The Feeling Heart in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Meaning, Embodiment, and Making 1501513222, 9781501513220

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The Feeling Heart in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

LXVII

The Feeling Heart in Medieval and Early Modern Europe Meaning, Embodiment, and Making Edited by Katie Barclay and Bronwyn Reddan

ISBN 978-1-5015-1787-7 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-1-5015-1327-5 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-1-5015-1322-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019953046 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Detail of a miniature of the allegorical personifications of Friendly Expression and Courteous Manner, catching flighty hearts in their net; from Pierre Sala, Petit Livre d’Amour, France (Paris and Lyon), c. 1500, Stowe MS 955, f. 13r (stowe_ms_955_f13r) Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Acknowledgements This project began during an Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies conference as a conversation between Katie and Bronwyn, after hearing a series of papers where the heart featured as a prominent motif. It was a conversation that continued at a workshop we ran on the theme of the Feeling Heart, sponsored by the Australian Research Council Centre for Excellence in the History of Emotions: Europe, 1100–1800 (CHE). From that workshop, we progressed to this collection. We are grateful for both the financial support offered by CHE and the engaging conversation and contributions made both by attendees at the event and by our contributors to this volume. We also thank our peer reviewers, whose hidden labor made this a stronger and richer collection, and the various museums, archives, and galleries who allowed their material to be reproduced in it. The heart has been a key icon in Europe now for a millennium. We hope this collection goes some way towards not only providing its history, but contributing to an ongoing discussion about its uses today.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513275-202

Contents Acknowledgements List of Figures

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Katie Barclay and Bronwyn Reddan The Feeling Heart: Meaning, Embodiment, and Making

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Part 1: Meaningful Hearts Patricia Simons 1 The Flaming Heart: Pious and Amorous Passion in Early Modern European Medical and Visual Culture 19 Chloé Vondenhoff 2 Matter(s) of the Heart in Yvain and Ívens saga

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Carol J. Williams 3 Two Views of the Feeling Heart in Troubadour Song

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Bronwyn Reddan 4 The Battle for Control of the Heart in Charles Perrault’s Dialogue de l’Amour et l’Amitié (1660) 79

Part 2: Embodied Hearts Kathryn L. Smithies 5 The Leper’s Courageous Heart in Jean Bodel’s Les Congés

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Clare Davidson 6 “For wele or woo”: Lyrical Negotiations of the Cognizant Heart in Middle English 113 Colin Yeo 7 “The Grave Where Buried Love Doth Live”: Hearts-Imagery and Bakhtinian Grotesque in Early Modern English Poetry

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Contents

Susan Broomhall 8 Heart Tombs: Catherine de’ Medici and the Embodiment of Emotion 143

Part 3: Productive Hearts June-Ann Greeley 9 The Medieval Spirituality of “Purity of Heart” and “Heart-piercing Goodness” in Selected Works of St. Anselm of Canterbury 165 Eleonora Rai 10 Spotless Mirror, Martyred Heart: The Heart of Mary in Jesuit Devotions (Seventeeth–Eighteenth Centuries) 184 Bridget Millmore 11 “An Heart that can Feel for Another”: Love Tokens and the Icon of the Heart in Eighteenth-Century Britain 203 Elizabeth C. Macknight 12 The Hearts of a Private Archive from France, Saxony, and England 220 Further Reading

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Notes on Contributors Index

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List of Figures Figure 1.1

Figure 1.2

Figure 1.3

Figure 1.4

Figure 1.5

Figure 1.6 Figure 3.1 Figure 3.2 Figure 4.1 Figure 8.1

Figure 8.2

Figure 8.3

Figure 11.1 Figure 11.2 Figure 12.1 Figure 12.2 Figure 12.3

Sassetta, The Virgin and Child surrounded by angels, with St. Anthony of Padua and St. John the Baptist, 1437–1444, tempera on wood, 207 × 118 cm, Louvre, Paris (Inv. 1956–11). Photo Credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY 26 Florentine (here attributed to Cosimo and Francesco Rosselli), The Infant Christ, ca. 1480–1485, hand-colored engraving, 8.9 × 6.3 cm, British Museum, London (1854,0513.190). ©Trustees of the British Museum 27 Diana Scultori (Diana Mantuana), The Young Christ resting on a Flaming Heart, 1577 (signed and dated), engraving, 18.3 × 14 cm, Albertina, Vienna 28 Master Caspar of Regensburg, Frau Minne’s Power over Men’s Hearts, ca. 1479–1485, hand-colored woodcut, 25.7 × 36.5 cm, Kupferstichkabinett, Stattliche Museen, Berlin (Inv. 467–1908). Photo Credit: bpk Bildgaentur / Art Resource, NY 30 Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Allegory of Good Government, detail: Charity, 1338–1339, fresco, Town Hall, Siena. Photo Credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY 32 Hendrik Goltzius, Venus and Cupid, ca. 1595, engraving, 24.9 × 18.1 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (RP-P-OB-10.580) 36 Non es meravelha – end-rhymes 70 Bernart de Ventadorn Non es meravelha (first stanza). Transcription from Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, R 71 superiore, fol. 9r 70 Genealogy of Amour and Amitié 83 Germain Pilon and Domenico del Barbiere [called The Florentine], Funerary monument of the heart of Henri II (1519–1559), king of France, 1.5 m × 0.755 m, Musée du Louvre, Paris 146 Primaticcio, Ponce Jacquio, Jean Picard, Frémyn Roussel, The Heart Monument of François II, Basilica of Saint Denis. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Estampes RESERVE Pe-11a-Pet. Fol 150 Artist active in France. The Reign of Jupiter, ca. 1575. Marble, 38.1 cm × 48.3 cm. ©The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, The Annenberg Foundation Gift, 1997 (997.23) 151 Love token engraved with loving couple (1952,0904.332). © The Trustees of the British Museum 206 Love token engraved with Cupid, hearts and arrows (1952,0904.121) © The Trustees of the British Museum 211 Memorandum case with contents, Archives départementales du Rhône et de la métropole de Lyon AD69 11J/79 221 Liebhaber coat of arms embroidery, Archives départementales du Rhône et de la métropole de Lyon, AD69 11J/87 226 Manuscript Vie d’Henri Comarmond 1820, Archives départementales du Rhône et de la métropole de Lyon, AD69 11J/79 230

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List of Figures

Figure 12.4

Figure 12.5

Flowers in the personal diary of Joséphine Berlié (née Comarmond), Archives départementales du Rhône et de la métropole de Lyon, AD69 11J/79 232 Wax seals pertaining to Liebhaber kin, Archives départementales du Rhône et de la métropole de Lyon, AD69 11J/88 235

Katie Barclay and Bronwyn Reddan

The Feeling Heart: Meaning, Embodiment, and Making The heart is a key symbol in the Western world, found everywhere from Facebook and Twitter to signify “like”, to Valentine’s Day cards and religious art, to medical texts and literary metaphor. Its significance today reflects a long history with the heart a key conceptual device related to emotions, cognition, the self and identity, and the body. It is a physical organ that does considerable symbolic work. The heart is read as a metaphor for human desire and will, and situated in opposition to or alongside reason and cognition. In medieval and early modern Europe, the “feeling heart” – the heart as the site of emotion and emotional practices – informed a broad range of art, literature, music, heraldry, medical texts, and devotional and ritual practices. This multidisciplinary collection brings together art historians, literary scholars, historians, theologians, and musicologists to highlight the range of meanings attached to the symbol of the heart, the relationship between physical and metaphorical representations of the heart, and the uses of the heart in the production of identities and communities in medieval and early modern Europe. Despite its significance as a symbol in Western Europe, the scholarship on the medieval and early modern heart is remarkably small. What exists, however, provides a rich and evocative starting point for a conversation on its meanings and the complex uses to which it has been put. Some of the earliest scholarship on the heart explored its visual representation over time, moving from its role in religious iconography, to love tokens and Valentine’s cards, to its more recent ♥ form.1 Cardiologist P. J. Vinken pursues a range of explanations for the evolution of the modern heart’s distinctive shape, despite its lack of verisimilitude to the physical organ.2 More recently, others have attempted to elucidate such images through long histories of their representation across time and space.3 These histories identify a breath-taking range of representations, from hearts pieced with arrows and spears, entwined hearts, hearts that weep, hearts filled with other hearts or religious iconography, and hearts that are held and given, set alight, or broken. Hearts are elaborately represented in paint and statuary, often colored red but also set in gold or with jewels, surrounded by crowns, shards of light, flowers, and other lavish decoration. These are histories that emphasize not only the multiple representations and

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functions of the heart, but also the significance of the icon to cultural practices and the esteem in which the heart was held. If the heart is central to visual culture, its role in other aspects of medieval and early modern life is increasingly recognized. As an organ that has long been interpreted through its corporeal and metaphorical dimensions, many histories of the heart have started with its medical evolution. Like other bodily parts, the heart has compelled the production of histories of medicine that acknowledge the corporeal as cultural.4 If the medical history of the heart has highlighted the intersections, engagements, and tensions between Aristotle and Galen, and later anatomists like William Harvey and Andreas Vesalius, it has also emphasized the centrality of metaphor to the production of medical knowledge.5 Theories of the heart as an organ that breathes, moves, or circulates vital spirits or blood through the body, that attracts or expels and produces heat and power, all relied on metaphor to illuminate function.6 Galen described the heart as a smith’s bellows drawing in air to explain how his heart attracted blood to encourage its circulation across the body; Harvey, in turn, depicted the heart as a mechanical pump, ejecting blood through the lungs and into the body.7 As a source of heat, and thus life, as Aristotle suggested, the heart was the “hearthstone” of the body.8 While Galen and later Descartes were to counter the heart’s primacy through their emphasis on the brain as the site of rationality and order, the heart remained a key organ across the early modern period.9 If metaphor shaped medical meaning, as Fay Bound Alberti suggests, developments in cardiology in turn transformed how the heart operated as a cultural icon.10 Moreover, that the heart was an organ – something of the body – ensured that physiology always infused metaphors of heart. Heart iconography did not operate beyond the body but acted to continually reinforce the centrality of corporeality to the human condition.11 The scholarship of the symbolic uses of the heart in medieval and early modern culture is still a relatively small field, yet what is emerging is not a history of a single motif, but of the multiple and complexes uses to which the heart was put. During the medieval period, as Heather Webb and Robert Erickson suggest, the heart was not only a source of heat that gave life to the body, but it came to carry the burden of life – it was the seat of the soul and will, of intellect and emotion.12 As Eric Jager demonstrates, the heart was a rich symbol of the self and interior life for the medieval world, particularly associated with memory and conscience.13 It could be imagined as a book, a place where knowledge was processed, inscribed, and made part of the self. Such inscription is suggestive of a broader theme of the heart as something porous, open to external influence, even available as a window to the soul.

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The permeable heart sits in tension with images of the heart as hard or closed, the location of secrets and hidden truth.14 This imagery was particularly prominent in religious writing, where the hard heart, a dry soil, resisted God’s nourishment. Rather Christians were to be tender hearted, pricked by compunction, often symbolized as arrows or spears – iconography that drew on both Cupid from the classical world and the Bible.15 Tender, open hearts were available to receive and reflect God’s love; their openness not only suggested purity but honesty and transparency, values that held significance across the medieval and early modern periods.16 Through piercing the heart, the external was made internal, a model that both highlighted the boundaries of the body/soul and the possibilities for their dissolution. A process of “tenderizing” the heart was particularly associated with conversion. Hearts were made soft and available through religious practice or divine intervention; it was through such transformation of heart – a heart that signified soul, self, will, intellect – that people were brought closer to the divine.17 As hearts offered fertile ground for spiritual growth, they could also be equated with wombs, a model that could reinforce a patriarchal inscription of the “male pen” on the female body, but also provide opportunities for the rewriting of spiritual growth as feminine.18 Elsewhere the association between the heart and the exercise of God in the human ensured its centrality to Christian devotional imagery across Europe, not least in the development of the cults of the Sacred Heart.19 It was not just God’s love that could pierce the heart. The association between romantic love – that in the Christian tradition should emerge from God’s grace – and the heart is enduring, although the topic has attracted remarkably little scholarly attention.20 Like the divine, the capacity of “the other” to encroach and destabilize the boundaries of self could be symbolized through reference to the permeable heart. The heart as self could thus be available for giving to another and even consumed cannibalistically.21 When love was removed, hearts could crack, fracture, break, thus leading to debilitation and death, both real and metaphorical.22 Referring to a beloved as sweetheart, dear heart, my heart, was and remains popular, whilst the capacity of the heart to stand for the self and so be cherished can be seen in the less enduring practice of heart preservation and burial by the families of the deceased.23 If the heart reflected the personal, it could also symbolize family, state, and nation. Depictions of the heart as the ruler of the body politic provided a significant framework for medieval and early modern political life that competed with models that placed power in the head.24 This collection builds upon previous scholarship by expanding discussion of the heart beyond the confines of a single genre, discipline, or chronological period. It seeks to broaden our understanding by bringing together contributions

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on the use of the heart in art, music, literary and religious texts, material culture, and social rituals and practices. Its concentration on Europe, where a common religious heritage, transnational migration, and trade unified disparate groups allows for a broader conversation than a single-country focus allows. The chapters shed new light on the development of long-standing ideas including the heart as the seat of self, the heart as the repository of spiritual knowledge, and the association between love and the heart. It extends these ideas with consideration of the heart as a feeling organ and opens new ground in providing histories of the heart in contexts where there is little established literature, namely the symbol of the flaming heart and the meaning of heartimagery in the Old Norse literary tradition. The unifying theme of this collection is an understanding of the heart as a site of emotion or as integrated into the human body as an emotional subject. Historians increasingly present a picture of the diverse and sophisticated articulations and understandings of emotion found across the medieval and early modern world.25 Whilst the vocabulary for expressing the phenomena of emotion – passion, affection, feeling – has changed over time, with such terms holding greater stability in some periods than others, the significance of the affective dimensions of human experience has been a critical constant.26 Moreover, new histories of emotion are providing sophisticated methodological tools for accessing something that was so often thought to be fleeting or intangible. Emotions are no longer simply biological, but are produced through performances, social practices, and in engagements with our cultural and material world.27 This collection highlights the heart as a central symbol that was used in the production of emotion for medieval and early modern peoples. In particular, its key contribution, which is found across all the essays, is the way the heart enables a visual metaphor of embodied emotion. Feeling is made tangible through an iconography (visual, written, musical) that gives it corporeal structure, but which nonetheless never completely captures it, allowing emotion to retain its dynamism. This tension between emotion as embodied and corporeal and its capacity to resist containment and explanation – its excess – is consistently explored and refigured in the iconography of the medieval and early modern “feeling heart.” Thus, a history of a potent symbol – the heart – provides insight into how emotion comes to manifest as a product of both body and culture. Our discussion of the feeling heart is divided into three parts: meaningful hearts, embodied hearts, and productive hearts. Part 1 (meaningful hearts) examines the symbolism, iconography or representation of the heart across a range of genres and European spaces. Part 2 (embodied hearts) analyzes representations of the heart as an embodied entity and expands our understanding of the corporeal relation to metaphor in understandings of the heart. Part 3 (productive

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hearts) shifts the focus to social practice and the use of the feeling heart to create identity and connections between individuals, families, and other social groups. These divisions are largely artificial, and several of the chapters could sit comfortably in another section, but the organizing principle enables some of the key insights of the collection to be drawn out. Part 1 offers examples of heartcentered discourses in which the heart is a symbol for the interior self and the sensory and emotional experiences that shape the identity of that self as an affective being. Parts 2 and 3 move outwards to interrogate the relationship of the heart to the body and to the production of affective bonds in social groups. In doing so, The Feeling Heart offers a history of the heart that traces its symbolic resonance from its role as a metaphorical and physiological container of meaning to its uses in the production of the medieval and early modern self and society.

Meaningful Hearts The heart was a porous icon. In medieval medical thought, the heart was literally an organ marked by interstices that enabled it to breathe and give life to the body.28 Its porosity was also marked by the capacity to hold, and sometimes contain, meaning. As an organ closely associated with the self, it was a remarkably flexible symbol with resonance across corporeal, personal, spiritual, political, economic, and social domains. The first part of the collection draws together chapters that further understanding of the symbolism, iconography, or representation of the heart in different genres across the medieval and early modern period. Patricia Simons, Chloé Vondenhoff, Carol J. Williams, and Bronwyn Reddan analyze the ways in which the feeling heart performed significant cultural work in secular and sacred imaginations. Bringing perspectives from art, literature, and musicology, they explore the meaningful heart across genre and place. Following some strands of medieval physiology, the heart was the location of both emotion and cognition, the seat of knowledge and judgement. The body transmitted information to the heart through the senses – touch, sight, hearing, smell, taste – where they were processed and inspired motion and emotion.29 This physiological model underpinned and inflected on how the heart was represented. In this volume, Simons traces the iconographic history of the heart radiating flames or depicted as being on fire in European visual culture from the late Middle Ages into the seventeenth century. Focusing on the intellectual and experiential contexts of medical beliefs, religious symbolism, and amorous poetry, Simons highlights the crossover between sacred and secular imagery,

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including popular devotional prints and the burning heart held by Charity, Christ, or Venus. She argues that, rather than a natural and transparent signifier of passion, the burning heart derives from ancient Greek ideas about the organ’s anatomical function as a furnace. The representation of the flaming heart came to symbolize a life, self, being, that was inherently emotional and passionate. Representations of the heart as an organ shaped by the senses is central to Vondenhoff’s discussion of changes to the courtly love imagery in Chrétien de Troyes’s story of Yvain during its translation into Old Norse as Ívens saga. Chrétien’s romances represent the heart as a feeling organ responsible for the generation and regulation of the affective states of characters. They develop a model of the self as a heart-centered phenomenon that focuses on explaining the relationship of the human body to the outside world, particularly through an emphasis on hearing and sight. It is through hearing that the heart learns; through sight that love in enabled. This concern with the physiological role of the heart gave rise to the formation of specific heart-motifs such as “remembering with the heart” and “the itinerant heart,” which explicate the role the heart plays in relation to the senses. It is a model also evident in Williams’s analysis of twelfthcentury troubadour song in which the singing voice, entering through the ears, produces the heart as the seat of affection. However, in its Old Norse translation, Ívens saga, Chrétien’s feeling heart is largely absent. It was generally not connected to love, nor was it ascribed a role in the production of the affective states of characters. Instead, it was re-scripted as the seat of courage and its size interpreted as a cipher for a character’s disposition. Heart-imagery in Ívens saga emphasizes the cognitive function of the heart, the location of the hugr (mind), rather than the sensory or feeling physiology foregrounded in Chrétien’s Yvain. Moreover, whilst the French cour is active, engaged, moving, refusing containment, the Norse hjarte lacks such physical dynamism, suggestive of a stable, bounded self. As an organ that functioned as part of cognitive and emotional processing, the heart was responsible for the production of a wide range of emotional experience. Yet, if one emotion was predominant, it was love. This was partly, as is explored by Greeley and Davidson in Part 2, because the Christian heart was the site of God’s grace, experienced as love in the heart, which should form the bedrock for human action.30 In godly models of human relation, caritas should be the foundation of all human relations, whether between spouses, family, community, or nation. Love grew from love; it can be contrasted with desire, an unruly passion that misdirected the godly heart. Love is prominent in depictions of the heart across the period. In troubadour love songs, as Williams demonstrates, poetic expression of the inalienable

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link between love and the heart conceptualizes the latter as both an active and passive agent of the emotions. This view of the feeling heart informs Dante Alighieri’s subsequent articulation of the theory and rationale of troubadour song, as well as self-conscious theorizing by the troubadours themselves. Love is the source of poetic inspiration and the life-force of the heart; love originates within the heart, awakened through sight, and yet the heart is consumed by love, particularly where love is envisioned as desire. The voice of song gives expression to the love contained or received by the heart and acts to transmit that feeling to others. Love is similarly central to Reddan’s examination of Charles Perrault’s 1660 Dialogue de l’Amour et l’Amitié. An exchange that uses the personification of Love and Reason as allegorical figures struggling for control over feeling subjects, it emphasizes the significance of the heart as the metaphorical location of emotion and subjectivity in early modern France. In this context, the feeling heart is both a battleground of and a vessel for emotion, but unlike the troubadour song in Williams’s chapter, Perrault’s feeling heart is not an active participant in the creation of emotion. He conceptualizes the heart as a place where emotion is felt; it is a receptacle or container for the emotions over which the feeling subject struggles to exercise control. Hearts here, as can also be seen in Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella discussed by Yeo in Chapter 7, are something to be owned and conquered by emotion, but which are not involved in its generation. Such representations witness both an increased boundedness of the self-heart, something that is no longer distributed and diffuse but available for capture, and a decentering of the affective heart as central to the imagining of the human. Representation of the heart as a site of sensory and emotional experience in the sources examined by the chapters in Part 1 adds layers of metaphorical meaning to the physiological role of the heart. In this context, hearts could both refuse containment – something evidenced in Simons’s discussion of flaming hearts held in the hand or detached from the body entirely – as well as contain. Many representations in the medieval and early modern period depict hearts holding things, whether Christ, Mary, various saints, other hearts, writing, memory, emotion, humanity; as Graham Holderness notes, the interior of the early modern Christian was “a very crowded place.”31 If the porous heart was suggestive of the heart’s capacity to receive, as a container, it represented the human as product of environment and engagement with the world. As the chapters in Part 2 show, the heart as a container meant that the human could be infused with the collective emotion produced in the affective, communal heart, both physiologically as emotion was directed as corporeal experience, and metaphorically as a structure of self. The agency of the heart in the production of a corporeal self is diminished

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over the centuries for central Europeans, perhaps producing accounts that would have not been unfamiliar to their northern neighbors in an earlier time. The medieval and early modern heart thus displayed an instability of meaning that reflected the heart’s positioning as produced by and producer of the human and the world.

Embodied Hearts The physiological significance of the heart as an organ and an embodied symbol acted to continually produce an affective corporeality that expands the symbolic meaning of the heart. If hearts could be disembodied and detached, they also brought the spiritual, social and cultural to the body – a reciprocity that reinforced the self as both grounded and holistic.32 Part 2 explores the potentiality of the heart as embodied metaphor for interpreting the medieval and early modern world. Chapters by Kathryn L. Smithies, Clare Davidson, Colin Yeo, and Susan Broomhall explore the connection between physiological understandings of the heart and its representation, and the capacity for the “embodied heart” to enable the affective to be at once both internal and active in the world. The dynamism of the corporeal-metaphorical exchange between physical and symbolic hearts emerges in chapters by Smithies and Yeo. Smithies analyzes the representation of the courageous heart of Arrageois poet and leper, Jean Bodel, in his leave-taking poem Les Congés (ca.1200). She interprets this emotionally-charged poem as an attempt by Bodel to cultivate the courage he needs to meet the earthly pain and loss caused by his leprosy. The heart is the key to Bodel’s salvation; he appeals directly to his heart, the only part of his body that remains healthy, for courage to become the penitent leper whose suffering imitates that of Christ. His appeal reflects a desire for a spiritual-corporeal transformation, not from sickness to health, but from sorrow to courageous acceptance. Bodel’s heart was a “symbol of affect” that controlled the movement of emotions to and from the heart, thus binding the physical heart to the psychological heart. Courage for Bodel was an emotional transformation, experienced through the body and in the soul. A similar embodiment of heart is explored by Davidson in her analysis of “the cognizant heart” as a seat of thinking and feeling in Middle English writing. A medieval heart that is simultaneously a site of emotion and intellect, not only collapses the reason–emotion binary, but locates thought as embodied experience. Moreover, as the heart is the seat of cognition-emotion, emotions such as love are not only embodied but simultaneously cognitive and emotional – an

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interpretation that has resonance with contemporary models of emotion as not only “felt judgements” but things that people “do”.33 Like for Bodel, cognized feeling is experienced corporeally, an extension of mind/emotion into body. If such an embodied mind-emotion is now to be expected of the medieval topos, Davidson also finds emotion reported as exceeding not only the descriptive possibilities of language, but the capacity of the heart to think it. A joy produced of satiated desire and love produces a superabundance of feeling that exceeds the interpretive capacities of the heart. Here emotion and the thinking heart are in tension, a motif also explored by Greeley in Chapter 9. The ability of the affective heart to be experienced as fully embodied is thus never certain. Whether the heart can ever be fully embodied remains a topic of tension in the early modern period, even as the heart became less central to the self. Yeo’s exploration of heart-imagery in English Renaissance love poetry highlights the important doubling of the physical and metaphorical as a technique for explaining the experience of love. He applies Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of grotesque realism to corporeal metaphors in works by Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare, and John Donne to highlight their potential to unnerve and disturb. Through “degrading” abstract metaphors of the heart, grotesque realist images reinforced the bodily effects of love and thus allowed it to be described as an embodied rather than a spiritual experience. Unlike Bodel, for whom the heart was simultaneously spiritual and embodied such that its transformation operated to perfect body and soul, seventeenth-century English poets conceived of corporeal and metaphorical hearts as distinct entities, whilst recognizing the potential of their collapse to realize emotion as an embodied experience. Like the Middle English writers explored by Davidson, the corporeal enables a particular recounting of emotional experience that is suggestive of the inability of the body to fully explain the affective heart. A different type of corporeality emerges in Broomhall’s investigation of the dialectic relationship between early modern embodiment and materiality in the poetic and artistic expressions of the feeling heart that were integral to Catherine de’ Medici’s self-presentation as a political protagonist in France. Following the deaths of her husbands and sons, de’ Medici commissioned a series of “monuments” to their memory and, simultaneously, her grieving heart. Representations of de’ Medici’s heart and its emotional experiences became material and rhetorical performances of power that produced both her gendered, grieving body, and political agency. This was a materialization of the affective heart in stone and paper designed to redirect attention to de’ Medici’s corporeal experience of grief, which in turn authorized her embodiment of political authority. Part of this performance drew on the custom of heart burial, in which hearts were removed from the body and used to enable particular forms of devotion or

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care.34 The cardiotaph that de’ Medici commissioned for her husband placed a physical heart at the center of the production of her political persona, thus linking her heart to his and suggesting the capacity of her heart to embody that of another. That the heart could capture another is a repeating trope in Parts 2 and 3 of this collection. Yeo finds “thy bosom is endeared with all hearts”; Davidson emphasizes hearts as other hearts; Millmore in Chapter 11 encounters hearts that overlap and combine. The multiple-heart self was an embodiment of collective identity in the individual. As an embodied self, this was not just an abstraction of identity – a metaphor – but suggestive of the capacity of the human to simultaneously be both self and other. Thus the heart here comes to signify excess, not only an extension of the person through the affective into the world, but the world returning to the human as affective experience.

Productive Hearts Hearts that exceed and extend beyond the self and body are implicated in the production of group conscious and social connections as well as individual identity. The chapters in Part 3 show how individuals use metaphors of the heart to “do” things such as enable relationships, produce group identities, and shape social and political power. Catherine de’ Medici’s use of the heart to legitimize her claims to political authority is a suggestive example. Part 3 extends this discussion by exploring how the feeling heart has been used by individuals, families, and other social groups to “create” religious communities, political identities, and family practices. June-Ann Greeley, Eleonora Rai, Bridget Millmore, and Elizabeth C. Macknight show the heart as a symbolic tool that produces social connections and cultural networks, as well as family and community identity. Greeley and Rai focus on the role of the heart in spiritual and religious devotional practices from the eleventh century to the present day. Both authors examine personal practices of affective piety that extend to enable communal belief. Greeley offers a close reading of the prayers and meditative writings of Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) and Rai explores Jesuit devotion to the Sacred Heart of Mary in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For Anselm, the heart is the most essential locus of the triad of heart-soul-mind that was central to devotion in medieval Christianity. The heart is where the “pluck” of compunction begins an emotional process from sorrow to the joy that arises from God’s love entering the heart, an experience that exceeds human understanding and brings one into union with the divine. With significant parallels

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to Bodel’s text, Anselm’s moving reflections on his heart’s stubbornness and his desire for reformation produces an account of the heart as the center of medieval devotion. Importantly, it is a spiritual reflection that participates in the transformation of Christian practice as his writings spread across Europe. Anselm’s meditation on the heart’s relation to the divine is part of the production of a new form of emotional devotion for the medieval world in which the affective heart is key. The centrality of the affective heart to religious practice continues across the centuries, especially in the growth of devotion to the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. Rai’s study of devotional books promoting the Cult of the Heart of Mary by Giovanni Pietro Pinamonti (1632–1703) and Liborio Siniscalchi (1674–1742) emphasizes the complex spiritual potentialities of the heart as a tangible and imaginable object with the capacity to contain the emotions of individuals, the divine, and humanity. For Pinamonti and Siniscalchi, Mary’s heart was both a pathway to the heart of Christ and a tool that enabled religious conversion for lapsed Catholics. Their devotional books used the corporeal nature of Mary’s heart to convey its spiritual significance. Contemplation of her physical heart, particularly as a vulnerable and sorrowing organ, became a device to root abstract religious and emotional ideas in everyday understanding and experience. The heart was placed at the center of a successful missionizing campaign that produced a popular and long-lasting community of devotees. For both Anselm and early modern Jesuits, the heart was the site of conversion for the individual, and a tool of conversion for others through its capacity to enable affective devotion in those who contemplated it. If the heart had the ability to inspire and produce religious communities, it also played a central role in making family. Chapters by Millmore and Macknight highlight the ability of hearts inscribed on material culture to produce meaningful connections between families separated by geographic and temporal distance. Millmore analyses the uses and meanings of the visual and verbal lexicon of the heart in the creation of love tokens from low-value coins in eighteenth-century Britain. She reads these affective objects as metaphorical expressions of the many different types of love experienced by the British working population who crafted them, as well as a symbol of life itself. The exchange of such tokens sought to strengthen familial bonds and secure feelings of attachment in times of disruption by expressing love, pain and suffering at the absence of love, as well as belief in “true love.” She suggests the potential of such investment in the loving heart for a group for whom such ties could be fragile. The heart here performed significant emotional work in enabling the production of personal connections through the exchange of objects in which the inscription of hearts served as proxies for their makers.

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Macknight explores the significance of the feeling heart in the creation of a private archive containing traces of the past lives of nobles from France, Saxony, and England connected by blood and marriage. A “flaming heart” is incorporated in a coat of arms, expressing social status and familial identity. Hearts appear in letters and diary entries articulating emotion and filial or marital identities and in drawings and printed works as statements of faith and religious identity. The co-production of the archive by family members and professional archivists drew on practices of ancestral commemoration in which the feeling heart operated as a metaphorical evocation and signifier for familial, marital, and noble identity. The affective heart thus functioned through its capacity to evoke emotional connection across generations and a shared family identity rooted in a lineage of affection and manifested outwardly to the world through their heart crest.35 As the chapters in Part 3 demonstrate, the heart was a symbol that was used to produce social and community life in the medieval and early modern period. It was an “ideational resource”, a set of ideas that could be drawn to explain, interpret, and construct social and political life.36 Its efficacy was informed by the heart’s emotional resonance, which enabled it to convey the abstract affective connections of community and the personal feelings that exceeded the capacities of language, even thought, from one person to another. The affective heart, that captured and conveyed the collective emotional self, thus enabled an intimacy that extended across individuals and groups, time and place.

Conclusion Across the medieval and early modern period, the heart was a physical organ that performed considerable symbolic work as a site of emotional experience, of conscience, character, self, and soul. It was the site of the self and interiority, as well as a bridge between the individual and the external world, the source of life, being, and love. The history of the heart is a history of the imagining of self, soul, will, intellect, and body; it is also a history of emotion. As this volume demonstrates, the feeling heart was the site of an emotional self both embodied and extended; its history begins with love but extends to encompass the breadth of human emotional experience. Across time, the heart remained a symbol that evoked corporeal emotion and which sought to ground that feeling as an embodied experience of relation with the other. Thus it was often particularly associated with emotions of connection – love, hate, desire, grief, sorrow

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at loss or separation – and also with courage to engage (whether in war or with the divine). Through its capacity to represent and convey emotion, the heart became an important tool in producing bonds between individuals, connections that could be manifested tangibly but experienced as intimate relations. The heart also contains a history of changing ideas. The medieval heart, that could be a site of emotion, cognition, self, and will, as well as corporeal organ, had greater capacities than its early modern descendant, which increasingly lost its role as an agent in its own right. For later thinkers, the heart was a productive symbol that did significant work in articulating feeling and producing identity, but which often became subject to larger process of identity, emotion, or body. Shifting ideas of biology, and particularly the sensate body, began to downplay the direct role of the heart in processing sensory experience, such as produced through sight, hearing, taste and touch – the route to the heart became more winding in modern biologies. Having said that, the meanings evoked through the affective heart were unstable and evolving over time and place. As the less affective Norse heart suggests, the potential for alternative renderings of the heart’s agency was already present in the medieval, whilst the continuing significance of an agentic heart, associated with selfhood and will, continued to appear, if with less force, in the eighteenth century. This diversity in form and feeling is reflected in the variety of genres examined by this volume. Music, art, literature, devotional writings, material culture and archives – not just representations of the past but part of the physical world of historical actors – activated different physical senses and held different intentions, and so required the heart to be used and understood in varying ways. In being held together, they enable an increasingly panoramic perspective that highlights the complex multi-dimensionality of a critical icon in the production of ideas about the human. Similarly, different disciplinary perspectives, drawing attention to the various intellectual traditions that the heart has been significant to, have highlighted the capacities of the medieval and early modern heart to further our understanding of human experience, whether that is devotional revolutions, personal and political relationships, or the evolution of artistic practices. The feeling heart was a symbol that actively shaped the medieval and early modern world. The heart’s constructive capacities continue in the present. The iconic significance of the heart is illustrated by its ubiquitous presence in contemporary popular culture, particularly in the realm of social media. To “heart” a Twitter or Instagram post is to “like” it, and thus allow quantification of emotion with a running tally of reactions. On Facebook, the heart emoji is one of five predetermined “Reactions” – Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, Angry – that add emotional

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texture to a “like”. As one might expect, the heart reaction signifies love, and functions as an amplification of the emotional significance of a like.37 In Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, hearts function as a symbol for emotion and as a proxy for social connectedness. Snapchat goes one step further by using hearts to create an emotional hierarchy that continuously monitors the closeness of users’ social connections. Relationships are ranked according to a colorcoded scheme in which the yellow heart signifying “#1 best friend” changes to red or pink depending on the length of time this status is maintained.38 In the making and remaking of the self in contemporary social media, hearts are almost entirely disembodied, their indiscriminate distribution rendering their emotional meaning almost entirely devoid of corporeal content. In the accumulation of hearts as ephemeral markers of connection, the corporeal affectivity of the heart is transformed into a state of contingency in which the self is separated from the body. Yet, as a productive symbol, the heart’s ability to communicate meaning and emotion, to forge communities, and even to shape the subsequent dynamics of response from others, is suggestive of its ongoing uses in the making of a modern world, where the affective connection between the self and other remains central. The medieval and early modern heart continues, if obliquely, to contribute meaning to the heart today.

