ann Clarke Bartlett (ed.), Vox Mystica: Essays on Medieval Mysticism in Honor of Professor Valerie M. Lagorio (Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer, 1995), pp. 3–14; Rachel Fulton, ‘“Taste and See That the Lord is Sweet” (Ps. 33:9): The Flavor of God in the Monastic West’, Journal of Religion 86.2 (2006), 169–204.

66‘Ut ipso cordis palato sentiam’ (CT, pp. 176–7).

67‘Amas, nec aestuas. Zelas et securus es. Paenitet te et non doles. Iraseceris et tranquillus es’ (CT, p. 112); cf. Augustine’s Confessions 1.4.4.

68‘Vident et videre desiderant: sine anxietate desiderant, sine fastidio satiantur’ (CT, p. 159).

69‘De paena autem peccati hoc obdurata mens sustinet, ut peccata sua videre possit, flere non possit’ (CT, pp. 151–2). This relationship between emotion and sin is also noted in Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages, p. 49.

70Caritas is mentioned with incredible frequency throughout the Confessio theologica: it can be found in CT, pp. 119, 127, 129, 130, 133, 140, 155, 156, 158, 159, 161, 171, 172, 173, 175, 179, 181, 182. At the beginning of the CT, God himself is identified as caritas: ‘Tu vere Patris et Filii caritas, unitas, et sanctitas’ (CT, pp. 119). John also quotes Augustine’s Confessions supporting this point, saying ‘O aeterna veritas, et vera caritas, et cara aeternitas! Tu es Deus meus’ (CT, p. 161; from Confessions 7.10.16). This is somewhat different from how other scholars have depicted the medieval definition of caritas (as fellow-feeling) in other contexts; see, for instance, Romig, Be a Perfect Man or Morrison, ‘Framing the Subject’. The connection between caritas and Augustine will be discussed further in Chapter 3.

71‘Incipit pars tertia in qua mens devota a nimio Christi amore flagrans, Christo inhians, Christo suspirans, Christum quem solum amat videre desiderans, nihil dulce habet nisi gemere et flere’ (CT, p. 142).

72‘Tuae enim caritatis iaculo vulneratus sum … Anxius et sitibundus ad te volando curro’ (CT, p. 155). The idea of caritas as a wounding arrow is a rhetorical trope found often in monastic writing (and derived in part from the Song of Songs); see Chapters 3 and 5, below.

73The passage comes from Psalm 127:16, and according to Leclercq and Bonnes, is reminiscent of a prayer from the Precum libelli, which will be discussed further in Chapter 2.

74The ‘sinful woman’ mentioned here is Mary Magdalene.

75‘Venite lacrimae obsecro, in nomine Domini mei Jesu Christi venite; implete cor meum, irrigate oculos meos, humectate genas meas, aspergite me fletibus, fluite super faciem meam, date mihi planctum amarum, generate dulcem veniam … Qui eduxit aquam de petra et peccatricem mulierem intus misericorditer infundit, pariterque benigne foris suscepit, ipse suo piisimo iussu vobis tardantibus dicat, ut cor meum vos desiderans, et vos quaerens, vestra ita inebrietis inundatione, ut se a fletibus temperare nec velit, nec possit … Donec salubre est flere, donec salubre est paenitere, festinate lacrimae quas opto, quas tota mente mea peto: ut pro vulneribus animae meae indesinenter diebus ac noctibus defleam: ne tempora indulta poenitentiae pereant; ne dies ad bene vivendum concessi, sine causa fluant, Spiritus Dei, bonus doctor et illuminator matris ecclesiae, qui ex duro corde producit lacrimas, et dat paenitentibus dignos paenitentiae fructus, descendat in cor meum, ut cudat ex eo saxeo et ferreo irriguum superius, et irriguum inferius’ (CT, pp. 151–2).

76RB 7:67–9, as quoted in Hollywood, ‘Song, Experience, and the Book’, p. 64.

77For more on this process, see Conrad Leyser, ‘Lectio divina, oratio pura: Rhetoric and the Techniques of Asceticism in the Conferences of John Cassian’, in Giulia Barone, Marina Caffiero, and Francesco Scorza Barcellona (eds), Modelli di santità e modelli di comportamento: contrasti, intersezioni, complementarità (Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1994), pp. 133–44; Robertson, Lectio Divina; Mary Agnes Edsall, ‘Reading Like a Monk: Lectio Divina, Religious Literature, and Lay Devotion’ (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2000); Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982).

78Hollywood, ‘Song, Experience, and the Book’, pp. 77–8; Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice’; Frederick Paxton, ‘Performing Death and Dying at Cluny in the High Middle Ages’, in Bruce T. Morrill, Susan Rodgers, and Joanna E. Ziegler (eds), Practicing Catholic: Ritual, Body, and Contestation in Catholic Faith (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 43–57; Morrison, ‘Framing the Subject’, p. 31; Christopher Swift, ‘The Penitent Prepares: Affect, Contrition, and Tears’, in Elina Gertsman (ed.), Crying in the Middle Ages: Tears of History (New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 79–101.

79Hollywood, ‘Song, Experience, and the Book’, pp. 64–9.

80‘Fac’ appears in CT, pp. 145, 173, 177, 179; ‘Da mihi’ appears in CT, pp. 180, 181; ‘Rogo’ appears in CT, pp. 181, 182.

81Cf. CT, p. 180.

82Cf. CT, p. 178.

83Cf. n. 75 above.

84‘Its delight is exclusively in you. In an unfailing purity it satiates its thirst in you. It never at any point betrays its mutability. You are always present to it, and it concentrates all of its affection on you. It has no future to expect. It suffers no variation and experiences no distending in the successiveness of time’ (‘Tu solus es, te perseverantissima castitate hauriens mutabilitatem suam nusquam et nunquam exerit et in te sibi semper praesente, ad te toto affectu se tenet, non habens futurum quod expectet nec in praeteritum traiiciens quod meminerit, nulla vice variatur nec in tempore ullo distenditur’) (CT, p. 166); cf. Augustine’s Confessions 12.11.12.

85‘Confugiat mens mea sub umbrum alarum tuarum ab aestibus cogitationum huius saeculi’ (CT, p. 143).

86For more on the relationship between memory and affect, see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 54.

87Of the mentions of caritas listed above, the following italicised pages indicate instances when caritas is connected implicitly or explicitly to the model of the crucified Christ: CT, pp. 119, 127, 129, 130, 133, 140, 155, 156, 158, 159, 161, 171, 172, 173, 175, 179, 181, 182.

88‘Per eius sanguinem habemus accessum ad te’ (CT, p. 140).

89‘per illa salutifera vulnera tua, quae passus es in cruce pro salute nostra, ex quibus emanavit ille pretiosus et vivificus sanguis quo sumus redempti propitiabili dignatione … 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).

90This also happens to be part of one of the four prayers excerpted in the Libellus; see Introduction, above.

91Note that the conflation of love with the sight of God’s wounds here is similar to an image found in the Rothschild Canticles (Figure 8); see Chapter 5, below, and Jeffrey Hamburger, ‘The Visual and the Visionary: The Image in Late Medieval Monastic Devotions’, in The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York: Zone Books, 1998), p. 127. There is a gender inversion here: the male monk wants to be pierced with a dart or a lance, assuming the ‘female’ position. While I will not dwell on this here, an important book on such gender issues is L.C. Engh, Gendered Identities in Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons on the Song of Songs: Performing the Bride (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014).

92Note that the word vulnera also means sins – it is used as such in the RB, ch. 46 – so there is a double entendre here too. The Christian’s sinfulness causes his suffering, and the sinner’s vulnera require him to be crucified and to obtain visual vulnera to brand him a sinner. The tears of contrition even flow from the wound (i.e. sin) in the sinner’s soul.

93Morrison defines empathy as metaphorical identity that strives to be literal – I am you – so such extremity is an empathic act; Karl Morrison, ‘I Am You’: The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology, and Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).

94See the parallel use of forms of emanare for both tears and blood in John’s text. In CT, p. 181, concerning blood: ‘Wherefore I pray for the clemency of your goodness through those salvific wounds which you suffered on the cross for our salvation, from which flowed the precious and life-giving blood by which we have been redeemed with propitious graciousness’ (‘Quapropter precor clementiam bonitatis tuae per illa salutifera vulnera quae passus es in cruce pro salute nostra, ex quibus emanavit ille praetiosus et vivificus sanguis quo sumus redempti propitiabili dignatione’). And in CT, p. 180, concerning tears: ‘In a contrite spirit, producing a true font of tears constantly flowing out of much love and desire for you’ (‘in animo contrito, producens verum fontem lacrimarum iugiter emanantem ex multo amore et desiderio tuo’).

95CT, pp. 172, 180, 183.

96This excerpt is also a part of a Libellus prayer.

97‘Carissime, obsecro per passionem et crucem tuam, reple cor meum tua inextinguibili dilectione, tua continua recordatione, tua continua recordatione, adeo ut totus sicut flamma urens ardeam in tui amoris dulcedine … scribe digito tuo in pectore meo dulcem memoriam tui melliflui nominis nulla unquam oblivione delendam. Scribe in tabulis cordis mei mandata et voluntatem tuam, legem et iustificationes tuas: ut te immensae dulcendinis Dominum, et praecepta tua semper et ubique habeam prae oculis meis. Quam dulcia faucibus meis eloquia tua. Da mihi tenacem memoriam, ut non obliviscar ea’ (CT, p. 172).

98See Fulton, From Judgment to Passion, pp. 164–5. The idea of writing on the ‘tablets of the heart’ is also seen in later medieval manuscript illumination, when books sometimes were made in a heart-shaped format (and scribes literally wrote on them), or the so-called ‘charters of Christ’. See Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, p. 102; Jessica Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 189–91; and Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 306–8.

99This kind of imitatio on the part of the sinner is discussed in Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), pp. 126–45.

100CT, p. 121.

101On John’s originality here, see Chapter 2; on how John’s use of Hannah and Mary Magdalene differs from how these two female biblical figures are used later, see Chapter 5.

102John is one of the earliest monks to portray Mary Magdalene as a pillar of steadfast love of Christ: most other writers only use her after the end of the eleventh century. See Chapters 2 and 5; and see also Fiona Griffiths, Nuns’ Priests’ Tales: Men and Salvation in Medieval Women’s Monastic Life (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), pp. 67–76.

