I am grateful for Brian Patrick McGuire'sreview of my book Emotional Monasticism: Affective Piety in the Eleventh-Century Monastery of John of Fécamp (Manchester, 2019). McGuire writes that the book is "an entire monastic landscape," "providing an excellent review of how devotion was practiced in John's time," "giving John the place he deserves in the history of medieval spirituality," and affording "the eleventh century and its monastic forms of affectivity...much-needed recognition." I am honored that McGuire considers my book "an important book for the history of medieval life and spirituality."
My comments below are not a rebuttal of the content of McGuire's review. Instead I am responding to certain points that he made in an attempt to further the scholarly conversation.
I share McGuire's frustration with the term "affective piety"--a catch-all phrase that is often ill-defined and applied in a one-size-fits-all way in medieval scholarship. I use the term and its variants in my book in order to engage directly with the current historiographical narrative. Some medieval scholars have insisted that "affective piety" was the purview of later medieval lay people, women, and mendicants, but not eleventh-century monks. I engaged with this term in order to reinsert earlier, male "Benedictines" into their rightful place in the tale that scholars tell. Too often we learn that "affectivity" had no early medieval antecedents, and that "Benedictine" monasticism was a cult of "unfeeling," ritualized, blind obedience, when this could not be further from the truth.
The only way we can truly understand what "affective piety" was to medieval people is if we look closely at its workings in specific texts, artifacts and contexts. McGuire is disappointed that I did not give "an old-fashioned review of the contents of the work, section by section." Instead, I chose to hyper-focus my analysis of John's work and its significance on the singular question of its "affective piety." My entire book is an attempt to define this term in the context of the eleventh-century monastery, including "affective piety's" sources and role in early medieval monastic life, and its wide-ranging ramifications for how monks behaved in the Central Middle Ages.
In his review, McGuire "wonder[s] why the term 'spirituality' has taken a back seat to the 'emotional'"--and this is an interesting point. As I suggest in the book's conclusion, I suspect that medievalists in the secular academy are increasingly wary of using words like "spirituality," replacing that discourse with terms like "emotional" or "affective" (or, perhaps, in an earlier scholarly moment, "individual"). This may be a failure on our part as twenty-first-century historians to really understand what it was to practice medieval religion (an unbridgeable gap, perhaps!). One of the most useful things about the relatively newfound scholarly interest in emotions is that it provides another way of understanding the dynamics of medieval belief for historians who are not themselves practicing medieval Christians. It's not a perfect approach, by any means, and needs to be augmented with many others. But it is, perhaps, one way of translating medieval religiosity into contemporary discourse, in order to assert both its beauty and its relevance to twenty-first century readers. By dissecting John's devotion to reveal its inner contours, and by naming its "emotional" dimensions, I hope to convince medievalists to spend time marveling at both the fascinating theories and enormous implications of a single monk's prescriptions for interior devotional life.