Notes 1. 2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

N. Boyadjian, The Heart: Its History, Its Symbolism, Its Iconography and Its Diseases (Antwerp: ESCO Books, 1980). Pierre Vinken, The Shape of the Heart (New York: Elsevier, 2000); Pierre Vinken, “How the Heart was Held in Medieval Art,” Lancet 358, no. 9299 (2001): 2155–57. Louisa Young, The Book of the Heart (New York: Doubleday, 2003); Ole M. Høystad, A History of the Heart (London: Reaktion, 2007); Gail Godwin, Heart: A Personal Journey through Its Myths and Meanings (New York: William Morrow, 2001); Marilyn Yalom, The Amorous Heart: An Unconventional History of Love (New York: Basic Books, 2018). Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1996); David Hilman and Carla Mazzio, eds., The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 2010). James Peto, ed., The Heart (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); C. R. S. Harris, The Heart and the Vascular System in Ancient Greek Medicine from Alcmaeon to Galen (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973). Heather Webb, The Medieval Heart (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Jole Shackelford, William Harvey and the Mechanics of the Heart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

The Feeling Heart: Meaning, Embodiment, and Making

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

15

Robert A. Erikson, The Language of the Heart: 1600–1750 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 9–10. Erickson, Language of the Heart, 4. Webb, The Medieval Heart. Fay Bound Alberti, Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine and Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Richard Meek and Erin Sullivan, eds., The Renaissance of Emotion: Understanding Affect in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015). Erickson, Language of the Heart; Webb, The Medieval Heart. Eric Jager, “The Book of the Heart: Reading and Writing the Medieval Subject,” Speculum 71, no. 1 (1996): 1–26; Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000); Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). W. E. Slights, The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Steven F. H. Howell, The Spiritual Language of Art: Medieval Christian Themes in Writings on Art of the Italian Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2015). D. Neal, “Suits Makes the Man: Masculinity in Two English Law Courts, ca. 1500,” Canadian Journal of History 37 (2002): 1–22. Alison Searle, “‘My Souls Anatomiste’: Richard Baxter, Katherine Gell and Letters of the Heart,” Early Modern Literary Studies 12, no. 2 (2006): 7; Claire McLisky, ‘“A Hook Fast in his Heart’: Emotion and ‘True Christian Knowledge’ in Disputes over Conversion between Lutheran and Moravian Missionaries in Early Colonial Greenland,” Journal of Religious History 39, no. 4 (2015): 575–94; Jacqueline Van Gent, “The Burden of Love: Moravian Conversions and Emotions in Eighteenth-Century Labrador,” Journal of Religious History 39, no. 4 (2015): 557–74; Adrian Chastain Weimer, “Affliction and the Stony Heart in Early New England,” in Puritanism and Emotion in the Early Modern World, ed. Alec Ryrie and Tom Schwanda (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 121–44; Paola Baseotto, “Theology and Interiority: Emotions as Evidence of the Working of Grace in Elizabethan and Stuart Conversion Narratives,” in A History of Emotions, 1200–1800, ed. Jonas Liliequist (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012), 65–77. Jennifer Rae McDermott, “‘The Melodie of Heaven’: Sermonizing the Open Ear in Early Modern England,” in Religions and the Senses in Early Modern Europe, ed. Wietse de Boer, Christine Göttler (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 191–92; Kirilka Stavreva, “Prophetic Cries at Whitehall: the Gender Dynamics of Early Quaker Women’s Injurious Speech,” in Women, Gender and Radical Religion in Early Modern Europe, ed. Sylvia Brown (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 25–26. David Morgan, The Sacred Heart of Jesus: The Visual Evolution of a Devotion (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008); Phil Kilroy, The Society of the Sacred Heart in Nineteenth-Century France, 1800–1865 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2012). Claudia Jarzebowski, “The Meaning of Love: Emotion and Kinship in Sixteenth-Century Incest Discourses,” in Mixed Marriages: Transgressive Unions in Germany from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, ed. D. Luebke and M. Lindemann (Oxford: Bergahn Books, 2014), 166–83.

16

21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

32. 33.

34. 35.

36. 37.

38.

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Milad Doueihi, A Perverse History of the Heart (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Richard Sugg, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians (London: Routledge, 2015). John Ford, The Broken Heart (1630); Marion Wells, The Secret Wound: Love-Melancholy and Early Modern Romance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). Estella Weiss-Krejci, “Heart Burial in Medieval and Early Post-Medieval Central Europe,” in Body Parts and Bodies Whole, ed. Katharina Rebay-Salisbury, Marie Louise Stig Sorensen, and Jessica Hughes (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2010), 119–34. Takashi Shogimen, “‘Head or Heart?’ Revisited: Physiology and Political Thought in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,” History of Political Thought 28, no. 2 (2007): 208–29. This is now a large field. For a bibliography, see “CHE Bibliography (History of Emotions”, Zotoro, accessed July 1, 2018, https://www.zotero.org/groups/300219/che_ bibliography_history_of_emotions. For a discussion of definition, see Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Kirk Essary, “Passions, Affections, or Emotions? On the Ambiguity of 16thCentury Ambiguity,” Emotion Review 9, no. 4 (2017): 367–74. For an introduction to a range of methodologies, see Susan Broomhall, ed., Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2016). Webb, The Medieval Heart, 50. Erickson, Language of the Heart; Webb, The Medieval Heart. S. Schriener, Are You Alone Wise?: The Search for Certainty in the Early Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 38–44; J. G. J. van den Eijnden, Poverty on the Way to God: Thomas Aquinas on Evangelical Poverty (Leuven: Peeters, 1994), 146–48. Graham Holderness, “‘The Single and Peculiar Life’: Hamlet’s Heart and the Early Modern Subject,” in Shakespeare Survey Online, ed. Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 304. Webb, The Medieval Heart. Dixon, From Passions to Emotions; Monique Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind Of Practice (And Is That What Makes Them Have A History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion,” History and Theory 51, no. 2 (2012): 190–220. Weiss-Krejci, “Heart Burial”. Katie Barclay, “Emotional Lineages: Blood, Property, Family and Affection in Early Modern Scotland,” in Historicizing Heritage and Emotions: The Affective Histories of Blood, Stone and Land, ed. Alicia Marchant (London: Routledge, 2019), 84–98. Thomas Olesen, Global Justice Symbols and Social Movements (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015), 156. Madison Kircher, “Despite All Those Requests for a Dislike Button, Love Is Still the Top Facebook Reaction,” New York Magazine, February 24, 2017, accessed November 1, 2017, http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/02/love-is-most-popular-facebook-reaction.html On Snapchat, a user’s “#1 best friend” is the person to whom they have sent the most photos and videos, and vice versa. A red heart means that this status has been maintained for two weeks in a row, two pink hearts appear after two months: “Snapchat,” Emojipedia, acessed November 15, 2017, https://emojipedia.org/snapchat/

Part 1: Meaningful Hearts

Patricia Simons

1 The Flaming Heart: Pious and Amorous Passion in Early Modern European Medical and Visual Culture When discussing the heart’s figuration in medieval and early modern European visual culture, scholars have chiefly addressed its shape and how it was held, but there is remarkably little discussion of the heart radiating flames or depicted over a fire.1 The heart, and then the flaming heart, became a visual attribute of several sacred figures (most notably Christ, Mary, and St. Augustine) as well as the allegorical personifications of Charity and of secular Amore and Venus. Such cardiac symbols suggest the fiery, ardent emotional intensity of divine suffering and love, or of secular desire, with the heart being a common metaphor for a person’s central character and core emotions (the Latin for heart being cor). But what is the impulse for these fiery hearts? Rather than a natural and transparent signifier of passion, as is so often assumed, the burning heart emerges slowly in European visual culture and my chapter briefly traces that iconographic history in relation to the intellectual and experiential contexts of medical beliefs, religious symbolism, and amorous poetry (both sacred and secular). Such an overview ensures that in any particular case study, visual or otherwise, the personal and individual can be understood in relation to the bigger picture of conventional and contextual patterns, and claims for historical change can be measured against those broader intellectual, cultural, and social trends. Furthermore, fundamental ideas about the heart as a physical organ were closely interwoven with its metaphorical and visual dimensions.

Medical Theories Valentine’s Day imagery, popular culture, and numerous emoticons show that we are still heirs to a principle underlying ancient ideas about the body, that the heart was the principal organ, site of life force as well as emotions. For centuries, Europeans adopted the ancient physiological scheme that believed human bodies were regulated by various humors, and that an imbalance caused disease and emotional excess.2 But little has been said about anatomical

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theory concerning the heart’s function, which was another inheritance from the classical world that also shaped ideas about the intertwining of corporeality with emotions. Contrary to what is commonly assumed by scholars studying the modern era, the heart was the center of human emotions millennia before the seventeenth century. Over the course of that century, a host of shifts in the efficacy and intensity of emotional imagery incorporated the flaming heart, but it was far from a novel symbol when authors like William Harvey, René Descartes, and Robert Burton wrote of the fiery heart. Plato’s blend of physical evidence, medical theory, teleological reasoning, and natural philosophy influentially established a basic association between the heated heart and emotions. Around 360 BCE, he explained that the gods placed reason in the head and soul in the thorax. That part of the soul “which partakes of courage and spirit, since it is a lover of victory” was closer to the head, between the midriff and the neck, thereby more able to be ruled by reason, which could “forcibly subdue the tribe of the desires” when they were disobedient. The heart was “the chamber of the bodyguard, to the end that when the heat of the passion boils up” reason would instead prevail throughout the body. He relied on commonly understood medical ideas to then say that respiration of the lungs provided relief for heated passions, cooling “the leaping of the heart, in times when dangers are expected and passion is excited – since [the gods] knew that all such swelling of the passionate parts would arise from the action of fire.”3 Ancient Greek medical theory established that the heart was the body’s primary organ and that innate heat was its most basic distinguishing feature and function.4 Aristotle believed that the seat of consciousness resided in the heart rather than the brain proposed by Plato and it was the source of both emotions and motion.5 He instructed that the heart “is necessary because there must be a source of heat: there must be, as it were, a hearth, where that which kindles the whole organism shall reside; and this part must be well guarded, being as it were the citadel (akropolis) of the body.”6 Galen later disagreed with some of Aristotle’s conclusions and was less influential in medieval curricula, though the works of this second-century CE physician, who wrote in Greek, underwent a revival during the Renaissance once improved translations were available. For him too, the heart was the source of the body’s crucial, innate heat and was the organ most closely related to the soul.7 He reiterated metaphors about the organ’s primacy, likening it to a furnace or hearth: “The heart is, as it were, the hearthstone and source of the innate heat by which the animal is governed.”8 Medieval anatomical texts reiterated the principle that the heart was the most important “spiritual member” and an engine of heat, generating “vital

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spirits and blood” that gave the entire body “heat and life.”9 The twelfthcentury Anatomia attributed to Master Nicholas explained that the heart was “hot in complexion” and “hollow, to provide for ebullition of the blood and generation of the vital spirits.”10 Never described in detail, the heart’s process of bubbling, refining, thinning, vaporizing, or purifying blood was usually situated in the right ventricle, while in the left chamber it was aerated, mixed or cooled with pneuma or spirit chiefly drawn from the lungs. The essential heating function of the heart was still a basic principle to Descartes, who wrote in 1649 that blood “carries the heat it acquires in the heart to all the other parts of the body, and serves as their nourishment.”11 Decades after Harvey’s publication in 1628 of his discovery that the blood circulates through the body by means of the pumping action of the heart, Descartes continued to adhere closely to ideas first propounded in ancient medicine. Visual culture confirmed the standard model of the heart. Plato’s notion of an upper and lower division of the torso is still clearly represented in the woodcut of Gregor Reisch’s encyclopedic compendium Margarita philosophica, first published in Freiburg in 1503, where the heart, surrounded by the lungs, is separated from the lower spleen, liver, intestines, and other organs.12 The heart’s purpose in relation to life and heat is remembered in Piero di Cosimo’s panel of the 1510s depicting Prometheus bringing fire to humanity, holding his torch up to the cardiac region of the lifeless figure’s chest so that it will be animated by the spark of soul, passion and life.13 Emotions remained associated with the heart. The ca. 1225 Anatomia vivorum refuted the claim that boldness was due to a large heart (think of “Richard the Lionheart”), fear and timidity to a small organ, nevertheless opining that the boldest animals “have both large hearts and much heat.”14 The medical plotting of astrological influences on the body of Zodiac Man thus had the sign of Leo associated with the heart.15 Others held Aristotle’s opposite view, that “animals whose heart is large are timorous, and those with a small or smaller heart are more bold and confident.”16 In either case, the heart was the physical seat of emotions. Considering issues of causation and corporeality in relation to the heart, in the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas argued that the passions of the soul move the physical heart, giving examples such as rage inflaming its blood, whereas most ancient authorities proposed that the emotional state of anger was caused by overheated blood.17 Observable physical changes like the red face of an angry person or the faster pulse when someone was afraid or excited, helped to construct, then sustain the link between the heart and emotions. The pulse was considered indicative of many “fluctuations of the mind, such as fear, hope, sadness and joy, luxury, chastity, greed, and generosity.” For example, “a thin, slow and small

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pulse causes sadness,” an enlarged pulse was related to pride, a depressed one associated with humility.18 The pulse, and thus the motion of the heart, was a core diagnostic tool for emotional as well as physical states. Famously, a woman’s quickening pulse enabled Galen to diagnose lovesickness, an erotic disease of considerable importance for medieval and Renaissance physicians.19 Such views were not radically altered when human dissection and professional critique became more common.20 In his book on anatomy, first published in 1502, the Venetian physician Alessandro Benedetti, for instance, referred to Plato when writing of the area of the heart and lungs. There “boldness, dread, flight, and counselors of madness at one time or another made their abode, with rage that is often implacable. Love, likewise, the fearless invader, has pitched his camp there, with gentle hope his companion.” In particular, he repeated the ancient concept that the lungs cooled flames of anger.21 The heart’s causative connection with various emotions was elaborated in Andrés Laguna’s Anatomica methodus printed at Paris in 1535. After alluding to Plato’s concept of the thorax, Laguna had numerous “perturbations” originate in the heart, including “anger or passion, fear, terror, and sadness . . . shame, delight, and joy,” for which he described detailed physical reactions including paleness, blushing, and even death when the “entire heat of the heart was cut off.”22 Although revolutionary in many respects, Vesalius’s Fabric of the Human Body (1543) did not eradicate all previous errors regarding the heart’s anatomy. He carefully avoided attracting ecclesiastical ire by deflecting the issue of how much the heart alone was the seat of the soul and thus the text offered no insights on the heart’s relationship to emotions except to reiterate that it was “the seat and fomenter of innate heat” and “the seat of the irascible soul.”23 A later work of his included the case of a man with a “sad and painful heart.”24 Political symbolism also linked the heart with heat. Due to its primacy, the heart was likened to a king or empire.25 Probably taking his cue from Plato’s notion of the heart as a watchman situated in the central thorax, Aristotle said the heart was in the front and center of the body like a ruler, given the nobler and most honorable position.26 Similarly, the heart was in the middle of the chest “as befits its role as the king in this midst of his kingdom” according to Henri de Mondeville, surgeon to the king of France in the early fourteenth century.27 Central, hot, and essential to life, from the twelfth century on the heart was regarded as akin to the sun, able to evenly distribute its heat to every part.28 A late fifteenth-century French manuscript illumination of the anatomical Zodiac Man thus has a golden tube connecting the heart to a radiantly yellow sun, a scheme reiterated in a metalcut for a Book of Hours printed in Paris in 1498.29 The metaphor was given new life in the dedication of Harvey’s book to King Charles I, which opened with the grand declaration that “The heart of animals

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is the foundation of their life, the sovereign of everything within them, the sun of their microcosm, that . . . from which all power proceeds. The King, in like manner, is the foundation of his kingdom, the sun of the world around him, the heart of the republic.”30 Thus two key metaphors, the ancient ruler and the medieval sun, were combined in an age of increasingly monarchical power. Seven years earlier, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy employed similar language, though its medieval roots are more evident. The heart was “the seat and fountaine of life, of heat, of spirits, of pulse and respiration, the Sonne of our body, the king and sole commander of it, the seat and organe of all passions and affections: . . . that can yield such variety of affections . . . As in sorrow, melancholy; in anger, choler; in ioy, to send the blood outwardly, in sorrowe to call it in.”31 Before Harvey, the universal understanding was that blood was transformed in some way by heat within the heart, but not destroyed by combustion, so the cardiac furnace was hot rather than fiery. Nevertheless, metaphors instilled the idea of internal heat that encouraged imagery of a flaming heart. Burton’s analogy for the action of the left part of the heart echoed Galen and relied on the power of flame: “as a torch doth oyle, [it] drawes blood unto it, begetting of it spirits and fire; and as fire is in a torch, so are spirits in the blood.”32 Aristotle, Galen and others described the motion of either the lungs or the heart as bellows, stoking the furnace.33 Of course, metaphors like fountain and river appear at times, and also palace, strikingly with a chimney venting the furnace according to Galen. The European understanding of the heart was fundamentally shaped by ancient medical and philosophical traditions regarding its function as a site of heat and emotions. This was not a matter of abstract, intellectual and learned history only, for it was a cultural given that there was a natural, inevitable connection between bodies and feelings, centered on the heart. From the conception of the heart as a furnace derives much of the intersection of the physiological and emotional, physical and poetic, anatomical and visual registers.

Devout and Divine Love Despite the central notion that the heart was innately heated and filled with vital spirit, it was not at first shown with flames once it entered religious and secular imagery.34 Wounded, often bleeding, the vital organ does invariably signify the conjunction of physical, spiritual, and emotional experience. Usually “heart” in the Vulgate bible refers to a state of mind or one’s core being

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or character, but on occasion it burns with intense feeling. The hearts of the apostles were burning within them when they were awed and inspired by the risen Christ (Luke 24:32), fire raged in one’s suffering heart if it tried to exclude God (Jeremiah 20:9), and a heart was kindled with burning indignation (Psalm 38/39:4). It is, then, a core physical and emotional site of intense feeling, often of suffering. Visually, the organ is shown painfully pierced, by the darts and arrows let loose from Cupid’s bow, by the lance spearing Christ’s side at the Crucifixion, or by swords of sorrow afflicting the Virgin Mary. The daggers were derived from Simeon’s prophecy delivered to Mary when the Christ child was presented in the temple, saying that “the thoughts of many hearts shall be made manifest; as for thy own soul, it shall have a sword to pierce it” (Luke 2:35). Notably, the Vulgate’s Latin represents the heart as a vessel of intelligence (cordibus cogitationes) and the ancient notion of the heart, as the seat of the soul (anima), is used for the pangs affecting Mary. Nevertheless, images of the Mater Dolorosa commonly show her tearful and sorrowful, holding her hands or wringing them in mournful prayer, but not displaying her heart. Mary’s distress is referred to in the thirteenth-century hymn called the Stabat Mater, in which the devotee imagines him- or herself in multiple, empathetic positions, praying to share the Virgin’s suffering and love of Christ her son on the cross, asking her to “Make my heart burn with love of Christ,” “thrust each of His wounds through my heart,” and “Let me share His pain.”35 The votary thus yearns to be involved in the humbling and exquisitely sensate anguish of both mother and saviour. As with the pangs of earthly love, pain intersects with pleasure, and the symbolic, affective heart can be one’s own, or someone else’s. Identification with or imitation of the organ’s emotional and simultaneously intensely physical experience can cross gender lines and blur the boundaries between sacred and profane, metaphor and corporeality. Yet visualization of the heart of the mournful mother as a flaming heart is relatively late. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, chiefly in Northern European art, the subject is instead shown with one or more swords stabbing Mary’s clothed chest rather than with a symbolic, wounded heart, let alone one that is fiery.36 Unlike Mary’s human, maternal, and dolorous heart grieving and aching for God, Christ’s Sacred Heart is divine, filled with love for humanity.37 Its most recognizable form is as a glowing or flaming heart either isolated or exhibited in the center of his chest, following the ancient idea that that was the most honorable and noble location, as befitted a ruler. But that iconography also became popular relatively late, after a series of visions experienced by the French nun St. Margaret Mary Alacoque beginning in 1673, when she saw Christ’s fiery

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wounds and “his most loving and most beloved Heart, which was the living fountain of his flames,” also described as a “fiery furnace.”38 Medieval devotion to Christ’s five wounds already endowed the heart with special significance, though it was not necessarily characterized as burning. An early hymn associated with the devotion begins with a nod to the Aristotelian idea about the noble heart: “Hail heart of the highest king / I salute you with a joyful heart / To embrace you delights me / And my heart is moved by this.”39 The hearts of both devotee and Christ are this intertwined in a duet of affective responses. The emotional tenor is intense, but there is no explicit reference to fire. Flames or powerful rays of light began to blaze from a heart held by or surrounding Christ during the fifteenth century, emanations evident in prints.40 Devotion to Christ’s heart among medieval mystics intensified, and the burning fire indicates great ardor. Franciscans were especially devoted to the emotive imagery of the heart. Rays from the wounds of crucified Christ beam down to imprint the stigmata on St. Francis, including one glowing from Christ’s pierced side directed down to the saint’s chest, but in most cases this entails the right side of their bodies. Such is the case in the late thirteenth-century fresco in the upper church of S. Francesco in Assisi and Giotto’s panel in the Louvre painted around the same time, or his depiction in the Bardi chapel (1317–1319). But rays impressing the stigmata strike near Francis’s heart and blaze forth light, though not flame, in later examples such as Lorenzo Monaco’s Stigmatization of 1410–1424 and Bartolomeo della Gatta’s panel of ca. 1487.41 This accords with the early Franciscan account of the event, written sometime in the thirteenth century (Francis died in 1226). It distinguished between the stigmata made by the Crucifixion on his physical body and another sign made on the saint’s interior: the vision left “a most intense ardor and flame of divine love in [his] heart” in addition to “a marvelous image and imprint of the Passion of Christ in his flesh.”42 Yet the burning heart did not become an attribute of St. Francis, instead on occasion signifying the Franciscan friar St. Anthony of Padua (see Figure 1.1).43 In Sassetta’s altarpiece for the Franciscan monastery at Borgo Sansepolcro, commissioned in 1437, the saint holds a book and in his other hand a fiercely flaming heart. Shaped in the pyramidal form akin to a conventional pinecone, it follows an analogy frequently repeated by anatomists.44 Benozzo Gozzoli’s fresco in Rome, from a decade or so later, similarly shows a heart engulfed by animated flames, though the formal allusion to a pinecone is lost.45 At other times, the saint holds flaring flames without any heart-like shape discernible so the attribute is chiefly explained by Franciscan fervor, though a key episode in his hagiography perhaps explains the cardiac emphasis. As Anthony predicted,

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Figure 1.1: Sassetta, The Virgin and Child surrounded by angels, with St. Anthony of Padua and St. John the Baptist, 1437–1444, tempera on wood, 207 × 118 cm, Louvre, Paris (Inv. 1956–11). Photo Credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

the heart missing from a miser’s corpse was found in the man’s treasure chest, and such deadening greed is implicitly contrasted with the saint’s lively, ardent symbol. Echoing the Sermon on the Mount (“Where your treasure-house is, there your heart is too”), Anthony’s glowing, inexhaustible treasure is laid up in heaven rather than on earth.46 Early cardiac flames are influenced not only by Franciscan mysticism but also by poetic imagery, as we will see. An example of the crossover between religious and secular worlds is evident in a late fifteenth-century engraving where the infant Christ holds up a fiery heart pierced by an arrow (see Figure 1.2). Flames became more common as the Catholic Counter Reformation developed.47 Fire is emphatic in Diana Scultori’s engraving of 1577 representing the young Christ as the savior holding an orb and sitting on an open, flaming heart, inscribed in Latin below “Christ burns as he rests, seated on the heart. This gives him the most beautiful love” (see Figure 1.3).48 Impaled with an arrow as though assailed by Cupid in the late fifteenth-century print, the heart is instead slashed open in the post-Tridentine print, deeply wounded by the prophesied dagger (Luke 2:35). Secular, amorous imagery is adapted in the earlier print, while biblical authority blends with secular iconography in Scultori’s more emotive, dramatic rendition.

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Figure 1.2: Florentine (here attributed to Cosimo and Francesco Rosselli), The Infant Christ, ca. 1480–1485, hand-colored engraving, 8.9 × 6.3 cm, British Museum, London (1854,0513.190). ©Trustees of the British Museum.

The earlier Christ, his curly hair hand-colored in a surviving example to be reddish-golden like an ideal love object, holds the smitten and flaming heart under a scroll inscribed “Daughter, give it [your heart] to me.” The phrase is an adaptation from Proverbs, “Give me, my son, your heart,” the gender switch suggesting that the print’s inscription is an invocation for the recruiting and spiritual nurturance of nuns.49 The heart Christ holds indicates his tender affection for female devotees who are enamoured with burning love for him, rather than standing for his own organ. They have given him their hearts, making of him a conquering, cute Cupid. He is an infant, as he is also in an earlier woodcut signed by Peter de Wale, and in a version of that Northern composition that appears in a hand-colored woodcut added later to a Book of Hours compiled ca. 1440.50 The pre-pubescent nature of the divinity partly connotes young Cupid, and the Italian example certainly recalls contemporary representations of putti, though that is not surprising for any image of an idealized child.51 Indeed, his

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Figure 1.3: Diana Scultori (Diana Mantuana), The Young Christ resting on a Flaming Heart, 1577 (signed and dated), engraving, 18.3 × 14 cm, Albertina, Vienna.

standing contrapposto stance and crooked elbow are similar to examples of infants or the blessing Christ Child standing on or near his mother in contemporary paintings of the early 1480s by the Florentine artist Cosimo Rosselli, whose half-brother Francesco was an engraver.52 It is likely that the Florentine print originated from the Rosselli workshop. The depiction of Christ in infancy evokes empathetic feelings toward an innocent babe. While wounded in some woodcuts, which thereby emphasize Christ’s human suffering and God’s loving and fatherly sacrifice, the child in the Florentine engraving is stoic and triumphant. He holds the small cross not so much as a reminder of his travail but as a symbol of human death that is outweighed by eternal life after his resurrection. The inscription on the stony mount below his feet (“The rock – petra – that was Christ,” a direct quotation from the Bible) proclaims that he is the firm foundation on which the Church is built, and by implication the papacy founded by St. Peter (Petrus).53 This institutional accent also points to the context of nunneries, within which nurturing

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sentiments were encouraged and acted out with holy dolls and cribs. The engraving is a virtual recruiting tool for nuns, stirring their motherly but also romantic emotions. Diana Scultori’s engraving again depicts the devotee’s heart, but anguished and suffering like Mary’s. Dedicated to the Roman noblewoman Livia Massimo, this print also envisages a primarily female audience. The image, akin to an arrow, strikes the eyes and arouses passions in the hearts of its viewers. Inscriptions below a variant issued in the early seventeenth century by Hieronymus Wierix (d. 1619) come from the Bible, first the passionate love poetry of the Song of Songs, in which the Marian sponsa (bride) says “I lie asleep; but oh, my heart is wakeful!” and then she hears a knock at the door (5.2).54 The second inscription carries on the scenario with a New Testament passage from Revelations: “I stand at the door and knock, if anyone opens the door I will come in to him” (3:20). The voice of the engraving is now Christ’s, resting but fiercely vigilant as Scultori’s inscription insisted too, and ready to rekindle lukewarm (tepidus, Revelations 3:16) faith if hearts are opened. The gashed, fiery heart is thus that of the now ardent believer, open and filled with the presence of Christ. The wood fueling the fire beneath Scultori’s heart appeared earlier in secular as well as religious depictions, at the foot of the cross in a Dominican psalter from Venice illuminated at the end of the fifteenth century, for instance, or on the first page of a collection of love sonnets, probably decorated in Milan during the second or third quarter of the fifteenth century.55 Fire fed by wooden sticks is one of many modes of torturous ordeal undergone by the lover’s heart, attacked by saw, press, sword, lance, knife, arrow and other instruments in the ca. 1479–1485 colored woodcut by Casper von Regensburg of Frau Minne and the Lover (see Figure 1.4).56 The beseeching and adoring male youth kneels beneath a large, naked, commanding female figure, at the mercy of the personification of courtly love’s Lady. Christ’s later flaming heart does not derive from the Bible. In the Stabat Mater hymn, as in scripture and the engravings by Rosselli and Scultori (Figures 1.2 and 1.3), it is the hearts of disciples and devotees that flare intensely in their love. They are commanded in the Old Testament: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be [engraved] upon your hearts.”57 The passage is amended slightly in the New Testament (Mark 12:30), where the most important charge is the injunction that one must love God with the entire heart, soul, mind, and strength, a quadruple, assiduous commitment that finds no point to a simple divide between mind and body, emotion and reason. In 1603 and later editions, Cesare Ripa’s personification of

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Figure 1.4: Master Caspar of Regensburg, Frau Minne’s Power over Men’s Hearts, ca. 1479–1485, hand-colored woodcut, 25.7 × 36.5 cm, Kupferstichkabinett, Stattliche Museen, Berlin (Inv. 467–1908). Photo Credit: bpk Bildgaentur / Art Resource, NY.

Catholic Faith thus holds a heart while the lit candle affixed at its top represents intellectual illumination.58 Similarly, St. Augustine’s blazing heart does not directly stem from his writings, although the pierced heart does.59 An editor of Augustine’s works, Iohannes Molanus cited relevant passages in 1570 when discussing the saint’s iconography “cum corde transfixo,” with a punctured heart.60 The most important citation was from the saint’s Confessions, addressing God: “you had shot through my heart with the arrow of your charity, and I bore your words deeply fixed in my entrails.”61 Augustine mentions an arrow rather than flame or light, though on occasion one or more beams of light strike the saint’s heart, as one does in a Dutch engraving of the 1580s inscribed with the first part of his statement from the Confessions.62 Augustine’s standard iconography presented him as a bishop, holding crozier and book or writing at his desk, stressing his authoritative role as one of the four learned Doctors of the Church. Numerous fifteenth-century prints and paintings from Northern Europe, however, have him holding a non-blazing heart, usually shot through

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with arrows, and by the 1630s, or earlier, his attribute was a fiery heart without any impalement.63 This change partly resulted from the increased popularity of Christ’s Sacred Heart, but the shift is surely also due to the growing imagery of any intense devotee as well as the new emphasis on Augustine’s mention of Charity in his Confessions. A prayer attributed to him in the eleventh century had picked up the idea from his Confessions, having the saint ask that Christ wound his soul “with the fiery (igneo) and potent dart of your exceeding great charity.”64 Caritas, the allegory of not only earthly charity but also divine love and thus the principal theological virtue, indeed came to be signified by fire. At first the association between Caritas and fire was only occasional and textual, but from the second half of the thirteenth century the personification was sometimes represented with a flaming cornucopia, vase, or candle.65 Giotto introduced the heart to the virtue’s iconography when frescoing the Arena Chapel in Padua ca. 1305. Charity’s offering of her whole heart to God in that fresco was not aflame, though three sets of fire flare out from her nimbus. The flaming heart, symbolizing the burning ferocity of devotion and divine love, was visually introduced at the end of the 1320s. Taddeo Gaddi frescoed the personification holding up a flaming heart ca. 1328–1330, as one of the virtues on a vault of the Baroncelli chapel in the Franciscan church of S. Croce, Florence.66 The innovation is explained by its context, for St. Francis’s poetry and then the writings of the Franciscan St. Bonaventura imagined God’s love as fiery, Caritas as light or fire.67 “Love has thrust me in the furnace,” begins Francis’s second canticle with an oft-repeated refrain, then explaining that love has “Wounded my heart with a blade and divided it entire.” Arrows, spears, and darts inflame him, so that “I die of Love’s sweet pain,” and he ultimately finds peace in the knowledge that Christ has always “loved me with an ardent love.”68 The third canticle, which is more likely to have been written later by Jacopone da Todi (d. 1306), opens by invoking the divine love of Charity: “Love, that is Charity, why have you wounded me so? My heart is cut in two and burns with love. Glowing and flaming,” his heart “is consumed, like wax set to the fire . . . Living thus, I die, so fiercely grows the burning.”69 A fifteenth-century Franciscan saint, the charismatic, vehement preacher Bernardino of Siena (1380–1444), extolled Christ’s heart ablaze with love and caritas (the “fiery red love”), in one sermon on Christ’s Passion saying the savior’s heart was “a burning furnace of charity to inflame” and inspire universally, a “profound heart, secret heart, all-thinking heart, all-knowing heart, caring heart, or rather one burning with love.”70

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Over the course of the fourteenth century, the intense metaphorical symbolism of Caritas, alongside its sustaining physical aspects, and its dual nature encapsulating love of neighbors as well as love of God, was aptly captured in the corporeal, heated heart. Around the same time as Gaddi’s fresco, Giovanni di Balduccio carved a marble relief of Charity nurturing two infants from a fiery heart, one of the panels of virtues ornamenting the Florentine granary of Or San Michele, and at the end of the 1330s the same sculptor’s cycle of virtues for the Portinari tomb in Milan’s S. Eustorgio again depicted Charity suckling two infants, with a flaming heart replacing the breast flowing with milk.71 Not long after Gaddi’s fresco and the marble relief, Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted more noticeable instances of Charity triumphantly holding up the flaming heart.72 She is seated below Mary’s throne in the Massa Marittima altarpiece of ca. 1330–1335 produced for an Augustinian church, though the bright red heart just barely emits flame. Rising fire is more evident in Ambrogio’s version of the virtue overseeing the commune in the Allegory of Good Government adorning a council chamber in Siena’s town hall, frescoed in 1338–1339 (see Figure 1.5). In both cases clad in diaphanous, almost luminous gauze, with flowing blond hair, the personification lures the amorous eye. Her charm for councilors and parishioners alike demonstrates the degree to which amor coelestis and amor seculi overlapped.

Figure 1.5: Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Allegory of Good Government, detail: Charity, 1338–1339, fresco, Town Hall, Siena. Photo Credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY.