103‘Qui eduxit aquam de petra et peccatricem mulierem intus misericorditer infundit, pariterque benigne foris suscepit’ (CT, pp. 151–2).

104Some scholars have noted that this persistent longing is one of John’s unique contributions to affective devotion. For more on this, see Chapter 2.

105‘Deducant oculi mei, Domine, divisiones aquarum, te miserante et donante, cui omnia possibilia sunt et nihil difficile. Similiter vero illa quae te Domine in sepulcro iacentem quaerebat, tantis lacrimis inundaverat tantoque mentis fervore te, quem amabat, videre desideraverat ut recedentibus aliis ipsa non recederet, et tuo nimio amore plena, locum sepulturae iterum iterumque visura adiret. Stetit, perseveravit, invenit tandem quod desideravit. Illi enim te prae caeteris amanti, et studiosius omnibus quaerenti, primitus apparere dignatus es, quia virtus tanti amoris perseverantia fuit. Quo itaque studio, quibus lacrimis, quaue sancti desiderii instantia nocte ac die per omnes dies vitae nostrae te omnium Dominum iam in caelis regnantem et omnia sub tuo imperio tententem, quaerere, venereari et amare debemus?’ (CT, p. 178).

106‘ut lacrimae meae fiant mihi panis die ac nocte … da mihi partem illam optimam quam Maria elegit et quam ego ipse elegi olim et praeelegi per inspirationem gratiae tuae ut a cunctis absolutus curis liber ad pedes Domini Jesu Christi sedeam et intente audiam quid caelestis sapientia doceat’ (CT, p. 136).

107See Giles Constable, Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 3–141. See also Katherine Ludwig Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 38. For more on John’s sources, see Chapter 2, below.

108Bishop Hugh of Lincoln is recorded to have actually eaten some of Fécamp’s relics of Mary Magdalene in the twelfth century: ‘Bishop Hugh of Lincoln’s Devotion to Relics’, in John Shinners (ed.), Medieval Popular Religion, 1000–1200: A Reader (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2007), pp. 181–3.

109Both the Mary Magdalene and the Hannah texts quoted above appear in the Libellus prayer excerpts.

110Hannah is seen as a symbol of Ecclesia (versus Penninah’s Synagoga), or as a personification of Christian sacrifice (and an exemplar for the practice of monastic oblation) in literature before the eleventh century. John is the first medieval writer to use Hannah as a devotional exemplar (he is followed by Peter Damien and Abelard, though neither uses Hannah as robustly as John does). John’s invocation of Hannah as a prayerful exemplar paralleled what monks were already familiar with from the liturgy, since at Lauds on ferial Wednesdays monks would sing her canticle from 1 Samuel 2:1–10 (Chadd I, p. 161). Fran Altvater, ‘Barren Mother, Dutiful Wife, Church Triumphant: Representations of Hannah in 1 Kings Illuminations’, Different Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art 3 (2011), 1–29. For more on this, see Chapters 2 and 5.

111Italics are here my emphasis.

112‘Recordor, Domine, recordor, pie, illius sanctae mulieris quae ad tabernaculum rogatura venit, quae multis lacrimis dari sibi filium petiit, de qua Scriptura refert, quod vultus eius post lacrimas et preces non sunt amplius in diversa mutati. Recordor, inquam, tante fidei tantaeque constantiae: et dolore torqueor, et verecundia confundor, quia ego miserrimus nil tale facio’ (CT, pp. 177–8).

113‘Si enim ita flevit, et in fletu perseveravit mulier quae quaerebat filium, quomodo plangere, et in planctu persistere debet anima quae quaerit Deum? Plangat obsecro anima mea, Deus meus, plangat, et a planctu non desinat caelesti visitatione compuncta’ (CT, p. 178).

114It is interesting that John uses the examples of two women – the Magdalene and Hannah – for his audience of male monks. Medieval men’s reaching for female examples is not new – many scholars have written on the subject, most notably Caroline Walker Bynum (in Jesus as Mother) and Fiona Griffiths (in Nuns’ Priests’ Tales). It is worth noting that the fact of these female exemplars does not confirm a female audience for John’s CT – male monks were speaking in Hannah’s voice all the time when they sang her canticle in the liturgy, for instance.

1

Reforming the reader’s interior: defining emotional reform and affectivity in John of Fécamp’s Confessio theologica

To the best of our knowledge, John of Fécamp wrote only one major treatise in the course of his fifty-five years at the monastery of Fécamp. Unlike the expansive corpus of Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) or Lanfranc of Bec (1005–89), John revised a single work at different moments in his priorship and abbacy, choosing not to write new works.¹ This is a significant fact. Ultimately, as this book will show, John seemed to have felt that his Confessio theologica was the core of what he had to teach his monks, his noble female acquaintances, and the wider Anglo-Norman audience of his work.

The Confessio theologica’s central argument is the following: Christians desiring a connection to the divine needed to work to reform their devotional emotions, not just their devotional actions. John demands readers ‘enter into the interior of [their] mind[s]‌’.² For John, even the most devout Christian was in need of a conversio – a turning back to God – because even the most devout Christian relapsed into habitual behaviours, dulling his or her awareness of the divine. At the pinnacle of that divine awareness was the paradoxical experience of caritas – suffering that heals, pain that soothes, love that wounds. Each time it was read, John’s CT was meant to create such an awareness – and, thereby, an inward conversio – in its Christian reader.

John outlines a comprehensive theory of contemplative practice in his Confessio theologica; in its printed edition, the treatise includes over seventy pages of prose alongside four oft-excerpted prayers. To provide the foundation for the chapters that follow, this chapter will examine the CT in its entirety. I will analyse John’s theory of contemplative practice through a close reading of his text, defining terms, ideas, and devotional objectives which will lay the foundation for the rest of my book.

The Confessio theologica as a book for monks

When André Wilmart, Jean Leclercq, and Jean-Paul Bonnes wrote their pioneering studies of John of Fécamp, they postulated that John initially composed the Confessio theologica (Theological Confession) for his own spiritual edification when he was prior of Fécamp.³ They believed that John also revised the CT two more times before his death in 1078: two copies of a second recension, which a scribe called 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, hereafter Libellus), were sent first to an anonymous nun, c. 1030, and then thirty years later to the Empress Agnes of Poitou (1025–77), c. 1060. A third recension, called the Confessio fidei (Confession of Faith) by a scribe in its lone surviving manuscript, was written in response to the Berengar of Tours (c. 999–1088) Eucharistic controversy, around 1050.⁴

Before I jump into the content of John’s treatise, a brief discussion of the questions of recension and reception is important to our understanding of John’s text’s construction and, more importantly, of John’s audience. Few scholars since Wilmart, Leclercq, and Bonnes have examined the complete first recension of the CT in their work on John; most rely instead on his work’s more famous extracts, four prayers excerpted from the Libellus and published in the late medieval Pseudo-Augustinian collection of prayers called the Meditations of St Augustine.⁵ This selective reading of John obscures the meaning of John’s words and prevents an accurate identification of John’s contemporary audience.

Since the only published critical edition of the Confessio theologica dates to 1946, and since that edition only examines the so-called first recension, relying on only one manuscript and one manuscript fragment, it goes without saying that the recensions of John’s work demand further study (work that, admittedly, I will not do here).⁶ Leclercq and Bonnes relied on these two manuscripts for their edition because they were (and continue to be) the only identified surviving manuscripts of the earliest recension of the Confessio theologica: Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 3088 (fols 1–6v), an eleventh-century fragment of unknown origin and of only six folia,⁷ and Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 1919, a twelfth-century manuscript from a Cistercian or Premonstratensian abbey in Champagne, perhaps around Troyes.⁸ In contrast, second recension manuscripts of the Libellus version surviving from the later eleventh and twelfth centuries far outnumber those of the first and third – there are eleven in total – indicating that this was the version of John’s work most widely read by his contemporaries. Only one known manuscript of the third Confessio fidei recension survives, making that recension even harder to trace than the first, and also causing some scholars to doubt it to be authentically John’s at all.⁹

No matter the recension, though, John’s Confessio theologica was read extensively by, and was likely initially composed for, a male monastic audience. Wilmart argued that John of Fécamp’s writings were effusions de sa prière intime,¹⁰ sincere records of John’s own private prayer that were then disseminated to his monastic brethren once they got wind of the existence of such personal texts. To support this notion (and to support his dating of the CT to John’s priorship at Fécamp), Wilmart cited the passage below, where John refers to the need to be obedient to his own abbot in his daily life:

Grant, O Lord, that I always love my abbot, your servant, and all my seniors and brothers with sincere and humble charity [RB, ch. 71]; that from my heart I feel deep sorrow in their evils and sins and adversities; that from my heart I feel deep joy in their goods and virtues and advances; that I never set anything before your love, but love you in all things and above all things [RB, ch. 72]. Give me true humility and obedience, true submission and mortification, so that unrestrained judgment lives not in me, nor my own will to lead [cf. RB, ch. 5]. Give to me simplicity, innocence, and wholeness of mind, continuous custody of my heart and mouth, so that I condemn and despise no one, doubt the merits of no one, render evil for evil to no one, but walk in the simplicity of my heart before you always.¹¹

Wilmart takes John’s first-person supplications literally, and interprets them as biographical facts: John refers to his abbot, therefore he is composing this text when he was prior; John speaks in the first person, therefore the CT is a private confessional text written from John’s point of view. In 1946, Leclercq and Bonnes followed Wilmart’s lead, likewise claiming that John’s CT was ‘liée à sa vie personelle’ and was initially a product of his own monastic life.¹²

It is certainly likely that John wrote the Confessio theologica as Fécamp’s prior. It was not uncommon for a prior to write a manual of spiritual advice to his monks: Anselm of Canterbury wrote his Prayers and Meditations while he was prior at Bec, which served to model proper devotional behaviours to the monks in his care.¹³ But Wilmart, Leclercq, and Bonnes’s confidence that John wrote the CT for his own spiritual edification is problematic: the passage above merely shows that the Confessio theologica was initially written with a monastic audience in mind, long before John sent the manuscript to a nun or Agnes. The passage above constantly draws from the precepts of the Rule of St Benedict, as I indicate in brackets, both directly excerpting the RB’s prescriptions and indirectly reflecting them in original prayerful language. John also emphasises loving ‘all [his] seniors and all [his] brothers’, an explicit reference to the monastic community. These comments suggest that John certainly composed his first recension with fellow followers of the RB in mind.¹⁴ These and other RB-inspired passages from the CT are the principle passages that are omitted in the second Libellus recension, likely as part of an effort to make John’s text more accessible to a wider, non-monastic audience, chiefly of noble women.¹⁵

In addition, it is clear from manuscript evidence that all three of the recensions of John’s text, even the Libellus recension, were read by a substantial male monastic audience in John’s lifetime. The evidence for this conclusion is as follows: all three manuscripts of John’s complete text that survive from the eleventh century (two Libellus, one Confessio fidei¹⁶) are from male monastic houses; all nine (seven Libellus, one Confessio fidei, one Confessio theologica¹⁷) that survive from the twelfth century are too; and these numbers do not include the likely countless unidentified monastic manuscripts that feature unattributed excerpts of John’s prayers and other works (like Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 3088’s edition of the CT, mentioned above).¹⁸ Moreover, many of these early manuscripts survive from monasteries that were strongly connected to Fécamp’s monastic network, foundations that were either reformed by John’s mentor and Fécamp’s first abbot, William of Volpiano (962–1031), or whose abbots maintained strong connections with John himself during the eleventh century.¹⁹ Thus, while the Libellus sometimes circulated with a dedicatory letter to an empress or a nun,²⁰ John’s contemplative prescriptions were not targeted exclusively (or even primarily) at a female audience. John’s text was originally composed for monks, and, while later adapted to an expanded audience that included women, it was still read by and circulated among John’s male brethren.

