Learning to Feel: Affect and Piety in Anglo-Saxon Verse

“Learning to Feel: Affect and Piety in Anglo-Saxon Verse,” argues that not only did affective piety exist centuries before the dates commonly held in current scholarship, but that early medieval English poetry employed a complex set of poetic conventions for devotional affect. “Learning to Feel” engages the literary history of later periods as it contests scholarly narratives that date affective piety—that is, deep emotional engagement with religious devotion—to the twelfth century advent of mandatory confession and shifts in artistic representations of Christ’s suffering. By contrast, “Learning to Feel” argues that profound emotional engagement with devotion inheres centuries earlier, and is central to understanding devotional poetry in the Anglo-Saxon era (i.e., the eighth through twelfth centuries). Not only is the devotional literature of this era affectively engaged, but the earliest English verse uses affective devotion to heighten its aesthetic effect, rather than merely using affective art as a means to didactic ends. Indeed, the allusive nature of devotional poems’ religious content demands cultivated devotion as a prerequisite to their effectiveness. Building upon scholarship that has revised anachronistic concepts of Anglo-Saxon ideas of psychology and affect generally, “Learning to Feel” shows how Anglo-Saxon devotional literature in fact lays the groundwork for affect and piety in literature for centuries that follow. In the earliest medieval devotional poetry, neither devotional nor artistic conventions may be simply subordinated to one another. This body of literature instead evinces a devotional aesthetic deeply invested in affective identifications and associations that are culturally defined and understood. The aesthetic of the medieval period was not, of course, the autotelic or a priori models that pervade post-Kantian aesthetics, but one closer to the sense of the Greek word aisthesis, one involving perception and those things that work upon it. The devotional aesthetic of the earliest English literature relies upon the affective associations evoked by homiletic, hagiographic, and penitential conventions. Yet where, for example, homily carefully explicates the lessons to be derived from exemplary narratives, devotional verse uses such narrative and its formulaic language allusively, in conjunction with poetic conventions (e.g., elegy, exile, kinship, etc.), to heighten portrayals of powerful devotional affect. The differences between these early conventions and those of later periods account in large part for the dramatic differences in their devotional aesthetics. Challenging current pieties about affective devotion from the twelfth century on, this dissertation shows that earlier literature deeply involves affect in its devotional poetic conventions. This evocation of devotional affect is neither merely instrumental to didactic ends nor an aesthetic for its own sake—affect and aisthesis are intricately connected within the devotional aesthetic of the earliest English verse. Chapter 1 addresses those specific devotional affects said only to arise centuries later—sympathetic devotion and sympathy for suffering. Readings of The Dream of the Rood and Guthlac B show how depictions of stoic suffering are complicated by intense pious sympathy, and how both models of suffering and grief participate in Anglo-Saxon poetic conventions surrounding kinship and broader conventions surrounding the ecclesiastical familia. The next chapter demonstrates how Anglo-Saxon poems on Judgment Day rely upon their audiences’ belief in coming Judgment to enhance its allusive and elliptical evocations of extravagant horrors. Similarly, Anglo-Saxon depictions of Paradise simultaneously evoke and forbid delight in luxury objects, yet appeals to its delights exceed the bounds of didactic utility, producing affective pleasure of the same variety they caution against. These disparate conventions contribute to the verse’s aesthetic power, even when their affective associations appear to exceed what their didactic content would allow. The final chapter explores how the Old English prosimetrical translation of Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae displays lingering interest in the affective pleasures of instruction far beyond that of its source text. This study builds upon field-changing work on Anglo-Saxon understandings of affect and psychology to revise existing narratives of literary history and religious culture