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Amorous Poetry and Imagery Medical discourse associated the fiery heart with vehement emotions, chiefly of courage, anger, and desire. These traits tended to be positively associated with virile masculinity, which accorded with the understanding that the male body was distinguished by more heat than the colder, moister female body. Blazing hearts signal strong passions, more often attributed in pre-modern visual culture to male figures like Christ, certain saints or male lovers. But in texts and images, the heart’s natural heat and emotional nexus fostered its connection with the agonies of maternal, as well as divine and courtly love. No single point of origin can be found, no easy influence moving in one clear direction or the other may be mapped onto the permeable and shifting landscape of divine and worldly love. Barbara Newman noted that by 1400 “carnal and celestial loves had come to resemble each other,” and she has traced the “story of how Caritas came to bear Cupid’s arrows and Aphrodite’s flaming torch.”73 Robert Freyhan pointed out in 1948 that poetry intersected with mysticism and that, for instance, “Venus with the torch . . . originally contributed to the flame motive” of Caritas.74 Venus became associated with hearts too. The ancient goddess, or a variant like Frau Minne (see Figure 1.4), presided over the gifting and wounding of hearts and the burning of amorous passions. Christ exchanged hearts with favored saints like St. Catherine of Siena while secular lovers dedicated their hearts to their beloved or to Venus. The heated heart appeared in the amorous poetry of troubadour songs, and Arabic precedents, but it took on greater symbolic resonance in the thirteenth century. Jacobus Voragine’s Golden Legend told the story of St. Justina, resolute opponent of demonic love magic that tried unsuccessfully to “set her heart afire with love” and “inflame her soul with sinful desire.”75 The flaming heart especially featured in the metaphorical, introspective dolce stil novo mode of Italian poets. The fiery heart was at the core of one of the earliest poems of the movement, a sonnet by Guido Guinizzelli (d. 1276) that delivered a paen to the nobility and transformative intensity of love that blazed like the sun. “Love’s fire catches in the noble heart / Like the power of a precious stone . . . Love remains in the noble heart for the same reason / That fire shines on the tip of a candle / Clear and refined in its own delight.”76 Then in the last decade of the century, the burning heart was made especially vivid and dramatic in Dante’s Vita nuova. Love appeared to him in a dream vision, holding his burning heart (core ardendo), which the beloved Beatrice was then forced to eat.77 Guido Cavalcanti replied with a sonnet that interpreted the dream as a prophecy of Beatrice’s death, noting that the loving heart had been fed to her in the hope that the nourishment would avert her demise.78 The fierce heart thus stood for both ardent

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passion and vital life force, just as medical knowledge avowed, an amalgamation also evident in later images of Charity nursing from her fiery breast, simultaneously offering spiritual and corporeal sustenance. The heart ablaze with love or turning colder than ice due to age or a lady’s chilly reception was a standard trope in subsequent poetry, including Petrarch’s influential verse in the fourteenth century and some imagery in Lorenzo de’ Medici’s fifteenth-century poetry. Fierce desire “was lit in my heart” according to the lover of Petrarch’s poetry, the heart “so aflame within that I joy in my flames” because “love inflames my heart with ardent zeal.”79 Lorenzo’s nymph Ambra inflamed the heart of a river god with “burning, blind desire,” for instance, and divine light made “my frozen heart catch fire and burn.”80 Small red hearts appear throughout a fifteenth-century Milanese manuscript collection of love poetry, presented to a woman addressed as Mirabel Zucharia. These pictograms, some of the heart aflame, replace the word cuore (heart) throughout, adding visual wit to the text.81 Although based on ancient medical theory, the poetic and visual image of the flaming heart is medieval rather than classical or mythological. The amalgamation can be attributed to the curriculum of medieval universities, where literate men, including poets, learned Aristotle’s natural philosophy and imbibed basic medical concepts. The flaming heart was not inherited from antique poetry, however. Dante’s burning heart was held by a Lord who appeared in a flame-colored cloud (una nebula di colore di fuoco), but this commanding figure identified as Amore bore little resemblance to impish Cupid. Ovid imagined Cupid brandishing a flaming torch and aiming his darts so that they pierced a man’s breast rather than the heart specifically.82 Desire was fiery but the heart was not itself aflame. To the seventh-century encyclopedist Isidore of Seville, however, the heart was the target and it was set afire, for Cupid’s iconography consisted of arrow and torch, “an arrow because love wounds the heart, a torch because love inflames it.”83 By the time of the Florentine engraving of the 1480s (see Figure 1.2), the arrow and flame both assail the heart directly, and the torch has gone, though it still appears in some images. Classical imagery depicts Cupid (or amoretti) or his mother Venus with a flaming torch on occasion, though he is often sleeping. The harmful torch is similarly present but in abeyance as Cupid dozes at Venus’s side in Correggio’s canvas of 1524–1528 in the Louvre, its flame nevertheless alluding to the carnal pleasure of the voyeuristic satyr nearby. Cupid urges Venus to take up the torch while Mars places his hand on the shoulder of a strangely demure goddess engraved in the second state of Marcantonio Raimondi’s print (dated in its first state by an inscription to 1508). However, in

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none of these images is the blazing weapon aimed at or near the lover’s heart or chest. In some striking cases, the torch or firebrand is directed at the genitals or the fire of sinful lust emanates from that region. The latter is especially evident in a detail from Fra Angelico’s Last Judgement in Berlin, the former central to the misogyny underpinning the legend of Virgil and Febilla, whose rapacious sexuality meant that firebrands could be lit from her genitals. So too Venus’s torch comes close to vanquishing Diana’s chastity in Perugino’s Battle between Lasciviousness and Chastity now in the Louvre. Following Isabella d’Este’s instructions in 1503 for a canvas to hang in her private apartments, the battle is represented as a virtually equal struggle between Venus and Cupid on one side and, on the other, Diana with Minerva. In particular, Isabella demanded that Venus was to be shown with a merely superficial hit from Diana’s arrow and “part of Diana’s garment will have been singed by the torch of Venus,” an action that Perugino represented with a large firebrand directed at Diana’s lower body.84 Cupid instead aggressively aims the torch of fiery desire at Venus’s own genital region in an engraving of ca. 1515–1520 by Agostino Veneziano.85 Again, however, these images capture the fires of desire in a corporeal manner but do not refer to the heart. Venus often holds the flaming torch of passion, as she does on the helmet of the knight and poet Ulrich von Liechtenstein, portrayed ca. 1300 in the collection of songs known as the Codex Manesse.86 Most commonly, the torch features in images of the Planet Venus holding sway over her “children,” whose indulgent, sensual activities include music playing, dancing, and bathing. The deity sometimes holds a firebrand or fiery arrow when her astrological influence came to be represented in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscripts and prints.87 Usually accompanied by a mirror of vanity in her other hand, the firebrand is often replaced, however, by a tall bunch of flowers. The combination of flame and heart, depicted in the fifteenth-century Milanese manuscript of love poetry and the Florentine engraving, for example, seems to become a direct attribute of Venus in the sixteenth century. The association was foretold in images such as the German woodcut of another female personification, Frau Minne (see Figure 1.4), where the flaming heart was one of many striking examples of love’s suffering. By the 1520s, planetary Venus frequently exhibits a flaming heart, as her fiery and amorous attributes merge, although the signification of the raging fire points to continuing focus on her sexual and corporeal power as well as her emotional impact. By the end of the sixteenth century the blazing heart was a more general sign for Venus, around 1596 decorating the border of Goltzius’s engraving of her with Cupid, for instance (see Figure 1.6) – in which the inscription notes that neither gods nor

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Figure 1.6: Hendrik Goltzius, Venus and Cupid, ca. 1595, engraving, 24.9 × 18.1 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (RP-P-OB-10.580).

humans could avoid the darts, “so great has been the strength of my fire” – or raised in victory by the goddess in Jacob de Gheyn II’s painting of 1605–1610.88 Not long thereafter, St. Augustine was shown with the same blazing heart, a mark now of religious triumph, pious love and spiritual interiority at the height of the Counter Reformation. The fire-tipped arrow aimed at the heart also featured in allegorical, mythological, and spiritual contexts. Most famously, it recurs in a vision of St. Teresa of Avila (1515–1582), captured by Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s sculpture of 1647–1652. Like the written account, the statue is redolent with secular imagery of sharp penetration by fire and of the lover overcome with desire. An angel, his face aflame, held “a long golden spear, and at the iron tip there appeared to be a point of fire. This he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails . . . [he] left me completely afire with a great love for God . . . .”89 Teresa was later shown holding a flaming heart, while a cherubic angel descends with the elements of the Eucharist, in an engraving attributed to Rubens’s design.90

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The repertoire of the religious and secular imaginations was drawn from the same cultural context, in which the heart was linked with the ferocity of passion and the intensity of emotions. The medieval and Renaissance development of the amorous, blazing heart arose not only in conjunction with allegorical thinking, courtly poetry, and religious mysticism but also with the translation into Latin of many Greek and Arabic medical texts. From Aristotle’s hearth and Galen’s furnace to St. Teresa’s core penetrated and set afire with divine love, the heart in medical as well as symbolic terms was considered the essential, heated, and emotional seat of being.

Notes 1.

2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 120–36 (heart-shaped books); Pierre Vinken, The Shape of the Heart (New York: Elsevier, 2000), 33–43, 144–52; Pierre Vinken, “How the Heart was Held in Medieval Art,” Lancet 358, no. 9299 (2001): 2155–57; Louisa Young, The Book of the Heart (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 141–45 (“The Flaming Heart,” treating sacred iconography only, chiefly from the seventeenth century) and 181–87 (“From the Pine Cone to the Valentine Heart”); Martin Kemp, Christ to Coke: How Image Becomes Icon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 81–113. For an overview, see Fay Bound Alberti, Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine, and Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 18–21, though little is said about the flaming heart. Plato, Timaeus, 69e–70c, translated in Timaeus, Critias, Cleitophon, Menexenus, Epistles, trans. R. G. Bury (London: William Heinemann, 1929), 181–83. C. R. S. Harris, The Heart and the Vascular System in Ancient Greek Medicine from Alcmaeon to Galen (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973). Harris, Heart, 121–34, 160–62, 172–73. Aristotle, Parts of Animals, 3.7, trans. A. L. Peck (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 265 (670a23–26). Galen, On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, trans. Margaret Tallmadge May (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), 50–55, 278ff; Harris, Heart, 267–84, 335–37, 343, 347–49, 353, 374–76 and passim. Galen, Usefulness, 292; also his “The Construction of the Embryo,” in Galen, Selected Works, trans. P. N. Singer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 185 (“a kind of hearth or furnace”). The furnace metaphor appears, for instance, in the Anatomia Vivorum of ca. 1225, George Corner, Anatomical Texts of the Earlier Middle Ages (Washington DC: Carnegie Institution, 1927), 94; The ‘Physiologia’ of Jean Fernel (1567), trans. John Forrester (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2003), 519. Corner, Anatomical Texts, 69–70, 75 (the Anatomia Magistri Nicolai Physici), reiterated in the Anatomia vivorum (108–9). Corner, Anatomical Texts, 75–76. René Descartes, Les Passions de l’âme (Amsterdam: Louis Elzevier, 1650), 13–14 (1.9).

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12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

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Gregor Reisch, Margarita philosophica (Freiburg, 1503), F ii verso (9.38). Patricia Simons, “Piero di Cosimo’s Creation of Pandora,” Source 34, no 2 (Winter 2015): 34–40. Corner, Anatomical Texts, 92–93. For example, Reisch, Margarita, 3r (7.2). The quotation is from Gabriele Zerbi, Liber Anathomie Corporis Humani (1502), trans. in L. R. Lind, Studies in pre-Vesalian anatomy (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1975), 155, and see also 106 for Benedetti; Aristotle, Parts of Animals, 667a11–22; Fernel, Physiologia, 91. Heather Webb, The Medieval Heart (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 100–03. Corner, Anatomical Texts, 92–93. For Galen and, before him, Erasistratus diagnosing by pulse, see Leanne McNamara, “Hippocratic and non-Hippocratic Approaches to Lovesickness,” in Ancient Concepts of the Hippocratic, ed. Lesley Dean-Jones and Ralph Rosen (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 323. For the pulse in later periods see Mary Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 3, 9, 18, 89, 135–39, 175, 189, 201, 235, 257, 259; Jacques Ferrand, A Treatise on Lovesickness, trans. and ed. Donald Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 49–51, 60, 65, 66, 68, 81, 119, 143, 271–73, 295. See, for example, Webb, Medieval Heart, 103–7 (Mondino and Alderotti); Lind, PreVesalian Anatomy, 53–55 (Alessandro Achillini, Annotationes anatomicae, 1520), 214–18 (Niccolò Massa, Liber introductorius Anatomiae, 1559), 281–84 (Laguna’s Anatomica methodus, 1535). Alessandro Benedetti, Historia corporis humani sive Anatomice, ed. Giovanna Ferrari (Florence: Giunti, 1998), 184 (3.1), first published in 1502 but reprinted several times; trans. in Lind, Pre-Vesalian Anatomy, 101. Lind, Pre-Vesalian Anatomy, 280–82. Andreas Vesalius, On the Fabric of the Human Body. Book VI: The Heart and Associated Organs, trans. W.F. Richardson (Novato: Norman, 2009), 23, 92–93. Andrea Vesalius, Anatomicarum Gabrielis Fallopii Observationum Examen (Hanover, 1609), 236, “tristi in corde sensu doloreve” (first published 1564). For example, Jacques Le Goff, “Head or Heart? The Political Use of Body Metaphors in the Middle Ages,” in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, ed. Michael Feher (New York: Zone, 1989), vol. 3, 13–27, at 21–23; Webb, Medieval Heart, 32 (Bernard Silvestre’s Cosmographia of 1147–48); Lind, Pre-Vesalian Anatomy, 214 (Massa, Introductorius Anatomiae, 53r, regem), 281 (Laguna); Fernel, Physiologia, 379. Aristotle, Parts of Animals, 235 (665b18–27); Harris, Heart, 134. Webb, Medieval Heart, 44, and more generally 32–33. For instance, Corner, Anatomical Texts, 76; Webb, Medieval Heart, 106 (Alfred of Sareshel, De motu cordis, ca. 1200). The manuscript page is reproduced in Louisa Young, The Book of the Heart (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 28; the latter is Horae: Ad usum Romanum (Paris: Philippe Pigouchet for Simon Vostre, 1498), a ii recto. William Harvey, Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus (Frankfurt, 1628), 3; An Anatomical Disquisition on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals, trans. Robert Willis (London: Dent, 1906), 3.

1 The Flaming Heart

31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

41. 42. 43.

44. 45.

39

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford, 1621), 27 (1.1.4). Burton, Melancholy, 28; Galen, Usefulness, 316. For example, Hippocratic Writings, ed. G. E. R. Lloyd (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), 349–50 (“The Heart,” of ca. 260 BCE); Aristotle, De respiratione, 21, 480a.20–23, in On the Soul. Parva Naturalia. On Breath, trans. W. S. Hett (London: William Heinemann, 1935), 476–77; Galen, Usefulness, 316; Harris, Heart, 169, 273; Corner, Anatomical Texts, 93; Lind, Pre-Vesalian Anatomy, 283 (Laguna). For a chronological overview of the heart in relation to religious emotions, but with virtually no mention of fire, see André Lefèvre et al., “Cor et Cordis Affectus,” in Dictionnaire de spiritualité (Paris: Beauchesne, 1937), vol. 2, pt. 1, cols. 2278–307. Analecta hymnica medii aevi, ed. Clemens Blume, vol. 54 (Leipzig: Reisland, 1915), 312–13. See also Chapter 10. Auguste Hamon, “Coeur (Sacré),” in Dictionnaire de spiritualité (Paris: Beauchesne, 1937), vol. 2, pt. 1, cols 1023–46; Webb, Medieval Heart, 31–37. Emily Jo Sargent, “The Sacred Heart. Christian Symbolism,” in The Heart, ed. James Peto (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 109. “Ad cor,” Thesaurus Hymnologicus, ed. H.A. Daniel (Leipzig, 1855), vol. IV, 227–28: “Summi regis cor aveto / Te salute corde laeto / Te complecti me delectate / Et hoc meum cor affectat / Ut ad te loquar, animes,” attributed to St. Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) though a slight variant is given to Blessed Herman Joseph (d. 1241) from Cologne. No extant manuscript dates from earlier than the fourteenth century, however, and some think the verses on the heart were added in the fifteenth century: A Dictionary of Hymnology, ed. John Julian, rev. ed., 1907 (New York: Dover, 1957), vol. 2, 989–90. For example, Peter de Wale’s hand-colored woodcut of The Five Wounds of Christ, ca. 1470, in the Kupferstickabinett, Berlin. A variant, a cruder hand-colored woodcut, was added to a Book of Hours: Barbara Newman, “Love’s Arrows: Christ as Cupid in Late Medieval Art and Devotion,” in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 263–86, at 268, fig. 1.2. However, what is read by Newman as Christ’s non-flaming firebrand and therefore associated with Cupid’s torch is instead a besom-like flagellum paired with a cat o’ nine tails. The rods still have green shoots according to Christiane Raynaud, “La mise en scène du coeur dans les livres religieux de la fin du Moyen Âge,” in Le ‘Cuer’ au Moyen Âge: Réalité et sénéfiance (Aix-en-Provence: CUER MA, 1991), 315–43, at 318–19, 325–26 n. 17, fig. 1. The former is in the Rijksmuseum, the latter in the Pinacoteca Comunale of Castiglion Fiorentino. Jager, Book of the Heart, 91. George Kaftal, Iconography of the Saints in Tuscan Painting (Florence: Sansoni, 1952), cols. 77–88, esp. nos. d–h, figs. 78, 85; idem, Iconography of the Saints in Central and South Italian Schools of Painting (Florence: Sansoni, 1965), cols. 104–06, nos. f, h, k, figs. 115–16; George Kaftal with Fabio Bisogni, Iconography of the Saints in the Painting of North East Italy (Florence: Sansoni, 1978), cols. 73,76, nos. i, t. Corner, Anatomical Texts, 59, 76, 108; Lind, Pre-Vesalian Anatomy, 53 (Achillini, saying the pyramid signifies heat), 214 (Massa). On the fresco of St. Anthony of Padua with Angels and Donors in S. Maria d’Aracoeli, see Diane Cole Ahl, Benozzo Gozzoli (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 251–52 no. 67.

40

46. 47.

48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62.

63.

64. 65.

Patricia Simons

Matthew 6:21 and Luke 12:34; Raphael Huber, St. Anthony of Padua, Doctor of the Church Universal (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1944), 123–24. For the Counter Reformation, though not flames, see Scott Manning Stevens, “Sacred Heart and Secular Brain,” in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 263–82. Paolo Bellini, L’opera incisa di Adamo e Diana Scultori (Vicenza: Pozza, 1991), 234–35 no. 38. FILIA DA MI TVVM. He stands on a rocky ground inscribed PETRA AVTEM ERAT XPS (The rock that was Christ); Proverbs 23:26, “Praebe, fili mi, cor tuum mihi.” My reading differs in several important respects from that in Mark Zucker, The Illustrated Bartsch 24 Commentary Part 4 (New York: Abaris, 1999), 186. See n. 40 above. Newman, “Love’s Arrows,” argues persuasively for a connection between Cupid and Christ, though infancy does not exclusively indicate Cupid. See esp. Edith Gabrielli, Cosimo Rosselli (Turin: Umberto Allemandi, 2007), 150–51, 167–68 nos. 33, 48. I Corinthians 10:4, “petra autem erat Christus.” British Museum 1859,0709.3125 (“Ego dormio, et cor meum vigilat”); L. Alvin, Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre des trois frères Jean, Jérome et Antoine Wierix (Brussels, 1866), 274, no. 1346. Knocking on the heart’s door, which then opens, is a theme explored in engravings by Antonie Wierix, 260–62. The psalter is Bodleian MS. Canon. Liturg. 272, Psalm 1. For the Milan (or Naples) manuscript see George Warner and Julius Gilson, British Museum. Catalogue of Western Manuscripts in the Old Royal and King’s Collections, vol. 3 (London: British Museum, 1921), 58 (King’s 322). Michael Camille, The Medieval Art of Love (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998), 117–19 for the woodcut and an anonymous Rhenish painting in Leipzig. Deuteronomy 6:5–6. Other examples include Psalm 38/39:4; Luke 24:32. Cesare Ripa, Iconologia (Rome, 1603), 151, “Fede Cattolica.” For the saint’s iconography, but with no mention of flames or fire, see Jager, Book of the Heart, 27–43; Newman, “Love’s Arrows,” 268–76. Iohannes Molanus, De picturis et imaginibus sacris (Louvain, 1570), 125r–126v (ch. 68). Augustine, Confessions, 9.2.3: “Sagittaueras tu cor nostrum caritate tua, et gestabamus verba tua transfixa visceribus” (trans. Newman, “Love’s Arrows,” 269; a passage reiterated and disseminated through The Golden Legend). See also 10.6.8, “You have stricken my heart with your word, and I loved you.” Harmen Jansz Muller (after Hans Speckaert), St. Augustine, 1583–87, in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (RP-P-1906–2726); also Nicoletto Semitecolo’s figure of Augustine kneeling below the crucifix, with a bleeding heart pierced by rays (1367): Kaftal and Bisogni, North East Italy, col. 95, no. 29f, fig. 124. For instance, Rubens’s painting of ca. 1639 in Prague; Philippe de Champaigne’s of ca. 1645–50 in LACMA; Bartolomé Estebán Murillo’s example of 1665–1675 in the Seattle Art Museum. Newman, “Love’s Arrows,” 269, from a Liber meditationum attributed to John of Fécamp. R. Freyhan, “The Evolution of the Caritas Figure in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 11 (1948): 68–86; William Levin, “The Iconography of Charity Redux,” Fifteenth Century Studies 20 (1993): 119–67.

1 The Flaming Heart

66.

67. 68.

69.

70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82.

83.

41

Levin, “Charity,” 130–31, figs. 12, 14 for the vault and another figure in the window frame; Joachim Poeschke, Italian Frescoes. The Age of Giotto 1280–1400 (New York: Abbeville, 2005), pl. 158; not mentioned by Freyhan. St. Francis, Opera omnia, 2nd ed., ed. J. von der Burg (Cologne, 1849), 154–208 passim (Canticles 2–3). For Bonaventura, see Freyhan, “Caritas,” 73–74. St. Francis, Opera omnia, 154–64, “In foco amor mi mise: / . . . / Ferito d’un coltello: / Tutto ‘l cor mi divise. / . . . / Moromi di dolciore; / . . . / Perche prima era stato / L’amore molto verace: / Di Christo innamorato / Hor son fatto capace: / Sempre l’ho ‘n cor portato: / In foco amor mi mise,” adapted from the translation in Frederick Ozanam, The Franciscan Poets in Italy in the Thirteenth Century (London: D. Nutt, 1914), 85–87. St. Francis, Opera omnia, 166, “Amor, de caritate / Perche m’ hai si ferito? / Lo cor tutt’ ho partite / Et arde per amore. Arde et incende, . . . / . . . / Si se consuma come cera al foco, / . . . / Vivendo si è morire! / Tanto monta l’ardore!.” St. Bernardino of Siena, Opera quae extant omnia (Venice, 1591), vol. 1, 432, 451: “caritate ignea rubicunda . . . Ibi enim ostendit cor suum esse fornacem ardentissimae charitatis ad inflammandum, & incendendum plenissime & efficacissime universum. . . . cor altum, cor secretum, cor omnia cogitans, cor omnia sciens, cor diligens, imo amore ardens.” Freyhan, “Caritas,” 84–85. The relief is now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC (1960.5.4). Freyhan, “Caritas,” 81. Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 139. Freyhan, “Caritas,” 85, see also 76–78. Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. William Granger Ryan, vol. 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 193. Peter Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 57: Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore, “Foco d’amore in gentil cor s’aprende / come vertute in petra prezïosa . . . / Amor per tal ragion sta ‘n cor gentile / per qual lo foco in cima del doplero: / splendeli al su’ diletto, clar, sottile.” Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova, ed. and trans. Dino Cervigni and Edward Vasta (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 48–51 (3:3–3:12). The Poetry of Guido Cavalcanti, ed. and trans. Lowry Nelson Jr (New York: Garland, 1986), 60–61 (beginning “Vedeste, al mio parere, onne valore”). The passages are from Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, trans. and ed. Robert Durling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 140–41, 320–21, 328–29 (nos. 62, 175, 182), on age see no. 315. Lorenzo de’ Medici, Selected Poems and Prose, trans. Jon Thiem (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), 87, 134. See n. 55 above. Ars Amatoria, 1: 21–23 and Amores, 1.1.26, Amor aiming at the pectore. His arrows were gold-tipped and kindled the fire of love, piercing bone and marrow, in Metamorphoses 1: 463–73. His weapons were fire and arrows, and he wounds Jupiter in the breast: Apuleius, Golden Ass, 4:30 (“flammis et sagittis armatus”), 6:22 (“pectus meum”). Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, 8.11.80, “Sagittam et facem tenere fingitur; sagittam, quia amor cor vulnerat; facem, quia inflammat,” from Patrologiae Latina, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne, vol. 82 (Paris, 1859), col. 322C.

42

84. 85. 86. 87.

88.

89.

90.

Patricia Simons

Ettore Camesasca, L’opera del Perugino (Milan: Rizzoli, 1969), 107 no. 94. British Museum H,2.71. Newman, God and the Goddesses, 169–71, fig. 4.7. Gwendolyn Alder Trottein, “The Children of Venus in Late Medieval and Renaissance Iconography,” PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1986, fig. 19 (Tubingen, 48–51), fig. 69 (Solis, 171–72). “Et magnam passim vim meus ignis habet / Non Dii, non homines ulli mea spicula vitant”; de Gheyn’s painting of Venus and Cupid is in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (SKA-2395). The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila by Herself, trans. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957), 210 (chap. 29) (translation adjusted): “un dardo de oro largo, y al fin del hierro me parecía tener un poco de fuego. Este me parecía meter por el corazón algunas veces y que me llegaba a las entrañas. Al sacarle, me parecía las llevaba consigo, y me dejaba toda abrasada en amor grande de Dios.” British Museum 1891,0414.847.

Chloé Vondenhoff

2 Matter(s) of the Heart in Yvain and Ívens saga Next to its symbolism in religious and political writing, the heart played a prominent role in the medieval romance tradition. It became the leading image in the ideology of courtly love, which shaped the heart as a feeling organ. The works of the French poet Chrétien de Troyes played a significant role in the formation of this image of the heart, as well as in the spread of its ideology. His romances feature a heart that is closely connected to the generation and regulation of the affective states of characters. Their sensations are presented as heart-centered phenomena in a textual model that focuses on explaining the relationship of the human body to the outside world. Chrétien’s focus on his characters’ affective states and their underlying psychological motivations gave rise to the formation of specific heart-motifs such as “remembering with the heart” and “the itinerant heart,” which explicate the role the heart plays in relation to the senses. Such metaphors have primarily been discussed in reference to Cligès, a text known for its detailed digressions on the relationship of the heart and the senses. However, this chapter will show that Chrétien’s Yvain also lends itself well to an investigation of heart-imagery, particularly in comparison to its Old Norse translation, Ívens saga. Although Chrétien’s story of the knight with the lion is believed to have been brought to Scandinavia for the sake of its courtly ideology, the leading image of this ideology, the heart, was notably modified in translation. This chapter seeks to explore this reformulation of the heart as the story moved from one literary tradition to another. First, it will consider the nature of its representation in both traditions. The semantics of Old French and Old Norse heartvocabulary will be elucidated, as well as the heart’s assigned properties and functions. Second, it will compare the metaphorical conceptions of the heart in both texts, with a particular focus on the heart in relation to the senses and the outside world.

Note: This chapter was supported by the University of Iceland Research Fund and the international research project “Voice and Emotion in Medieval Literature,” led by Professor Sif Ríkharðsdóttir and funded by The Icelandic Research Fund. I am, moreover, grateful to Utrecht University for its support and supervisory guidance. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513275-003

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Translation as an Act of Negotiation Chrétien’s romances enjoyed huge success almost immediately after they were written. Alongside their adaptation in the German, Dutch, and English literary traditions, his stories were brought to Scandinavia during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Whilst previously judged as mere translations of inferior literary quality, recent scholarship has shown that these rewritings need re-evaluation. Scholars including Marianne E. Kalinke and Suzanne Marti have argued against the use of the term translation for the different versions of Chrétien’s stories that circulated in Scandinavia; they note that the term no longer conveys the sense of its medieval original, translatio.1 Where now translations are praised for the level of both linguistic and stylistic fidelity to their originals, translatio referred to a more general transferal of material and in practice resulted in what we would refer to as adaptation. Seeing these romances in a new light has also led to a reconsideration of the practice of medieval translation itself. Instead of focusing on what has not been replicated, literary historians have become concerned with the question of why this was the case. Emma Campbell and Robert Mills highlight the role of the translator as an interpreter and, moreover, as a careful negotiator of language and culture.2 Zrinka Stahuljak argues that the translator, who is familiar with the semantic and cultural systems of both the source and adopting language, acts as a mediator assigned to “fix” divergences between the two language systems.3 Although Stahuljak focuses on medieval translators operating in conflict situations, Sif Ríkharðsdóttir has noted a similar position of negotiation for the Old Norse translator of Yvain. Instead of portraying the Norwegian rewriting as a shallow imitation that fails to capture Chrétien’s emotively rich material, Ríkharðsdóttir attributes deviations between source text and translation to the adaptation of the story for its new target audience. She suggests that this required not only a linguistic, but also an ideological reformulation of the source text.4 Ívens saga was part of a collection of French courtly literature translated into Old Norse at the behest of King Hákon Hákonarson during the thirteenth century. Not only were these texts imported for their style and form, but more importantly, for their content as part of a civilizing movement for the elite. Despite the aimed inauguration of French literary and possibly cultural concepts into Scandinavian culture, the rewritings often deviate in their representation from their source. They show evidence of having been assimilated to the conventions of the receiving culture. Many studies have provided examples supporting this argument. Claudia Bornholdt, for example, has shown that the heroes of Chrétien’s romances were transformed in the sagas “in a manner that

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brings them closer to a Scandinavian audience unfamiliar with the ideas and ethics prevailing in continental courtly literature.”5 As such, the text of Ívens saga reflects cultural meaning. Its textual modifications bear witness to the cultural norms and literary predilection of the reading communities that produced and preserved them. In light of these studies, this chapter will present examples of such textual reformulation with respect to the feeling heart. It will show that the heart and its related imagery as found in Chrétien’s Yvain were concepts that came under negotiation in the movement of this narrative from one cultural context to another. In the process of doing so, this chapter seeks to illuminate both contexts. It focuses on those instances where the source text has been modified to rescript unfamiliar physiological imagery to something more familiar. Since this type of analysis depends on very close, often word-for-word comparisons, this chapter will use the terms “source” and “translation” respectively for Yvain and Ívens saga. It should be pointed out, however, that although clearly delineable as modern nomenclature, both terms are misleading when applied to the broader context of medieval textual culture. For one, we no longer have access to the original source text, namely the manuscript the Old Norse translator was working with. Nor do we have that of the original translation. The story has come down to us only through later Icelandic manuscripts, the earliest of which date from the fifteenth century. The influence of Icelandic scribes on these modifications should therefore not be ruled out. However, given their linguistic unity and the close connections between their textual communities, it may be assumed that Old Norse and Old Icelandic literary convention ran parallel at least up until the fifteenth century.6

The Heart in French Romance and Old Norse Literary Tradition Many different representations of the heart circulated in medieval western Europe. Next to philosophers and physicians, thinkers of all kinds were interested in unraveling the mystery of the heart, the specifics of its location, and its functions. Included in such thought communities were the French medieval poets, whose works not only reflect already existing models of the heart, but also played a prominent role in the formation of such imagery. Ole Martin Høystad observes a surge of interest in the heart and its functions in the French romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. He shows how these romances created a “cult of the heart,” firstly through a general refinement of the

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emotional life of its characters, and, more importantly, through the ideology of courtly love. Instead of passionate love, this ideology promoted an image of romantic love that was closely connected to the heart. The practitioner of courtly love – or fin’amor as it was known by the Occitan troubadours who brought the literary conception to the courts – was not to concern himself with sexual consummation, but with loving his lady in his heart by carrying around her image wherever he went.7 As the site for love, as well as its main symbol, the heart thus literally and figuratively lay at the center of the emotional ideal these romances conveyed. Where the heart takes center-stage as a feeling organ in Yvain, the Old Norse translation mostly refrains from mentioning it. Of the sixty-two Old French heart-references, only about a third have been copied into Ívens saga. Although the abridgement of the story in Old Norse certainly plays a role in this equation, the relative lack of heart-references can for a large part be attributed to the adaptation of the story to the native literary tradition. Klaus von See has identified an infrequency of heart-references in Old Norse prose and poetry in general.8 In the Old Norse literary tradition, the heart did not hold the same importance as its French counterpart. It was generally not connected to love, nor was it ascribed a role in the production of the affective states of characters. It did, however, feature as the seat of courage. Its size, which depended on the amount of blood it contained, would reveal a character’s disposition. Small hearts, containing little blood, belonged to the brave; conversely, big hearts, filled with blood, were ascribed to the cowardly.9 Von See has suggested that all references to the heart unconcerned with “courage” or “fear” are in fact influenced either by Christianity or the French romance tradition.10 Cuer, as we find it in Yvain, was therefore likely a rather unfamiliar concept to the Old Norse translator. Its image, assigned properties, and functions had to be integrated into the Old Norse literary model to make the story accessible to the Norwegian audience.

Negotiating Semantic Profiles The first negotiation to be addressed is of a semantic nature. Whenever heartreferences have been translated in Ívens saga, they point towards a cognitive faculty. As a substitute for cuer, we most often find Old Norse hugr in translation. Hugr generally stands for mind, although it can be translated alternatively as “soul,” “spirit,” or “heart,” depending on the context in which it is found, the text’s genre and its date of composition.11 In later Old Norse-Icelandic texts,

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like Ívens saga, hugr is typically associated with the mind, especially when it is found in relation to hjarta (heart).12 Colin MacKenzie, in his investigation of vernacular psychologies in Old Norse-Icelandic literature, shows that although hugr and hjarta share a close relationship, they are not functionally synonymous: “At one pole, hugr is almost exclusively responsible for cognitive functions, while at the other it is only hjarta which is represented as the vital, vivifying part of a person. This animating function is never applied to hugr and as such it allows us to separate hugr from hjarta in some degree.”13 The semantic differences between hugr and hjarta suggest that while both terms may refer to the same organ and possibly a corresponding locus, they denote separate entities. In Snorri’s Skáldskaparmál, for example, hugr is said to be housed in hjarta, which in turn resides in the breast.14 Ívens saga also provides many examples that make such a separation plausible, where hugr and hjarta go sideby-side, signifying different faculties. Consider, for example, the following substitutes for cuer in the Old Norse. After her husband has been defeated at Yvain’s hands, Laudine, the lady of the Fountain, is in need of a new lord to rule over her land and people. Although initially distraught by the idea of her husband’s killer as the new lord, she is convinced by her maid Lunete to marry Yvain, who, after all, proved the superior knight. Lunete fetches Yvain to bring him the good news, which she delivers to him in the following poetics: “she wants to have you in her prison, and she wants you imprisoned in such a way that not even your heart (cuers) would be free.”15 In this passage, Chrétien deploys a common motif in which the knight is presented as a prisoner of love. As befitting a true lover, Laudine wishes to be the keeper of Yvain’s heart. The Old Norse translator, however, seems to have felt the need to differentiate between both the affective (hjarta) and cognitive (hugr) faculties that the lady would be master of: “My lady wishes to have you in her power as captive, however, so entirely that neither your mind (hugr) nor your heart (hjarta) shall escape her power.”16 Although minor, additions to the source text are rather unusual in a rewriting that tends to shorten overly descriptive and metaphorical language.17 This meticulousness on the part of the translator shows Ívens saga to be more than a mere copy of its French source text. Instead, it gives evidence of the mediation of the translator in the faculty assigned to the process of loving someone: she will not only be held in his heart, but also in his mind. Multiple examples can be given of the addition of the mind to such metaphorical descriptions. When Yvain returns from his wanderings to the land of the Fountain, we encounter the same image of the lady being master over the knight’s heart. Upon his return, none of his former household recognizes their lord, who now appears before them as the knight with the lion: “Everyone

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offered to serve the lord, as was proper, without knowing who he was, even the lady, who possessed his heart (cuer) but did not know.”18 Although Old Norse hjarta would suffice here in translation, we again find the addition of hugr: “They offered Sir Íven hospitality and service as was proper, yet they did not recognize him nor did his lady. He had concealed his thoughts (hugr) and heart (hjarta).”19 As well as the addition of hugr, the imagery of the heart was redirected in the adaptation of this passage. The rather literal phrasing in the Old French of “having” another’s heart – a motif frequently deployed by Chrétien in his romances as a heart that leaves the body to reside in another’s – is an image the Old Norse translator chose to move away from. Instead, Sir Íven is said to hide his thoughts and heart. That the motif of the travelling heart is consistently redirected throughout Ívens saga will become clear in the discussion at the end of this chapter.