The Confessio theologica as a book for personal use

At the end of his Confessio theologica, John summarises the purpose of the text he has written:

Therefore not out of the temerity of presumption, but out of the great avidity of my desire for you [God] I have applied myself to this little compilation of readings for your praise, in order that I might always have a short and handy word about God with me, and from the fire of reading it, as many times as I grow cool, I may be reignited in your love. For since we are placed in the midst of snares, we easily grow cold in our heavenly longing. And so we lack a constant defence, so that, having been roused, we run back to you, our true and highest good, whenever we slide away. But pardon me, I ask, O Lord, pardon me, a most unworthy and unhappy slave speaking too long with you about you. Pardon me, a wretch, O Holy One. For I have opened my lips to you out of an excessive love of your name.²¹

This passage provides us with some clues about John’s envisioned use for his Confessio theologica: John wants his text to be for personal edification and prayer. Indeed, medieval copies of the CT and Libellus seem to conform to John’s stated purpose, usually circulating in small manuscripts that could easily have been carried on a person.²² Following the biblical injunction to always have a prayer on one’s lips, John’s CT thus aims to provide reflections and prayers to readers in handy, pocket-sized form.

The personal nature of the Confessio theologica is also seen in the tone John adopts for the book. The treatise is written entirely in the first person. However, the purpose of John’s text is not to tell the story of his own life – there are no biographical details in the text; nor is it to write for his own spiritual edification alone – shortly after its initial composition, he sends it out to a nun, in 1030. John’s retention of the first person ‘I’ in his Libellus recension – a treatise he specifically revised to send to a nun in 1030 and an empress in 1060 – is a clue for us. Neither a nun nor Agnes is the ‘I’ of Abbot John, and yet he retains the first-person speaker. Like so many prayerful medieval texts written in the first person, John’s text’s ‘I’ aims to provide a contemplative model for any reader to use in his or her own devotional practice.²³ This creates a ‘text … [that] does not so much express the inner thoughts of the author, but functions rhetorically by constructing a speaking exemplum that an audience can respond to or even model its conduct upon’.²⁴ John’s ‘I’ is a performative ‘I’, a means by which the reader could speak and appropriate John’s confessional words for him or herself.²⁵ The tone of the Confessio theologica is a private one: by reading John’s text in the first person, the individual reader could better rouse himself to an embrace of the contemplative method that John is prescribing. Like monks in a calefactorium, John’s readers would use the CT to warm up their prayer, thus better stirring, reawakening, and emotionally reforming their love for God.²⁶ While the RB regulates communal action, the CT is John’s attempt to regulate internal devotion – one reader at a time.

John believes that the chief way to ‘be reignited in [God’s] love’ is to make oneself aware of how, even in the regular prayerful actions of his life, one has not yet aligned right action with right feeling. John defines this problem explicitly in the CT, inviting his reader to speak along with the text:

Give me contrition of heart, even a font of tears, especially when I bring you my requests and my prayers, while I chant the psalmody of your praise, while I contemplate or make known the mystery of our redemption, the manifest judgment of your mercy [i.e. engage with doctrinal instruction] … while I, albeit unworthily, stand in attendance of your altars, desiring to offer that marvellous and heavenly sacrifice, worthy of all reverence and devotion [i.e. celebrate the Eucharist].²⁷

This is the CT’s chief purpose: the reader must work to reform his emotional palate, to feel as connected as possible to God in his own heart and with his own tears while performing pious actions. Fulfilling his monastic duties (singing the psalms, studying doctrine, celebrating the Eucharist) is not enough. In an article on medieval monastic prayer, Amy Hollywood has raised the very issues that John himself is grappling with in his treatise. She writes:

To many modern ears, the repetition of the Psalms [required by the RB] … will likely sound rote and deadening. Some modern Western conceptions of the mystical, spiritual, or religious life insist that it be an immediate and spontaneous engagement with the divine. From this perspective, one might well ask of the Rule: What of the immediacy of the monk’s relationship to God? What of his personal feelings in the face of the divine? What spontaneity can exist in the monk’s engagement with God within the context of such a regimented and uniform prayer life? If the monk is reciting another’s words rather than his own, how can the feelings engendered by these words be his own and so be sincere?²⁸

It is not just modern minds that wonder – eleventh-century minds did too. In spiritual practice, beyond right action, what is the right feeling an individual monk should have in relationship to the divine? And how can he instigate such feeling – such emotional reform – in such a regular existence of persistent, regimented prayer?

The Confessio theologica provides its answers to these questions – and prescribes proper devotional feeling – over the course of three untitled parts.²⁹ Like the beginning of Augustine’s Confessions, Part I of the CT is an extended opening invocation of God and a definition and glorification of each member of the Trinity, a warm-up of sorts. In this part especially, John often excerpts quotations from the liturgy, from the Bible and the Psalms, and from the Church Fathers in order to provide an orthodox definition and praise of the divine in the words of the authorities. (He claims at one point early on that ‘my words are the words of the Fathers’.³⁰) Having paid due homage to the divine in Part I, Part II proceeds to instruct the reader, reviewing the need for faith, prayer, and a neglect of earthly things in order to achieve God’s grace and eventual redemption. The longest and most original part of John’s CT is Part III, where the ideal affective state of the prayerful reader is defined. In this section, John in effect proposes a method for personal emotional reform that engenders a tearful, pleading, prayerful, emotional turmoil with the aid of the emotional examples of the crucified Christ, Mary Magdalene, and Hannah, and by modelling the performance of an intense, internal self-examination in the eyes of God. By the end of the work, John’s CT has not described a method for prayer to its readers, but has rather inflicted it upon them. One can imagine a reader, upon reaching the end of the CT, not feeling passively instructed but frenzied and weepy.

John reminds his readers throughout the Confessio theologica that ‘in this present life, saturated with miseries and errors, the perfection of the contemplative life is not achievable’.³¹ John’s CT promises, therefore, no divine union or ultimate peace as a result of the prayer it prescribes – that is not its use, after all.³² Rather, John’s CT attempts to awaken the reader to his own imperfect self, shaking him from rote devotion and prompting within him impassioned excitations of prayer. By speaking directly as and for the individual, the CT works to perform its method on each single reader, awakening in him the proper affective state of prayer. John (after Augustine) calls this a conversio in his text: a turning (or returning) towards God. Just how the CT does this, what the contours of its method for emotional reform is, and what this ‘conversion’ attempts to achieve, will be the focus of the remainder of this chapter.³³

Reforming the interior at the site of the heart

In his work In Isaiam, Richard of Saint-Victor (1110–73), writing about a hundred years after John of Fécamp’s death, praised Jerome (347–420) for his diligence at digging for the truth in things. Richard says that Jerome ‘knew how obscure truth is, how deep it lies buried … by how much work it is reached, how practically no one ever succeeds, how it is dug out with difficulty and then only bit by bit’.³⁴ John, like Jerome before him and Richard after him, believed that the true method for efficacious prayer was buried deep inside the emotional core of his readers, and he wrote his whole Confessio theologica as an attempt to create a contemplative process by which it could be teased out of them.

For John, the first step in this process is for the reader to move from exterior praise of God to interior feeling,³⁵ to heighten the ‘interior senses of [one’s own] soul’.³⁶ To love God and truly connect to him in prayer, John says, one must not just perform the right words publicly, but rather use those words to open up an ‘inmost’ vision.³⁷ It is that inner vision, that interior, that is judged by God after all – the intentions behind the words, and not the words, are what matters in prayer.³⁸ Public professions of faith performed by rote are the empty things of earth, but inner vision and feeling is the substance of God.³⁹ This idea of interior/exterior in fact mirrors a monastic plan, where the area outside the monastery’s walls (extra terminos) is an area where non-monastics can visit, and the area inside the walls (infra terminos or interior domus) is the space where the individual monk’s real soulful work occurs, the cloister of the soul (claustrum animae).⁴⁰ When defining these exterior and interior spaces in the CT, John himself even alludes to walled space, imagining metaphorical walls within the contemplative self that serve to stop up earthly influence and protect the soul when it is in silent retreat.⁴¹

John’s instruction to his reader to go inside himself follows his idea that, though God is found inside every single being,⁴² human beings are too often outside of themselves.⁴³ The goal of contemplation according to the Confessio theologica’s method is to recognise the presence of God that is already inside the human soul. This recognition, to John, is actually an act of recall, of unforgetting the seal of God that was always set on the reader’s heart.⁴⁴ This effort of memory works to call God into the reader’s soul and to have him ‘penetrate more deeply to the inmost parts by [his] powerful virtue’.⁴⁵ By calling God into the self, the reader will create a revulsion for the self that neglected God for so long,⁴⁶ replacing it with an inner hunger for God,⁴⁷ a hunger that will never fully be sated while the reader is alive.⁴⁸

Once the necessity of this interior journey is established, John quotes Augustine’s Confessions, asking: ‘in what place do you dwell in me, God?’.⁴⁹ God’s place, it turns out, is the human heart;⁵⁰ and it is the heart that is the site of the contemplative reform in the reader. Following Augustine’s description of Ambrose in the Confessions, John’s reader will also ‘[seek] out the meaning’:⁵¹

