Imagining the Life of Christ: Affective Devotion and Vernacular Audience in Late Medieval Italy

It is widely acknowledged that affective devotion played a pivotal role in the ‘iconic turn’ of piety in late medieval and early modern Europe. However, a thorough investigation of the textual tradition which infused the theory of visual meditation into practice is still lacking. This is particularly true for vernacular translations, which are largely unknown despite their historical importance. Translations made an increasing number of texts available to a wider audience; theology in the vernacular made its way to both clergy and lay people, providing a theoretical framework to devotional practices involving the use of pictorial representations. It seems therefore of high relevance to shed light on the texts and images which disseminated affective meditation practices in late medieval and early Renaissance Italy.

Italy was the place where the tradition of 12th-century visual contemplation was revived in Franciscan milieus, resulting into what has been named as ‘gospel meditation’, an emotional meditation on the life of Christ performed through visual imagination. In the 13th and 14th centuries, the practice of meditating on the life of Christ spread especially in Franciscan environments. In particular, the Meditationes vitae Christi was a key text in promoting a technique of meditation based on the so-called ‘imaginariae representationes’. This text thus implied a theory of creative imagination and led to the creation of new iconographies.

Despite its paramount importance and impact, this interplay between texts and pictures has been only partially explored. The Meditationes vitae Christi has been frequently linked to milestones of the Italian Trecento painting; a comprehensive investigation of representations of the life of Christ in both texts and visual artifacts can help placing these well-known cases into a broader context.

This project aims to reconstruct the devotional culture which conveyed gospel meditation in both textual and visual forms in the Italian Trecento and Quattrocento. An outstanding aspect of the research will be the interplay between literary studies, intellectual history, and visual studies.

Focus will be primarily put on a carefully selected corpus of texts. Alongside the well-known works already mentioned, affective piety was also transmitted through widespread collections of short meditative texts, often falsely attributed to famous authors. Despite their wide dissemination and impact on religious piety, these works have been largely neglected by scholarship. However, the abundance of surviving manuscript copies of these works, both in Latin and in the vernacular, serves as compelling evidence for their enduring significance in shaping modern forms of piety.

My corpus includes the various vernacular versions of three shorter works which are often transmitted with the Meditationes vitae Christi: Pseudo Bernard’s Meditatio in passionem et resurrectionem Domini and Planctus beatae Mariae and Pseudo-Origen’s Homily on Mary Magdalene. The special attention devoted to vernacular texts represents a prominent feature of my research which marks a difference from the existing scholarship on affective piety.

This corpus stands out for both its importance and its spreading. Through a full census of its manuscript tradition, I was able to identify 39 manuscripts, 15 dating to the 14th century and the remaining 24 to the 15th century, a result which demonstrates the enduring popularity of these texts in Renaissance culture.

The project’s objectives are therefore the following:

1. to identify, when possible, the target audience of these texts and the devotional practices they served;

2. to provide an account of the social context in which these texts were transcribed and read;

3. to study the intersections between these texts and the visual arts.

The first aim will be reached by studying the texts, with attention both to their literary features and to their ways of transmission. The lexical choices and rhetorical strategies used in the texts will be also thoroughly analyzed in order to shed new light on the devotional practices associated with these works. The manuscripts will be considered as cultural documents, so as to determine their context of production and use.

The second objective of this project is to fully deal with social-historical questions related to the reception of these texts. The interplay between religious and lay audience will be carefully considered. The data on manuscript distribution, readers, owners, and textual clusters will be analyzed through the lens of historical network analysis: a tool already successful applied to modern book culture and which, as shown by recent studies, can yield robust results even in the case of a vast data loss (as frequent in the case of manuscript traditions).

The gender dimension will also play a crucial part in this part of my research. In fact, many of the manuscripts involved belonged to female religious communities: several studies have been written on the role of women readers in devotion, but this issue has never been thoroughly examined due to the lack of a systematic knowledge of the relevant texts. Mapping the diffusion of vernacular meditative texts composed or transcribed either by of for women will allow to verify whether it is possible to distinguish forms of gendered piety and, if so, to explain them.

As for the third objective, images used for devotional practices will be investigated in order to assess how affective meditation practices were mirrored in pictures. Specific attention will be devoted to narrative cycles of the Passion. Case-studies will include: illuminated manuscripts of the Meditationes vitae Christi; books of hours, especially when connected with forms of collective devotion; independent cycles. The demonstrable interplay between illumination and other visual arts will also be considered. The research will also build upon the existing literature concerning artworks designed for private and domestic devotion in late medieval and early Renaissance Italy, fostering a productive exchange between visual studies and textual traditions.

The objectives are ambitious and go far beyond the state-of-the-art, as the textual corpus to be investigated has never received significant attention and information on this subject is scattered in many publications. Most of the manuscripts transmitting devotional texts have never been fully described: as a result, the various versions of these texts have never been adequately classified; moreover, issues on the dissemination of these text in Italian society have never been addressed. Finally, while images for devotional purposes have been the subject of numerous studies, the relation between meditative literature and devotional art still remains to be fully explored.

As for methodology, the research will be based on the study of textual and visual sources. Manuscripts will be seen not only as mere “containers” of texts, but also and especially as cultural documents to be analysed through the lenses of palaeography, codicology and library history, in order to figure out their context of production. Data on texts and manuscripts will be processed in accordance with the methodologies of historical network analysis. Artworks will be examined from an iconographical and social-historical point of view, so as to verify how the affective devotion practices conveyed in the texts were mirrored in images.

The expected results include the full description of the manuscripts transmitting the texts of the corpus, which will be published on a freely accessible database; moreover, the publication of three scientific articles is planned: a shorter one on the miscellany manuscripts transmitting the texts of the corpus and two longer ones on the cultural-historical and visual issues. The proposed study will therefore have a vast impact on the history of piety, on literary studies and on visual studies.