Negotiating Heart-models A similar reformulation of the French heart into the Old Norse that separates hjarta and hugr and underlines the cognitive function of the latter may be found right at the beginning of the story. As tradition dictates, the story of Yvain opens at King Arthur’s court on Pentecost day, where we find knights and ladies gathering to exchange stories of past adventures and love. Calogrenant, one of Arthur’s knights, is about to tell a tale of one of his failed quests. In an attempt to guide his audience in their listening experience, Calogrenant asks them to lend him their ears and, moreover, their hearts: Lend me your hearts [cuer] and ears, for words that are not understood by the heart are lost completely. There are those who hear something without understanding it, yet praise it; they have only the faculty of hearing, since the heart does not comprehend it. The word comes to the ears like whistling wind, but doesn’t stop or linger there; instead it quickly leaves if the heart is not alert enough to be ready to grasp it. If the heart can take and enclose and retain the word when it hears it, then the ears are the path and channel through which the voice reaches the heart; and the voice, which enters through the ears, is received within the breast by the heart. So he who would hear me now must surrender heart and ears to me.20

Although the narrative shows Calogrenant relating his story to an intradiegetic audience (his fellow knights and the queen), the placement of this request in what may be seen as the prologue of Yvain, implies that this may well be Chrétien addressing his contemporary audience. Such requests for attention are

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commonplace in medieval prologues.21 Authors would deploy them as rhetorical formulae in the service of establishing an author–audience relationship. Auctorial appeals for attention would often involve the ears, which may be reflective of the stories’ origins in an oral culture. Chrétien, however, places the focus on the heart when listening to the story “for words that are not understood by the heart are lost completely” (150–53). Entendre (understanding) is thus not for the ears alone, but also a function that can be ascribed to cuer. In this passage, the audience is presented with, what is essentially, a model of perception. Chrétien shows story-processing to be a physical process, which is laid out step-by-step: words present themselves to the ears, like winds that are channeled through the ears to the breast where they are received by the heart. In this model, the ears function in service of the heart. They act as gateways to the body through which information enters the heart. Claude Luttrell has noted multiple examples in Chrétien’s romances in which a similar image of a heart attended to by the senses may be found. He argues that although such passages have been influenced by biblical texts, they ultimately build on Aristotelian principles. In his cardio-centric model, Aristotle presents the heart as an active organ able to process input received by the senses. De Anima, as well as several of the treatises in the Parva naturalia, place the heart in the driver’s seat as the sensus communis that transmits the sensations of the exterior world from the particular sense organs to the common sense-faculty.22 This representation of the heart gave rise to the connection of the heart with memory (memoria).23 In the Middle Ages, memory was believed to reside in the heart. This locus was encoded in the Latin verb recordari (to recollect), whose etymology is said to trace back to revocare (to call back) and cor (heart).24 The knowledge retained by memoria was not just something to be “learned by heart,” but something to be learned from. Images mediated through the senses are stored in the heart in order to generate affective rumination and accordingly produce sensations.25 The process of memorization is explained in a twelfth-century love bestiary by Richard de Fournival, contemporary in its date of composition to Yvain: Memory has two doors: Sight and Hearing. And to each of these two doors a pathway leads, namely Depiction and Description. Depiction serves the eye and Description serves the ear . . . When one hears a romance read, one hears the adventures as if one saw them in the present. And because one is converting past to present by these two things, namely Depiction and Description, it is clearly apparent that by these two things one can have access to Memory.26

In his Bestiaire d’amours, Richard de Fournival shows how memoria has the capacity to render the past as if it were present. This form of affective rumination

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is also touched upon by Chrétien in the opening scène of Yvain. Just preceding Calogrenant’s conte de honte, we find knights and ladies gathering to exchange stories. One topic dominates their conversation: love. Chrétien introduces this leitmotiv to draw a critical comparison between lovers in Arthur’s time with those in the present. In Arthur’s days, he notes, love was “riches et boens” (line 17, “sweet and flourishing”), but today: “very few serve love: nearly everyone has abandoned it; and love is greatly abased.”27 By inviting his listeners to look “beyond those who are present among us and speak of those who were,” the poet is instructing the audience to take to heart the ideal love present in Arthur’s time, that is the love depicted in his romance.28 The image of a memory served by depiction and, more importantly, description, as it is painted by Fournival and which the opening scene of Yvain is reflective of, is in line with Calogrenant’s subsequent request for his auditors to lend him their ears and hearts. The past adventures related by the knight are also to be learned from in the present. This makes it plausible that the story Calogrenant presents us with is meant to be emotionally instructive. After all, the knight Yvain, himself a student of love, is a certified lover by the end of the story. In the Old Norse translation of Calogrenant’s request, we again find both hugr and hjarta substituting for cuer. The co-appearance of both terms leads to the mind as the site of cognitive processing in the story: Listen well and lend me your ears, for words heard are lost at once unless the mind (hugr) preserves what the ears receive. Many often end up praising what they are unable to understand and from which they do not profit, and they hear while the mind (hugr) forgets to comprehend just like the wind’s breezes that do not come to rest. That is what happens to words that are heard if the mind (hugr) is not awake to receive them. Let those who want to understand my words apply both their ears and heart (hjarta).29

Like cuer, which we have found to be reflective of memoria in Chrétien’s corresponding text passage due to its ascribed properties, hugr is presented in this passage as an abstract function responsible for story processing, residing within the more substantial organ of the heart. Can hugr then be said to correspond in profile and function to that of memoria? Remarkably, the properties that affiliate the image of the heart as it is found in Calogrenant’s request with the medieval model of memory have been modified in translation. For one, the detailed perception model presented by Chrétien has received a metaphorical redirection. Whereas in Yvain, the storyteller’s words are presented as winds offering information to the ears that channel such information to the heart, in Ívens saga there is no specific point where the ears are the trajectory by which the voice gets to the heart. Instead, “the wind’s breezes that do not come to rest” are presented as a metaphor for “the mind forgetting to

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comprehend” (39). As a consequence, the ears lose their imagery as doors to a person’s memory. Secondly, since there is no specific sense of the information brought to the ears being retained and stored in the Old Norse rewriting of Calogrenant’s request, there is also no example presented to the audience to learn from. This may be why the opening scene in which courtiers gather to exchange stories of love has been omitted in Ívens saga. The Old Norse translation does not reiterate the image of lovers in Arthur’s day in order to bring about affective rumination. Instead the translator has opted for a less emotive image through a description of King Arthur and his brave knights.

Negotiating Sensory Models As has become evident from Calogrenant’s request, the ears play an active role in the bringing about of sensations. The vocal movement in the act of telling a story is represented by Chrétien as a dynamic one: words leave the storyteller’s heart to be channeled through the ears to the auditor’s heart. Ruth Cline has shown such examples of “intercorporeal dynamism” to be well-established metaphors in Chrétien’s romances.30 According to Cline, as the senses are gatekeepers through which sensations enter and exit the body, they have independent agency in Chrétien metaphors. The senses are the vehicles through which sensations come about. Cline illustrates this with a discussion on the relationship of the eyes to the heart as set forth in Cligès.31 Cligès is Chrétien de Troyes’s second romance, predating Yvain by only a few years. Cligès opens with the story of how the knight’s parents, Alexander and Soredamors, fell in love during their stay at Arthur’s court. In the following passage, the narrative literally opens a window into the heart of Alexander, who is painfully struck by the arrows of a personified love: “But no bruise or cut appears, and still you complain? Are you not mistaken?” “No indeed, for he has wounded me so deeply that he has shot his arrow straight into my heart and has not pulled it out again.” “How could he have shot through your body when there is no sign of a wound? Tell me this, I’d like to know! Through where did he shoot you?” “Through my eye.” “Through your eye? Did he not put it out?” “He did not hurt my eye at all, but I have a great pain in my heart.” “Now tell me how the arrow passed through your eye without wounding or putting it out. If the arrow entered through your eye, why is the heart in your breast suffering and the eye not suffering, though it took the initial blow?” “I can give you the answer to that: the eye itself is not concerned with feelings and can feel nothing on its own.”32

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Chrétien’s elaborate description of Alexander being struck by Amor’s arrow – an image most likely deriving from Ovid – is striking. The physiological particulars involved in the process of falling in love are set forth step-by-step, through a series of questions posed by the victim of love himself. Such detailed, inquisitive descriptions are not uncommon for Chrétien, as both Frank Brandsma and Mark Aussems have noted.33 The latter has dubbed such dialogues “question passages,” a clever narrative technique that helps the narrator expand on issues in need of clarification.34 The channeling function of the eyes is given emphasis by the question of whether the arrow put out Alixandre’s eye. The answer, no, suggests that sensations enter the body through figurative gateways that are the route to the heart, the place where the sensations are ultimately felt. Unfortunately, as far as we know, the story of Cligès was not rendered in Old Norse. However, a similar example of amor eros, or lovesickness, is set forth in Yvain. In this example the process of falling in love is again carefully laid out through a series of questions. When Laudine confronts Yvain with the death of her husband, the love-stricken knight places himself completely in her power. Somewhat surprised, Laudine asks the knight what strange force has overpowered him and he answers: “My lady”, he said, “the power comes from my heart, which commits itself to you; my heart has given me this desire.” “And what controls your heart, good sir?” “My eyes, my lady” “And what controls your eyes?” “The great beauty I see in you.” “And what wrong has beauty done?” “My lady, such that it makes me love.”35

In this passage, Chrétien specifically addresses the role of the eyes in the process of falling in love. As the agents responsible for bringing about the sensation of love, they not only perceive the image of beauty, but also have control over the heart. Chrétien’s physiology of the heart as a feeling organ again received a systematic redirection in its adaptation to Old Norse. Any references to the senses as representing channels or doors to the heart were either omitted or reformulated. Íven’s explanation for his sudden infatuation does not involve gateways such as the eyes: “‘My heart forces this good will on me,’ he says. ‘For what reason?’ says she. ‘On account of your desirable beauty,’ says he. ‘What misdeeds has my beauty done against you?’ said she. ‘Lady,’ he said, ‘because it makes me love’.”36 Since this is an almost word-for-word rendering of the Old French source – even the inquisitive form has been copied – the omission of the eyes is remarkable. Although the modification is small, it cannot simply be dismissed as a curtailment of a resumptive nature. Such examples are in fact multiplied many times over.37

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Not all of Chrétien’s digressions on the senses and their relation to the heart could be avoided with such small modifications. In the Norse rewriting of the scene in which Yvain defeats Count Alier to save the Lady of Noroison, Chrétien’s heart-metaphor is completely re-scripted. When fighting the Count, Yvain fights so bravely that he encourages others: Those who were with him took courage from his example; for a man with a poor and timid heart, when he sees a brave man undertake a bold deed in front of his very eyes, may be suddenly overcome with disgrace and shame, and cast out the weak heart from his body and take on steadfastness, bravery, and a noble heart.38

In this passage, the eyes are again the vehicles through which a change in emotional state is brought about; Yvain’s companions literally take heart. Although roughly the same message is conveyed in translation, the specific role assigned to the eyes as mediums through which “a change of heart” comes about has been ignored. Íven fights so bravely that: “those who accompanied him now grew daring because of his valor and chivalry, and charged forward boldly.”39 Moreover, Ívens saga does not convey this image of a heart physically leaving the body. This is not the only example of “intercorporeal dynamism” that has been ignored by the Old Norse translator. As shown earlier, the image of the knight’s heart travelling outside of the body to be with its lover’s was also redirected in Ívens saga. Gerard Brault refers to this notion of the heart moving in and out of the body as the “itinerant heart”.40 Both he and Cline have shown it to be a frequently deployed motif in Chrétien’s romances. For one, it comes in the form of a ritual exchange of hearts through which the hearts of two lovers may be fused, making them susceptible to each other’s emotions. More frequently found is the image of the heart going back and forth between lovers.41 Such is the case when Yvain has to leave his beloved Laudine to defend his reputation as a knight. Having lived in the service of love for too long, Yvain is encouraged by Gauvain to join Arthur and his party on their tournaments. In an attempt to uphold both his duties as a knight and as a lover, Yvain lends his body to chivalric adventure, but leaves his heart behind with his beloved: My lord Yvain left so reluctantly that his heart stayed behind. The king might take his body with him but there was no way he could have the heart, because it clung so tightly to the heart of her who remained behind that he had no power to take it with him. Once the body is without the heart, it cannot possibly stay alive, and no man had ever before seen a body live on without its heart. Yet now this miracle happened. . . . The heart was well kept, and the body lived in hope of rejoining the heart.42

Not only is this passage the most elaborate example of the itinerant heart motif in Yvain, but its deployment is essential in the psychologizing of the knight’s

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predicament. It is therefore striking that this entire passage was omitted in Ívens saga. In the past, the exclusion of such metaphorical ornamentation has been credited to the overall streamlining of the story. However, given the repeated loss of such imagery, it seems more likely that the removal of these heart-metaphors should be attributed to systematic re-scripting.43 When Yvain fails to return to his lady before the agreed-upon deadline, the audience learns that Laudine has reciprocally given her heart to the knight. Enraged that Yvain did not uphold his promise, Lunete now accuses him of stealing her lady’s heart: This thief has seduced my lady, who had not experienced such evil and could never have believed that he would steal her heart. Those who love truly don’t steal hearts; but there are those who call true lovers thieves, while they themselves only pretend to love and in reality know nothing about it. . . . But Yvain has dealt my lady a mortal blow, for she thought he would keep her heart and bring it back to her before the year had passed.44

In the Norse rewriting, it too remains to be seen whether Yvain’s intentions are honorable or false, but instead of being accused of taking the perhaps too literal image of the heart, Yvain is reproached for stealing the somewhat more general and, more importantly, less physical image of love instead, thereby bypassing the itinerant heart motif: “My lady thought you were sincere, and it never occurred to her that you would steal her love and betray her.”45

Conclusion This chapter has investigated the transformation of Yvain’s heart-imagery in its transmission to the Old Norse literary tradition. In the past such modification was mostly attributed to the general abridgement of the story. However, the consistency and meticulousness with which the Old Norse translator edited-out or otherwise redirected such references suggests a more conscious negotiation of Chrétien’s heart-imagery. This chapter has highlighted three different types of negotiation. The first is of a semantic nature. Not only the heart, but also the mind, as a separate faculty of the heart-organ, is essential when it comes to love in Ívens saga. The second negotiation is that of Chrétien’s heart-model as reflected in Calogrenant’s request. This image of a heart attended to by the senses is reminiscent of Aristotelian theory and can be connected to the medieval model of memory. In Ívens saga, this representation is redirected towards a metaphysical model independent from sensory input. Under particular negotiation in the text seems to be the independent

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agency of the senses as the trajectories through which sensations move in and out of the body. Lastly, such avoidance of intercorporeal movement is also attested by a negotiation of the itinerant heart motif. The perhaps too literal representation conferred by Chrétien to such a figurative image was filtered out in the Old Norse translation. The negotiations addressed show medieval translations such as Ívens saga to be mediators between the literary and cultural conceptions of the original and the receiving text communities. In this position, the Old Norse translation informs both: its modifications bring the examiner closer to indigenous convention, while analysis of such assimilation at the same time elucidates those of the original. The exact literary and cultural standards that motivated the alterations to Yvain’s heart-imagery invite further analysis. A more comprehensive investigation of the adaptation of Chrétien’s matière into Old Norse, including Parcevals saga, Valvens þáttr and Erex saga, will deepen our understanding of the transformation of Chrétien’s heart-imagery.

Notes 1.

2. 3. 4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

Marianne E. Kalinke, “Scribes, Editors, and the riddarasögur,” Arkiv för nordisk filologi 97 (1982): 36–51; Suzanne Marti, “Translation or Adaptation? Parcevals saga as a Result of Cultural Transformation,” Arthuriana 22, no. 1 (2012): 39–49. Emma Campbell and Robert Mills, eds., Rethinking Medieval Translation: Ethics, Politics, Theory (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), 8. Zrinka Stahuljak, “Medieval Fixers. Politics of Interpreting in Western Historiography,” in Rethinking Medieval Translation, 147–63. Sif Ríkharðsdóttir, Medieval Translations and Cultural Discourse: The Movement of Texts in England, France, and Scandinavia (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), see chap. 3; Ríkharðsdóttir, Emotion in Old Norse Literature. Translations, Voices, Contexts (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017), see chap. 1. Claudia Bornholdt, “The Old Norse-Icelandic Transmission of Chrétien de Troyes’s Romances: Ívens saga, Erex saga, Parcevals saga with Valvens þáttr,” in The Arthur of the North, ed. Marianne E. Kalinke (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), 98–122, 98. On their linguistic unity see, for example, Michael Barnes, “Language,” in A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture, ed. Rory McTurk (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2005), 173–89; on the connections between both communities, see Ríkharðsdóttir, Emotion in Old Norse Literature, 2–7. Ole Høystad, A History of the Heart (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), 113. Klaus von See, “Das Herz in Edda und Skaldendichtung,” Skandinavistik 8 (1978): 16–26, reprinted in Klaus von See, Edda, Saga, Skaldendichtung: Aufsätze zur scandinavischen Literatur des Mittelalters (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1981), 73–83. See also Høystad, A History of the Heart, 102; Kirsi Kanerva, “Disturbances of the Mind and Body. Effects of the Living Dead in Medieval Iceland,” in Mental (dis)order in Later

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10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

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Medieval Europe, ed. Sari Katajala-Peltomaa and Susanna Niiranen (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014), 219–42, 228. Von See, Edda, Saga, Skaldendichtung, 81. Colin MacKenzie, “Vernacular Psychologies in Old Norse-Icelandic and Old English” (Ph D diss., University of Glasgow, 2014), see chaps. 3 and 5. As is attested, for instance, by the verb hyggja (to think, believe). MacKenzie, “Vernacular Psychologies,” 91–97. Ibid., 91. “qu’avoir vos vialt en sa prison, / et si i vialt avoir le cors / que nes li cuers n’an soit defors” (lines 1924–27). All Old French quotations of Chevalier au lion cited in this article have been taken from the Corpus de la littérature médiévale online series (2001). This edition is based on the Guiot manuscript, Paris, Bibliothèque national, fr. 794. The English translations of Yvain have been taken from William Kibler’s prose edition Arthurian Romances: The Knight with the Lion (Yvain) (London: Penguin Books, 1991). “þvíat mín frú vill hafa þik sem hertekinn mann í sínu valdi, svá vandliga at eigi skal hugr þinn né hjarta vera ór hennar valdi” (58). All Old Norse quotations and their corresponding English translations have been taken from Marianne E. Kalinke’s edition of Ívens saga in Arthurian Archives IV: Norse Romance II, The Knights of the Round Table (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999). This edition is based on Stockholm 6 4to, but also AM 489, AM 179 and Add. 4857, whenever the first proved illegible. See, for example, Marianne E. Kalinke, King Arthur North-by-Northwest. The ‘matière de Bretagne’ in Old Norse-Icelandic Romances (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzels boghandel, 1981). “et tuit a lor seignor ofrirent / lor servise, si con il durent, / sanz ce que il ne le conurent;/ neïs la dame qui avoit / son cuer, et si ne le savoit” (lines 4574–78). “Buðu þá herra Ív fögnuð ok þjónustu sem þeim sómdi, ok þektu þau hann ekki né frú hans. Hann hafði hirt hug sinn ok hjarta” (82). “Cuer et oreilles me rendés, / car parole oïe est perdue / s’ele n’est de cuer entendue / or y a tix que che qu’il oent / n’entendent pas, et si le loent; / et chil n’en ont fors que l’oïe, / puis que li cuers n’i entent mie. / As oreilles vient le parole, / aussi comme li vens qui vole, / mais n’i arreste ne demore, / ains s’en part en mout petit d’ore, / se li cuers n’est si estilliés / c’a prendre soit appareilliés; / que chil le puet en son venir / prendre et enclorre et retenir. / Les oreilles sont voie et dois / ou par ent y entre la vois; / et li cuers prent dedens le ventre / le vois qui par l’oreille y entre. Et qui or me vaurra entendre, / cuer et oreilles me doit render” (150–71). Douglas Kelly, The Art of Medieval French Romance (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 119. Claude Luttrell, “The Heart’s Mirror in Cligès,” in Arthurian Literature 13, ed. James P. Carley and Felicity Riddy (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995), 1–18, 8 paraphrasing De Anima, III, i and ii; De Sensu, VII; De Memoria, I, 450a and 451a, De Somno, II, 455a and 455b; De Juventute, I, 467b. See for instance Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 2008), 52. Ibid., 49. Ibid., 75–78. Jeanette Beer, Master Richard’s Bestiary of Love and Response (West Hatfield: Pennyroyal Press, 1985), 1–2.

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27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39. 40.

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“mes or i a molt po des suens / qu’a bien pres l’ont ja tuit lessiee, / s’an est Amors molt abessiee” (lines 18–20). “Mes or parlons de cez qui furent, / si leissons cez qui ancor durent” (lines 29–30). “Verið vel skiljandi ok eyru til leggjandi, þvíat heyrð orð eru þegar tynd, nema hugr hirði þat er eyra við tekr. Þeir verða margir optliga er þat lofa er þeir eigi gá at skilja ok hafa eigi meira af, en þeir heyra meðan hugr gleymir at skilja þvílíkt sem vind fljúgandi ok nemr hvergi staðar. Svá fara þau orð er heyrð eru, nema hugr vaki við at taka; þvíat þeir er mín orð vilja skilja, leggi bæði til eyru ok hjarta” (39). For a discussion of “intercorporeal dynamism,” see Heather Webb, The Medieval Heart (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 54. Ruth Cline, “Heart and Eyes,” Romance Philology 25 (1972): 263–97. This translation has been taken from Kibler, Arthurian Romances. “‘Mes trop me bat, ice m’esmaie. / Ja n’il pert il ne cop ne plaie, / Et si t’an plains? Don n’as tu tort?’ / ‘Nenil! Qu’il m’a navré si fort / Que jusqu’au cuer m’a son dart trait; / Ancor ne l’a a lui retrait.’ / ‘Comant le t’a donc trait el cors, / Quant la plaie ne pert defors? / Ce me diras: savoir le vuel! / Par ou le t’a il tret?’ ‘Par l’uel.’ / ‘Par l’uel? Si ne le t’a crevé?’ / ‘An l’uel ne m’a rien grevé, / Mes au cuer me grieve formant.’ / ‘Or me di dinc reison comant / Li darz est parmi l’uel i antre, / Li cuers por coi s’an dialt el vantre / Que li ialz audi ne s’an dialt, / Qui le premier cop an requialt?’ / ‘De ce sai ge bien reison randre: / Li iauz n’a soing de rien antandre / Ne rien n’i puet feire a nul fuer’” (lines 689–711). This quotation has been taken from Cligès, trans. Ingrid Kasten (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2006). Mark Aussems, “Spiegelpersonages in Chrétiens Le Chevalier de la Charrette,” Madoc 21, no. 2 (2007): 23–31, which builds on Frank Brandsma, “Mirror Characters,” in Courtly Arts and the Art of Courtliness, ed. Keith Busby and Christopher Kleinhenz (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), 275–82. Aussems “Spiegelpersonages,” 25–26. This literary device may stem from the activity of lectio or the reciting of a text to an audience, during which listeners were free to ask questions. “‘Dame,’ fet il, ‘la force vient, / de mon cuer, qui a vos se tient; / an ce voloir m’a mes cuers mis.’ / ‘Et qui le cuer, biax dolz amis?’ / ‘Dame, mi oel.’ / ‘Et les ialz, qui?’ / ‘La granz biautez que an vos vi.’ / ‘Et la biautez qu’i a forfet?’ / ‘Dame, tant que amer me fet’ (lines 2017–25). “Í þvílíkan vilja nauðgar mik mitt hjarta,’ sagði hann. ‘Fyrir hverjar sakir?’ segir hún. Þín hin fýsiliga fegrð,’ sagði hann. ‘Hvat hefir fegrð mín misgert við þik?’ sagði hún. ‘Frú,’ kvað hann, ‘þvíat hún gerir mik elska” (60). The same is true when characters in Yvain are described to be “struck by a blow through the eyes” or more specifically “struck by love into the eyes.” Such references have not been copied in Ívens saga and oftentimes the entire passage has been omitted. See, for example, Yvain, lines 1370–78. “Cil qui avoec lui estoient, / por lui grant hardemant prenoient; / que tex a poinne ovrer antasche, / quant il voit c’uns prodon alasche, / devant lui tote une besoingne, / que maintenant honte et vergoingne, / li cort sus, et si giete fors, / le povre cuer qu’il a el cors, / si li done sostenemant, / cuer de prodome et hardemant” (lines 3167–76). “þeir er honum fylgðu dirfðuz nú af hans hreysti ok riddaraskap ok riðu vel fram ok djarfliga” (70). Gerard Brault, “Chrétien de Troyes’ Lancelot: The eye and the heart,” Bulletin bibliographique de la Société internationale arthurienne 24 (1972): 142–53, 144.

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41. 42.

43. 44.

45.

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Cline, “Heart and Eyes,” 283–84 and 295; Brault, “Chrétien de Troyes’ Lancelot,” 144–47. See also Høystad, A History of the Heart, 126–28. “Mes sire Yvains molt a enviz / est de s’amie departiz / ensi que li cuers ne se muet. / Li rois le cors mener an puet / mes del cuer n’en manra il point / car si se tient et si se joint / Qu’il n’a pooir que il l’en maint; / des que li cors est sanz le cuer / don ne puet il estre a nul fuer; / et se li cors sanz le cuer vit / tel mervoille nus hom ne vit. / Ceste mervoille est avenue. [. . .] Li cuers a boene remenance / et li cors vit en esperance / de retorner au cuer arriere.” (lines 2641–62). For example, note also the omission of Yvain, lines 1363–65 in the Old Norse translation. “sa dame a cil lerres souduite, / qui n’estoit de nus max estruite / ne ne cuidoit pas, a nul fuer, / qu’il li deüst anbler son cuer; / cil n’anblent pas les cuers qui ainment, / si a tex qui larrons les claimant / qui en amer sont non veant / et si n’an sevent nes neant. [. . .] Mes sire Yvains la dame a morte / qu ele cuidoit qu’il li gardast / son cuer, et si li raportast, / einçois que fust passez li anz” (lines 2727–47). “Mín frú ætlaði þik heilhugaðan, ok kom henni þat aldri í hug, at þú mundir stela ást hennar ok svíkja hana” (68).

Carol J. Williams

3 Two Views of the Feeling Heart in Troubadour Song The heart as the site of emotional experience is celebrated in almost all love song. One of the earliest European repertoires to develop this consistently was that of the troubadours in the twelfth century. Musicological studies to examine this specifically are rare but among the best is Judith Peraino’s Giving Voice to Love, which nonetheless refers to the feeling heart only tangentially.1 The unity between the heart as the seat of the affections and the singing voice is a fundamental assumption of the troubadour repertoire and key to understanding the relationship between the feeling heart and the expression of emotion elaborated there. Though living well after the high point of troubadour culture, Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), provides the rhetorical support for its expressive union of the emotional heart and the singing voice by defining the troubadour lyric as “poetry made from rhetoric and music.”2 The same connection is the focal point of his own lyric and theoretical works. He develops this idea specifically using troubadour lyric in De vulgari eloquentia (1303–1305) and had earlier examined his own juvenile poetry, largely inspired by his love for the unattainable Beatrice, using the same filter in his La Vita Nuova (1295).3 The contemporary supporting theory and rationale of troubadour song in the vernacular focuses almost entirely on matters of syntax and versification, ignoring the role the heart plays in stimulating the singing voice to emotional expression.4 More interesting and to the point are several instances of selfconscious theorizing within the songs themselves. Bernart de Ventadorn (ca. 1145–1200), certainly one of the greatest of the troubadours, for example, explains the impossibility of song without the involvement of the feeling heart in his Chantars nom pot gaires valer (PC 70.15).5 He brags about his own artistry in this respect in Non es meravelha (PC 70.31). Arnaut Daniel (fl.1180–1210), lauded by Ezra Pound as the greatest poet to have ever lived,6 similarly addressed the carefully crafted relationship between the melody and the word in his Ab gai so cundet e leri (PC 29.10). The background to this study commences with an examination of the role of the feeling heart in the expression of emotion through the singing voice in the history of emotions from classical and biblical times to the early Middle Ages. An examination of the role of the feeling heart in troubadour song follows

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513275-004

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and is pursued from two different angles. The first is the hindsight view of Dante as expressed in La Vita Nuova and further in in his De vulgari eloquentia; the second is the self-conscious theorizing about the relationship between the feeling heart and the singing voices of the troubadours themselves. The link between these two will be demonstrated through analysis of a small collection of troubadour song.

Background In the history of the emotions, the voice, often the singing voice, is the main expressive agent for the heart as the seat of the affections. That this was the case in the Middle Ages has not always been clear, but there is a substantial history for these connections to be found in ancient philosophy. Aristotle describes the heart as the physiological and psychological center of all warmblooded creatures; it is the seat of both thought and reason as well as being the organ of sensation.7 He proposes that every perception awakens a feeling of pleasure or pain; the desire or aversion thus caused produces a certain degree of warmth in the heart which in its turn motivates movement, as in perhaps the movement of vocal cords in the speaking or singing voice.8 Aristotle, as well as other ancient Greek and Roman writers, also connected expression and the voice through oratory and rhetoric, the art of persuasion. Knowledge of the “principles of music, which have power to excite or assuage the emotions of mankind” was considered essential in the training of an orator. The use of pitch in the modulation of the voice was one of the tools of oratory, though this would probably not be called singing.9 Another approach, the concern of both Plato and Aristotle, considered the power of music to change human behavior and serve as a tool in social engineering through ethics.10 The fact that these approaches informed the philosophy around the passions and emotions of the heart for the ancient world is well established. The revival of Aristotelian thinking gave these ideas new currency in the Middle Ages. The great renaissance of Aristotelian thought in western Europe began in the twelfth century, prompted initially by Syrian and Arabic scholars. Of these the best known are Avicenna and Averroes who produced commentaries on nearly all the known works of Aristotle. Latin translations of these Arabic texts and further commentaries on Aristotle began to reach Europe via Spain and provoked considerable interest. The study of the philosopher’s writings by European scholars was further stimulated by crusaders’ discoveries of Aristotelian texts in Constantinople. These, when translated into Latin, were

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made more generally available and became thoroughly embedded in the advanced learning of universities, particularly that of Paris. The surviving documents reflecting the intellectual life of Paris in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries preserve the vigor with which these ideas were discussed.11 A particularly good example of how the new Aristotelianism was absorbed into thinking about music is the Ars musice of the Parisian Johannes de Grocheio. He thoroughly shook the accepted Neoplatonic foundations of music philosophy and applied fresh thinking to all types of sounding music including that of the troubadours and trouvères.12 Grocheio borrows from Aristotle directly in considering the primacy of the heart as an organ: “Just as in the generation of animals, nature first forms the principal members, namely the heart, liver, brain . . . .”13 More directly to the purpose, he describes dance music as that which “draws the hearts of girls and young men and takes them away from vanity and is said to be effective against the passion which is called love sickness.”14 In the halls of learning, this revival of ancient philosophy was running in parallel and interacting with ongoing and evolving biblical studies and Christian theology. An important influence on the history of song was found in the Old Testament where particularly significant moments are captured in poetic, song-like style. Some examples from many include Jacob blessing his sons (Genesis 49), Moses’s farewell (Deuteronomy 32–33) and David’s lament (2 Samuel 1). Perhaps these song-like passages were recited in a form of elevated speech, though it is more likely that they were sung to a simple melody. These passages stand out against the prosaic with an elevated style and predictable rhythmic and metric patterning, which while preserving the memory of the events also give the hearer the means to commit it to memory. The embodiment and capture of memory is one of the rarely examined functions of song.15 Biblical commentary provides many examples of linking the emotions of the heart and the expression of these in the voice. St. Paul, for example, considered the Christian affect to consist of “speaking . . . in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord.”16 A richer source is provided by Augustine (354–430), particularly in his Confessions where he gives an affective response to the cathedral music at Milan.17 He feared that what was being sung mattered less to him than its musical adornment and thus castigated himself for surrendering to the pleasure of the senses.18 Augustine’s pathway to allowing this sensual pleasure was one where the heart and the voice acted as one: “when you pray to God in Psalms and hymns, turn over in your heart what you say with your mouth.”19 These examples from the ancient and Christian worlds provide instances where music and its ability to arouse and express emotion is used for an extrinsic purpose;

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for example, to intensify the persuasive means of oratory, or to serve in the social engineering of the state, or finally to amplify the means of worship. With troubadour song, the arousal and expression of emotion through the feeling heart is the end purpose. The span of the twelfth century broadly contains the very vigorous growth of the troubadour repertoire with more than 2,600 songs produced by around 460 named artists. The first troubadour to emerge was Guilhem (1071–1126), the seventh count of Poitou and ninth duke of Aquitaine, grandfather to Eleanor of Aquitaine. Though the self-confessed “last troubadour” was Guiraut Riquier (ca.1230–1292), the movement had been dealt a death blow by the Albigensian Crusade (ca.1209–1229) with many troubadours fleeing persecution or suffering execution. The love song features in great numbers within the troubadour repertoire and typically links the heart as the seat of the affections and the expressive voice. Whether this connection is based on the implementation of a rich background of learning, or acquisition through contemporary cultural exchange remains a debatable question. While it is true that most troubadours were probably able to read and write to some degree, as would be consistent with their usually high-born estate, whether they had sufficient learning to have absorbed what the ancients and Church Fathers had to say on the power of music to evoke the emotions is less certain. Another contributing influence is the possibility of cultural exchange with Muslim Al-Andalus, where there was an already well-established tradition of love poetry and song.20 Certainly a body of song and poetry on the themes of secular love flourished in the tenth and eleventh centuries in Al-Andalus, not far from the southern border of Occitania.21 The presence of this developed tradition of love poetry and song nearby and the multiple opportunities for cultural exchange give some credibility to this theory of the origin of troubadour song. Whatever its beginnings, there is no surviving contemporary theory which articulated the relationship between the heart, its emotions, and the singing voice. It was almost two centuries later, in a re-examination of the troubadour lyric that this theory was to be developed.

The First View: Reflections of Dante on the Feeling Heart in Song Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) considered himself to be the natural heir of troubadour verse since the roots of the Italian lyric tradition are to be found in the Provençal poetry of twelfth-century southern France. The conventions of

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troubadour love poetry were transplanted to the court of Frederick II in Palermo, which in turn became the fostering ground for the Sicilian school of early Italian poetry. It was from this base that Dante’s dolce stil novo, or “sweet new style” emerged.22 He proudly stated that: “Since I find that no one, before myself has dealt with the theory of eloquence in the vernacular . . . I shall try . . . to say something useful about the language of people who speak the vulgar tongues.”23 He used this scholarly lacuna as the inspiration for his unfinished Latin treatise on language and poetry De Vulgari Eloquentia (1302–1305). In book I of the treatise Dante examines the historical foundations of human language from the Tower of Babel to his own time, and focuses attention on the three vernacular languages, which eventually developed in southern Europe following the dispersal of humanity after the tower’s fall. These three languages are identified by the word used for “yes” in each: oc, in Provence; oïl, in NorthCentral France, and sì in Italy.24 Of the “French” vernaculars, he identified the langue d’oïl as particularly suited to prose narratives “such as compilations from the Bible and the histories of Troy and Rome, and the beautiful tales of King Arthur.”25 The langue d’oc, a “sweeter and more perfect language,” was that in which “eloquent writers in the vernacular first composed poems.”26 Book II is more sharply focused and provides a discussion of vernacular poetry illustrated in many cases by excerpts of troubadour lyric. It is here that Dante defines poetry, specifically poetry in the vernacular, as “nothing other than a verbal invention composed according to the rules of rhetoric and music.”27 This definition rests on that significant third element, love and the affairs of the heart, which Dante establishes in a consideration of the power of poetry. He asks what “greater power could there be than that which can melt the hearts of human beings, so as to make the unwilling willing and the willing unwilling, as it has done and still does.”28 Nonetheless, though the involvement of the heart in the fabric of poetry is an assumption in De Vulgari Eloquentia, the main emphasis is on structure and style. In an earlier work of Dante’s, the heart as both the active and passive agent of the emotions is the central focus. La Vita Nuova (1295) is an analytic collation of Dante’s own juvenile poetry, largely inspired by his love for the unattainable Beatrice. It is an important landmark in emotional autobiography, the most important perhaps since Augustine’s Confessions in the fifth century. This prosimetrum, “treatise by a poet, written for poets, on the art of poetry,” is a collection of lyric poems linked by autobiographical prose and also includes formal and structural analysis of most of its thirtyone poetic texts.29 These comprise twenty-five sonnets, one ballata, and four canzone that present a frame story recounting Dante’s love for Beatrice from his first sight of her to his mourning after her death. The use of the prosimetrum medium

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may have been influenced by a similar approach in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, or perhaps more likely by the razos and vidas (prose accounts and short biographies) of the Provençal troubadours. Another way of viewing La Vita Nuova is as an expression of courtly love or fin amor. This system of ritualized love was inherited by Dante from the Provençal poets. He was trying to write poetry that was less about the self and more about love itself and just as with troubadour lyric, the feeling heart features in almost every song. A particularly dramatic example of this is provided in the dream vision of the first poem of the collection, a sonnet. Dante is reflecting on Beatrice’s first greeting of him as he falls asleep. In a dream he sees Love standing before him, cradling the sleeping Beatrice in one arm while he bears aloft Dante’s burning heart in the other. Love awakens Beatrice and though she is reluctant, he feeds her the heart. When she has finished, Love, weeping, leaves for the heavens taking Beatrice with him. Although this poem was written in response to Beatrice’s first greeting of Dante, the sonnet concludes with a prefiguration of her death that even the consumption of Dante’s living, feeling heart could not prevent. The dream is broken at that point and Dante awakes in anguish. Though one interpretation of Beatrice eating the heart is that it was a Eucharistic act, the fact that she was reluctant to take of the body of Dante would speak against this. It is more likely a reference to the story of the Eaten Heart relayed through the vida of the troubadour Guilhem de Cabestanh. In this story, Guilhem loves Seremonda, the wife of his patron, Raimon de CastelRoussillon. When the affair is discovered Raimon slays Guilhem, tears out his heart, and beheads him. Later he has the heart cooked as a delicacy for his wife, but at the end of the meal, on learning that she has eaten the heart of her lover, she declares that she will never eat anything finer and throws herself off the balcony to her death.30 The story was very popular and is retold by Filostrato on the fourth day of Boccaccio’s Decameron,31 and is also found among Ezra Pound’s Cantos.32 In these cases, the lovers are first joined by the heart of one being consumed by the other and then reunited in death. Dante’s allusion to this tale in La Vita Nuova differs in that the heart that Beatrice eats is his own living, feeling heart. When Beatrice ascends to the heavens, she takes his now embodied heart within her, leaving him heartless and without the potential for another love. His longing for death is the real tragedy here. Another sonnet, the tenth sonnet in this collection, with its introduction and postlude, demonstrates how Dante exposes the structural craft of his verse while he recomposes his own autobiography and, in the process, illustrates the link between love and the heart. The question motivating the sonnet is “What is love?”