Give me a contrite heart, a pure heart, a sincere heart, a devout heart, a chaste heart, a sober heart, a mild heart, a gentle heart, a calm heart, a most serene heart, a heart full of desire for you … Cleave the hardness of my heart in order that that font may flow out for which my soul exceedingly seethes with desire … in order that my tears may become to me bread day and night … Free me from the quarrels and contentions that my wretched mind suffers there where the squabbling multitude of men is found … in order that loosed from all cares, I may freely sit at the feet of the Lord Jesus Christ and may listen intently to what heavenly wisdom teaches.⁵²

The main obstacle to allowing God to dwell within, for John, is a hardened heart.⁵³ John notes that in heaven where there is an eternal vision of God, there is no place for any ‘sharpness of gall’.⁵⁴ A hard heart prevents divine vision, and prevents God’s mercy from penetrating ‘deep within (intus) the sinner’.⁵⁵ In order to attain a true connection with God through prayer, the heart first needs to be broken with repentance (contritum), ‘torn’ (scinde) and un-‘hardened’ (duritiam cordis mei). Only then can God ‘pour [himself] from heaven into [one’s] heart’.⁵⁶

With this heartfelt embrace of God, John’s reader would finally be able to match his external recitations with an authentically fervent, internal feeling; he would finally be able to say ‘This I confess with my mouth, this I believe in my heart, and for this I give you thanks.’⁵⁷ John not only instructs his reader to open his heart to God in the CT, but, more tellingly, he invites the reader to inscribe the love and commandments of God onto his heart ‘so that [he] will never forget and can never erase it’.⁵⁸ Once opened, the reader will finally be ‘delivered from the noise that [otherwise] seizes the heart of man’.⁵⁹ Surprisingly, this longed-for openness is not a blissful, calm state. John explains that a truly open-hearted man is actually in a constant state of suffering, broken by constant repentance,⁶⁰ crushed by constant ‘sacrifice’.⁶¹ Real ‘misery’, to John, is that of a ‘sinful soul’ whose heart is ‘unfeeling’ (insensibilis)⁶² and distant from God; but, perhaps ironically, once the heart is broken and God is let in, there is still only ‘plaintive notes and excessive wailings and deep sighs of the heart’.⁶³ This miserable state of suffering, however, brings the sinner closest to God. Suffering, tears, and despair are signs of a contemplative practice that is effective. John cries repeatedly in the CT for interior tears – tears stemming from the heart, tears that extend from feeling.⁶⁴ Such suffering opens the heart to senses that can point the sinner towards God: smells, sounds, sights, and tastes are discovered, and the heart develops eyes, ears, and a mouth through which the reader can receive the divine.⁶⁵ Such openness comes with an intense feeling of suffering. But this, John believes, is much less painful than the ultimate consequences of a life of hard-hearted exterior living. John writes that his CT is ultimately written ‘so that with the very palate of my heart I may feel’.⁶⁶

The use of feeling, emotion, and affectus in John’s devotional programme

Contrary to the image of the unfeeling monk, endlessly repeating rote verses of prayer, John’s programme called for intense emotion on the part of the devotee. For while heaven is a place of serenity, both for God – ‘You [God] love, without passion; are jealous, without anxiety; repent, yet grieve not; are angry, yet serene’⁶⁷ – and for Christians – ‘They see and desire to see: without anxiety they desire, without disgust they are sated’⁶⁸ – the temporal realm was a place so apt to harden the heart of the sinner that only intense feeling could break it open to God’s love: ‘With the penalty of sin, moreover, the hardened mind tolerates this, that it is able to see its own sins, [but] it is not able to weep.’⁶⁹ This inability to feel and suffer while on this earth, John reasons, makes the devotee blind to the true consequence of his sin. As in the model of Christ’s suffering on the cross, only suffering and feeling can truly propel the devotee towards the divine in John’s view. So, once the devotee has moved into his own heart, he must now break that heart so that it can feel.

And what, exactly, must the heart feel? A complex of emotions that can be neatly summed up by one of the most frequently used terms in the John’s treatise: caritas.⁷⁰ John defines caritas as when ‘the soul of the devout mind, burning with an excessive love for Christ, gaping for Christ, sighing for Christ, desiring to see Christ his lone love, possesses nothing sweet except for moaning and crying’.⁷¹ John’s Confessio theologica often speaks of the paradox of caritas, calling it a wounding love, a healing pain, a tender agony. Caritas pierces the heart like an arrow of love; its affection causes torment:⁷²

Come, tears, I beseech you, in the name of Jesus Christ my Lord, come; fill my heart, wet my eyes, moisten my cheeks, sprinkle me with crying, flow over my face, give me bitter wailing, generate sweet pardon … He who brought forth water from the rock⁷³ and mercifully infused the sinful woman inwardly,⁷⁴ at the same time as kindly took her up outwardly, may he himself by his own most holy command speak to you, delayed tears, in order that you may so make drunk my heart with your inundation, desiring you and seeking you, so [the heart] cannot keep itself from crying. As long as it is salutary to weep, as long as it is salutary to repent, hasten, O tears that I wish for, that with my whole mind I seek, in order that I may cry bitterly day and night unceasingly from the wounds of my soul: lest the times granted to repentance pass away, lest the days granted to living well flow by without cause, let the Spirit of God, good teacher and illuminator of Mother Church, who from a hard heart produces tears and gives to penitents fruits worthy of repentance, descend into my heart in order that he may strike streams from above and below [the heart], made as it is of stone and iron.⁷⁵

Given today’s popular conception of crying and love as less ‘rational’ and more ‘spontaneous’ emotion, John’s evocation of them may seem contrived. With our modern sensibilities, we might be sceptical of any crying monk who had been reading the CT, suspecting that, by crying, the monk was merely following orders for right action, and not necessarily feeling John’s prescribed suffering. But, for John’s eleventh-century monastic readers, such deliberate crafting of affective experience was common, and no less genuine than an unprompted bout of tears. The RB describes the process of monastic learning as a process of internalisation, where repetition means deeper understanding and not (as a modern audience might suspect) rote memorisation. Through reiteration of John’s contemplative prescriptions, a monk would come ‘to observe without effort, as though naturally, from habit, no longer out of fear of hell, but out of love for Christ, good habit, and delight in virtue’.⁷⁶ The process of lectio divina in the monastery was also derived from the belief that genuine knowledge followed repetitive behaviour:⁷⁷ repetitive behaviour could indeed yield more sincere feeling in its participants.⁷⁸ The Confessio theologica’s prescriptions may seem contrived to a modern reader – but they may well have been effective in fostering genuinely emotional prayer in John’s monastic audience.

John did not believe, however, that a human could cultivate right emotion without divine help, no matter how hard he might try. Ever since John Cassian, monks had believed that right emotion in prayer was performed (or rather affected) on them by God (afficio); the resulting affective experience was therefore passively received by a Christian who allowed God to bestow the emotion, or affect, upon him (affectus).⁷⁹ John’s Confessio theologica embraces this point, its first-person speaker pleading with or even ordering God in the imperative to affect such feeling in the devotee’s self. ‘Do [this for me] (Fac)’, ‘Give [this to] me (Da mihi)’, and ‘I beg you (Rogo)’ are the commands used by the CT’s speaker to plead with God that he afficit the grace of emotional affectus.⁸⁰ John shares this age-old notion that emotion is granted to the devotee through the largesse of God.⁸¹ Prayerful emotion is experienced, not wholly created, by John’s readers – it is affected on them by God.⁸² As he writes in the passage above: ‘Let the Spirit of God … who from a hard heart produces tears, and gives to penitents fruits worthy of repentance, descend into my heart.’⁸³ Still, while only God can provide the right feeling, Christians are expected to try to cultivate caritas, all the while begging for God’s help.

The word affectus is important in the history of Christian devotion, and plays an outsize role now in its scholarship thanks to the term ‘affective piety’, so its appearance in the CT merits a brief note. John’s CT only explicitly uses the word affectus twice. The first time, John quotes Augustine on the state of heavenly bliss, where devotees finally come face to face with God: in heaven, inhabitants are always the recipients of the right affection (affectu) from God, which streams like rays from God’s sunlike presence.⁸⁴ In the second mention, which will be discussed more extensively below, John shows his reader how the right longing for God (affectu) can be cultivated on this earth with the help of the image of the crucified Christ. In each of these cases, the CT reminds its readers how praying for the proper affectus in turn could make devotees more receptive to these emotions and stronger combatants in the fight for refuge ‘away from the turmoil of the thoughts of this age’.⁸⁵ Moreover, these efforts, John says, will cause the memory of a specific affectus to live on in the devotee, by being more easily revivable in the future.⁸⁶

John’s use of the model of the crucified Christ

To bolster his specific prescriptions for suffering, tears, and emotional devotion to God, John provides the readers of the CT with three biblical exemplars for right devotion and right feeling: Christ on the cross (Matthew 27:27–44; Mark 15:16–32; Luke 23:26–43; John 19:16–27), Mary Magdalene crying over Jesus’s empty tomb (John 20:11), and Hannah tearfully praying for a child (1 Samuel 1–2). John envisions each of these biblical figures in order to better induce a proper emotional reformation in his readers. He invites his readers to empathise with all three characters and to adopt these characters’ emotional states for themselves.

John’s use of the vision of the crucified Christ is the model for devotion most frequently invoked in the CT, and the model that is most embraced by later medieval ‘affective piety’. John’s CT defines caritas as the right emotion for the devotee to feel when praying – an experience of divine love through suffering. No other model embodies caritas more powerfully than the obedient Son’s torture and death for the sake of love. Fittingly, most of John’s explicit mentions of the word ‘caritas’ are made in connection with Jesus’s crucifixion.⁸⁷ By peppering his CT with images of the suffering Christ, John shows that ‘it is by [Christ’s] blood that we have access to [God]’.⁸⁸ Here, John acknowledges both that Jesus’s atonement literally allows Christians ‘access’ to heaven after death, and that Jesus’s blood – the material proof of his suffering – allows Christians to feel emotionally in contemplation, granting them interior access to God while they are on this earth.

The Confessio theologica’s most distinctive use of the crucifixion, however, does not merely present an image of Jesus’s suffering caritas. It also attempts to crucify the reader, shaping the reader into Christ himself so that he can better feel the painful lengths Christ went for the sake of godly love. John uses the following image to spark in his reader the same affective experience of the crucified Christ:

Through those saving wounds which you suffered on the cross for our salvation and from which flowed the precious and vivifying blood by which we have been redeemed with propitious graciousness … 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 caritas. 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 to 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 [affectu] 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.⁸⁹

This passage distils the essence of John’s distinctive use of the crucifixion in his CT.⁹⁰ Here, the prayerful speaker of the CT asks that the image of the wounded Christ in turn work to wound the sinner and penetrate the tough shield of the human heart so that the sinner can weep day and night. This notion of wounding and penetrating the heart is an image common in the Bible, particularly in the Song of Songs, and thus common also to both contemporary monastic literature and later medieval mystical writings.⁹¹ But beyond making biblical references and speaking in rhetorical tropes, John is doing something very specific here: as John’s devotee looks at Christ’s bleeding wounds in his mind’s eye, the vision of those wounds (and the caritas that they signify) affect a wound in the devotee’s own soul.⁹² The soul becomes wounded as Christ’s body is wounded; and instead of bleeding from the wound, the soul cries abundant tears from the wound – its wounds weep. The devotee’s very act of engaging with this crucified image is a painful one – the image ‘pierces’, ‘cleaves’, ‘wounds’, and it is not consoling. The image of the crucified affects an emotional crucifixion of the devotee. But it is a crucified suffering that is a sign of caritas – it is a ‘dart of love’ – and, as a result, it is the most effective (efficax) technique that John offers to his reader to receive the feeling (affectu) of weeping for closeness to God. The passage invites its reader to engage in an empathy so extreme he longs to become the crucified Christ and to make the ultimate sacrifice – at least, emotionally.⁹³ This is as close to God as a human can get.

John even emphasises the connection between the tears that pour from the wounded heart of the sinner and the blood that gushes from the wounds of Christ by using parallel language throughout his work;⁹⁴ John’s devotee-speaker longs to be a ‘holocaust’ and a ‘sacrifice of a broken spirit’.⁹⁵ John thus bombards his reader with the model of Christ.

Another passage from the CT expands the scope of John’s use of the crucified Christ as a model for his reader to follow:⁹⁶

Dearest one, I beseech you through your passion and cross, fill my heart with your inextinguishable love, with your constant remembrance, so that like a burning flame I may entirely blaze in the sweetness of your love … write with your finger in my heart the sweet memory of your mellifluous name, a memory never erased by any forgetfulness. Write on the tablets of my heart your commandments and will, your laws and right doing, so that I may always and everywhere have you, Lord of immense sweetness, and your precepts before my eyes. How sweet are your words to my throat. Grant me a tenacious memory, so that I forget them not.⁹⁷

Where is the reader’s crucifixion in this passage? Rachel Fulton has argued that medieval people would have seen this ‘writing’ on the heart as a kind of ‘inscriptive wounding’; much as a stylus would wound the skin of parchment during the act of writing.⁹⁸ ‘Writing’ here, then, becomes parallel to the earlier wounding of the heart, whose tough shield the devotee asks Christ to penetrate with his two-edged sword; John calls for Christ to help pierce the sinner in a new way.⁹⁹ The devotee wants his heart – now unhardened – to be wounded continuously (‘always and everywhere’) by the ‘memory’ of Christ’s own passion. There is a kind of self-perpetuating circularity here: the devotee asks for the vision and memory of the wounded Christ to create a wounding of his own heart, and these wounds in turn will serve as a constant reminder for him of the model of Christ’s passion and caritas, which will continue to wound him.

John’s use of the models of Mary Magdalene and Hannah

Perhaps because Jesus’s human life is less important to John than the emotional model of the crucifixion, John is not interested in devotion to the Virgin Mary in his Confessio theologica, unlike many of the affective writers who come after him. The Virgin, in fact, is mentioned only once, obliquely, in the whole treatise.¹⁰⁰ Alongside the crucified Christ, however, John refers the Confessio theologica’s readers to two other biblical models: Mary Magdalene and Hannah. This is unusual before the twelfth century, particularly the use of Hannah.¹⁰¹ Nonetheless, both the Magdalene and Hannah are showcased by John in the same way that the crucified Christ is: in all three recensions of John’s work, they serve as archetypes for right emotional devotion and behaviour for John’s readers, whether male or female.

Mary Magdalene appears several times in the Confessio theologica, primarily as a model for tearfulness.¹⁰² In fact, in the Confessio theologica, John highlights how the Magdalene went through all of the stages that John’s treatise prescribes. He mentions Mary Magdalene as a model for his first stage of prayer – interiority – saying that God ‘mercifully infused the sinful woman inwardly, at the same time that he kindly took her up outwardly’.¹⁰³ Mary Magdalene thus serves as a model of someone who reformed her exterior actions and her interior connection to God. John mentions Mary Magdalene again after he has established the desirability of tears in Part III of the CT, showing her to be a relevant emotional model as well, exemplifying a persistent, tearful, loving, caritas-filled devotion to God. In John’s formulation, Mary Magdalene returns again and again to the action of seeking God; through her, John relates another virtue to his reader’s practice of prayer – the virtue of persistence. Since John acknowledges that the reader’s prayer will never be satisfied with a heavenly vision on this earth, patience and persistence are important.¹⁰⁴

John’s most involved depiction of Mary Magdalene’s spiritual persistence is the following:

Let my eyes, O Lord, bring down allotments of waters, with you, for whom all things are possible and nothing difficult, merciful and forgiving. But just like that woman who was seeking you, O Lord, while you were lying in the tomb, had been inundated with so many tears, and had desired to see you whom she loved with such great fervour of mind, that although others were receding that woman did not recede, who, full of your excessive love, approached to visit the place of burial again and again. She stood, she persevered, she found finally what she desired. For to that one loving you above the rest, and seeking you more zealously than all, you deigned to appear first of all, since the power of such great perseverance was love. Therefore with what zeal, with what tears, or with what constancy of holy longing must we seek, fear, and love you, night and day through all the days of our life, the Lord of all things now reigning in heaven and holding all things under your command?¹⁰⁵

Christ shows right caritas and inspires proper suffering in the viewer. Mary Magdalene’s example helps to cultivate continual suffering once it is achieved; she shows the stamina required. With the aid of such persistence, the devotee can then say: ‘so that my tears become to me bread day and night … give me the best part, which Mary chose and which I myself have chosen formerly and preferred through the inspiration of your grace, in order that I, absolved from all my cares, may freely sit at the feet of the Lord Jesus Christ and may listen intently to what heavenly wisdom teaches’.¹⁰⁶ In this image, John alludes to Mary sitting at Jesus’s feet, tearful and devoted, while Martha busies herself about the house.¹⁰⁷ It is no coincidence, then, that the monks of Fécamp had a relic of Mary Magdalene, who was such a potent exemplar from their abbot’s CT.¹⁰⁸

The third biblical model invoked by John in the CT is one from the Hebrew Bible: Hannah.¹⁰⁹ While scholars have previously examined Mary Magdalene as a sometime feature of affective piety, Hannah has not been discussed, and her presence seems to be one of John’s unique contributions.¹¹⁰ In 1 Samuel 1, Hannah is a barren woman. Like Mary Magdalene, Hannah is persistent and tearful (in Hannah’s case, it is because she longs for a baby); and yet, though God is silent in her repeated request for a child, she never stops praying, and she persists in her tearful prayers (1 Samuel 1:10). For John’s monks, Hannah likely served as a poignant model. It was Hannah whom the priest Eli accused of being drunk when, tearfully praying, she ‘spoke in her heart,¹¹¹ and only her lips moved’ (‘loquebatur in corde suo, tantumque labia illius movebantur’; 1 Samuel 1:13–14); Hannah’s interior plea, then, would have resonated with John of Fécamp’s own prescription that prayer come from an open heart.

When John mentions Hannah, he emphasises all of these points: her tears, her persistence, and her special, internal, self-altering prayer:

I recall, O Lord, I recall, holy one, that holy woman who came to the tabernacle intending to ask, who sought with many tears a son to be given to her, concerning whom the Scripture reports that her countenances after her tears and prayers were no more changed into different things. I recall, I say, such great faith and such great constancy, and I am twisted with pain and confounded with shame, because I most wretchedly do no such thing.¹¹²

John continues:

For if the woman who was seeking a son wept in this way, and in weeping persevered, how ought the soul who seeks God to wail and in wailing to persist? Let my soul, I beseech, wail, O my God, let it wail and let it not cease from wailing, having been pierced by a heavenly visitation.¹¹³

The image of Hannah praying allows John to remind his reader of the intent behind his entire CT project: to teach his reader how to pray. For it is not just John’s wish to turn his reader towards the experience of caritas, or to get his reader to cry continual tears; it is John’s intent to teach his reader how to pray correctly, with the right internal connection, with an open heart, and with catalysed, reformed feeling. Hannah, then, serves as a means for tying all of John’s observations together and bringing his monk-reader back to the main goal of his CT: to create ‘this little compilation of readings for [God’s] praise’ to incite proper, fervent, emotional prayerful activity in his monastic readers so that they ‘may be reignited in [God’s] love’.¹¹⁴

Conclusion

John of Fécamp’s Confessio theologica has often been called the beginning of medieval affective piety; but this chapter attempts to move beyond John’s current status as the beginning of a devotional trend and instead to locate the role of emotion in John’s larger devotional purpose. The mere fact that John calls to mind a crucified body is not a sufficient evidence of his ‘affectivity’; and, in view of his larger treatise, his chief interest is not in Jesus’s humanity. To understand what John’s affective piety is, we must look to the larger programme of his CT. In doing so, we learn that he is reaching for the example of Christ alongside other examples of Mary Magdalene and Hannah; we learn that his chief interest in all of these exemplars is the perfected emotional devotion that they model for his reader. Moreover, we learn that these characters and their lives are not the focus for John, but rather that they serve as vehicles carrying the devotee towards a greater goal, as the means to an end. John asks, how can a monk stay emotionally awake in his prayerful actions? How can a devotee know that he is doing the right thing while he is praying, when prayer, as a task, is never satisfied with a heavenly vision or reassurance from God? How can a monk improve and reform his devotion? Look at these biblical models, John says. Are you really suffering in your love for God, as Christ did on the cross? Are you really persistent in your tearful emotion, as Mary Magdalene was at the tomb? Are you really heartfelt and constant in your prayer, as Hannah was in the sanctuary, even though you have no assurance that God is listening? If you are really doing all of these things, John says, then, monk-reader, you are fully engaged in the act of true prayer.