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Love and the noble heart are but one thing, even as the wise man tells us in his rhyme,33 the one without the other venturing as well as reason from a reasoning mind. Nature, disposed to love, creates Love king, making the heart a dwelling-place for him wherein he lies quiescent, slumbering sometimes a little, now a longer time. Then beauty in a virtuous woman’s face pleases the eyes, striking the heart so deep a yearning for the pleasing thing may rise. Sometimes so long it lingers in that place Love’s spirit is awakened from his sleep. By a worthy man a woman’s moved likewise. This sonnet is divided into two parts. In the first I speak of Love as he is in potentiality; in the second I speak of him as potentiality made actual. The second part begins: Then beauty . . . The first part is further divided into two sections. In the first I say in what subject this potentiality resides; in the second I say how the subject and potentiality are brought together to produce one being and I describe how the one is in relation to the other as form is to matter.34 The second subsection begins: Nature, disposed to love . . . Next, where I say Then beauty . . ., I say how this potentiality is made actual, first in a man and secondly in a woman, in the line: By a worthy man . . . 35

In the explanation, Dante labors the idea that love is a potentiality made actual. This distinction between potential and actual is related in Aristotelian metaphysics to the distinction between form and matter to which Dante also alludes. He sets up the form and matter formula so that the heart (form) is the shaping force operating on nascent love (matter). Interesting too is the notion that love is ever present in the heart but lies dormant until it is awakened by beauty; this is perhaps a hint at the Platonic definition of love as the desire for beauty. But particularly significant in this sonnet and the main burden of the opening octave is the rejection of any role for reason in the progress of love. Dante opens by setting up the analogy of indivisibility so that love is inseparable from the heart, just as reason is inseparable from the mind. By doing this, he sets love and reason on separate and divergent paths. The “turn” or volta begins with the sestet where love is actualized by beauty entering through the eyes, striking the heart directly, and awakening love from its slumber. Reason in the mind is not consulted. The linking of the heart and love in all its guises is developed in twenty-eight of the thirty-one poems and even further in the linking prose passages of autobiography and analysis. Music plays a complex role in this verse collection, either as the sounding vehicle to carry Dante’s poetry as song to the Lady, or in silent reliance on the

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quadrivial concepts of Musica. The single ballata of this collection, found in section XII, provides a good example of the linking between love and the heart, where music is the servant of the heart. It opens: “My ballata, I would have you seek out Love and to the presence of my lady bring that the excuses which for me you sing he may by reasoned argument improve.” At the opening of the second stanza “Entering with love – an embassy of two – begin with music sweet” as also at the opening of the third stanza, the ballata speaks “By means of my sweet music, stay with her and for your servant’s sake concerning him, hold converse as you will. If your request for pardon she fulfil by her fair smile may she forgiveness show.” Then Dante addresses the ballata: “My gentle ballata, when you please to go at a propitious moment make your move.”36 This work is known as a ballata di scusa (ballata of pardon) and was usually addressed to an irate beloved. The style is possibly inspired by the Occitan escondig (pardon) genre where the troubadour defends himself against slander. The whole poem is an extended tornada documenting a discussion between the poet and the structural form, the ballata, which will convey the poet’s words. The ballata form, developed mid-thirteenth century, was originally written for music and dance, hence the name.37 The ripresa was sung by the dancers and the piedi and volta by a soloist. Dante was clearly aiming for the light and frothy trilling melodies and tripping steps of the popular style of the ballata, but to my mind he missed the mark. Because sense groups, or the group of notes capturing a musical idea, need to sound in real time, they tend to be rather short. In the lyric, or poetry in general, sense groups, or that small number of words needed to convey an idea, because they are not reliant on real time performance, in that they can be read and reread and reflected upon, tend to be longer and so the lyric can be driven by an often quite complex idea. This is very difficult to achieve with short, repeated sense groups such as we find in the typical song lyric. When we hear repeated musical patterns as happens in the ballata, we expect that the ideas associated with those repeats will be related in some obvious way; in Dante’s ballata, there is little consonance of this sort. In fact, none of Dante’s lyrics, as far as I know, were set to music in his own day to create what we today would understand as song. Nonetheless, Dante consistently uses language in both De vulgari eloquentia and La Vita Nuova that confirms that he considered his verse to be song; that is, his lyric is the song without reliance on sounding music. It is true that meter provides a kind of music; rhyme provides a kind of music; and alliteration and assonance are musical, but I think Dante regards his work as musical in the abstract and quadrivial sense of musica, which relates to parts being harmoniously connected. The only case where this might not be true is in that single ballata of La

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Vita Nuova in which he separates music from the complex and addresses it as the vehicle which bears his “song.” Dante’s statement that song is “poetry made from rhetoric and music,”38 though elliptical, is very close to standard definitions of song which speak of a union of music and lyric. Riemann, for example, defines song as “the union of a lyric poem with music, in which the sung word replaces the spoken word, while the musical elements of rhythm and cadence inherent in speech are heightened to . . . rhythmically ordered melody.”39 Implicit in this definition is the idea that music is a language or at least an expressive medium, serving as a vehicle for emotion, especially in its capacity to express the ineffable. Studies that look at the relative contribution of music and the lyric in the expression of emotion in song probably miss the point in that they consider music and lyric as separate and independent entities until they are put to the common purpose of the song.40 For Dante, it seems that the union of the parts (music and lyric) has greater effect on the expression of emotion in the song than the analysis of each half of the formula could explain. Or, put another way, there is something inexplicably expressive that happens when words and music are fused together as one language in the purpose of song. The flaw in this is that, of the surviving repertoire of troubadour song, only one in ten works had an accompanying notated melody. Dante cited examples in the De vulgari eloquentia of works with notated melodies, but he is silent on this and nowhere mentions sounding music in association with song at all. It seems that for him the music of troubadour song was wholly to be found in the verse and the additional notated melody was superfluous. Perhaps his access to this repertoire was not as a listener but as a reader of one of the several notationless chansonniers. This then raises the question of how Dante’s own songs would have been performed and whether performance would have enhanced or diminished the expression of the emotion of the song. These questions must remain unanswered here, clouded as they are by centuries of assumptions about the nature of song. For Dante’s songs, which so clearly project the emotions of the feeling heart, one can only reflect on how affective that expression might have been if Musica had served the cause with sounding melody at least for our unsubtle ears.

The Second View: Inward Reflections on the Feeling Heart in Troubadour Song Dante was not completely accurate in stating that he was the first to consider the theoretical background to writing verse in the vernacular, as he declared at

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the opening of his De Vulgari Eloquentia. The supporting theory and rationale of troubadour song in the vernacular was addressed in the Regles de trobar and Doctrina de compondre dictats (1286–1291), though these deal mainly with matters of syntax and versification.41 While it is true that with the langue d’oc, the troubadours “had a marvellously large, ambiguous, flexible language” to work with, they were much more than technicians and “expressed with extraordinary variety, charm and wit, contrasting feelings of love and anger, hope and bitterness, fidelity and heartache.”42 Several examples of self-conscious theorizing within the songs themselves demonstrate not only facility with the wordsmithing business of line length, rhyme and cadence, but with ease, teasing apart, and weaving together the finest filaments of meaning to distinguish between desire and love, and how the heart is the prime mover in this realm. The inevitable bonding of sexual desire and love and their distinction in the Western Christian love ideal is expressed clearly by William Reddy: “romantic love is paired with sexual desire. The lover feels both at once, yet the two feelings are in tension with each other. Desire is an appetite, self-regarding, pleasure seeking. Love is other-directed and entails placing the good of the beloved above one’s own.”43 This kind of sophisticated self-awareness is the foundation of much troubadour song. Bernart de Ventadorn, certainly one of the greatest of the troubadours and as a love poet rarely surpassed in any age, provides several examples of selfconscious reflection in his works. An examination of these allows us to see Bernart not just as a consummate and articulate word technician, but as a man for whom art is an expression of intense personal emotion. He explains the impossibility of song without the involvement of the feeling heart in his Chantars nom pot gaires valer (PC 70.15): “Singing can hardly be worthwhile to me if it does not come from within the heart, nor can a song come from my heart, if true heartfelt love is not in it.”44 These opening lines present Bernart’s formula about the inspiration for song, which must originate from deep within the heart and only when that heart is completely consumed by love. The final lines of the first stanza, “So therefore song is in my heart, as I have joy of love to share, in mouth and eyes and heart and mind,” confirm that the conditions have been met and that indeed a song is in his heart. His mouth and his eyes are ready to sing with his heart and mind filled with the joy of love.45 The emotions in the following stanzas rise and fall as Bernart reflects on his fortunes in love, ending in the final stanza on an optimistic note: “and every day is Christmas-like when her sweet eyes are filled with love which, slowly, she directs at me; a day is worth a hundred more.”46 The two tornadas, one of three lines and another of two, which follow, provide a fitting closure. The first commends the song, “The verse is fine and natural

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and good for him who understands, and better if he holds to joy,” and the final one commends the poet himself, taking the self-confident step of naming himself: “Bernard of Ventadour now hears and says and does: expect love’s joy.” Now that the canso has been completed he awaits joy from it. As to whether this joy is the recognition of his poetic skill, or support from his patron, or indeed love from his lady, we are left to guess.47 Though the song (chans) is in the process of being sung (chantars) and inhabits a performance present, no melody survives, though it would inevitably have been sung to one. This is not surprising given that troubadour melodies have a very poor survival rate; of the more than 2600 poems, only 264 are preserved with their melodies.48 Nonetheless, Bernart must have been valued as a melodist since, of the more than forty poems by him, an unusually large number, eighteen, survive with melodies.49 Non es meravelha (PC 70.31), in which Bernart vaunts his own artistry as a performer and poet, has its own melody, in fact the singer has a choice of two.50 It is a representative song not only for Bernart but also for the courtly love lyric in general where love is both the source of song and the source of suffering. The connection between these is made explicit in this song where the heart commands that there is no life without love; no song without love. The song begins with a four-line syntactical unit: “It is no wonder that I sing better than any other singer, for my heart draws me more towards love and I am better made for its command.” This is developed in the consequent four lines with “Heart and body and knowledge and sense and force and power I’ve placed in it; the reins so draw me toward love that I don’t strive toward any other direction.”51 Each of the seven stanzas falls similarly into two syntactical halves underlined by both the rhyme scheme and the melodic structure. The rhyme scheme is extraordinarily constrained to only four sounds: an, or, en, es, used in all the fifty-nine lines of the song, arranged to point up the four line syntactic units following the pattern a b b a / c d d c. A further limiting condition is that the rhyme of the last line of each stanza is identical with that of the first line of the following stanza. Thus, the pattern established in stanzas I and II is repeated in stanzas III and IV, and V and VI, with stanza VIII repeating the scheme of stanza I (see Figure 3.1). The expectation is that the tornada will make full use of the established syntactic unit of four lines; that is certainly what an attentive listener would expect. Instead, Bernart rushes towards closure by using the melody and rhyme pattern of the last three lines (see Figure 3.2). The text reads: “To my Cortes, there where she is, I send my verse, and never may it trouble her that I have been away from her so long.”52 This formal address to the beloved allows the performer and listener to step away from the emotional intimacy of the body of the song, as if sealing the envelope and sending the missive on its way: “The quality of Bernart’s

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Figure 3.1: Non es meravelha – end-rhymes.

Figure 3.2: Bernart de Ventadorn Non es meravelha (first stanza). Transcription from Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, R 71 superiore, fol. 9r.

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song reflects the depth, the wholeheartedness to love.”53 The syntactical halves are also confirmed by the melody, which is structured around the repetition of line 1 at line 5, thus dividing the stanza, and the return of line 4 as the last line, which brings closure. Worth noting too is the decorative emphasis on the words chan (song), and chantador (singer). Being the faithful servant of love would not on its own have made Bernart a great poet as he boasts in the opening lines of this song. It is not the sincere feeling of his heart’s love, so much as his ability to create that impression of sincerity. Considerable technical artistry lies behind this unpretentious song where every word seems to spring directly from the heart. Bernart is the master of self-concealing finesse.

Arnault Daniel: miglior fabbro The descriptor, the “better craftsman” was used by Dante in the Commedia and applied to Arnaut Daniel in comparison with Guido Guinizelli.54 The same phrase is used by T. S. Eliot in his dedication to The Wasteland where, in comparison to himself, he describes his friend Ezra Pound as “il miglior fabbro.”55 Arnaut Daniel’s songs, representative of the difficult trobar clus or concealed style, were not popular in his own day but he was nonetheless considered the “gran maestro d’amore” by Petrarch.56 In another example of self-conscious artistry, Arnaut addressed the carefully crafted relationship between the melody and the word in his Ab gai so cundet e leri (PC 29.10): “On a sweet and happy melody, I write, and polish and plane words that will be true and certain when I have filed them smooth, since Love soon refines and gilds my song, which moves to her upon whom Worth wakes and rules.”57 Arnaut uses terms from woodworking to describe his word-crafting. He speaks of making his words “true” as a woodworker might make “true” a board, then refining the words with various finishing tools. What interests this poet is not so much the content as the polish, the finish, the shell of the song. Arnaut takes the unusual step of avoiding structural rhyme within the stanza, providing each of the seven lines with a different end rhyme; a pattern repeated in order in the following five stanzas. This first stanza also suggests a reversal of our assumptions about the song-writing of the troubadours. The assumption has been that the troubadour first develops the verse, then “finds” the melody for it, perhaps providing an explanation of the root of the word troubadour in trobar, to find. But Arnaut has the melody in hand first and it is on this that he crafts his carefully tooled words. Unfortunately, that melody no longer survives.

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Even without the melody, the syntactical breaks within the stanza are clear. In five of the six stanzas, the syntax breaks into an antecedent phrase of four lines and a consequent of three. In the opening stanza, the antecedent is “On a sweet and happy melody, I write, and polish and plane words that will be true and certain when I have filed them smooth”; the reason for the poet’s careful crafting is provided in the consequent, “since Love soon refines and gilds my song, which moves to her upon whom Worth wakes and rules.” The second stanza presents the heart as the receptacle of love and confirms the pattern with an antecedent “Every day I improve and polish, because I love and crave the kindest one in the world: here I tell you openly I’m hers from head to heel,” and consequent which hints at the chill breeze of rejection, “and even if the cold wind blows, the love that rains in my heart keeps me the warmer the colder it is.”58 It is the fourth stanza, the climax of the song, where the contest between bodily desire and non-corporeal love is declared that breaks with this pattern and makes the syntactical break at the end of the fifth line, so that the antecedent focuses on the intensity of love embodied in the lover’s heart: “So much I love her and want her in my heart that I fear to lose her out of excessive desire, (if one can lose something out of excessive love) because her heart overcomes mine and doesn’t part from it,” and the consequent “so, indeed, she holds me like the inn holds the worker” confirms that his love-filled heart dwells within her.59 He rejects worldly wealth and acclaim and even the throne of Rome in the fifth stanza, if he cannot find refuge near her for whom his heart burns and flares. The sixth stanza returns to the theme of the first stanza, with the poet shaping both melody and rhyme in the antecedent “In spite of the pain I endure, I don’t sway from loving well; even if she deserts me, I write melody and rhyme for her,” and the slightly comedic consequent “I suffer more loving than one who labors because, compared to me, the one from Moncli didn’t love Audierna more than an egg.”60 It is perhaps this hint of humor which inflects the tornada: “I am Arnaut who gathers the wind and hunts the hare with the ox and swims against the flow.”61 Again unusually, he names himself, then makes the impossible boast of gathering the wind, proposes the proverb of the ox and the hare (implying the use of disproportionate means to achieve an end), and ends with a proud statement of his own difference. These three lines may be the most famous of all troubadour song: Arnaut himself refers to them in another poem,62 the Monk of Montaudon refers to them in his satire against other troubadours,63 and finally Arnaut used them as the codicil to his Vida.64 These lines operate as Arnaut Daniel’s signature. For all its dazzling technique, this song has some revelations to make about the feeling heart expressed with sophisticated complexity. At first the lover’s heart is a passive receptacle for love,

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which even as it pours down rain and tears, nonetheless warms the lover buffeted by the chill winds of disfavor. The heart then becomes the locus of increasing desire which holds him in thrall as be becomes a slave to his own sensuality “like the inn holds the worker.”

Conclusion There are three significant threads drawn from the ancient world, which form the foundation on which the medieval understanding of song expressing the emotions of the heart was built. These are firstly, Aristotle’s reasoning pointing to the primacy of the heart as the seat of thought and reason and the receptor of sensation. Building on this, the second thread is the use of the voice in oratory and rhetoric to excite or soothe the emotions of an audience. The power of music to change human behavior through ethics is the third thread. Perhaps more influential on the medieval understanding of song are several significant song-like passages from the Old Testament, which were readily absorbed into the chant repertoire of the early church. Devotional singing in worship was one of the fundamental tenets of the Christian practice, and the biblical commentators and Church Fathers were quick to direct the human voice to express heartfelt devotion to the divine. It was these influences from the ancient world and the early Christian church, seasoned by cultural exchange with the established love poetry and song from Muslim Al-Andalus, that ignited the troubadour movement. It was Dante who, with the avowed intention of developing a Tuscan vernacular poetry of love, rediscovered the fading gold of troubadour song. His analysis of the earlier works united with his self-conscious presentation of the fruits of this analysis in his own works, provides us with a clear view of the contemporary connections between the heart, the love it contains or receives, and the expressing voice of song. More remarkable than this, however, is what the troubadours themselves had to say of the intentional crafting of these connections. These songs, revelatory of the theory and technique of expressive song-writing, appear in considerable numbers evenly throughout the movement and provide a fascinating view of the creative artist at work. They give us a glimpse of the poet standing outside his work observing it while he observes himself creating it. It resets the relationship between composer, song, audience, and reader. The troubadours who invoked the heart in their songs gave the poet and the audience access to a complex system involving the whole range of human experience and in the process developed a language for the feeling heart that would become fundamental to all love song.

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Notes 1.

2.

3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

Judith Ann Peraino, Giving Voice to Love: Song and Self-Expression from the Troubadours to Guillaume De Machaut (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Though not musicological, direct reference to the feeling heart occurs in the work of Roland Barthes, particularly in his The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, 1st ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985). “nichil aliud est quam fictio rethorica musicaque poita.” DVE II.iv.2 [Dante Alighieri, Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, ed. and trans. Steven Botterill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 56; hereafter DVE]. DVE; Dante Alighieri, La Vita Nuova: Poems of Youth, ed. and trans. Barbara Reynolds (London: Penguin, 2004). See J. H. Marshall and Vidal Raimon, The Razos De Trobar of Raimon Vidal and Associated Texts (London: Oxford University Press, 1972). The associated texts include Jofre de Foixà’s Regles de trobar and the anonymous Doctrina de compondre dictats. See Alfred Pillet and Henry Carstens, Bibliographie der Troubadours (New York: B. Franklin, 1968). Updated online as Bibliografia elettronica dei trovatori [BEdT], accessed July 9, 2017, http://www.bedt.it/BEdT_04_25/id_testo_pc.aspx. The abbreviated reference for this work is PC 70.15, where PC refers to the original bibliographers, Pillet and Carstens, 70 is the troubadour number and 15 is the number for the specific song. Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance, rev. ed. (London: P. Owen, 1960). De Juv. 469a, 3 “ . . . in sanguineous animals the source . . . of the sensitive soul . . . must be in the heart . . . ”; 469a, 10 “ . . . all sanguineous animals have the supreme organ of the sense-faculties in the heart, for it is here that we must look for the common sensorium belonging to all the sense organs.” De Anima 433a, 15 “Every desire too is for the sake of something; for the object of desire is the starting-point for the practical intellect, and the final step is the starting-point for action.” 433a, 17 “the object of desire produces movement.” Quint. Inst. 1.11.31 from Quintilian. The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, ed. by Harold Edgeworth Butler, 4 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920, also available online through Perseus). Plato Republic III.398–403 in Plato, The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett, ed. D. A. Russell and R. M. Hare, 4th ed., 4 vols. (London: Sphere, 1970), vol. 4, 165–71; Aristotle, Politics, book viii, chaps. 5–7 in Aristotle, The Politics, trans. Carnes Lord (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). See Joseph Dyer, “Speculative ‘Musica’ and the Medieval University of Paris,” Music & Letters 90, no. 2 (2009): 177–204, summarizing the scholastic rethinking of music as it was presented as one discipline of the quadrivium. Constant J. Mews, John N. Crossley, Catherine Jeffreys, Leigh McKinnon and Carol J. Williams, eds., Johannes de Grocheio: Ars musice (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2011). Ibid., 21.1, 88–89. Ibid., 9.8, 68–69. As an aside which cannot be followed up here, see Dante’s La vita nuova which opens “In the book of my memory . . . ” referring to his own history, the story of his life so far. See Alighieri, La Vita Nuova, 29.

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16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

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Ephesians, 5.19. Conf. 9.6.14; 9.7.16; 10.33.49–50, in Augustine, The Confessions (Adelaide: The University of Adelaide Library, 2008), accessed October 9, 2017, http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/a/ augustine/a92c/ “tamen cum mihi accidit ut me amplius cantus quam res quae canitur moveat, poenaliter me peccare confiteor et tunc mallem non audire cantantem.” Ibid., 10.33. 49–50. “Psalmis et hymnis, cum oratis, deum, hoc versetur in corde quod profertur in ore.” Praeceptum 2.3, in George Lawless, Augustine of Hippo and his Monastic Rule (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 84. The theory of Muslim influence through Spain as a significant influence on the flowering of troubadour song is developed in Magda Bogin, The Women Troubadours (New York: Norton, 1980). For more on this, see Mahmoud Guettat, La Musique Classique du Maghreb (Paris: Sindbad, 1980). Dante is named as the originator of this new style of Italian verse by Bonagiunta da Lucca (ca. 1220–1290) in Purgatorio 24, 57. See https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/ divine-comedy/purgatorio/purgatorio-24/, accessed October 9, 2017. “Cum neminem ante nos de vulgaris eloquentie doctrina quicquam inveniamus tractasse, . . . locutioni vulgarium gentium prodesse temptabimus, . . . ” DVE I.i.1 [Botterill, 2–3]. “Totum vero quod in Europa restat ab istis tertium tenuit ydioma, licet nunc tripharium videatur: nam alii oc, alii oïl, aliis sì affirmando, ut puta Yspani, Franco et Latini.” DVE I. viii.5 [Botterill, 16]. “videlicet Biblia cum Troianorum Romanorumque gestibus compilata et Arturi regis ambages pulcerrime, . . . ” DVE I.x.2 [Botterrill, 22]. Also see Grocheio, Ars musice [9.3]. “Pro se vero argumentatur alia, scilicet oc, quod vulgares eloquentes in ea primitus poetati sunt tanquam in perfectiori dulciorique loquela, . . . ” DVE I.x.2 [Botterill, 22) “nichil aliud est quam fictio rethorica musicaque poita.” DVE II.iv.2 [Botterrill, 56]. “Quod autem exaltatum sit potestate, videtur. Et quid maioris potestatis est quam quod humana corda versare potest, ita ut nolentem volentem et volentem nolentem faciat, velut ipsum et fecit et facit?” DVE I.xvii.4 [Botterril, 40]. Alighieri, La Vita Nuova, 11. For the vida, see Anthony Bonner, ed., Songs of the Troubadours (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1972), 189; and for an excellent discussion about the work, see Huw Grange, “Guilhem De Cabestanh’s Eaten Heart, or the Dangers of Literalizing Troubadour Song,” Tenso 27, no. 1–2 (2012): 92–108. For an English translation, see https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Decameron/Novel_4,_9, accessed October 10, 2017. The reference to Cabestanh’s heart is found in Canto IV, see https://www.poetryfounda tion.org/poems/54316/canto-iv, accessed October 10, 2017. This “wise man” is Guido Giunizelli. The standard philosophical pairing of form and matter implies the notion that matter is shaped by the form in the Aristotelian sense. Alighieri, La Vita Nuova, 59–60. For the Italian text, see “Digital Dante,” accessed March 8, 2017, http://digitaldante.columbia.edu/library/dantes-works/la-vita-nuova/#cap20.

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36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

41.

42. 43. 44.

45.

46. 47.

48.

49.

50.

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Ibid., 41–45; for the Italian text, see “Digital Dante,” accessed March 8, 2017, http://digi taldante.columbia.edu/library/dantes-works/la-vita-nuova/#cap12. The ballata has the musical structure AbbaA with the first and last sections (ripresa) having the same melody and words. The “b” (piedi) lines repeat a melody with different words and the “a” (volta) uses the same melody as the ripresa, though with different words. See above, note 1 DVE II.iv.2 [Botterrill, 56]. Hugo Riemann, Dictionary of Music, trans. J. S. Shedlock, 2 vols (London: Augener & Co., 1908), q.v. “Lied.” See, for example, Rada Mihalcea, and Carlo Strapparava, “Lyrics, Music and Emotions,” Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language and Learning, Jeju Island, Korea, July 12–14, 2012, 590–99. J. H. Marshall and Vidal Raimon, The Razos de Trobar of Raimon Vidal and Associated Texts (London: Oxford University Press, 1972). The associated texts include Jofre de Foixà’s Regles de trobar and the anonymous Doctrina de compondre dictats. Barbara H. Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 317. William M. Reddy, The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900–1200 CE (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 1. Alfred Pillet and Henry Carstens, Bibliographie der Troubadours (New York: B. Franklin, 1968). Updated online as Bibliografia elettronica dei trovatori [BEdT], accessed July 9, 2017, http://www.bedt.it/BEdT_04_25/id_testo_pc.aspx. This significant song is not found with melody in any of its seven manuscript transmissions; the easiest to read is Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, latini 5232, fol. 94 r–v, accessed July 9, 2017, http://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.lat.5232. “Chantars no pot gaire valer, / Si d’ins dal cor no mou lo chans! / Ni chans no pot dal cor mover, / Si no i es fin’ amors coraus. / Per so es mos chantars cabaus / Qu’en joi d’amor ai et enten / La boch’ e.ls olhs e.l cor e.l sen.” See http://trobadors.iec.cat/veure_d.asp?id_ obra=831 an excellent website produced by the Institut d’Estudis Catalans, accessed July 9, 2017. Translation from Stephen G. Nichols and John A. Galm, eds., The Songs of Bernart De Ventadorn: Complete Texts, Translations, Notes and Glossary (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1962), 80–82. “c’aicel jorns me sembla nadaus / c’ab sos bels olhs espiritaus / m’esgarda; mas so fai tan len / c’us sols dias me dura cen!” See preceding note. See Philippe Ménard, “Le Coeur dans les Poésies de Bernard de Ventadour,” in Actes du Ve Congrès International de Langue et Littérature d’Oc et d’Etudes Franco-Provençales, Nice, 6–12 Septembre, 1967, ed. G. Moignet and R. Lasalle (Nice: Fac. des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines de Nice, 1974), 182–95. John Stevens, et al, “Troubadours, Trouvères,” “Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press,” accessed March 4, 2017, http://www.oxfordmusicon line.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/28468. Robert Falck and John Haines, “Bernart de Ventadorn,” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, accessed July 20, 2016, http://www.oxfordmusi conline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/02862. The melody chosen for examination here is that from Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, R 71 superiore, fol. 9r, as it is complete and very clear, whereas the version in Paris,

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51.

52. 53. 54.

55. 56.

57.

58.

59.

60.

61. 62.

63.

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Bibliothèque nationale, fonds français 844, fol. 191r, is difficult to read, given that this folio is damaged and also the essential clefs of at least two lines are questionable. “Non es meravelha s’eu chan / melhs de nul autre chantador, / que plus me tra.l cors vas amor / el melhs sui faihz a so coman. / Cor e cors e saber e sen / e fors’ e poder i ai mes. / Si.m tira vas amor lo fres / que vas autra part no.m aten.” See http://www.bedt.it/ BEdT_04_25/id_testo_pc.aspx, accessed July 9, 2017. Translation from Nichols and Galm, The Songs of Bernart De Ventadorn, 132–34. “A Mo Cortes, lai on ilh es, / Tramet lo vers, e ja no.lh pes / Car n’ai estat tan lonjamen.” See preceding note. Reddy, The Making of Romantic Love, 159. Purgatorio xxvi, 117: “O frate – disse –, questi ch’io ti cerno col dito – e additò un spirto innanzi – fu miglior fabbro del parlar materno.” (“O brother, I can show among our band” (he pointed out a spirit in front) “a better craftsman of his mother-tongue”). These words are said by Guido Guinizelli. T. S. Eliot. The Waste Land and Other Poems (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1934). Trionfo d’Amore, IV, 40–42: “fra tutti il primo Arnaldo Danïello, / gran maestro d’amor, ch’a la sua terra / ancor fa onor col suo dir strano e bello;” (First of them all was Arnaut Daniel, / Master in love; and he his native land / Honors with the strange beauty of his verse.) “Ab gai so cundet e leri / fas motz e capus e doli, / que seran verai e sert / quan n’aurai passat la lima, / qu’Amor marves plan e daura / mon chantar que de lieis mueu / cui Pretz manten e governa.” See http://www.bedt.it/BEdT_04_25/id_testo_pc.aspx, accessed July 9, 2017. Translation from Leslie Thomas Topsfield. Troubadours and Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 208–11. “Tot jorn melhur e esmeri / quar la gensor am e coli / del mon, so’us dic en apert: / sieu so del pe tro qu’al cima /// e si tot venta’ill freg’aura, / l’amor qu’ins el cor mi pleu / mi ten caut on plus iverna.” See preceding note. “Tan l’am de cor e la queri / qu’ab trop voler cug l’am toli, / s’om ren per trop amar pert, / que’l sieu cors sobretrasima / lo mieu tot e non s’aisaura: /// tan n’a de ver fag renueu / q’obrador n’ai’e taverna.” See note 49. “Ges pel maltrag que’n soferi / de ben amar no’m destoli; / si tot mi ten en desert / per lieis fas lo son e’l rima: /// piegz tratz, aman, qu’om que laura, / qu’anc non amet plus d’un hueu / sel de Moncli Audierna.” The man from Moncli and Lady Audierna are unidentified lovers, probably from contemporary popular romance. See note 49. “Ieu sui Arnautz qu’amas l’aura / e cas la lebre ab lo bueu / e nadi contra suberna.” See note 49. “Ans que sim reston de branchas” PC 29.3, where the last two lines of the first stanza are “I know so much that I can stay the running flow, and my oxen are much quicker than hares.” [tan sai que’l cors fas restar de suberna / e mos buous es pro plus correns que lebres.] See http://www.bedt.it/BEdT_04_25/id_testo_pc.aspx and http://www.trobar. org/troubadours/arnaut_daniel/arnaut_daniel_11.php, accessed July 9, 2017. Pois Peire d’Alvernh’ a chantat in stanza 8 “With Arnaut that’s seven: . . . And ever since he hunted the hare with the ox and swam against the rising tide, his songs have been completely worthless.” [Ab Arnaut Daniel son set, / Qu’a sa vida be no chantet, / Mas us fols motz c’om non enten. / Pois la lebre ab lo bou chasset / E contra suberna nadet, / No val sos chans un aguillen.] See: http://www.bedt.it/BEdT_04_25/id_testo_pc.aspx and http://www.trobar.org/troubadours/montaudon/monge01.php, accessed July 9, 2017.

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Arnaut’s Vida ends “And he loved a lady of noble lineage from Gascony, the wife of En Guilhem de Buovilla, but it would seem that the lady never gave him pleasure in love, which is why he said ‘I am Arnaut who gathers the wind and hunts the hare with the ox and swims against the incoming tide’.” [Et amet una auta dompna de Gascoigna, moiller d’En Guillem de Buonvila, mas non fo crezut qez anc la dompna li fezes plazer en dreich d’amor. Per que el ditz: “Eu sui Arnautz q’amas l’aura e caz la lebre ab lo boue nadi contra suberna”]. See http://www.rialto.unina.it/Vidas/ArnDan(B).htm, accessed March 8, 2017.