John’s Confessio theologica’s attention to the reform of the inner emotion of its readers’ prayer seems remarkable for his eleventh-century context. Monastic leaders in the beginning of the eleventh century have traditionally been viewed as less concerned with how one prayed and more concerned that one prayed, more concerned with right external action than right internal emotion. But John’s attention to exactly the reverse persists throughout his CT and throughout all of his actions as abbot of Fécamp. So where did his idea for an internal, emotional reform of prayer come from? And just how innovative was it in the wider context of European monasticism? Those are the questions of the next chapter.

Notes

1John’s writings are notoriously difficult to identify today because they circulated anonymously. I acknowledge therefore that he could have written more than has been identified.

2‘Ingrediar in interiore mentis meae’ (CT, p. 167).

3Note that John did not title his own work ‘Confessio theologica’. The name is a variation from a twelfth-century manuscript of John’s work (Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 1919), where the book is called ‘liber confessionum’ in the titular rubric (see fol. 1 of that manuscript). The word ‘theologica’ was added in the sixteenth-century printed edition entitled Confessio theologica tribus partibus absoluta (Paris: M. Vascovanum, 1539). Stéphane Lecouteux has recently revised the date of the start of John’s priorship, changing it from 1016 to 1023 (until 1028) in ‘Réseaux’, I, p. 71.

4Leclercq and Bonnes, Un maître, pp. 37–44. For more on these recensions, their manuscripts, and their readership, see Lauren Mancia, ‘Affective Devotion and Emotional Reform at the Eleventh-Century Monastery of John of Fécamp’ (PhD dissertation, Yale University, 2013), pp. 88–162.

5The differences between the Confessio theologica and the Libellus recensions are less significant to the larger meaning of John’s text than earlier scholars have believed. Both versions cover roughly the same content, and are divided into three parts, though the Libellus is reordered and a little shorter; and, while the Libellus recension presents John’s four prayers extracted as separate meditations, the texts of those prayers exist in full as integrated parts of the prose of the first recension, Confessio theologica. For example, John’s most famous prayer, so-called Meditations of St Augustine prayer 37b, occurs at the end of the CT, on pp. 180–1. Moreover, the themes and phrases of these prayers are found in the larger text of the Confessio theologica. Meditations of St Augustine prayer 37a’s metaphors of the ‘fountain of life’ and the ‘thirsty soul’ and its desire for the gift of tears, reoccur throughout the CT. The differences between the Confessio theologica and Confessio fidei, on the other hand, are more significant, and will be discussed in Chapter 4.

6The only translation of John’s work exists in French: La Confession théologique, trans. Philippe de Vial (Paris: Cerf, 1992).

7Where they overlap, both Paris 1919 and Paris 3088 have texts of the Confessio theologica that align almost perfectly, and both contain the same explicits and the same subsequent Lamentation text following the CT (a text edited in Leclercq and Bonnes, Un maître, pp. 166–83). That Paris 3088’s leaves are from the end of the CT is helpful because it confirms that the manuscript is indeed a copy of the first recension of John’s work: it does not contain the separately enumerated prayers (which would make it part of the Libellus recension) or a fourth part on the Eucharist (which would make it part of the Confessio fidei recension).

8Stéphane Lecouteux has traced the connections between Fécamp and the Cistercian houses in Champagne (of which community Paris 1919 is a part). He has shown that Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 5318 (a collection of saints’ lives from Fécamp) was a model for a Cistercian compilation of saints’ lives at Clairvaux and diffused to other Cistercian abbeys under the name Liber de natalitis. Lecouteux also suspects that books from Saint-Bénigne (for instance, Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Ottob. lat. 120) were likewise associated with this lineage of hagiographical manuscripts stemming from Fécamp. ‘Réseaux’, I, pp. 139–43.

9On the dispute over the Confessio fidei’s authenticity, see Vincent Serralda, ‘Étude comparée de la “Confessio Fidei” attribuée à Alcuin et de la “Confessio Theologica” de Jean de Fécamp’, in Walter Beschin (ed.), Mittellatinisches Jahrbuch (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1988), pp. 7–27; Warren Pezé, ‘Aux origines de la Confession de Saint Martin’, Revue Mabillon 86 (25 n.s.) (2014), 5–44.

10Wilmart, ‘Deux préfaces spirituelles’, p. 25, n. 11.

11‘Praesta, Domine, ut famulum tuum abbatam meum et omnes seniores fratresque meos sincere et humili caritate semper diligam malis et peccatis atque adversitatibus eorum ex corde condoleam, bonis et virtutibus atque profectibus eorum ex corde congaudeam, amori tuo nunquam aliquid praeponam, sed te in omnibus et super omnia diligam. Da mihi veram humilitatem et oboedientiam, veram subiectionem atque mortificationem, ut liberum arbitrium non vivat in me neque propria voluntas ducat me. Da mihi simplicitatem, innocentiam et integritatem mentis, iugem custodiam cordis atque oris, ut nullum damnem aut respuam, de nullius meritis diffidam, nulli malum reddam pro malo, sed ambulem in simplicitate cordis mei coram te semper’ (CT, pp. 133–4).

12Leclercq and Bonnes, Un maître, p. 28.

13Teresa Webber, ‘Cantor, Sacrist, or Prior? The Provision of Books in Anglo-Norman England’, in Katie Bugyis, Margot Fassler, and Andrew Kraebel (eds), Medieval Cantors and their Craft: Music, Liturgy, and the Shaping of History, 800–1500 (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press/Boydell & Brewer, 2017), pp. 172–89.

14Mancia, ‘Affective Devotion and Emotional Reform’, pp. 88–162; Fulton, From Judgment to Passion, p. 166.

15This, in combination with the fact that the majority of the eleventh- and twelfth-century manuscripts that circulated in John’s lifetime were Libellus manuscripts prefaced by dedicatory letters to women, has caused some to argue that an audience of women chiefly consumed John’s work, namely McNamer, Affective Meditation, 60. McNamer here refers specifically to the Libellus recension. However, because most of the Libellus manuscripts enjoyed a circulation at male monastic houses, it is unlikely that John wrote his texts solely for women; see also Davis, The Weight of Love, p. 131.

16Of the Libellus: Metz, Médiathèque de Metz, ms. 245 and Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 13593. Of the Confessio fidei: Montpellier, Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Montpellier, ms. H309.

17Of the Libellus: Zwettl, Zisterzienserstift Zwettl, Cod. 164 and Cod. 225; Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 1580 and Cod. 1582; Barcelona, Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, Ripoll 214; Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm. 11352 and Clm. 12607. Of the Confessio theologica: Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 1919. Of the Confessio fidei: Troyes, Bibl. mun., ms. 2142 (fols 180v–189r).

18For more on this, see Chapter 5.

19Among the eleventh-century manuscripts: Metz, Médiathèque, ms. 245 was from Saint-Arnoul de Metz, a monastery that was reformed by John’s mentor William of Volpiano in 996/7, and that maintained a correspondence with John of Fécamp in the 1050s (see Chapter 3); Montpellier, Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Montpellier, ms. H309 is from Saint-Bénigne de Dijon, William of Volpiano’s monastery, John’s alma mater, and a monastery of which John was abbot from 1052 to 1054; Paris 13593 has a possible Bec origin (and Fécamp connection thereby – see Lauren Mancia, ‘Praying with an Eleventh-Century Manuscript: A Case Study of the Engimatic Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 13593’, in Thomas Barton, Susan McDonough, Sara McDougall, and Matthew Wranovix (eds), Boundaries in the Medieval and Wider World (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), pp. 153–77). Among the twelfth-century manuscripts: Ripoll 214 is from the monastery of Santa Maria de Ripoll in Catalonia, a monastery that has William of Volpiano listed in its necrology, likely because of its connection with Cuxa (see Stéphane Lecouteux’s ‘Deux fragments d’un nécrologe de la Trinité de Fécamp (XIe–XIIe siècles). Étude et édition critique d’un document mémoriel exceptionnel’, Tabularia 16 (2016), 1–89. Note that there is no surviving Confessio theologica manuscript from Fécamp itself, although the unattributed Paris 3088 might be.

20The existence of a dedicatory letter does not necessarily have anything to do with the readership of the particular manuscript, since dedicatory letters often circulated with their texts as a kind of foreword to attract attention, regularly having no bearing on the audience of the manuscripts themselves: Giles Constable, Letters and Letter Collections, Typologie des sources du moyen âge occidental 17 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1976); Christian Høgel and Elisabetta Bartoli (eds), Medieval Letters: Between Fiction and Document (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015).

21‘Idcirco non praesumptionis temeritate, sed magna tui desiderii auiditate huic defloratiunculae ad laudem tuam operam dedi, ut breve et manuale verbum de Deo mecum semper haberem, ex cuius lectionis igne, quoties tepefio, in tuum reaccendar amorem. Quoniam enim in medio laqueorum positi sumus, facile a caelesti desiderio frigescimus. Assiduo itaque indigemus munimento, ut expergefacti ad te nostrum verum et summum bonum, cum defluximus, recurramus. Sed ignosce, rogo, Domine, ignosce mihi indignissimo et infelici tecum de te divtius colloquenti servo. Ignosce, pie, mihi misero. Amore enim tui nominis nimio labia mea tibi aperui’ (CT, p. 182).

22There are several such cases in the eleventh- and twelfth-century examples. Pages from Paris 3088, the earliest fragment of the CT, measure long and narrow at 26 cm × 17.5 cm. The same is true for its Libellus editions: Metz, Médiathèque, ms. 245, for instance, is even longer and narrower, measuring 31.8 cm × 17.3 cm; Paris, BnF, ms lat. 13593, an edition of John’s Libellus prayers, is as small as a book of hours, measuring 20.3 cm × 15.2 cm.

23This kind of performative ‘I’ is common in medieval writing according to A.C. Spearing, Medieval Autographies: The ‘I’ of the Text (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012).

24Italics my emphasis. See Chapter 5; Thomas H. Bestul, ‘Self and Subjectivity in the Prayers and Meditations of Anselm of Canterbury’, in Roman Majeran and Edward Iwo Zielinski (eds), Saint Anselm: Bishop and Thinker: Papers Read at a Conference Held in the Catholic University of Lublin on 24–26 September 1996 (Lublin: University Press of the Catholic University of Lublin, 1999), p. 151.