Bronwyn Reddan

4 The Battle for Control of the Heart in Charles Perrault’s Dialogue de l’Amour et l’Amitié (1660) In 1660, French writer and poet Charles Perrault published a dialogue examining the nature of love and friendship and their representation in gallant conversation in mid seventeenth-century French salons.1 His Dialogue de l’Amour et l’Amitié (Dialogue on Love and Friendship) anthropomorphizes Love and Friendship as a brother and sister engaged in a lively discussion about how the world sees them and the nature of their respective relationships with other allegorical figures including Beauty, Desire, Goodness, and Reason.2 In developing different personalities for these anthropomorphized figures, Perrault conceptualizes the heart as a battlefield in which different forces compete for control of the feeling subject. Love is the dominant figure in this struggle; he boasts of his power to enter hearts incognito and admits taking pleasure in mistreating those who resist his sovereignty.3 But Love does not seek to rule all spheres of human activity. He is content to leave serious matters to Reason, whom he accuses of failing to respect his prerogatives of pleasure and gallantry. According to Love, it is Reason’s desire for absolute sovereignty over all matters that means they cannot coexist peacefully.4 Perrault’s suggestion that Love and Reason govern different aspects of human behavior, and that conflict arises when one of them encroaches on the territory of the other, emphasizes the centrality of the heart as the metaphorical location of feeling and subjectivity in seventeenth-century French literature. As Joan DeJean argues, interest in the heart as the spiritual or affective core of the feeling subject was an important theme in seventeenthcentury French texts.5 Her analysis of emotions discourse in these texts proposes a three-phase model of semantic innovation in which the heart played an increasingly prominent role.6 One of the most important influences on Perrault’s Dialogue is the Carte de Tendre (Map of Tenderness) in Madeleine de Scudéry’s ten-volume novel Clélie, Histoire romaine (1654–1660). Scudéry’s exploration of the affective dimensions of love and friendship in the Carte de Tendre emphasizes the significance of the

Note: Dr Bronwyn Reddan is the recipient of an Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions Project-to-Publication Fellowship (project number CE110001011). This chapter was supported by that fellowship. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513275-005

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heart in seventeenth-century French literature. In Clélie, the heart is represented as the metaphorical location of feeling and the source of a woman’s authority to define her relationships with her male suitors.7 Both ideas are embodied in the eponymous protagonist of the novel, Clélie, who is presented as an authority on the subject of tendresse, a concept introduced by Scudéry that developed a theory of love based on reciprocity and self-control.8 Clélie cites her heart as the source of her authority: “If it is true that I do not speak badly about it [tendresse] . . . it is because my heart taught me to speak well; it is not difficult to say what one feels.”9 She defines tendresse as “a certain sensibility of the heart” that allows her to distinguish tendre friends from ordinary friends.10 This definition of tendresse emphasizes the ability of the feeling subject to control the feelings in their heart. It is Clélie who decides if a suitor is granted a place in her heart as one of her tendre Amis (tender friends). She offers the Carte de Tendre to her suitors as a chart of the affective topography they must navigate to reach the destination of tendre.11 This reformulation of the affective dimensions of courtship identifies friendship as the model for tendresse, which, as Anne Duggan observes, reimagines courtship as a contractual negotiation and love as a rational social performance.12 Perrault’s Dialogue echoes Scudéry’s illustration of the metaphorical significance of the heart as the centre or core of the feeling subject, but his account of Love’s battle with Reason problematizes Scudéry’s suggestion that the Carte de Tendre offers a method for regulating love. Each author chooses different metaphors to conceptualize the heart; for Perrault the heart is both a battleground of and a vessel for emotion, whereas Scudéry imagines the heart as an emotional landscape. Commentary on Perrault’s Dialogue proposes two alternative interpretations of its contemporary significance, neither of which considers his conceptualization of the heart. The first reads Perrault’s text as an example of salon conversation.13 This reading is supported by Perrault’s prefatory letter in which he describes the dialogue as a “petite Galanterie” (small gallantry) composed in the context of conversation about the nature of love and friendship.14 The second reads the dialogue as a burlesque parody of the précieuse salon conversations ridiculed by Molière.15 This reading is based on the style of Perrault’s text, which Jean-Michel Pelous describes as an example of the use of humor to discuss the bad reputation of love among women.16 In this chapter, I propose a reading of the Dialogue that moves away from the question of whether it presents a serious or satiric take on love. Instead, I suggest that Perrault’s text is best understood as part of an ongoing conversation in seventeenth-century French salons about the conceptualization of feeling states now broadly categorized as emotions.17 It reflects the influence of classical and medieval medical theories that emphasized the significance of the heart as the seat of the passions and the body’s source of heat and

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vitality, as well as contemporary interest in the nature and effects of love.18 This interpretation of the Dialogue is based on a close reading of Perrault’s text in light of salon conversation about love exemplified by Scudéry’s Carte de Tendre.19

The Heart as a Site of Emotional Struggle Perrault’s representation of the heart as a vessel for emotion is part of a long intellectual and iconographical tradition identifying the heart as a symbol of passion and the source of life and vitality.20 This representation of the heart invokes Plato’s identification of the heart as the guardian of feeling and the source of the heat of the passions.21 It also reflects the influence of Hippocratic and Aristotelian thought in identifying the heart, rather than the soul or the mind, as the location of mental functioning and consciousness.22 Perrault’s emphasis on the emotional cadence of the heart links the Dialogue with the Galenic/Aristotelian framework Robert Erickson and Lucie Desjardins identify as a central feature of early modern thinking about the heart. This framework encompassed a range of different physiological and figurative meanings and emphasized the centrality of the heart as the source of vital functions including cognition, feeling, desire, and volition, as well as the seat of courage and emotion.23 The Dialogue follows this Galenic tradition rather than mechanical interpretations of the relationship between the heart and the circulation of blood developed by seventeenth-century theorists such as William Harvey and René Descartes.24 Perrault’s nuanced conceptualization of the relationship between love, agency and cognition in the Dialogue has not been examined beyond perfunctory characterization as “a typical analysis of emotion.”25 Unlike his fairy tales, which are the subject of countless books and articles, his Dialogue has not attracted any sustained critical attention. When it appears in commentary on Perrault’s literary oeuvre, it is referred to as a minor early work of prose now largely forgotten.26 This type of criticism emphasizes the connection between the Dialogue and the salon context in which it was composed. For example, Delphine Denis cites the Dialogue as evidence of the development of a literary convention of confrontation between love and friendship in the decade following the publication of Scudéry’s Carte de Tendre in 1654.27 Analysis of the substance of Perrault’s Dialogue is also limited. Paul Bonnefon’s 1904 essay on Perrault’s oeuvre is a rare exception but his comments are limited to a paragraph that describes the Dialogue as a “raffiné et subtil” (refined and subtle) exploration of the heart of which Scudéry would approve.28 Although undoubtedly written in the style of mid seventeenth-century

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salon literature, the following discussion argues that the Dialogue has meaning beyond its status as an example of a fashionable literary genre. Perrault’s representation of the heart as a vessel over which love and reason compete for control is an important intervention in seventeenth-century debates about the anatomical and affective significance of the heart. The starting point for examining Perrault’s conceptualization of the heart is the articulation of his motivations in a letter to Monsieur H. A. D’A, François Hédelin, abbé d’Aubignac. In this letter of dedication, Perrault develops a detailed genealogy of Love and Friendship and identifies his reason for publishing the Dialogue as his inability to refuse a request from d’Aubignac to have a copy of it, “[s]ince it is not enough that I have read my Dialogue to you.”29 After remarking on the effort required to transform his dialogue into a written text, “I confess, Monsieur, that I had much difficultly in converting it,”30 Perrault praises the worldly and delicate taste of his reader and expresses his desire that in reading the text and reflecting upon it, d’Aubignac does not revise his favorable opinion of it.31 But before d’Aubignac can proceed with his reading of the “petite Galanterie,” Perrault provides an account of a conversation discussing the ideas in it. According to Perrault, this discussion arose in response to questions he was asked a few days earlier.32 The nature of these questions – “why are Love and Friendship called Brother and Sister” (iii) and “who is the elder of the two, Love or Friendship” (vi) – as well as Perrault’s reference to a salon woman (femme d’esprit) as the person who posed the latter question, locates this conversation in the salon milieu in which Perrault was an active participant. Perrault’s references to the gallant nature of his text, as well as his expectation that d’Aubignac will evaluate it in accordance with the salon concepts of goût (taste) further emphasizes the significance of the salon in shaping the form and content of the Dialogue. The most important feature of Perrault’s letter is his exposition of the familial relationship between Love and Friendship. Citing the authority of Plato, Perrault argues that Love is the son born of passion between Désir (Desire) and Beauté (Beauty). Friendship is the daughter produced by a subsequent union between Desire and Beauty’s sister, Bonté (Goodness).33 A visual illustration of this family tree can be seen in Figure 4.1. It shows the unions between Désir and Beauté and Désir and Bonté, as well as the births of their respective children, Amour and Amitié. Perrault explains this genealogy in reference to the nature of contemporary gender norms. He claims that “we still see today that if we love a Mistress because she is beautiful, we love a Friend because he is good.”34 Perrault identifies this difference between male friendship and heterosexual romantic relationships as the reason Love and Friendship are brother and sister; they both issue from desire but are oriented towards different objects. He therefore concludes

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Figure 4.1: Genealogy of Amour and Amitié.

that Love and Friendship are half-siblings descended from the same father but with different mothers. Perrault’s contribution to salon conversation about the differences between love and friendship is further developed in his explanation of why Love is the elder sibling. In making this case, Perrault distinguishes his take on love from the perspective of Latin and Greek poets who speak of “grand Amour, Father of all things” rather than his son, of whom Perrault speaks.35 Perrault’s claim that Love is older than Friendship is based on his account of the story of their birth.36 This tale begins with their mothers, Beauty and Goodness, whom Perrault describes as “two sisters so accomplished and charming that one cannot see or know them without loving them.”37 Their resemblance means that they are often mistaken for each other, but Perrault argues that close observation reveals their differences. Beauty’s charms rest in her radiant appearance and forceful personality. She is imperious and proud and obeyed more promptly than any king: “for the conquest of a heart she need only be regarded.”38 Goodness is the mirror image of her extroverted sister. She is modest, unassuming and “infinitely more amiable”; her charms are less obvious, but ultimately “more solid and true than those of Beauty.”39 The catalyst for the conception of Love and Friendship is Desire. He is represented by Perrault as a restless young man of feeling who travels incessantly in search of adventure.40 He falls in love with Beauty at first sight, and his gallant courtship leads promptly to their marriage, from which Love is born. Love is, at first, a delightful infant. But after providing pleasure to his parents through songs, poems, and other gallant entertainments, he transforms into “the cruelest child that ever was.”41 He refuses to eat, drink or sleep, and sighs and complains incessantly. Then, after several days of marriage, Desire notices his sister-in-law, Goodness, whose presence he had overlooked due to his “grand passion” for his

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wife. He is charmed by Goodness’s sweet humor, patience, and generosity, and she agrees to take him as her husband. Friendship is then born. Friendship is not as agreeable as Love in her infancy but, as she becomes older, no social gathering is complete without her: “she appeared so charming and beautiful that she was desired and sought after by everyone who saw her.”42 Despite the role of Desire in initiating the unions that led to their birth, it is from the character of their mothers that Love and Friendship inherit their respective temperaments. Like Beauty, Love exercises absolute tyranny over the hearts of those he conquers and he shares his mother’s pleasure in the exercise of power over those subject to his will.43 By contrast, Friendship reflects her mother’s sweet nature. She is reluctant to cause inconvenience to anyone and willingly cedes her place in the hearts of those Love wishes to dominate.44 This representation of the different characteristics of Beauty and Goodness emphasizes their distinct personalities in order to justify Perrault’s conclusion that love is older than friendship. In making this argument, Perrault does not foreshadow commentary on marriage as a process of transforming love into friendship in the Dialogue. Marriage does not feature in the Dialogue aside from a brief exchange in which Friendship reproaches Love for undermining marriages by being seen only between wives and gallants and never with husbands and wives. Love does not respond to this accusation. Instead, he accuses Friendship of failing to be found in places where she ought to be, namely between brothers and sisters and parents.45 This exchange encapsulates the power dynamic between Love and Friendship: Love is in control of the conversation and his volition determines the subject matter of their exchange. The contrasting personalities of Love and Friendship is one of the most interesting features of Perrault’s Dialogue. Their playful exchange begins with a list of their complaints about the way they are perceived in the world. Both claim to be misrepresented in salon conversation; Love bemoans the bad things that are said about him, while Friendship laments that she is forgotten.46 In their efforts to correct the record and explain their true nature, Love and Friendship embody the gendered power dynamic that underpins the Dialogue. The gendering of Love as masculine and Friendship as feminine has important implications for Perrault’s representation of the heart as a metaphorical battlefield in which emotions struggle for control over the feeling subject. This is particularly true with respect to the language Love uses to explain his power over human hearts. His assertion of absolute dominion reads like a manifesto produced by a military leader justifying the conquest of foreign lands. Love enters hearts without permission or invitation and takes pleasure in gaining entry by masquerading as Respect or a “simple galanterie.”47 He replaces Friendship without warning or acknowledgement, but when a heart governed by reason

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attempts to exchange love for friendship, Love denies their bid for liberty. No time, person, or place is exempt from his persecution.48 Perrault’s characterization of Love as a tyrannical figure who asserts control over subjects who suffer because of his cruelty but cannot bear to live without him, has a long history in literary and philosophical reflection on the nature of love and its effects.49 The importance of this theme in seventeenth-century French texts is reflected in salon poetry and novels, songs, and operas, as well as in non-literary texts such as medical and religious treatises.50 Love was also an important topic of conversation in seventeenth-century literary salons and a central theme in the novels associated with salon literary production.51 Seventeenthcentury authors represented love variously as a perfect union based on the worship of beauty and virtue, a weakness or illness, and a dangerous, unmanageable passion.52 In this context, Jacques Ferrand’s 1610 medical treatise on lovesickness provides a vivid illustration of the physical suffering caused by love and the effect of love on the heart. According to Ferrand, once love has entered the body by deceiving the eyes (the gatekeepers of the soul), it launches an attack on reason, first from the liver, and then from the heart. Once love controls the heart, it succeeds in overwhelming reason and corrupting bodily functions, which causes symptoms such as paleness, distraction, loss of appetite and weight, sleeplessness, and weeping.53 Perrault’s representation of Love’s tyrannical nature is consistent with the treatment of love in seventeenth-century literature as an “irresistibly powerful force.”54 Love’s subjects love without knowing, they lose their reason, and once conquered by him, they can never escape. Love has no sympathy for those who complain about him: “all their noise does not move me . . . they are not as unhappy as they want us to believe.”55 He responds to Friendship’s contention that she knows of no greater cause of pain in human existence by identifying desire for love as an essential element of the human condition. Love claims that no amount of success brings contentment without love; even those he mistreats prefer to remain in his empire rather than give up love.56 Love’s victims do not want to escape the prison that Friendship accuses him of creating because “their illness is more agreeable than health.”57 Love is particularly unfeeling in his treatment of women. He is infuriated by their refusal to acknowledge his control of their hearts and therefore makes them “sigh for their Lovers [and] cry at their absence or infidelity.”58 He causes women physical pain in the knowledge that he will not be blamed because when Love causes women to suffer, they pretend the cause is a migraine or other physical ailments.59 Love suggests that this is a matter of pride rather than ignorance: “I rarely enter a heart that does not perceive me.”60 By contrast, men complain constantly about Love and create appalling paintings of him.61

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The Struggle between Love and Reason Despite Love’s boasts of ruling over an empire of subjugated hearts, he does not seek to control all aspects of his subjects’ lives. He is, according to Perrault, content to leave the serious matters of business, law, and politics to Reason. Love claims pleasure and all the activities associated with it – balls, gifts, the gallantry of lovers – as his prerogative. Love’s complaint against Reason is that she unjustly interferes with his pleasurable divertissements, and that it is her desire to rule all facets of human existence that means they cannot coexist peacefully.62 Love articulates this criticism in response to the accusation that he is the cause of conflict with reason because he “chases her [Reason] from all of the hearts over which [he is] the master.”63 He suggests that the conflict between them would be resolved if they confined their activities to their respective spheres of influence: “if she would not interfere with my affairs, as I do not meddle in hers, we would live very well together.”64 Perrault’s personification of Love and Reason as adversarial characters battling for control over the heart reframed criticism of love as an irrational passion by suggesting that it is reason, not love, which is disrupting the balance between the two. Perrault was not the only seventeenth-century author to represent the relationship between love and reason as an adversarial battle. Interest in the relationship between passion and reason was an important theme in seventeenth-century philosophical discourse as well as salon conversation.65 Nicolas Coëffeteau’s Tableau des passions humaines, de leurs causes et leurs effets (1620) describes love as a passion formed in the heart and a fatal force that unleashes misfortune and disorder as well as the source of all that is good in human life.66 The use of reason to regulate or moderate the passions to produce virtuous action is an important theme in Coëffeteau’s treaty, as well as in JeanFrançois Senault’s De l’Usage des Passions (1641) and Descartes’s Les Passions de l’âme (1649).67 In 1664, René Le Pays published an account of the territorial struggle between Love and Reason entitled Dialogue de L’Amour et de la Raison (Dialogue of Love and Reason). This allegorical conversation was included in Le Pays’s collection of gallant texts, Amitiez, Amours et Amourettes.68 It appears in a letter to Caliste, one of Le Pays’s female correspondents, and Le Pays introduces the dialogue as a text composed in response to a request from Caliste.69 The two letters immediately preceding this letter recount Le Pays’s acceptance of an invitation to attend Caliste’s salon to read the part of Love in Perrault’s Dialogue de l’Amour et l’Amitié to a small group.70 It is likely that Caliste’s request to Le Pays was made during this salon gathering and that he therefore composed the Dialogue de L’Amour et de la Raison in response to salon conversation about Perrault’s dialogue.

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As in Perrault’s Dialogue de l’Amour et l’Amitié, the character of Love in the Dialogue de L’Amour et de la Raison uses the language of sovereignty to defend himself from reproach by Reason. Reason’s primary complaint is that Love’s actions make it impossible for her to govern her subjects. She claims that when Love arrives he makes her position untenable: “you who drive me from all the places where you enter, who is never content while I occupy the least part of a soul.”71 Reason cannot compete with Love’s attacks as honor and duty are no match for the seductive power of his flattery.72 Reason’s strongest criticism is directed at Love’s actions with respect to marriage. She accuses him of encouraging young women to disobey their parents by causing them to love someone other than the future spouse chosen for them.73 Love defends himself by asserting his right to be consulted in the choice of marriage partner. He claims that fathers act unreasonably in failing to consult him because in doing so they usurp his sovereignty over the hearts of their daughters. According to Love, he is the one acting reasonably in seeking to protect his rights.74 The premise of this argument is that Love’s authority over hearts is absolute. Love makes this explicit by using his status as a god as his trump card against parental authority. He claims that reason requires that the counsel of a god (his) take precedence to the counsel of men (fathers). Moreover, Love suggests that any difference of opinion between him and a father causes “a civil war” in the heart receiving conflicting advice.75 Reason must therefore want Love’s counsel to be followed to achieve peace.76 Unlike Perrault’s Love, Le Pays’s Love does not deny that his actions encroach on Reason’s territory, nor does he suggest that peaceful co-existence would be possible if they respected each other’s respective sovereign rights. The gendered representation of their respective personalities further emphasizes the idea that Love and Reason are fundamentally incompatible. Reason is portrayed as an ill-tempered old woman and Love as an impertinent young man. This is a deliberate authorial strategy as Le Pays tells Caliste that he has decided to show Reason “in a bad mood with Love,”77 and to attempt to make Love “so reasonable” that he might make Caliste susceptible to love.78 The competition between Love and Reason is the most important feature of Le Pays dialogue; the function of the heart as their field of battle is relatively unimportant. While Le Pays’s Love and Reason refer to the heart as Love’s territory and the soul as Reason’s domain, the aim of their verbal contest is to determine which of them is the most reasonable. The outcome of this contest is not explicitly associated with control of the heart as it is in Perrault’s dialogue. This is illustrated by Love’s identification of his exercise of power as the key difference between him and Reason; he acts as a sovereign because he is reasonable only

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when it suits him, whereas Reason cannot exercise absolute power because she must be reasonable at all times.79 Le Pays’s suggestion that Love is capable of displacing Reason by developing an alternative model of reason is intriguing in light of Scudéry’s representation of love as a rational social performance in the Carte de Tendre. Scudéry’s emphasis on the ability of the feeling subject to regulate the extent to which they allow their heart to be moved by the performance of tendre represents the heart as an affective landscape in which both love and reason co-exist. In creating a map of the route to a woman’s heart, Scudéry moves beyond the notion of a binary opposition between love and reason by reformulating the choice of whether and whom to love as a rational assessment based on the extent to which the territory charted by the Carte de Tendre is successfully navigated. Suitors must respect the methodology of tendre in order to gain entry into a woman’s heart and the power to decide whether they reach this destination is vested in the women whom they court.80 Their hearts are not, as Perrault and Le Pays suggest, susceptible to conquest by love because the Carte de Tendre provides women with a set of social scripts that enables them to exercise control over who obtains access to their hearts.81

Conclusion Perrault’s characterization of Love as a conqueror of hearts replaces Scudéry’s reformulation of love as reciprocal exchange with military metaphors of domination. His personification of Love as an empire-builder who ousts competing emotions from the hearts of his subjects externalizes the cognitive dimension of love by conceptualizing it as a force that exists independent of the mind or will. This representation of the heart separates cognition from bodily experience by suggesting that it is not until love is felt in the heart that the feeling subject becomes conscious of it. In using the rhetorical technique of personification to give human characteristics to abstract feelings, Perrault represents their attempts to impose their will as a battle for control of the heart. The human personas he crafts for Love, Friendship, and Reason vividly illustrate the nature of this struggle as it is their respective characters that shape the type of relationship they develop with the subjects in whose hearts they reside. Each character seeks to influence the hearts they enter but only Love appears able to establish exclusive possession. He imperiously displaces his sister and creates an environment hostile to Reason. The key to Love’s success lies in his dominant personality. It is his embodiment of sovereign power that

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drives his desire to dominate hearts, and he terrorizes anyone who attempts to resist his authority. This representation of love suggests that people have limited agency over whom or how they love, as the decision to love is not one that can be consciously made. In imagining the heart as both a battleground and a vessel, Perrault constructs the heart as a place where emotion is felt and a receptacle or container for emotion. The heart is affected by emotion, but it does not play an active role in the creation of emotion. The metaphors of conquest and domination drive Perrault’s representation of Love as an emotion that strives to obtain exclusive possession of the heart. Le Pays’s Love also emphasizes the combative nature of love as a jealous master. By contrast, Scudéry’s Carte de Tendre represents love as a social performance that can and ought to be controlled by the feeling subject. She represents the heart as a territory that can be navigated by proper adherence to social codes of emotional expression. The struggle is not between reason and love but between the self and the heart. The divergence between these representations of the heart suggests that seventeenth-century salon conversation did not draw on a fixed understanding of the relationship between love and reason. The conversational exchange between the texts published by Perrault, Le Pays, and Scudery indicates that the question of how to navigate the affective dimensions of the heart was the subject of ongoing debate. Perrault’s dialogue offers an answer to this question that undermines the gender politics of the Carte de Tendre by emphasizing the vulnerability of hearts to love. His representation of Love’s dominance of Friendship challenges Scudéry’s representation of tendresse as a precondition to love. In the Dialogue de l’Amour et l’Amitié, love is more powerful than friendship and reason, and neither men nor women can resist love’s control of their hearts.

Notes 1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

Charles Perrault, Dialogue de l’Amour et de l’Amitié (Paris: P. Bienfait, 1660). The references in this chapter are to the 1665 edition by the same publisher available on “Gallica,” http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k108211q, accessed August 24, 2017. I have modernized the spelling of quotations but retained the original capitalization. The French names for these characters are Beauté, Désir, Bonté, and Raison. Unless stated otherwise, all translations are my own. Ibid., 4–6. Ibid., 37–38. Searches of the catalogue of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Google Books Ngram Viewer show an increase in the frequency of the word “cœur” in texts published between 1600 and 1700. The highest number of references are in the decade 1650–1660, with a particular spike in 1654.

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6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

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DeJean does, however, discuss Perrault’s vision of the modern, polymorphous heart as both a bodily organ and a site of interiority in his Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes: Joan DeJean, Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 78–123. See also Alain-Marie Bassy, who suggests that the Carte de Tendre resembles the physical dimensions of the human heart: “Supplément au Voyage de Tendre,” Bulletin du Bibliophile 1 (1982):13–33, 28. Anne E. Duggan, Salonnières, Furies, and Fairies: The Politics of Gender and Cultural Change in Absolutist France (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 62–90. On the origins and meaning of tendre and tendresse see DeJean, Ancients against Moderns, 84–88; Jeffrey N. Peters, Mapping Discord: Allegorical Cartography in Early Modern French Writing (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 93–99; Jean-Michel Pelous, Amour Précieux, Amour Galant (1654–1675): Essai sur la représentation de l’amour dans la littérature et la société mondaines (Paris: Klincksieck, 1980), 18–21. “S’il est vrai que je n’en parle pas mal . . . c’est parce que mon cœur m’a appris à en bien parler, et qu’il n’est pas difficile de dire ce que l’on sent.” Madeleine de Scudéry, Clélie, Histoire romaine (Paris: A. Courbé, 1656), vol. 1, 390. All references to Clélie are to this edition. “pour bien définir la tendresse, je pense pouvoir dire, que c’est une certaine sensibilité du cœur.” Clélie, vol. 1, 211. I have modernized the spelling of quotations from this source. Clélie, vol. 1, 390–99. Anne E. Duggan, “Lovers, Salon, and State: La Carte de Tendre and the Mapping of Socio-Political Relations,” Dalhousie French Studies 36 (1996): 17–21. G. Guiffrey, “Cours de d’éloquence française de M. Nisard,” Journal général de l’instruction publique et des cultes 23, no. 9, February 1, 1854, 78–79; René Gautheron, “Les Contes de Pierre Perrault,” The Dalhousie Review 13, no. 1 (1933): 70; Antoine Adam, “La préciosité,” Cahiers de l’Association internationale des études françaises 1, no. 1 (1951): 37–38; Oded Rabinovitch, “Anonymat et institutions littéraires au XVIIe siècle: La revendication des œuvres anonymes dans la carrière de Charles Perrault,” Littératures classiques 80, no. 1 (2013): 90–93; M. J. O’Regan, “Charles Perrault and ‘Précieux’ Prose,” The Modern Language Review 58, no. 3 (1963): 343–49. Perrault, Dialogue de l’Amour et de l’Amitié, iii. Giovanni Dotoli, “Pour une définition du burlesque,” Australian Journal of French Studies 33, no. 3 (1996): 343. Pelous, Amour Précieux, Amour Galant, 58. As Joan DeJean observes, the term passion, and to a lesser extent affection, were used more frequently than the term émotion to characterize feeling in seventeenth-century French texts. Other important terms included sentiment, and, following the publication of Scudéry’s Clelié, tendre and tendresse: Ancients against Moderns, 81–88. None of these terms features prominently in Perrault’s Dialogue: the term émotion appears once as a character who accompanies Love when he enters hearts: 6; sentiments appears as a general description of affective response: xv, 5. In this chapter, I use the term emotion as a category of analysis to examine the conceptual implications of Perrault’s representation of the heart. As Thomas Dixon has shown, the lack of consensus regarding the definition of emotion means that this choice is not unproblematic: “‘Emotion’: The History of a Keyword in Crisis,” Emotion Review 4 (2012): 338–44. Given the lack of consensus about an alternative term, it remains, however, a useful analytical tool; see, e.g., Emma Gilby,

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18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33.

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“‘Émotions’ and the Ethics of Response in Seventeenth-Century French Dramatic Theory,” Modern Philology 107, no. 1 (2009): 52–71. See the discussion at notes 20–24 and 49–53. There is a large body of scholarship analyzing the representation of amour and amitié in seventeenth-century French literature. On the representation of love in a salon context, see especially Pelous, Amour Précieux, Amour Galant; Joan E. DeJean, Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). Recent studies on friendship include: Lewis Carl Seifert and Rebecca May Wilkin, Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France (London: Routledge, 2016); Aurelie Prevost, L’Amitié en France aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles: Histoire d’un sentiment (Louvain-LaNeuve: UCL, Presses Universitaires de Louvain, 2017); Laura Burch, “New Pleasure in Life Unfolding: Madeleine de Scudéry’s Friendship Fan,” Seventeenth-Century French Studies 36, no. 1 (2014): 4–17. Patricia Simons provides an excellent summary of this tradition in Chapter 1. Plato, “Timaeus,” in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 70b–d, 1193–94. Robert A. Erickson, The Language of the Heart, 1600–1750 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 3–4. See also Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), xv, 4–5. Erickson, The Language of the Heart, 11–12; Lucie Desjardins, Le corps parlant: Savoirs et représentation des passions au XVIIe siècle (Sainte-Foy, Québec; Paris: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2001), 45–72. Anita Guerrini provides an overview of debate about the circulation of blood in France in the 1630s and 1640s in The Courtiers’ Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV’s Paris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 67–80. On the history of the heart as an emotional organ, see Fay Bound Alberti, Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine, and Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 16–28. Morna Daniels, “The Tale of Charles Perrault and Puss in Boots,” eBLJ 2 (2002), accessed July 4, 2017, http://www.bl.uk/eblj/2002articles/pdf/article5.pdf. O’Regan, “Charles Perrault and ‘Précieux’ Prose.” Delphine Denis, “Les inventions de Tendre,” Intermédialités: Histoire et théorie des arts, des lettres et des techniques 4 (2004): 65n46. Paul Bonnefon, “Charles Perrault. Essai sur sa vie et ses ouvrages,” Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France 11, no. 3 (1904): 376. “Puis que ce n’est pas assez que je vous ai lu mon Dialogue, et que vous désirez encore en avoir une copie, je ne veux pas vous la refuser.” Perrault, Dialogue de l’Amour et de l’Amitié, i. “J’avoué, Monsieur, que j’ai eu bien de la peine à m’y résoudre.” Ibid., i–ii. “qu’étant persuadé comme je le suis, que vous êtes l’Homme du monde qui a le goût le plus fin et le plus délicat pour toutes [les] choses, et principalement pour ces sortes d’Ouvrages, j’ai bien appréhendé que la réflexion plus exacte que vous pourrez faire sur celui-ci en le lisant, ne vous fit diminuer beaucoup de l’approbation que vous lui avez donnée.” Ibid., ii. “il faut que je vous dis deux ou trois Questions que l’on me fit en une conversation où je me trouvai il y a quelque jours:” ibid., iii. Ibid., iv–v.

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34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

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“nous voyons encore aujourd’hui, que si nous aimons une Maîtresse parce qu’elle est belle, nous aimons un Ami parce qu’il est bon.” Ibid., v. “grand Amour, Père de toutes choses.” Ibid., vi. In telling this story, Perrault suggests that Plato’s reference to Amour as “the Desire of Beauty” (le Désir de la Beauté) is a composite name identifying Love’s origin: ibid., iv–v. There are other Neoplatonic references in Perrault’s account of the relationship between the sisters Beauty and Goodness. “deux Sœurs si accomplies et si charmantes, qu’on ne pouvait pas les voir ni les connaitre sans les aimer.” Ibid., viii. “pour la conquête d’un cœur elle n’avait besoin que d’être regardée.” Ibid., viii. “on demeurait persuadé qu’elle était infiniment aimable, et que ses charmes étaient bien plus solides et plus véritables que ceux de la Beauté.” Ibid., x. Perrault describes Desire as “jeune et bouillant” (young and ardent) and “prompte et inquiete” (changeable and restless): ibid., x. “le plus cruel Enfant qui fut jamais.” Ibid., xiii. “elle parut si belle et si charmante, qu’elle fut désirée et recherchée de tous ceux qui la virent.” Ibid., xvi. Ibid., 17–20. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 1–4. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 17, 21–22. On the importance of painful and bittersweet love in seventeenth-century salon airs see Catherine Gordon-Seifert, Music and the Language of Love: Seventeenth-Century French Airs (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011), 25–28. Ibid., 245. See also Pelous, Amour Précieux, Amour Galant; DeJean, Tender Geographies. Carolyn Lougee, Le Paradis des Femmes: Women, Salons and Social Stratification in 17thCentury France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 35–38. On the representation of love in salon literature, see Pelous, Amour Précieux, Amour Galant. Monika Kulesza, L’amour de la morale, la morale de l’amour: Les romans de Catherine Bernard (Warszawa: Uniwersytet Warszawski Wydział Neofilologii, 2010), 9–13, 43–65. Jacques Ferrand, De la maladie d’amour, ou Mélancholie érotique (Paris: D. Moreav, 1623), 54–55. Lyons, “Reasonable Love,” 97. “tout leur bruit ne m’émeut guère . . . qu’il s’en faut beaucoup qu’ils soient aussi malheureux qu’ils veulent qu’on les croie.” Perrault, Dialogue de l’Amour et de l’Amitié, 16. Ibid., 18–19. “leur maladie est plus agréable que la santé.” Ibid., 19–20. “j’ai beau les faire soupirer pour leurs Amants, les faire pleurer pour leur absence ou pour leur infidélité.” Ibid., 6. Ibid., 6–7. “je n’entre guère dans un cœur qu’il ne s’en aperçoive.” Ibid., 6. “ils s’en plaignent à toute la terre, et même aux arbres et aux rochers, ils me disent des injures étranges, et ils font de moi des peintures si épouvantables.” Ibid., 7.

4 The Battle for Control of the Heart

62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67.

68.

69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79.

80.

93

“c’est une superbe et une vaine, qui veut régner par tout, qui critique tout, et qui ne trouve rien de bienfait, que ce qu’elle fait elle-même.” Ibid., 38. “qu’il y a longtemps qu’on me reproche de ne pouvoir vivre avec la Raison, et qu’on m’accuse de la chasser de tous les cœurs dont je me rends le maître.” Ibid., 36–37. “si elle voulait ne se point mêler de mes affaires, comme je ne me mêle point des siennes, nous vivrions fort bien ensemble.” Ibid., 37–38. Erica Harth discusses the influence of Cartesian philosophy in seventeenth-century salons in: Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). See also Faith E. Beasley, Salons, History, and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France: Mastering Memory (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). Nicolas Coëffeteau’s Tableau des passions humaines, de leurs causes et leurs effets (Paris: S. Cramoisy, 1620), 114, 144–49. Recent scholarship has emphasized that early modern thinking about the passions was not predicated on an opposition between reason and passion but a sophisticated understanding of the interrelationship between the passions and rational thought and action: see, e.g., Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, eds., Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). René Le Pays, “Dialogue de L’Amour et de la Raison,” in Amitiez, Amours et Amourettes, 2nd ed. (Grenoble: P. Charoys; Paris: C. de Sercy, 1664), 57–77. Le Pays’ Dialogue also appears in the 1685 revised edition of Amitiez, Amours et Amourettes (Paris: C. de Sercy, 1685). It was also published under the name F. Joyeux in 1667 in a volume entitled Traité des combats que l’Amour a eu contre la Raison et la Jalousie (Paris: M. Hauteville, 1667). Le Pays, Amitiez, Amours et Amourettes, 55. Ibid., 54. “vous qui me chassez de tous les lieux où vous entrez; qui n’êtes jamais content pendant que j’occupe la moindre partie d’une âme.” Ibid., 58. I have modernized the spelling of quotations from this source. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 64. Ibid., 64–65. “une guerre intestine.” Ibid., 65. Ibid., 65. “J’introduis la Raison en mauvaise humeur contre l’Amour.” Ibid., 56. Love subsequently disparages Reason for having “the face of a querulous old women who is always in a bad mood” (le visage d’une vieille querelleuse, qui est toujours de mauvaise humeur), ibid., 62. “je fais l’Amour si raisonnable, qu’il s’assujettit pour cette fois à raisonner avec la Raison . . . qu’il pût vous rendre aussi amoureuse que vous êtes raisonnable.” Ibid., 56. “vous ne sauriez rien ordonner en Maîtresse absolue, puisque vous êtes obligée de rendre raison de toutes choses. Mais pour moi, j’agis en Souverain, et ne rends raison que quand il me plaît.” Ibid., 76. Scudéry, Clélie, vol. 1, 390–99.

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This interpretation is similar to Anne Duggan’s reading of the territory of Tendre as a metaphor for a woman’s heart that redefined male–female relations based on the principles of negotiation and reciprocity: Duggan, Salonnières, Furies, and Fairies, 64–77. It is also influenced by Jeffrey N. Peters’s analysis of the Carte de Tendre as a visual representation of Clélie’s power over her suitors: Peters, Mapping Discord, 110–15. I discuss the gender politics of the Carte de Tendre further in Bronwyn Reddan, “Scripting Love in the Fairy Tales by Seventeenth-century French Women Writers,” French History and Civilization 7 (2017): 101–03.

Part 2: Embodied Hearts

Kathryn L. Smithies

5 The Leper’s Courageous Heart in Jean Bodel’s Les Congés In 1202, Jean Bodel, author of numerous literary works including chansons, poems, and fabliaux, entered a leprosarium on the outskirts of the northern French town of Arras. Eight years later he was dead, leaving a personal testament to the deep crisis of becoming a leper in his forty-five-verse leavetaking poem, Les Congés.1 Becoming a leper wrenched Bodel from his work as clerk to the Arras-Ville authorities and the intellectual community within which he thrived.2 Bodel was also a member of the Confrérie de la Sainte Chandelle (Brotherhood of the Holy Candle) or more colloquially, the Brotherhood of Jongleurs.3 This fraternity was founded for the care of the sick and dying and to perform services for the dead; it was also responsible for the rituals surrounding the Holy Candle relic associated with an earlier Marian miracle.4 Like many medieval towns, by the turn of the twelfth century Arras had four leprosaria as a response to the increasing incidence of the disease; Bodel even mentions one leprosarium, Méaulens, in his Congés.5 Each Arrageois foundation appears to have been the result of benevolent donations by local lords and ecclesiastics, and the leprosaria continued to benefit from further charitable donations. The will of Raoul de Neuville, bishop of Arras (d. 1221), reveals that he left a portion of his estate to “all the houses of lepers in our bishopric.”6 This benevolent pattern mirrors the situation throughout northern France and England and is representative of the charitable attitudes towards lepers at that time. It is an expression of lay piety in which the leper’s suffering was held as a mirror to Christ’s suffering and as such the leper held a privileged position as a penitent sufferer.7

Note: Dr. Kathryn Smithies is the recipient of an Australian Research Council Associate Investigator Award [2015] (project number CE110001011) and the SHAPS/CHE Research Support Scheme (School of Historical and Philosophical Studies/Centre for the History of Emotions), University of Melbourne. I acknowledge Professor Véronique Duché for her assistance with some Old French translations; however, all final decisions, unless otherwise noted, are mine, and I take full responsibility for any errors. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions, as well as Dr. J. Grigg for her review and suggestions. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513275-006

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Once admitted to a leprosarium, Arras’s lepers appear to have been wellcared for materially and spiritually. Lepers had access to a private room, the provision of food and clothing; whilst spiritually, each leprosarium had its own chapel, cemetery, and priest to say mass.8 Although some leprosaria in the Pas-de-Calais region performed a religious service on the leper’s admission to the leprosarium, Arras does not appear to have followed this tradition; nor is there any evidence of the mass of separation being performed at this time.9 In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, there was no compulsion to enter a leprosarium and, although it appears that Bodel asked the mayor and aldermen of Arras permission to enter the leper house at Méaulens, there were lepers living secluded but independent lives around the town.10 Bodel’s poetic plea to his friends to remember him after his entry to the leprosarium was answered by the fraternity’s response where they named him in their necrology, ca.1210. An examination of his Congés reveals not simply the pathos of Bodel’s farewell, but the way in which he prepares himself for his new life and final battle. His poem is a response to his sickness and deteriorating health and speaks directly of the loss of freedoms and the physical and mental scourging of his disease. Les Congés is emotionally charged as Bodel confronts his fate and meets his earthly pain and loss with courage. Amid his emotional appeal he speaks to his heart, the only part of his body that remains healthy (Mon cuer . . . tant a en moi remés de sain, 2:23–24), to give him the courage to bear his adversity. Bodel’s emotional appeals can be located within medieval understandings of the irascible passio, courage, and the feeling heart. He is fearful for his future, he is sad and in pain, yet he knows that he cannot hide from the disease’s progression. Consequently, Les Congés expresses his endeavors to feel courage in his heart as part of a continuing struggle towards salvation.

Heart and Courage Bodel draws on his heart for courage to become the penitent leper whose suffering imitates that of Christ.11 In the Middle Ages, the heart was understood to be multi-layered comprising three features: spiritual; physical; and psychological. First, the heart was a window to Christ and his benevolent mercy.12 Second, the beating physical heart sustained life. In the humoral theory of Hippocratic medicine, the heart was understood to produce the vital spirit that coursed through the body via the circulation to invigorate the body.13 Most important for Bodel,

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the heart was a “symbol of affect” that controlled the movement of emotions to and from the heart, thus binding the physical heart to the psychological heart.14 Psychologically, the heart was an emotional organ – the center and origin of sensibility and feeling, whose passiones (passions or sufferings) and affectiones (feelings or affections) moved the soul.15 Thomas Aquinas’s (1225–1274) synthesis of ancient and earlier medieval discourses on the soul concluded that the heart was a feeling heart in that it felt or sensed the passiones that motivated action (affectus) on the soul to strive for a state of goodness.16 For Aquinas, the purpose of suffering was to activate the person to exculpate their sins in order to purify their soul in readiness for the hereafter. Bodel recognizes that he is fast approaching death, declaring that his body is already on trestles (37:444) – and his Congés conceptualizes his suffering as a penitential scourging so that he can meet God in a state of grace.17 Aquinas recognized that irascible passiones denoted a process of struggle that can be described as an affective process.18 Irascible passiones included hope, despair, fear, anger, and courage which resulted in joy or sorrow (affectiones). Bodel’s heart feels this range of irascible passiones, which he identifies in his quest to prepare his soul to meet its destiny. He states that his body endures life but that the outcome will purify his soul (20:238–39). David of Dinant (ca.1160–ca.1217) wrote that “although the suffering of the heart and the affect of the soul are formed simultaneously, nevertheless, the suffering of the heart is the cause of the affect which forms in the soul.”19 In this way, the heart was the agent instigating behaviors that have been described as emotional practices.20 According to Aquinas’s framework, the heart experiences the irascible passio of courage that then motivates courageous (or cowardly) action. This free choice of action affects and transforms the state of the soul in its struggle for redemption. Bodel’s poem is a public performance whereby he strives to attain the right emotional response to his leprosy as a heaven-sent suffering; to prepare his soul to meet its destiny, he needed to be courageous. Courage was a virtue customarily connected with men. It played a conspicuous role in the identity of the warrior class and was central to the concept of chivalry and its code of conduct.21 Aristotle argued that “in the strictest meaning of the word, the brave man will be one who fearlessly meets an honourable death . . . ; and it is war which presents most opportunities of that sort.”22 In medieval society, courage was also associated with the act of martyrdom and locating courage within a religious paradigm meant that it could transcend masculine identification. In hagiographies, martyred female saints along with their male counterparts practiced courage through devotion and self-sacrifice.23

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To date, whilst medievalists have begun to explore the heart, there has been little on this from a perspective beyond medieval religious studies that focus on expressions of the heart within religious communities.24 There has been little consideration of courage as a key concept beyond the circumstances of war and combat, despite some medieval theologians – Aquinas, Albert the Great – associating courage with martyrdom. Moving the focus of scholarship away from religious and combat environments extends understandings of the ways in which secular, non-combative members of medieval society engaged with and embodied affective practices of the heart. Recent directions in the study of emotion offer new ways to engage with the affective overtones of Bodel’s poem, inviting further directed analysis on courage as an affective practice of the heart.25 This essay moves beyond martial and religious environments to examine the expression of a courageous heart in a jongleur’s personal leave-taking poem.

Cuer: Heart as the Seat of Courage in Les Congés Les Congés draws heavily on the heart (cuer) in reference to Bodel’s spiritual, physical, and psychological state, thus reflecting the heart’s range of meanings. Cuer in Old French denoted the physical beating heart, but it also indicated the seat of intelligence, personality, feelings, and volition.26 It is notable that Bodel often begins a verse with a passio: anuis (pain or torment); pitiez (wretchedness or sorrow); joie (joy); and courouceus (hurt or dishonour). His use of courouceus is an example of a verse (30) opening with an emotional state that has its etymological origins embedded in the heart. Translated as chagrin or even brokenhearted, courouceus draws attention to the heart and its ability to experience a variety of emotional states.27 Bodel also starts verses 3 and 22 with Cuer (upper case ‘c’). Whilst most scholars have translated this unproblematically as heart, contextually Bodel appears to relate Cuer to the passio courage. More significantly, etymologically, cuer also signified courage.28 Bodel’s use of cuer to mean courage had a precedent in his fabliau Barat et Haimet, in which he uses cuer twice in this way: de haut cuer (with courage) and par malvés cuer (by lack of courage).29 In the medieval world the feeling heart could experience a range of emotions; in Les Congés, however, the emphasis is on those passiones experienced in the name of pathos, endurance, and salvation of which courage was an integral part. Bodel needs courage to endure his suffering before he can move towards joy and salvation. The heart–courage link is further reinforced through Bodel’s use of cuer (lower

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case ‘c’) within the poem’s verses. In these instances, cuer is readily understood as the physical beating heart or the psychological feeling heart. Whilst the in-verse references to cuer are also associated with an emotional state, it is the sense of movement (motus) within the verses – essential for an emotional response to occur – that links the passiones and heart to courage. The melancholic passiones that Bodel feels in his heart – distress (mari, 5:49), torment (anuis, 8:85), and wretchedness (pitiez, 19:217) – coincide with the physical and psychological senses of movement: passiones, heart, and movement combine to realize Bodel’s courage.30 Movement (motus) is fundamental to the experience of emotion; the purpose of the passiones is to effect movement – a transition whereby an emotional state realizes a change in behavior or sentiment. A re-reading of Cuer in verses 3 and 22 intimates that Bodel appeals to, and needs, courage to overcome the self-pity that he feels in relation to the people around him. For instance, in verse 22, Bodel appears Job-like, unreservedly complaining about his physical and psychological decay. Bodel implicitly reinforces the courage metaphor, describing Baudouin as a tournament champion, and he petitions God to bestow joy on his friend recognizing Baudouin as an exemplar of courage (22:256–59). Bodel cannot yet experience joy, but as the poem moves towards its conclusion, his emotional state moves from resentfulness and bitterness towards accepting his situation. Without courage, Bodel cannot face his suffering or move towards the eternal joy he so desires.31 This emotional movement is mirrored in the text through physical movement. When Bodel’s heart feels anguish, it is often accompanied by the verbs to leave or to go: “Torment (Anuis), which descends (avale) in my heart / With tortured and pale flesh, / And which makes me become feeble, / [. . .] I pack my bags, / . . . / I take leave (preng je congié) without returning.”32 Bodel feels torment consuming his heart; it reminds him that he must leave and so he is moved to prepare for his one-way journey to the leper house. In other cases, he implores his heart to go to various acquaintances with a final farewell.33 Despite feeling misery, Bodel consents to it knowing that if he opens his heart to God he will experience God’s benevolence.34 In verse 27, Bodel states: “But this misery spreads gold over me, / For I know well that God heals / Him that, as a grace, accepts such a battle. / Without waiting, I want to make my spirit bloom, / Open my heart and close my eyes.”35 Harrowing emotions not only invoke the helplessness of the leper’s plight, but were also emotional states – a battle – which could not be escaped or endured without calling on courage. Courage to endure is one of the main themes to which Bodel returns throughout the poem.

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Synthesizing Ancient and Medieval Notions of Courage: Theory and Practice Courage as a concept and practice has a long history. Bodel’s poetic representation of courage sits between two guiding theories on the topic: ancient and medieval. Without denying the significance of the many classical philosophers and medieval theologians who wrote on the emotion of courage and its origin, the heart, the focus here will be on the writings of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas.36 This is for the following reasons. First, Aristotle’s ideas on courage in his Nicomachean Ethics arguably had a long history of transmission.37 Second, Aquinas adapted Aristotelian thought to fit a medieval framework. Aquinas’s work on courage was the result of thoughtful deliberation located in the milieu of theological debate on the cardinal virtues. Even though Aquinas’s work post-dates Bodel’s Congés, according to Nederman, Aquinas was merely reinforcing concepts that already had a foothold in intellectual thought.38 Bodel’s leave-taking poem reveals that he explicates Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s notions of courage. Informed by his environment and circumstances, Aristotle’s idea of courage was predominantly associated with war and the battlefield. For Aristotle, fear and confidence controlled and facilitated courage; courage was a positive response to fear and cowardice was a negative response. He used the example of civic warfare. Whilst still relevant in the medieval period, warfare had spread beyond city walls to encompass local feuds and feudal, sovereign, and religious wars. Medieval society was well acquainted with warfare; acts of bravery and its antithesis, cowardice, were recorded in a range of sources. Medieval leaders used a variety of methods and incentives to embolden their men, epitomizing Vegetius’s sentiments that courage was the result of disciplined training, typified in the lengthy apprenticeship young aristocratic boys undertook to become knights.39 Battle rhetoric, especially pre-battle speeches, also reveal that medieval soldiers were exhorted to display courage.40 Medieval leaders appealed to bravery and God’s intercession to embolden their men, whilst chivalric ritual played its role in exhorting courage through the act of knighting.41 Chivalric literature likewise reflected comparable sentiments, particularly regarding courage; even Lancelot states that courage was a virtue that came from the heart and made men of valor.42 Bodel locates his courageous heart in classical and medieval martial notions of courage. His final battle does not take place on a battlefield against warrior knights but within his being; against a body wracked with disease that only God can cure. Yet he still locates his struggle within a warlike framework

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using battle-specific language, metaphors, and events. In the opening verse, Bodel equates his struggle with leprosy to that of a battle. He writes that God has announced the battle (with the disease) by sounding the horn – joué de bondie (1:7). The word choice is significant because rather than any particular horn, bondie refers specifically to the horn that was sounded before a battle.43 Bodel reinforces the military imagery by positioning himself as an impending member of an army stating: “I am preparing to enter into an army” (aler en un ost m’atorne, 16:184), although this particular army will consist of a host of lepers, not soldiers. Bodel also describes his illness as waging war – guerroie – on him (15:178). Yet simultaneously, Bodel places his struggle within a Christian paradigm. He beseeches God, “I pray to you . . . to end this battle” (vous proi . . . a parfournir ceste bataille, 41:482, 485), acknowledging God’s role in his final earthly conflict. Bodel further straddles the classical and medieval concepts of courage through his references to the crusading experience: a classical battle situation which was waged in the Middle Ages as a holy war. Bodel was an enthusiast of the crusading movement, having pledged in 1202 to embark on the fourth crusade. Unfortunately, the crusade coincided with his diagnosis of leprosy.44 Bodel refers to this journey, that he can no longer participate in, as a pilgrimage (pelerinage, 9:103). Pierre Ruelle notes the figurative nature of pilgrimage, considering it to refer to a penance; medieval accounts often describe a crusade as a pilgrimage and in penitential terms.45 Crusading imagery is reinforced in Bodel’s invocation of God’s grace towards his friend Simon, who is about to go on crusade, asking God to help his friend wear his cross truly. In contrast, Bodel states “I cannot carry mine [cross]” (je ne puis porter la miue, 29:342).46 Simon’s cross is both metaphorical and real, referencing the costume of crusaders; similarly, Ruelle notes that “porter la miue” (29:342) carries a double meaning. Whilst it refers to the pledge of crusade participation, it can also denote the endurance of pain or an affliction – significant for understanding the expression of courage in Aquinas’s terms.47 Bodel further reinforces the crusade imagery in his reference to granting the Saracens a lasting truce (29:344), as such negotiation was a customary practice in medieval warfare.48 Additionally, “truce” invokes the Christian theme of forgiveness, in that Bodel mirrors Christ’s capacity for compassion.49 The dual meaning of “porter la miue” and the theme of forgiveness moves the poem further towards medieval notions of courage in the context of the practice of religion. In medieval society, courage (fortitudo) was one of the four cardinal virtues, and consequently it was not a state privileged only to those in battle; rather, it had a place in everyday moral life.50 Aquinas extended Aristotle’s concept of courage and warfare to include cases where death was realized in

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pursuit of the good (or a good and just cause). In this way, he gave precedence to martyrdom as the exemplary act of courage.51 For the medieval Christian, Christ’s experience – his torment, betrayal, crucifixion – made him the supreme martyr and exemplar of courage; thus, to be considered courageous meant imitating Christ, attaining salvation, and accepting divine providence. As Bodel moves through the poem, he comes to accept God’s plan for his destiny. In the final verse, he reveals his feeling heart, commenting that it “tightens” (destraigne, 45:534) at having to leave his friends. Yet, only through his heart’s suffering can he invoke courage and accept God’s plan for his destiny, declaring: “May God now grant me the grace to bear / The illness that maims my body / So that by accepting it willingly / To God I offer my soul.”52 These final four lines witness Bodel’s supplication to imitate Christ’s dignified suffering, and to attain salvation through his final courageous act where he commends himself to God’s will. In medieval society, the leper’s earthly purgatory-like suffering reminded people of Christ’s Passion and their own destinies.53 It also earned lepers a special position in the Christian hierarchy.54 For Aquinas, the act of courage had to be for a common good, such as martyrs who upheld Christianity or warriors who fought just wars. Although, as a leper rather than a martyr or Christian knight, Bodel does not fit Aquinas’s definition, arguably Bodel presents himself as an exceptional case. Bodel’s poem serves as a reminder of every Christian’s salvific journey and his Congés is a demonstration in Christian faith in which the leprous poet moves through a range of emotions towards eternal life. Bodel invokes his courageous heart to enable him to withstand his disease and approach God as a penitent Christian. He recognizes that his body has no hope of fighting the disease (32:383), but that he must endure its destruction. He wants to “unlock” (desclorre, 27:322) his soul and “open” (ouvrir, 27:323) his heart, as they “awaken” (ajorne, 27:324) him to his destiny and enable him to move towards eternal salvation. Aquinas’s synthesis on courage identified a tripartite of passiones, which had the potential for someone to be deemed courageous in the face of death. First, sustinere (to withstand or endure) was a passive suffering; second, tristitia (pain and sadness) highlighted the present suffering of the courageous; and third, timor (fear) emphasized concerns regarding future suffering.55 In addition to these three passiones, the courageous must also display, or exercise, the virtue of patientia (patience). Also described as perseverantia (perseverance), Aquinas considered patience as the “religious consummation of courage.”56 An individual who patiently endured the passiones in the face of death ultimately displayed Christian courage.57 A careful reading of Les Congés reveals

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each of courage’s passiones and reinforces a reading in support of the leper’s courageous heart. The poetic expressions of tristitia and timor are readily identifiable within Les Congés. The leper’s physical and emotional pain, as well as his sadness and fear, are patently evident throughout the poem. Many of the verses start with one of these emotional states. Wretchedness (pitiez) appears ten times and pain or torment (anuis) occurs six times, thus outnumbering the other emotional states combined and suggesting their pre-eminence. The passiones also feature within the verses. Here the leper poet expresses his patent sadness and pain. Bodel states that pain “makes me sad and downcast” (me fait mat et morne, 16:181), whilst wretchedness “strikes me down and saddens me” (m’amatist et assouploie, 31:361–62). The sadness which he feels when bidding his friends goodbye is so painful that “it breaks my heart” (li cuers me crieve, 4:46) and elsewhere he talks of feeling pain in his heart (Au cuer en ai dolor, 7:80). He laments that he cannot continue with his confraternal duties; specifically that he cannot participate fully in the ritual of the Holy Candle and this particularly begets misery in his heart. It is only alleviated by the kisses he petitions the Virgin to give in his stead, stating that if she consents, “I will have less distress in my heart” (S’avrai cuer mains mesaaisié, 43:516).58 The fact that Bodel’s heart suffers might lead to a conclusion that he is cowed by his situation; however, as Aquinas stated, the courageous had to feel pain to be able to galvanize courage and the heart was the seat of feeling.59 It is evident that Bodel focuses more on the emotional pain that his leprosy has caused him to suffer, rather than his bodily physical pain. Such expressions are consistent with medieval understandings on pain; in which pain was an enemy to prevail over or tolerate, rather than a part of the self.60 Bodel conveys an awareness of such a separation, rejecting the notion that the leprosy is a part of him. He states that “my heart and disease . . . / they are not of the same matter” (Mes cuers et li maus . . . / Ne sont pas fait d’une despoise, 23:275–76). Pain could also be voluntarily welcomed or accepted and this was especially pertinent in matters of martyrdom.61 Bodel clearly understands that he cannot defeat his condition to alleviate his physical suffering, and he describes leprosy as an evil from which no one escapes (22:263). In accepting his condition, he concedes that God “gives me peace [and] inspires me to serve him” ( . . . part me rapaie [and] . . . a lui server m’espire, 7:81–82). Bodel courageously experiences hardship; but he channels his suffering in a penitent way that leads to the potential for salvation. Bodel also expresses his fear but he does not seem afraid of death; rather he fears the trouble his disease has wrought in him. He is “too fearful to trouble the world” (trop criem au siecle anoiier, 34:408) and he likens his life to

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that of a game (gambling) where he cannot offer any surety other than fear (18:207).62 He also fears the shame that his infirmity has wrought upon him (Honte, que je tant criem, 13:153), causing him to hide away and delay entering the leprosarium. In the Middle Ages, fear was a necessary and important emotion for a Christian.63 Whilst his anxiety is palpable, Bodel embraces fear and it enables him to maintain a positive relationship with God. He faces his fear and directs it to provide inspiration; he rejects the shame that has made him hesitate before finally deciding to enter the leprosarium (13:153–55, 140).64 Here Bodel epitomizes the medieval view of courage that controlled fear and used it for a good outcome.65 Through the specific act of making the decision to leave for the leprosarium, Bodel overcomes his worldly fear of the loss of temporal goods (including friends) and moves towards a filial fear – a fear of offending God and thus being separated from him.66 Bodel implores God to inflict his deserved penance and knows that it will come without “any mercy” (nule pitanche, 18:211), to “relieve his misery” (aliege ma mesestance, 18:212) or “soothe his pain” (dolor m’estanche, 18:214), but that it makes his soul “free from debt” (fors de dete, 18:216).67 The sum of Bodel’s encounters with fear, pain, suffering, and sadness throughout the poem are symbols of his endurance.68 And it is this endurance that realizes the leper’s courage in a medieval and Christian ideal. Bodel reveals his endurance implicitly throughout his poem in his patient and persevering suffering. In a rare explicit expression of endurance, he openly petitions God to permit him to endure (endurer, 16:191) a penitent life that he recognizes is necessary to bear his suffering; it helps him to live through the darkness (16:192). In a Christian embodiment, Bodel likens his suffering to a prolonged period of Lent (karesme alongié, 21:252). Bodel also recognizes that he must be patient and bear his suffering with grace if he is to receive his eternal reward from God. He acknowledges that, whilst God can bring about his resurrection, this will only happen if he accepts his fate with grace (27:320–21). It is Bodel’s patient endurance that allows him to overcome his fear and sadness and it is the final passio that completes his act of courage. Patient endurance is also expressed in other medieval literary genres, including the corpus of Arthurian literature. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain patiently endures his suffering with the express goal of achieving courage, but ultimately fails because he cannot control his fear and hopes for life in the face of death.69 Unlike Gawain, Bodel recognizes the futility of fighting his disease. Bodel sought medical treatment that ultimately proved unsuccessful. Accepting the futility, he resigns himself to his destiny noting that all the doctors in Salerno could not cure him (17:201–2). The leprous poet has no hope of a worldly life as he will not be able to return from the leprosarium in a healthy

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state (nus en santé retorne, 16:185). Instead his only future is for an eternal life (mort dont on puet revivre, 24:288) through death. It is thus possible to read Bodel’s patient endurance as a form of docile suffering as he awaits his death. Docility corresponds to medieval notions of martyrdom where the focus was on passive endurance.70 Martyrs, through their exemplary passive endurance of bodily mortification came to be the epitome of courage.71 In an example of martyrdom, Bodel suffers his disease without any chance of fighting back. As it destroys his physical body, he displays his faith and endures his adversity patiently. Moreover, just as martyrs voluntarily chose their fate, Bodel exercises his free will to face, rather than fight against, his destiny. He willingly accepts bodily suffering, knowing that it will bring about a pure and clear soul (20: 237–39), and then restates his resolve to leave lovingly and willingly (37:435–36).

Conclusion The feeling heart is central to understanding Jean Bodel’s struggle with leprosy. His heart breaks, suffers, and endures, and what little joy he experiences is often overshadowed by the irascible passiones. Yet Bodel offers an encouraging study of a medieval leper firmly grounded in his time and he achieves this through positioning his heart as a courageous heart. Courage allows the leprous poet to face his destiny patiently despite the torment and wretchedness he feels in his heart. Indeed, it is only through his feeling heart that he can become courageous. Bodel’s poem is an example of the way in which secular members of medieval society might express the virtue of courage. Bodel is influenced by ancient and medieval notions of courage as the poem reveals Aristotelian influences and preempts much of Aquinas’s work. Bodel imagines his fight against leprosy as a battle and uses language more commonly understood in a war-like environment. Equally, through his patient endurance, he mirrors a martyr’s passive suffering. Whilst martyrs chose to die for their faith, Bodel has no choice – he cannot halt his disease. Bodel is neither knight nor martyr – the typical medieval embodiments of courage – but he emphasizes their qualities to establish his courage. As the poem progresses he comes to accept his destiny and faces his enduring ordeal willingly, as a penitent Christian; it is the passiones Bodel feels in his heart that motivate him to achieve his courageous outcome. From his heart, Bodel seeks God’s grace to provide the courage that allows him to endure his painful bodily deterioration and exclusion from society, and to face God with a pure and clean soul, where he will finally experience joy.

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Notes 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

Bodel’s leave-taking poem, Les Congés is extant in seven manuscripts. I am using Pierre Ruelle’s edition that cites the copy in BnF Arsenal 3142 (MS C): Pierre Ruelle, Les Congés d’Arras: Jean Bodel, Baude Fastoul, Adam de la Halle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965). All in-text references to the poem correspond to the following format: “verse:line(s).” For further information regarding Arras’s economic wealth, civic structure, and literary patronage, see Joseph A. Dane, “Parody and Satire in the Literature of ThirteenthCentury Arras, Part I,” Studies in Philology 81, no. 1 (1984): 1–27, esp. 2; Carol Symes, A Common Stage: Theatre and Public Life in Medieval Arras (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 41. Regarding Bodel’s work as an échevin (public servant), see Charles Foulon, L’Oeuvre de Jehan Bodel (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958), 16. Jean-Charles Payen, “L’Aveu-Pudique de l’Ecriture dans les Congés de Jean Bodel ou Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie en Face du Malheur et de la Pauvreté,” in Mélanges de Langue et Littérature Françaises du Moyen Age et de la Renaissance, ed. Charles Foulon (Université de Haute-Bretagne: Rennes, 1980), 267–75, esp. 268. Regarding Bodel’s participation in the confraternity, see Carol Symes, “Lordship of Jongleurs,” in The Experience of Power in Medieval Europe, 950–1350, ed. Robert F. Berkhofer III, Alan Cooper, and Adam J. Kosto (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 243; regarding the Marian miracle, see Catherine Vincent, “Fraternité Rêvée et Lien Social Fortifié: La Confrérie Notre-Dame des Ardents à Arras (début du XIIIe siècle–XVe siècle),” Revue du Nord 82, no. 337 (2000): 659–79. Albert Bourgeois, Lépreux et Maladreries du Pas-de-Calais, Xè –XVIIè siècles (Arras: Mémoire de la Commission Départementale des Monuments Historiques du Pasde-Calais, 1972), 39, 90, 100. Symes, Common Stage, 52. Carol Rawcliffe, Leprosy in Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), 104–30. Bourgeois, Lépreux et Maladreries, 56, 95–96, 98. Most evidence for the mass of separation – a form of living funeral whereby the leper was liturgically excluded from his society – dates from the fourteenth century and even then the practice was sporadic. Bourgeois, Lépreux et Maladreries, 54; Françoise Beriac, “‘Mourir au monde’. Les Ordines de Séparation des Lépreux en France aux XVè et XVIè Siècles,” Journal of Medieval History 11, no. 3 (1985): 245–68. Regarding Bodel’s situation, see Bourgeois, Lépreux et Maladreries, 54, 100; regarding leper houses as voluntary communities, see Jennifer Stemmle, “From Cure to Care: Indignation, Assistance and Leprosy in the High Middle Ages,” in Experiences of Charity, 1250–1650, ed. Anne M. Scott (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 45. Regarding independent lepers, see Symes, Common Stage, 39, 52. Larmat notes the significance of the heart in Les Congés, but falls short of associating the heart with courage: Jean Larmat, “Le coeur, le corps et l’âme dans les Congés: de Jean Bodel, de Baude Fastoul et d’Adam de la Halle,” in “Et c’est la fin pour quoy sommes ensemble”: Hommage à Jean Dufournet: Littérature, histoire et langue du Moyen Age, ed., Jean Dufournet and Jean-Claude Aubailly (Paris: Champion, 1993), vol. II, 865–73. Louisa Young, The Book of the Heart (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 146–58.

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13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

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Simo Knuutila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 213. The eleventh-century physician and philosopher, Avicenna, stated in his Canon of Medicine that emotions could affect the health of the heart. Fay Bound Alberti, “The Emotional Heart: Mind, Body and Soul,” in The Heart, ed., James Peto (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 134. Later medieval writers, including Albert the Great and Aquinas continued Avicenna’s tradition. Knuutila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, 222, 238. Alberti, The Emotional Heart, 126; Young, The Book of the Heart, 27. Thomas Dixon asserts that usage of the term emotion only appears from the eighteenth century onwards; rather, during the medieval period, passiones and affectiones were the words du jour whilst motus (motion) denoted the movement of passions and feelings: Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 4, 39–40. Ibid. Ruelle, Les Congés d’Arras, 147, n444. Gabriela Tanase also notes the penitential aspect of Les Congés: Gabriela Tanase, “Corps ‘enferm’ et démarche de la parole poètique dans les Congés des poètes lépreux,” French Studies 68, no. 2 (2014): 149. Avicenna had already classified the emotions into opposing pairs: irascible (struggle) and concupiscible (desirous). Knuutila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, 178; Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 42–43. Enzo Maccagnolo, “David of Dinant and the Beginnings of Aristotelianism in Paris,” in A History of Twelfth-Century Western Philosophy, ed. Peter Dronke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1988), 438–39. Monique Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (And Is That What Makes Them Have A History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion,” History and Theory 51, no. 2 (2012): 193–220. William Ian Miller, The Mystery of Courage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 13; S. H. Rigby, “Worthy but Wise? Virtuous and Non-Virtuous forms of Courage in the Later Middle Ages: Aristotelian Ethics in the Aristocratic Culture of the Later Middle Ages,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 35 (2013): 330. James A. K. Thomson, The Ethics of Aristotle: Nichomachean Ethics (London: Allen & Unwin, 1953), 78, book 3, chap. 6. Eric Jager, Book of the Heart (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), 87. For a perspective within medieval religious environment, see Ayoush Sarmada Lazikani, Cultivating the Heart: Feeling and Emotion in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Religious Texts (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2015). Notable scholarly exceptions include Sarah McNamer and Miri Rubin. McNamer focuses on the development of affective meditations on Christ’s Passion in which she revises the causal force from a masculine to feminine tradition. Rubin demonstrates how the Virgin served as a model of compassion in secular society. There is also the development and expression of romantic love that was already being produced in Bodel’s time: for example, Chretien de Troyes and its associated scholarship. Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 3, 13; Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (London: Allen Lane, 2009); William M. Reddy, The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900–1200 CE (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

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25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

40.

41. 42.

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Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Christine Libby, “The Object of His Heart: Subjectivity and Affect in Mystic Texts,” Literature Compass 13, no. 6 (2016): 362–71. Jacqueline Picoche, Dictionnaire Etymologique du Français (Paris: Le Robert, 1992), 110–11. Ibid., 111. Ibid.; “Cuer,” Anglo-Norman Dictionary, accessed November 9, 2017, http://www.anglonorman.net/gate/index.shtml?session=SNWK10319T1483497936; Algirdas Julien Greimas, Dictionnaire de l’Ancien Français (Paris: Larousse, 2001), 142; Alan Hindley, Frederick W. Langley, and Brian J. Levy, Old-French –English Dictionary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 170. Willem Noomen and Nico van den Boogaard, Nouveau Recueil Complet des Fabliaux (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1983–1998), 2:6:257, 2:6:451. For further examples of cuer as courage in medieval literature, see “Dictionnaire Étymologique de l’Ancien Français,” accessed November 9, 2017, http://deaf-server.adw.uni-heidelberg.de/lemme/cuer2# cuer2. Bodel also uses cuer to mean courage in La Chanson des Saisnes: Jehan de Bodel, La Chanson des Saisnes, ed. Annette Brasseur (Geneva: Droz, 1989), vol. 2, 967. Larmat, “Le coeur, le corps et l’âme,” 866. In verse 3, Bodel can only acknowledge his family’s contributions if his courage remains steadfast (3:25–27). “Annuis, qui en mon cuer avale / O chiere tempestee et pale, / Qui me fait souple devenir, / . . . je trousse ma male, / . . . / Preng je congié sans revenir” (8:85–90). See verses 10, 19, 26, 39. For other examples of a psychological movement, see verses 7, 42, 45. “Mais ceste povretez me dore, / Que je sai bien que Diex restore / Que en grace prent ceste luite. / Or primes vueil mon sens desclorre, / Le cuer ouvrir et les iex clorre” (27:319–232). Houser provides a succinct synopsis of ancient and medieval theorists’ expositions on courage. R. E. Houser, “The Virtue of Courage (IIa IIae, qq. 123–40),” in The Ethics of Aquinas, ed. Stephen J. Pope (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2002), 304–7. Cary J. Nederman challenges the mainstream thought that Aristotle’s Ethics was not known in the West until the thirteenth century, noting that earlier works such as Peter Abelard’s Collationes rely on Aristotelian ideas on courage: Cary J. Nederman, Medieval Aristotelianism and Its Limits: Classical Traditions in Moral and Political Philosophy, 12th–15th Centuries (Aldershot: Variorum, 1997), 58–59. Ibid., 59. Vegetius’s De re militari, translated and copied throughout the medieval period, influenced medieval leaders regarding the business of war. Christopher Allmand, “The De re militari of Vegetius in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,” in Writing War: Medieval Literary Responses to Warfare, ed. Corinne Saunders, Françoise Le Saux, and Neil Thomas (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), 15–28. John R. E. Bliese, “When Knightly Courage May Fail: Battle Orations in Medieval Europe,” The Historian 53, no. 3 (1991): 489–504; J. F. Verbruggen, The Art of Warfare in Western Europe during the Middle Ages: From the Eighth Century to 1340, trans. Sumner Willard and Mrs R. W. Southern (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1997), 41–50. Bliese, “When Knightly Courage May Fail,” 429–33. Anon, Lancelot of the Lake, trans. Corin Corley and intro. Elspeth Kennedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 51.

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43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50.

51.

52. 53.

54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61.

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Whilst some Old French dictionaries translate bondie as sound, sounding, blowing (of horn), bondir as various resounding noises, and bondoner – to sound, Ruelle offers a nuanced explanation of the word contextualized to the poem’s content, concluding that “la bondie” is a military bell giving the signal for combat. Ruelle, Les Congés d’Arras, 135; Hindley, Langley and Levy, Old-French–English Dictionary, 85; Greimas, Dictionnaire de l’Ancien Français, 71–72. Foulon dates the poem to June–August 1202. Foulon, L’Oeuvre de Jehan Bodel, 12. Ruelle, Les Congés d’Arras, 138. Those who pledged to participate in a crusade wore a fabric cross on their outer garments as a visible sign of their pledge. Ruelle, Les Congés d’Arras, 144. Bodel uses the word paien which in the medieval Christian world was an overarching term for a non-believer: infidel, Saracen, pagan. Frederic Godefroy, Lexique de l’Ancien Français (Paris: Champion, 1967), 367–68. Harry E. Cole, “Forgiveness as Structure: ‘The Book of Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere,’” The Chaucer Review 31, no. 1 (1996): 40–41. The four cardinal virtues were courage, prudence, justice, and temperance. Jörn Müller, “In War and Peace: The Virtue of Courage in the Writings of Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas,” in Virtue Ethics in the Middle Ages: Commentaries on Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, 1200–1500, ed. István P. Bejczy (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2008), 77. Lee H. Yearley, Mencius and Aquinas: Theories of Virtue and Conceptions of Courage (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990), 129–30; Rebecca Konyndyk de Young, “Power Made Perfect in Weakness: Aquinas’s Transformation of the Virtue of Courage,” Medieval Philosophy and Theology 11 (2003): 150. “Or m’i doinst Diex si endurer / Le mal qui le mien cors mehaigne / Que par le prendre en gré ataigne / A Dieu m’ame representer” (45:537–40). Regarding popular and scholarly misconceptions surrounding the medieval leper see Carol Rawcliffe, “Isolating the Medieval Leper: Ideas – and Misconceptions – about Segregation in the Middle Ages,” in Freedom of Movement in the Middle Ages: Proceedings of the 2003 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Peregrine Horden (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2007), 229–48. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: Latin Text and English Translation, Introductions, Notes, Appendices, and Glossaries (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1966), II–II 123 5. Louis IX of France stated that the leper’s suffering was “his purgatory on earth.” Rawcliffe, Leprosy in Medieval England, 55–65. Müller, “War and Peace,” 91–93. Yearley, Mencius and Aquinas, 130. Ibid., 131. Bodel’s exclusion from the ritual practice (kissing) and its injurious emotional effect reveals how emotions perform as embodied cultural practices. Müller, “War and Peace,” 93–95. Esther Cohen, “The Expression of Pain in the Later Middle Ages: Deliverance, Acceptance and Infamy,” in Bodily Extremities: Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture, ed. Florike Egmond and Robert Zwijnenberg (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 199. Ibid., 209.