25The CT has thus been called a monumental moment for the development of silent reading, see Paul Saenger, Space between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 202. Sarah McNamer agrees, calling this an ‘impassioned “I”’: McNamer, Affective Meditation, pp. 67–73.

26This performative instigation of emotions is akin to the ‘emotives’ described in Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling (see Introduction, above). The idea that emotion is performative and performable is also discussed in Davis, The Weight of Love, pp. 6, 19.

27‘Da mihi cordis contritionem, et lacrimarum fontem, praecipue dum preces et orationes meas tibi affero, dum tuae laudis psalmodiam decanto, dum mysterium nostrae redemptionis manifestum misericordiae tuae iudicium recolo vel profero, dum sacris altaribus, licet indignus, assisto, cupiens offerre illud mirabile et caeleste sacrificium omni reverentia et devotione dignum’ (CT, p. 173).

28Amy Hollywood, ‘Song, Experience, and the Book in Benedictine Monasticism’, in Amy Hollywood and Patricia Z. Beckman (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 65.

29The idea that prescribed feelings of the past can be recovered by historians is discussed by Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 196.

30‘Dicta mea dicta sunt patrum’ (CT, p. 121). There is more on this in Chapter 2.

31‘In hac quidem vita miseriis erroribusque plenissima haberi non potest contemplativae perfectio vitae’ (CT, p. 174).

32For more on how this contrasts with the writings of Anselm of Canterbury and others, see Chapter 5.

33For more about ‘conversion’ or ‘confession’ being an act of understanding and recognition of God by Christians, see Elizabeth C. Parker and Charles T. Little, The Cloisters Cross: Its Art and Meaning (New York: Abrams, 1994), pp. 72–5, 175–95; see also Chapter 2, below.

34As quoted in M.D. Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), p. 313.

35The process of moving from the exterior to the interior also mirrors the process of lectio divina. See, for instance, Jean-François Cottier, Anima mea: Prières privées et textes de dévotion du moyen âge latin (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), p. 110.

36‘interioribus sensibus animae meae’ (CT, p. 179). This idea is also found elsewhere in medieval texts; for instance, Piroska Nagy, ‘Religious Weeping as Ritual in the Medieval West’, Social Analysis 48.2 (2004), 123.

37‘intimae visionis’ (CT, p. 172).

38CT, p. 124.

39CT, p. 156.

40Phillip C. Adamo, New Monks in Old Habits: The Formation of the Caulite Monastic Order, 1193–1267 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2014), p. 183. On the interior domus, see Melville, The World of Medieval Monasticism, pp. 189–90. Melville also discusses like images of the ‘inner household’ and ‘soul’s cloister’ (claustrum animae) on pp. 318–20.

41Cf. CT, pp. 137, 158.

42CT, p. 114.

43This is an intentional paraphrase from Augustine’s Confessions 10.27.38.

44CT, p. 172.

45‘Atque altius penetra ad intima potenti virtute’ (CT, p. 181).

46For more on how both Augustine and Anselm do this, see Karl F. Morrison, ‘Framing the Subject: Humanity and the Wounds of Love’, in Karl F. Morrison and Rudolph M. Bell (eds), Studies on Medieval Empathies (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), p. 10.

47CT, p. 144.

48CT, pp. 159, 173.

49‘Et quis locus in me est, quo veniat in me, Deus meus?’ (CT, p. 110).

50This focus on the heart and on inscription on the heart is biblical: cf. Jeremiah 31:33, ‘But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.’ Thanks to Travis Stevens for pointing this out.

51Augustine, Confessions 6.3: ‘When [Ambrose] read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still.’

52‘Da mihi cor contritum, cor purum, cor sincerum, cor deuotum, cor castum, cor sobrium, cor mite, cor mansuetum, cor tranquillum, cor serenissimum, cor tui desiderio plenum … scinde duritiam cordis mei ut emanet fons iste cuius desiderio nimis aestuat anima mea … ut lacrimae meae fiant mihi panis die ac nocte. Libera me iurgiis et contentionibus quas ibi patitur misera mens, ubi est litigans hominum multitudo … ut a cunctis absolutus curis liber ad pedes Domini Iesu Christi sedeam et intente audiam quid caelestis sapientia doceat’ (CT, pp. 133, 136).

53The obsession with the heart (the ‘palate of the heart’, a ‘hardened heart’) is akin to Augustine’s obsession with the heart in his Confessions. For instance, CT, pp. 144, 172 is parallel to Confessions 5.13.23 and Confessions 7.16.22; see Lauren Mancia, ‘Reading Augustine’s Confessions in Normandy in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’, Tabularia 14 (2014), 195–233.

54‘Amaritudo et omnis fellis asperitas in regione tua locum non habet’ (CT, p. 156).

55‘et peccatricem mulierem intus misericorditer infundit’ (CT, p. 152).

56‘tu infunde caelitus cordibus nostris’ (CT, p. 127).

57‘Hoc ore confiteor, hoc corde credo, et pro hoc tibi gratias ago’ (CT, p. 141).

58‘in pectore meo dulcem memoriam tui melliflui nominis nulla unquam oblivione delendam’ (CT, p. 172). Mary Carruthers has spoken about this idea of the memory as a writing tablet upon which to inscribe thoughts in The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 102.

59‘Confugiat mens mea sub umbram alarum tuarum ab aestibus cogitationum huius saeculi’ (CT, p. 143).

60‘Da mihi cor contritum, cor purum, cor sincerum, cor devotum, cor castum, cor sobrium, cor mite, cor mansuetum, cor tranquillum’ (CT, p. 133).

61‘ut sacrificium spiritus contribulati et cordis contriti’ (CT, p. 172).

62‘Desiderat desiderio magno divisiones aquarum, peccatrix anima mea: sed obriguit misera, insensibilis facta est’ (CT, p. 151).

63‘Et inter has quarerelas nimiosque ploratus ac profunda cordis suspiria, assumis maestam et anxiam mentem super alta iuga montium’ (CT, p. 160).

64CT, p. 136.

65CT, pp. 157, 176–7. For more on the divine awakening of the senses in monastic writing, see R. Hale, “‘Taste and See, for God is Sweet”: Sensory Perception and Memory in Medieval Christian Mystical Experience’, in Ann Clarke Bartlett (ed.), Vox Mystica: Essays on Medieval Mysticism in Honor of Professor Valerie M. Lagorio (Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer, 1995), pp. 3–14; Rachel Fulton, ‘“Taste and See That the Lord is Sweet” (Ps. 33:9): The Flavor of God in the Monastic West’, Journal of Religion 86.2 (2006), 169–204.

66‘Ut ipso cordis palato sentiam’ (CT, pp. 176–7).

67‘Amas, nec aestuas. Zelas et securus es. Paenitet te et non doles. Iraseceris et tranquillus es’ (CT, p. 112); cf. Augustine’s Confessions 1.4.4.

68‘Vident et videre desiderant: sine anxietate desiderant, sine fastidio satiantur’ (CT, p. 159).

69‘De paena autem peccati hoc obdurata mens sustinet, ut peccata sua videre possit, flere non possit’ (CT, pp. 151–2). This relationship between emotion and sin is also noted in Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages, p. 49.

70Caritas is mentioned with incredible frequency throughout the Confessio theologica: it can be found in CT, pp. 119, 127, 129, 130, 133, 140, 155, 156, 158, 159, 161, 171, 172, 173, 175, 179, 181, 182. At the beginning of the CT, God himself is identified as caritas: ‘Tu vere Patris et Filii caritas, unitas, et sanctitas’ (CT, pp. 119). John also quotes Augustine’s Confessions supporting this point, saying ‘O aeterna veritas, et vera caritas, et cara aeternitas! Tu es Deus meus’ (CT, p. 161; from Confessions 7.10.16). This is somewhat different from how other scholars have depicted the medieval definition of caritas (as fellow-feeling) in other contexts; see, for instance, Romig, Be a Perfect Man or Morrison, ‘Framing the Subject’. The connection between caritas and Augustine will be discussed further in Chapter 3.

71‘Incipit pars tertia in qua mens devota a nimio Christi amore flagrans, Christo inhians, Christo suspirans, Christum quem solum amat videre desiderans, nihil dulce habet nisi gemere et flere’ (CT, p. 142).

72‘Tuae enim caritatis iaculo vulneratus sum … Anxius et sitibundus ad te volando curro’ (CT, p. 155). The idea of caritas as a wounding arrow is a rhetorical trope found often in monastic writing (and derived in part from the Song of Songs); see Chapters 3 and 5, below.

73The passage comes from Psalm 127:16, and according to Leclercq and Bonnes, is reminiscent of a prayer from the Precum libelli, which will be discussed further in Chapter 2.

74The ‘sinful woman’ mentioned here is Mary Magdalene.

75‘Venite lacrimae obsecro, in nomine Domini mei Jesu Christi venite; implete cor meum, irrigate oculos meos, humectate genas meas, aspergite me fletibus, fluite super faciem meam, date mihi planctum amarum, generate dulcem veniam … Qui eduxit aquam de petra et peccatricem mulierem intus misericorditer infundit, pariterque benigne foris suscepit, ipse suo piisimo iussu vobis tardantibus dicat, ut cor meum vos desiderans, et vos quaerens, vestra ita inebrietis inundatione, ut se a fletibus temperare nec velit, nec possit … Donec salubre est flere, donec salubre est paenitere, festinate lacrimae quas opto, quas tota mente mea peto: ut pro vulneribus animae meae indesinenter diebus ac noctibus defleam: ne tempora indulta poenitentiae pereant; ne dies ad bene vivendum concessi, sine causa fluant, Spiritus Dei, bonus doctor et illuminator matris ecclesiae, qui ex duro corde producit lacrimas, et dat paenitentibus dignos paenitentiae fructus, descendat in cor meum, ut cudat ex eo saxeo et ferreo irriguum superius, et irriguum inferius’ (CT, pp. 151–2).

76RB 7:67–9, as quoted in Hollywood, ‘Song, Experience, and the Book’, p. 64.

77For more on this process, see Conrad Leyser, ‘Lectio divina, oratio pura: Rhetoric and the Techniques of Asceticism in the Conferences of John Cassian’, in Giulia Barone, Marina Caffiero, and Francesco Scorza Barcellona (eds), Modelli di santità e modelli di comportamento: contrasti, intersezioni, complementarità (Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1994), pp. 133–44; Robertson, Lectio Divina; Mary Agnes Edsall, ‘Reading Like a Monk: Lectio Divina, Religious Literature, and Lay Devotion’ (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2000); Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982).

78Hollywood, ‘Song, Experience, and the Book’, pp. 77–8; Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice’; Frederick Paxton, ‘Performing Death and Dying at Cluny in the High Middle Ages’, in Bruce T. Morrill, Susan Rodgers, and Joanna E. Ziegler (eds), Practicing Catholic: Ritual, Body, and Contestation in Catholic Faith (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 43–57; Morrison, ‘Framing the Subject’, p. 31; Christopher Swift, ‘The Penitent Prepares: Affect, Contrition, and Tears’, in Elina Gertsman (ed.), Crying in the Middle Ages: Tears of History (New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 79–101.

79Hollywood, ‘Song, Experience, and the Book’, pp. 64–9.

80‘Fac’ appears in CT, pp. 145, 173, 177, 179; ‘Da mihi’ appears in CT, pp. 180, 181; ‘Rogo’ appears in CT, pp. 181, 182.

81Cf. CT, p. 180.

82Cf. CT, p. 178.

83Cf. n. 75 above.

84‘Its delight is exclusively in you. In an unfailing purity it satiates its thirst in you. It never at any point betrays its mutability. You are always present to it, and it concentrates all of its affection on you. It has no future to expect. It suffers no variation and experiences no distending in the successiveness of time’ (‘Tu solus es, te perseverantissima castitate hauriens mutabilitatem suam nusquam et nunquam exerit et in te sibi semper praesente, ad te toto affectu se tenet, non habens futurum quod expectet nec in praeteritum traiiciens quod meminerit, nulla vice variatur nec in tempore ullo distenditur’) (CT, p. 166); cf. Augustine’s Confessions 12.11.12.

85‘Confugiat mens mea sub umbrum alarum tuarum ab aestibus cogitationum huius saeculi’ (CT, p. 143).

86For more on the relationship between memory and affect, see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 54.

87Of the mentions of caritas listed above, the following italicised pages indicate instances when caritas is connected implicitly or explicitly to the model of the crucified Christ: CT, pp. 119, 127, 129, 130, 133, 140, 155, 156, 158, 159, 161, 171, 172, 173, 175, 179, 181, 182.

88‘Per eius sanguinem habemus accessum ad te’ (CT, p. 140).

89‘per illa salutifera vulnera tua, quae passus es in cruce pro salute nostra, ex quibus emanavit ille pretiosus et vivificus sanguis quo sumus redempti propitiabili dignatione … 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).

90This also happens to be part of one of the four prayers excerpted in the Libellus; see Introduction, above.

91Note that the conflation of love with the sight of God’s wounds here is similar to an image found in the Rothschild Canticles (Figure 8); see Chapter 5, below, and Jeffrey Hamburger, ‘The Visual and the Visionary: The Image in Late Medieval Monastic Devotions’, in The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York: Zone Books, 1998), p. 127. There is a gender inversion here: the male monk wants to be pierced with a dart or a lance, assuming the ‘female’ position. While I will not dwell on this here, an important book on such gender issues is L.C. Engh, Gendered Identities in Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons on the Song of Songs: Performing the Bride (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014).

92Note that the word vulnera also means sins – it is used as such in the RB, ch. 46 – so there is a double entendre here too. The Christian’s sinfulness causes his suffering, and the sinner’s vulnera require him to be crucified and to obtain visual vulnera to brand him a sinner. The tears of contrition even flow from the wound (i.e. sin) in the sinner’s soul.

93Morrison defines empathy as metaphorical identity that strives to be literal – I am you – so such extremity is an empathic act; Karl Morrison, ‘I Am You’: The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology, and Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).

94See the parallel use of forms of emanare for both tears and blood in John’s text. In CT, p. 181, concerning blood: ‘Wherefore I pray for the clemency of your goodness through those salvific wounds which you suffered on the cross for our salvation, from which flowed the precious and life-giving blood by which we have been redeemed with propitious graciousness’ (‘Quapropter precor clementiam bonitatis tuae per illa salutifera vulnera quae passus es in cruce pro salute nostra, ex quibus emanavit ille praetiosus et vivificus sanguis quo sumus redempti propitiabili dignatione’). And in CT, p. 180, concerning tears: ‘In a contrite spirit, producing a true font of tears constantly flowing out of much love and desire for you’ (‘in animo contrito, producens verum fontem lacrimarum iugiter emanantem ex multo amore et desiderio tuo’).

95CT, pp. 172, 180, 183.

96This excerpt is also a part of a Libellus prayer.

97‘Carissime, obsecro per passionem et crucem tuam, reple cor meum tua inextinguibili dilectione, tua continua recordatione, tua continua recordatione, adeo ut totus sicut flamma urens ardeam in tui amoris dulcedine … scribe digito tuo in pectore meo dulcem memoriam tui melliflui nominis nulla unquam oblivione delendam. Scribe in tabulis cordis mei mandata et voluntatem tuam, legem et iustificationes tuas: ut te immensae dulcendinis Dominum, et praecepta tua semper et ubique habeam prae oculis meis. Quam dulcia faucibus meis eloquia tua. Da mihi tenacem memoriam, ut non obliviscar ea’ (CT, p. 172).

98See Fulton, From Judgment to Passion, pp. 164–5. The idea of writing on the ‘tablets of the heart’ is also seen in later medieval manuscript illumination, when books sometimes were made in a heart-shaped format (and scribes literally wrote on them), or the so-called ‘charters of Christ’. See Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, p. 102; Jessica Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 189–91; and Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 306–8.

99This kind of imitatio on the part of the sinner is discussed in Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), pp. 126–45.

100CT, p. 121.

101On John’s originality here, see Chapter 2; on how John’s use of Hannah and Mary Magdalene differs from how these two female biblical figures are used later, see Chapter 5.

102John is one of the earliest monks to portray Mary Magdalene as a pillar of steadfast love of Christ: most other writers only use her after the end of the eleventh century. See Chapters 2 and 5; and see also Fiona Griffiths, Nuns’ Priests’ Tales: Men and Salvation in Medieval Women’s Monastic Life (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), pp. 67–76.

103‘Qui eduxit aquam de petra et peccatricem mulierem intus misericorditer infundit, pariterque benigne foris suscepit’ (CT, pp. 151–2).

104Some scholars have noted that this persistent longing is one of John’s unique contributions to affective devotion. For more on this, see Chapter 2.

105‘Deducant oculi mei, Domine, divisiones aquarum, te miserante et donante, cui omnia possibilia sunt et nihil difficile. Similiter vero illa quae te Domine in sepulcro iacentem quaerebat, tantis lacrimis inundaverat tantoque mentis fervore te, quem amabat, videre desideraverat ut recedentibus aliis ipsa non recederet, et tuo nimio amore plena, locum sepulturae iterum iterumque visura adiret. Stetit, perseveravit, invenit tandem quod desideravit. Illi enim te prae caeteris amanti, et studiosius omnibus quaerenti, primitus apparere dignatus es, quia virtus tanti amoris perseverantia fuit. Quo itaque studio, quibus lacrimis, quaue sancti desiderii instantia nocte ac die per omnes dies vitae nostrae te omnium Dominum iam in caelis regnantem et omnia sub tuo imperio tententem, quaerere, venereari et amare debemus?’ (CT, p. 178).

106‘ut lacrimae meae fiant mihi panis die ac nocte … da mihi partem illam optimam quam Maria elegit et quam ego ipse elegi olim et praeelegi per inspirationem gratiae tuae ut a cunctis absolutus curis liber ad pedes Domini Jesu Christi sedeam et intente audiam quid caelestis sapientia doceat’ (CT, p. 136).

107See Giles Constable, Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 3–141. See also Katherine Ludwig Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 38. For more on John’s sources, see Chapter 2, below.

108Bishop Hugh of Lincoln is recorded to have actually eaten some of Fécamp’s relics of Mary Magdalene in the twelfth century: ‘Bishop Hugh of Lincoln’s Devotion to Relics’, in John Shinners (ed.), Medieval Popular Religion, 1000–1200: A Reader (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2007), pp. 181–3.

109Both the Mary Magdalene and the Hannah texts quoted above appear in the Libellus prayer excerpts.

110Hannah is seen as a symbol of Ecclesia (versus Penninah’s Synagoga), or as a personification of Christian sacrifice (and an exemplar for the practice of monastic oblation) in literature before the eleventh century. John is the first medieval writer to use Hannah as a devotional exemplar (he is followed by Peter Damien and Abelard, though neither uses Hannah as robustly as John does). John’s invocation of Hannah as a prayerful exemplar paralleled what monks were already familiar with from the liturgy, since at Lauds on ferial Wednesdays monks would sing her canticle from 1 Samuel 2:1–10 (Chadd I, p. 161). Fran Altvater, ‘Barren Mother, Dutiful Wife, Church Triumphant: Representations of Hannah in 1 Kings Illuminations’, Different Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art 3 (2011), 1–29. For more on this, see Chapters 2 and 5.

111Italics are here my emphasis.

112‘Recordor, Domine, recordor, pie, illius sanctae mulieris quae ad tabernaculum rogatura venit, quae multis lacrimis dari sibi filium petiit, de qua Scriptura refert, quod vultus eius post lacrimas et preces non sunt amplius in diversa mutati. Recordor, inquam, tante fidei tantaeque constantiae: et dolore torqueor, et verecundia confundor, quia ego miserrimus nil tale facio’ (CT, pp. 177–8).

113‘Si enim ita flevit, et in fletu perseveravit mulier quae quaerebat filium, quomodo plangere, et in planctu persistere debet anima quae quaerit Deum? Plangat obsecro anima mea, Deus meus, plangat, et a planctu non desinat caelesti visitatione compuncta’ (CT, p. 178).

114It is interesting that John uses the examples of two women – the Magdalene and Hannah – for his audience of male monks. Medieval men’s reaching for female examples is not new – many scholars have written on the subject, most notably Caroline Walker Bynum (in Jesus as Mother) and Fiona Griffiths (in Nuns’ Priests’ Tales). It is worth noting that the fact of these female exemplars does not confirm a female audience for John’s CT – male monks were speaking in Hannah’s voice all the time when they sang her canticle in the liturgy, for instance.