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63.

64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

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There are several references to gaming in the poem (especially verses 7, 10 and 18) which possibly allude to Bodel’s Job-like situation of loss and the wager between the Devil and God that Job would deny God if he was brought to ruin. Stephen Loughlin, “The Complexity and Importance of timor in Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae,” in Fear and Its Representations in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Anne Scott and Cynthia Kosso (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), 1–2. Ruelle, Les Congés d’Arras, 140n154. Loughlin, “The Complexity and Importance of timor,” 11; Aristotle also considered that it was right to fear shame. Elizabeth S. Belfiore, Tragic Pleasures: Aristotle on Plot and Emotion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 194. Loughlin, “The Complexity and Importance of timor,” 13. Larmat, “Le coeur, le corps et l’âme,” 867. Aquinas stated that endurance was the outcome of supressing fear. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II–II, 126.3. Corey Owen, “Patient Endurance in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Florilegium 27 (2010): 177–207, 180–81. Docility was a synthesis by Albert the Great and Aquinas of Cicero’s and Aristotle’s considerations of courage. Müller, “War and Peace,” 88–89, 92–93. Aquinas stated that martyrs were praised for their courage. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II–II Q123.5.

Clare Davidson

6 “For wele or woo”: Lyrical Negotiations of the Cognizant Heart in Middle English Although the association between knowledge, perception, and hearts did not originate in the literature of the Middle Ages, the increasing use of the vernacular throughout the period proliferated idiomatic use of the concept in the English language. In Middle English usage, herte, apart from referring to a bodily organ and the region of the body around the organ, is imbued with a variety of psychological meanings. It represents the conscious and true self as the center of sensitive functions, the soul as the base of spiritual life and moral virtues, the mind, including understanding and imagination; and the location of the physical effects of emotion.1 Within medieval literature “having” a heart is a physiological state, but it is also a sustained and self-aware subjective experience with metaphorical implications. The Middle English heart is cognizant and inherently capable of reasoning, although this does not translate to an individual commitment to rational behavior. As Corinne Saunders describes, medieval representations typically depict love as an intense experience that has the capacity to overwhelm the ability to exercise reason.2 Middle English poetry assigns capacities to the heart that transgress a binary division between emotion and intellect, as well as embodied and mindful experience. Although recent work on the history and literature of emotional culture no longer makes a stark division between “emotional” or “intellectual” content, the effect of dividing emotion and reason continues in subtler forms.3 This chapter offers an affective reading of the Middle English heart that explores the interpersonal politics of literary representations of the heart as a physiological and metaphorical gauge of feeling and metonym for human consciousness. It addresses the entangled nature of cognition, experience, and emotion as embodied states of being that disrupt the traditional mind/body hierarchy.4 It reads the trope of the cognizant heart as a representation of the capacity for emotional thinking, thereby complicating a neat division between emotional and rational forms of knowledge.5 This understanding of the heart is in keeping with a medieval and modern concept of the integrated “psychosomatic” self in which “physicality was integrally bound to sensation, emotion, reasoning, identity.”6

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Analyzing the cognizant heart in Middle English texts elicits a deeper understanding of medieval interiority, emotionality, and the emotional experience of love. Poetic association of love with the cognizant capacities of the heart contribute to the longstanding Western concept of the organ as the seat of feeling, passion, and sensory perception.7 This understanding of the cognizant heart works to simplify literary representations of the interpersonal and abstract dynamics of many emotional experiences. It acts as a metonym for conscious experience by reducing embodied experience to the syntactically manageable. Medieval texts reveal a heart that can have, a heart can be had, it can know, be known, it can be exchanged, it can see, it can speak, and it can read. Narratives that describe the exchange, possession and knowledge of “hearts”, as well as a variety of other discursive and interpersonal relations between them, show that within texts, at least, emotional experience is often metaphorical.8 That cognition may require a metaphorical rendering of abstract mental experience has a medieval precedent in Thomas Aquinas’s discussion of the psychological and physiological experience of desire in the Summa Theologiae. Suggesting that all lovers wish for a unitive experience of “indwelling,” he states that the latter will always remain figurative, because although a lover and beloved can be “united” through appetite and apprehension, in practice they remain distinct from one another at all times.9 The desire that Aquinas held to be the most significant effect of love on the lover – a feeling of intense proximity registered as a metaphorical union with the beloved – is facilitated through poetic expression of the cognizant heart. The ruminative and other metaphorical functions of the heart are essential components of character in Chaucer’s late fourteenth-century poem, Troilus and Criseyde.10 The inclinations and emotional interiority of the eponymous lovers and their matchmaker, Pandarus, drive a narrative of interpersonal drama in which subjective agency is associated with love and frequently played out in the heart. But the trope of the conscious heart that appears in Chaucer’s highly wrought character studies is often contracted to a simple term of address or qualification of a subject’s intention. This chapter integrates the depiction of embodied love in the works of Aquinas and Chaucer to enable a reading of emotional physiology and behavior in a later medieval lyric.11 Chaucer’s detailed rendering of the body in love in Troilus and Criseyde depicts singing to be an expressive act of love.12 The role of singing as a specific emotional practice is the subject of the second half of this chapter, which analyzes the interpersonal implications of binding subjectivity to the heart in an anonymous, late fifteenth-century love song.13 Through a comparison of Middle English texts concerned with performances of love, this chapter shows how the prevalent medieval image that equates an exchange of hearts with an act of love relies on

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an understanding of the heart as a metonym for subjective knowledge. The literary parameters that dictate the capacities of the heart determine how a lover’s heart may be possessed, shared, or lost, and so provide a cultural context for interpreting relationships and conflicts within narratives. Analyzing this normative motif in accordance with a medieval physiology of emotion enables a close reading of the intimate interpersonal dynamics and wider cultural politics that are expressed in Middle English poetry.

The Cognizant Heart in Troilus and Criseyde Because Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde can be read as a summa of different approaches to love it has been the focus of significant critical interest in emotion prior to the recent methodological turn towards the history of emotions and affect.14 Stephanie Downes and Rebecca McNamara observe that earlier criticism of Troilus anticipates Monique Scheer’s influential theory of emotional practice because it emphasizes the role of emotion as a process that actively modifies and is modified by the behaviour of characters.15 This line of inquiry highlights the significance of Chaucer’s work as a description of vernacular theories of emotion production.16 Chaucer incorporated a wide array of multilingual sources into his Middle English writing. Along with other vernacular poets, he provides an implicit account of the aesthetic questions raised by the model of sensory awareness set by Aquinas without referring explicitly to his model.17 Vernacular poetry expresses, as Maura Nolan shows, “a mode of representation devoted to the depiction and reproduction of experience, understood both synchronically (as particular sensations) and diachronically (as the combination of sensation, emotion, events, and changes over time).”18 In Troilus and Criseyde, sensory and aesthetic awareness of pleasurable and sorrowful experiences of love are associated with the capacity of the cognizant heart. The processes of love in Troilus, from its initial apprehension to gratification and on to despair, are matters of the physiological and metaphorical heart. The term “heart” in Troilus and Criseyde has traditionally been assigned two meanings: “a vessel (for emotions, for thoughts, and even for the soul), or . . . that which is placed within an enclosure/vessel (the heart in the body).”19 This definition likens the heart to a container, but simultaneously suggests that the material contained transgresses a division of the organ’s function as a literal and figurative site of embodied consciousness. Chaucer’s depiction of the heart is informed by contemporary scientific understanding of the physiology of the heart as the source of vital heat and blood produced by the motions of cardiac

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expansion and contraction.20 The anatomical process of the spirit, blood, and heat moving through the heart to make its way through the rest of the body gives a literal meaning to a discourse of desire in which the heart can “stere” (I. 229) and “sprede and rise” (I. 279), such as when Troilus first registers desire for Criseyde.21 The heart was apprehensive and directive because it caused external behaviors that were determined by internal feelings. For instance, Aquinas describes how the spirit and heat, massed in the body through contractions of the heart, were expressed through vocal compulsion, such as with the sick who groaned, or foreseeably with Troilus, who tries to subdue his desirous sigh.22 According to Aquinas, intimate mental experiences, such as those of desire and love, affected the body by causing internal anatomical adjustments. This is significant because it interprets bodily or physiological reactions as the product of psychological processes: “bodily members are organs of the powers of our soul or animating principle” . . . “[they] do not set themselves in motion, but are roused through psychological powers” (ST I–II. 17. 9).23 For Aquinas, an increased heart rate, the enlargement or contraction of the heart, or the movement of heat across the body, were physiological expressions of a mental state. Chaucer’s writing also figured the heart as a knowledge-processing area, thus representing and contributing to wider philosophical and scientific theories of consciousness in which, as Saunders notes, the “process of thinking was inextricable from the physiology of emotion.”24 In Troilus, the heart is not only described as responsive when it is stimulated or excited by mental states. As the “brestez ye” [breast’s eye], it is also described as being able to “see” and able to caste [deliberate] and thynke.25 When Pandarus wants to learn the name of his new beloved, Troilus resists both his insistent questioning and love’s desire to reveal itself. The narrator locates this struggle in his heart: “gan Troilus in his herte caste.” It is Troilus’s thinking heart that keeps private counsel and guards the secret of Criseyde’s identity.26 The secret intent of Troilus’s consciousness, which is laid bare as the focus of the text, juxtaposes the mental control related to the artifice of secrecy and “craft”, with the lack of control, represented by his unruly love, the truth of which may sprynge out of him if not managed. His furtive self-awareness is a calculated process of thought that takes place within his heart. In this passage, the heart is not merely involved in an emotional experience that is registered through physical sensations, but the location of a cognitive negotiation of a complex interpersonal and emotionally-significant situation. Rather than locating this “heart” in the neural networks and hormonal receptors of the brain as a modern understanding of psychological experience might suggest, Troilus’s heart functions as metonym for the embodied, cognitive self.

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When Pandarus learns that it is Criseyde that Troilus has begun to love, he uses his heart to develop a plan to convince Criseyde to fulfil Troilus’s emotional aspirations. In doing so, Pandarus emphasizes the merit of patient planning and the value of being a man who does not display a “rakel hond” [hasty hand] but instead “wol bide a stounde [while], / And sende his hertes line out fro withinne / Aldirfirst [first of all] his purpose for to wynne” (I. 1065–70). A “hertes line” refers to the heart’s intention or order, a force that can be transmitted from the interior to the exterior world.27 Furthermore, his internal reflection about how best to express his heart’s intention is described by the narrator as taking place in Pandarus’s own “herte thoughte.” Pandarus uses the model of another person’s thinking heart to guide his own subjective agency and the poem shows a series of interactions between narrative mentalities. Accordingly, a reader of the poem encounters the narrator’s depiction of Pandarus as a didactic framework for emotional cognition, namely consciousness represented as a heart. In Troilus and Criseyde, the extreme emotional arousal of the lovers ultimately disrupts the sustained cognizant ability of their hearts. This is in keeping with medieval understandings of love as a heightened experience that could dislocate or suspend consciousness.28 Drawing from Boethius, Chaucer’s narrator grandly declares the bliss of the lovers’ first night together as beyond literary expression: Felicite, which that thise clerke wise [wise scholars] Comenden [recommend] so, ne may nought here suffise; This joie may nought writen be with inke; This passeth al that herte may bythynke [think]. (III. 1691–94)

By alluding to the shared pleasure of the lovers through a topos of inexpressibility, the narrator collapses the metaphor of the cognizant heart. He implies the inadequacies of literary representation and the inability of philosophers to communicate superlative joy. The experience can only be comprehended by the reader through the qualification that it is incomprehensible. This paradox discredits the role of cognition in apprehending pleasure and constructs and privileges a less self-aware form of affective response. The individuating effect of locating the heart, inherently singular and internal, as a physiological corollary to consciousness, is also compromised by descriptions of the exchange or sharing of hearts. After Troilus and Criseyde spend their first intimate night together, they exchange vows of love through describing the amalgamation of their hearts. Troilus declares “now fele I that myn herte moot a-two” [heart must break in two] if Criseyde does not swear that he is iset [set] in her heart as firmly as she is in his own (III. 1493, 1498).

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Criseyde responds by calling Troilus her “herte deere” and assuring that he is “so depe in-with myn herte grave” that he could never be turned out (III. 1488, 1499).29 Later in the poem, Criseyde is sent to the Greek military in exchange for a prisoner-of-war, and, after agonizing over the act that she knows will make her name synonymous with betrayal, commits herself to another suitor, Diomede. In deep distress at her forced absence, Troilus has a dream in which a boar kisses her and worries this is an omen that she has apayed [satisfied, pleased, or repaid] her heart elsewhere (V. 1249). He later confirms his interpretation by consulting his prophetess sister, who declares that “thy lady, wherso [where ever] she be, ywis [certainly], / This Diomede hire herte hath, and she his. / Wep if thow wolt, or lef [leave it], for out of doute, / This Diomede is inne, and thow art oute.” (V. 1516–19). Troilus, wasted by heartbreak, dies on the battlefield sometime after. Critical interpretations of the tragedy reflect changes in literary theory but also show contemporary understandings of love and desire.30 For instance, in understanding the lovers’ impending sorrows to be a consequence of ethical failings, Lee Patterson argues they do not achieve true mutuality in love because of their individual lack of integrity.31 An alternative approach is found within medieval physiologies of emotion in which love is not able to transcend the boundaries of physiological selfhood, although it can cause a feeling of union between people through shared apprehension.32 An exchange of hearts is a conventional expression of love in the Middle Ages that builds on the motif of the cognizant heart to represent reciprocal feelings and intentions. For instance, after considering the consequences of loving Troilus, Criseyde has a dream in which a white eagle tears her heart out with his claws and then flies away, but “with herte left for herte” (II. 925–31).33 The force of the exchange undermines Criseyde’s pragmatic consideration of choosing to love, but the dream marks the beginning of her consent to the relationship.34 Representing mutual love as an exchange of hearts is likewise seen in the Middle English Fortunes Stabilnes, a series of fifteenth-century ballades written by Charles d’Orleans. According to John Burrow, Charles “speaks as if the hearts in question were actual physical organs” because the arguments that he puts forward to his lover to convince her to give him her heart “make sense only if the hearts in question are understood literally.”35 Situating heart imagery within a wider medieval cultural discourse resists a binary understanding of the medieval exchange of hearts as exclusively literal or figurative. A more dynamic critical approach to medieval love relationships is facilitated through recognition of the cultural significance of the heart as a metonym for emotional consciousness. The rest of this chapter is concerned with the image of mobile hearts – hearts that may be given, traded or taken – in literature after Chaucer.

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Bartering Hearts in a Late-Medieval Lyrical Ledger of Love The relationship in the sparsely composed Middle English carol, “For wele or woo,” is expressed through a series of behaviors that are said to denote an experience of reciprocated love. The manuscript containing the carol, which is held in the collection of the Canterbury Cathedral Library, is dated to 1500, but H. T. Kirby-Smith, notes that the carol was probably composed some time earlier.36 The carol describes the past, present, and ongoing association between two or more loving hearts:

For [wele or w]oo [joy or woe] I wyll not fle [desert] To love that hart that lovyth me. That hart my hart hath in suche grace That of too hartes one hart make we; That hart hath brought my hart in case To loue that hart that lovyth me. For one the lyke vnto that hart Never was nor ys nor never shall be, Nor never lyke cavse set this apart To love that hart that lovyth me. Whyche cause gyveth cause to me and myne To serve that hart of suferente [sovereignty], And styll to syng this later lyne: To love that hart [that lovyth me.] Whatever I say, whatever I syng, Whatever I do, that hart shall se That I shall serue with hart lovyng That lovynge hart [that lovyth me.] Thys knot thus knyt [fastened] who shall vntwyne, Syns we that knyt yt do agre To lose [loosen] nor slyp [neglect], but both enclyne To love that hart [that lovyth me?] Farwell, of hartes that hart most fyne, Farwell, dere hart, hartly to the, And kepe this hart of myne for thyne As hart for hart for lovyng me.37

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The genderless voice of the song describes the behavior that accords to love felt for a beloved, before directly addressing this beloved in the final quatrain. The piece can be classified as a carol because of its burden, which is made up of the first two lines and forms an external refrain that is to be repeated after each of the regularly structured quatrains, here in an abab rhyming pattern.38 As a carol, it is suited to being sung and could have been accompanied by dance. Song in the later Middle Ages was, as Nicolette Zeeman observes, “a particularly effective means of expressing, exciting, and in some way containing passion.”39 Middle English carols were often didactic and reflected the complex intersections between the secular and spiritual in medieval life: “religious feeling was often touched with feeling that might now be regarded as secular, and vice-versa: love had a religious aspect, because human and divine love were seen as ultimately having some relationship.”40 Reflecting this overlapping of domains, “For wele or woo” is especially indeterminate. In his 1935 compilation of early English carols, Richard Leighton Greene notes that while it is possible to interpret the piece as devotional, its omission of specific identification means that it would be “safer” to interpret it as amorous.41 But, as a representation of the interpersonal politics of love, the carol has both devotional and amorous significance. Multilingual literary traditions and the fluidity of language and ideas during the medieval period influenced Middle English attitudes towards love.42 Latinate religious texts explicating the significance of love enabled spiritual depictions of the emotion in the writing of the troubadours and the works of Marie de France and Chretien de Troyes.43 These texts show an integrated physical, mental and spiritual understanding of love through idiomatic representation of “the migration of the lover’s spirit or heart to where the beloved is” and “the lover’s heart dwelling in or by the beloved, and the exchange of souls or hearts,” emotional states that are based on “the notion of love as a movement and a cleaving of the self to the object of desire.”44 “For wele or woo” has a thematic context in these earlier depictions of emotional interiority, encapsulating a cultural construction of love that continued to shape literary culture.45 In the same way that Chaucer’s work documents fourteenth-century attitudes to love, the song expresses beliefs about desire and interiority in late fifteenth-century England. In the carol, the lovers are referred to only as “hearts” and are exclusively defined by the associated capacities and interests. Such minimal characterization epitomizes a lack of the physical awareness of the heart that saturates Troilus and Criseyde. This is unsurprising, as Saunders notes the attention to physicality within Chaucer’s descriptions of the body in love make it extraordinary within the period.46 The “individuating quality of sensation,” which Nolan identifies as a literary technique in Chaucer’s

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writing, is absent from the carol, which instead communicates the relational dynamics, or the interpersonal politics of love, in a more general form.47 A reading or performance of the piece can be made personal through the provision of relevant details. The other’s heart is described by the carol’s speaker as incomparable: “For one that lyke vnto that hart / Never was nor ys nore never shall be.” David Lawton argues that “in medieval usage, voice, vox, has twin, somewhat paradoxical, meanings: as quotation, the trace of an authority cited if not always endorsed; and, notwithstanding, as independent human utterance.”48 In the carol, the homage to a specific individual reveals just such a disjunction. The truth of the statement, if not the sincerity of the speaker, is made suspect by the use of hyperbole, which is compromised by the universality of the claim appearing in a lyrical script. If everyone is lovable because they are different, the fact of difference itself is not a specifically lovable characteristic. The song forms an emotive script that is to be enacted by the singer.49 Through giving voice to one-half of a dialogue, the carol represents a dynamic emotional negotiation that, while conventional, may be rendered specific through individual application of meaning. In the carol, the subjects are characterized only by their relationship to one another and as being in a state of heart-baring. Within the poetic exchange, the only prerequisite to identifying with the singing voice, or indeed, the other heart within the negotiation, is having a heart, or rather, having knowledge of having a heart. The refrain (“For [wele or w]oo I wyll not fle / To love that hart that lovyth me”) sets the parameters of exchange and proximity that denote the capacities of a cognizant heart throughout the piece. The speaker vows consistent feelings of love to the heart that “lovyth me.” The reductive identification of the lover-heart as the beloved belies the consistency of feeling, since only while the other heart loves the speaker will they have their love returned unto them. Although the carol may be understood as a normative proclamation of love, it is written with a riddle-like ambiguity. The repetition of the term heart and its derivatives blend the speaker and the beloved into one indistinct form. Nevertheless, through frequent personal pronoun use, shifting from “I” to “me” and running into the first stanza, “my,” the carol is assertively self-focused: “That hart my hart hath in suche grace / That of too hartes one hart make we; / That hart hath brought my hart in case / To loue that hart that lovyth me.” Although the other heart is rhetorically reduced to the defining feature that is their heart, the speaker is expressed to be something larger, an agent “with” a heart, and therefore more than a heart. The speaker’s heart is brought into a state of love in return for a love given, joining together two hearts. Reciprocation of love, which is qualified as both something exchangeable that can be

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possessed, and a state that can be “fled” [departed from], is the bedrock of the sentiment. In this context, the heart can be defined as a sustained cognitive awareness of having a heart, meaning that the literal joining together of two hearts is not an illogical proposition. It is not only Aquinas who imbued the knowledge of consensual love with unitive power. In his twelfth-century work Cligès, Chrétien de Troyes states that although “it is not true or plausible that two hearts may be united in a single body,” the hearts of lovers can be considered “one” through the flow of desire between them.50 In the carol, a state of “grace” is said to be the unifying experience. Aligning with both a religious and non-religious interpretation of the song, in Middle English grace signifies help from God, providence, or a particular goodwill or intentionality, and so implies an awareness of sustained consciousness.51 The self-aware speaker describes the feeling of love to be a superior objective or reason for action: “Nor never lyke cavse set this apart / To love that hart that lovyth me.” The following stanza defines this “cause” as one that also motivates a community of associated subjects: “Which cause gyveth cause to me and myn / To serve that hart of suferente [sovereignty], / And styll to syn [sing] this later lyne, / To love that hart that lovyth me.” The carol is unclear as to whether the experience of love or the subjective other heart is the cause to be served. Serving a person, even an abstracted heart-as-person exclusively defined by being in a love relationship, has more of a solid social and political basis, than actively “serving” an emotion. And yet in “For wele or woo,” the two sovereignties are presented as inseparable. Love itself is a “cause,” motivating the desire to act in the service of the beloved. This is not just for the speaker, but for an identifiable group who may serve the same beloved, or a plurality of beloveds. Singing itself becomes an act of service, which is carried over into the next stanza: “Whatever I say, whatever I syng, / Whatever I do, that hart shall se / That I shall serue wyth hart lovyng / That lovyng hart that lovyth me.” The speaker dedicates all “doing” to the other heart and so privileges the service of love. Although a role of service is professed, the final line once again draws attention to the necessity for reciprocity within the love exchange. This late fifteenth-century carol is remote from the Summa Theologiae, and yet both texts contain a worldview in which the abstracted and frequently metaphorical emotional state of love is the cause of all agency.52 At the same time, as a love song directed to either a spiritual or temporal beloved, “For wele or woo” communicates the interpersonal processes of love rather than the sensatory. The carol finishes with a parting: “Farewell, of harts that hart most fyne, / Farwell, dere hart, hartly to the, / And kepe this hart of myne for thyne / As hart for hart for lovyng me.” In a devotional capacity, allusion to exchange and

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owed love throughout the carol evokes the debt due to Christ for his suffering in the Passion. This is commonly figured as a transaction of the heart. For example, in The Commandment, Richard Rolle instructs the reader to “Loue Ihesu, for he made þe and boght þe ful dere. Gif þi hert to hym, for hit is [his] dette” [Love Jesus, for he made you and bought you at great cost. Give your heart to him, for it is his debt].53 Separated from a strictly religious devotional context, but not exclusive of it, the notion of “heart for heart” belies a complex and abstracted form of interpersonal relations that has a number of viable interpretations. “For” can be read as a preposition here, indicating the location and other kinds of interrelationships between the hearts. The heart is the noun in this lyric, but it is a noun that implies its own capacity for doing. “Heart for heart” can designate a causal relationship with one heart identified as acting as heart through necessity, or because of the other. The phrase can be a justification with the initial heart acting out of regard or for the sake of the other or even as a simple infinitive, a “heart-in-order-to-heart.” “Heart for heart” could also signify a transaction or barter through a process of exchange or substitution. “Heart in place of heart” or even “heart in spite of heart,” both emphasize the continuing individuality of the narrator heart. Mutuality, in relation to love or anything else, describes an act of comparison and mediation. The speaking heart answers to or corresponds to the other heart. The relationship that “for” constructs between two like, but fundamentally unalike, hearts is also bound by temporality. It can be read as “heart during heart” or “heart for the space of a heart.” “For” can also be read as conjunction, joining two parts of a divided whole together. This makes it a statement of reason in which “for” acts as an amplification: one heart is more heart-like when encountered in relation to the other. It also indicates a goal of a particular eventuality, “heart so that heart” or “heart in the event that heart.” Diverse interpretations of the Middle English use of the heart within “For wele or woo” denote it to be the center of cognitive awareness and intention. In order to engage with lyrical representations of the heart in which it can be exchanged, replaced, and situated temporally, a reader must understand the capacities and inclinations of the cognizant heart. Familiarity with this concept, itself representing a kind of emotional and cognitive knowledge of the heart as prosopopoeia, allows translation of the peculiar account of love into a normative description of a loving relationship. The penultimate quatrain of the carol elaborates on the feeling of love through an analogy with tying knots: “This knot thus knyt who sall vntwyne, / Syns we that knyt it do agre / To lose nor slyp, but both enclyne / To love that hart that lovyth me?” The first two lines describe the temporality of the emotional experience as being in the present, but simultaneously a matter of predestination.

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The inevitability of “this” knot, which has already been knotted, will continue to be tied with the consent of those who tie it. After affirming love as natural and predestined, the speaker proposes a question: who would seek to untangle such a knot? The repetition of the final line as a question contrasts the specific nature of the personal pronoun with an appeal to a broader community, although there are several foreseeable interpretations. The speaker could be referencing a knot of love tied between two in-love hearts that some outside interloper may wish to untie. If the carol is placed in a devotional context, then the community of knottiers who tie a knot with the same lover, Christ, defend their prerogative to make this choice. Alternatively, the lyrics speak to multiple lovers at the same time although the carol is voiced by one specific heart. The tying of the knot surpasses any future attempt at loosening it and so becomes a teleologically-purposed truism. The knot is already tied and the negation of the knot must be an undoing, not a preventing. This metaphor fundamentally frames the heart’s capacity for love, and the associated behaviors it causes, as a matter of providence and a natural expression of humanity.

Conclusion Poetic registers that document Middle English emotion locate the heart as a site of exchange, between people but also within individuals, from exterior to interior and from feeling to cognition. Anchoring the similar and interrelated processes of feeling and cognition to the physiological certainty and movements of the heart naturalizes the related poetic depiction of the functions and behaviors of love.54 From Chaucer’s acclaimed poetry to small and disregarded anonymous lyrics, Middle English accounts of the heart depict human subjectivity to be inherently disposed towards reciprocated and consensual experiences of love and desire. These literary depictions of the heart show the cultural value that was placed on love as an embodied emotional experience, though this value was mediated by ethical concerns and social expectations. Physiological associations of the heart with apprehension and intentionality made it especially apt for explicating the impact of external and internal pressures on a character. Narrative tensions often follow the movement of hearts; the cognizant heart is mobile and qualified in relation to its proximity to other hearts because it works as a commodification of feelings that can be given, retracted, or shared. These capacities of the heart inform its function as a metonym for consciousness and a gauge by which to measure the instabilities of aesthetic pleasure, “for wele or woo,” that typify fifteenth-century literary depictions of love.55

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Notes 1. 2.

3.

4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

“herte (n.),” The Middle English Dictionary, ed. Hans Kurath and Sherman M. Kuhn (Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press, 2014), hereafter MED. Saunders cites Le Chevalier de la Charrete, by Chrétien de Troyes: “Reason . . . does not follow Love’s command.” Corinne Saunders, “Love and the Making of the Self: Troilus and Criseyde,” in A Concise Companion to Chaucer, ed. Corinne Saunders (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 137. Peter Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968); Norman Klassen, Chaucer on Love, Knowledge, and Sight (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995), 16. On this point, see also Denis Renevey’s study of Richard Rolle’s religious writing, which argues that “the metaphorical discourse of love where sensatio is the mode of cognition loses some of its potential cognitive power” as the language instead engages an “enduring quality of the feeling which the desire induces.” Denis Renevey, Language, Self and Love: Hermeneutics in the Writings of Richard Rolle and the Commentaries on the Song of Songs (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001), 118. Stephanie Trigg “Introduction: Emotional Histories – Beyond the Personalisation of the Past and the Abstraction of Affect Theory,” Exemplaria 26 (2014): 3. For an extensive summary of some of the different scholastic approaches to this relationship, see Simo Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 240, 278. Caroline Walker Bynum, Resurrection of the Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 5, 11. Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), 4. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that all mental experiences are understood through embodied metaphor; that is, metaphors are matters of thought, not just language. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 14. The anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing anticipates such an approach through arguing that the bodily nature of human language shapes cognitive understanding of non-bodily concepts. The Cloud of Unknowing, ed. Patrick Gallacher (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997), lines 1675–81, 2148–53. Robert Miner, Thomas Aquinas on the Passions: A Study of Summa Theologiae, 1a2ae, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 134. John Leyerle argues that in Troilus Chaucer uses the heart as a nucleus to give specific form to an abstract concept: the heart “is the cause of love and its variable fortune in the poem, thus subsuming both of the main themes.” John Leyerle “The Heart and the Chain,” The Learned and the Lewed, Harvard English Studies 5 (1974): 113–45; reprinted in Corinne Saunders, ed., Chaucer (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 152. Maura Nolan, “Medieval Sensation and Modern Aesthetics: Aquinas, Adorno, Chaucer,” The Minnesota Review 8 (2013): 145–58, 148. Nicolette Zeeman shows that these kind of Chaucerian song insertions “draw attention to the formal qualities of song itself – not least the qualities that make it a possible means of passionate self-expression”: “The Theory of Passionate Song,” in Medieval Latin and Middle English Literature: Essays in Honour of Jill Mann, ed. Christopher Cannon and Maura Nolan (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2017), 232. See also Chapter 3.

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17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

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Barry A. Windeatt describes Troilus and Criseyde to be a summa in Troilus and Criseyde (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 212, 214. Stephanie Downes and Rebecca McNamara, “The History of Emotions and Middle English Literature,” Literature Compass 13, no. 6 (2016): 449, 451. Sarah McNamer has called for closer attention to the embodied theory of emotional production described by Chaucer and other vernacular authors as opposed to the more explicit accounts found in Latinate and medical texts: “Feeling,” in Middle English: Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 241–57. Nolan, “Medieval Sensation and Modern Aesthetics,” 148–49. Ibid. S. L. Clark and Julian N. Wasserman, “The Heart in ‘Troilus and Criseyde’: The Eye of the Breast, the Mirror of the Mind, the Jewel in Its Setting,” The Chaucer Review 18, no. 4 (1984): 317. Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, “Aquinas’s Natural Heart,” Early Science & Medicine 18, no. 3 (2013): 267. All further references to Troilus and Criseyde are to: Geoffrey Chaucer, “Troilus and Criseyde,” in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 471–586. O’Rourke Boyle, “Aquinas’s Natural Heart,” 272. All further references to Summa Theologiae (ST) are to the Blackfriars edition: Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: Latin and English Translation, Introduction, Notes, Appendices and Glossaries, 61 vols. (London: Blackfriars with Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1967). Saunders, “Affective Reading: Chaucer, Women and Romance,” The Chaucer Review 51, no. 1 (2016): 14. As an organ of emotional production, the heart receives sense perceptions of the external world through its direct physiological link to the eyes. Mary Carruthers describes how “the roving desire of the soul is caught and fixed by something specific out of all that the senses receive from the world, something we can then form as an experience which can be grasped, recollected, analyzed and understood” in “Virtue, Intention and the Mind’s Eye in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,” in Traditions and Innovations in the Study of Medieval English Literature: The Influence of Derek Brewer, ed. Charlotte Brewer, Barry Windeatt, and E. G. Stanley (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2013), 84. “namelich in his counseil teelynge / That toucheth love that oughte ben secree; / For of himself it wol ynough out sprynge, / But if that it the bet governed be. / Ek som tyme it is a craft to seme fle / Fro thyng whych in effect men hunte faste.” MED, s.v. Line (n. (1)); Chaucer appropriates the image of intrinseca linea cordis (the line of the heart within) from Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s thirteenth-century treatise Poetria Nova which gives advice on how to start a poem. Leyerle “The Heart and the Chain,” 156. For instance, see Miner’s discussion of Aquinas’s theory of ecstasy as an effect of love in Miner, Thomas Aquinas on the Passions, 132–36. Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 137. Downes and McNamara, “The History of Emotions,” 449. Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 137. Miner, Thomas Aquinas on the Passions, 135–36.

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35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53.

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Saunders, “Love and the Making of the Self,” 143. David Aers argues that within the dream Criseyde perceives herself as passive and dominated and that the dream “highlights the violence and perils of loving concealed behind the traditional conceit of an exchange of hearts.” Aers draws attention to the social reality that shaped the experiences of many medieval women, but his reading can be moderated by an affective understanding of the exchange of hearts in which it signifies internal consent to feeling an emotion. David Aers, “Criseyde: Woman in Medieval Society,” The Chaucer Review 13, no. 3 (1979): 186. These arguments include the claim that “his gift of his heart to Beauty has left him “‘without hert’,” so it is for the lady to save him from death by transplanting her own into his body. Nor would she suffer from such a transplant, since she herself in already possessed of the lover’s heart, and no one needs more than a single heart. So the lady both must and can give him her own heart in return for his.” John Burrow, “The Exchange of Hearts in the English Poems of Charles d’Orléans,” The Chaucer Review 52, no. 4 (2017): 483. H. T. Kirby-Smith, The Celestial Twins: Poetry and Music through the Ages (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 103. Richard Leighton Greene, ed., The Early English Carols, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), fig. 444. Karl Reichl, “The Middle English Carol,” in A Companion to the Middle English Lyric, ed. Thomas Gibson Duncan (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), 158. Zeeman, “The Theory of Passionate Song,” 231. David Fuller, “Lyrics, Sacred and Secular,” in A Companion to Middle English Poetry, ed. Corinne Saunders (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 258. Greene, The Early English Carols, 485. A recent analysis and survey of the work being done on English multilingualism in the medieval period especially in relation to emotion, can be found in Downes and McNamara, “The History of Emotions,” 451. Saunders, “Love and the Making of the Self,” 137. Nicolas Perella, The Kiss Sacred and Profane: An Interpretive History of Kiss Symbolism and Related Religio-Erotic Themes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 89–90. The song’s thematic influence on the work of sixteenth-century poet Thomas Wyatt appears especially clear. Kirby-Smith, The Celestial Twins, 104. Saunders, “Love and the Making of the Self,” 140. Nolan, “Medieval Sensation and Modern Aesthetics,” 152. David Lawton, Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2017), 3. William M. Reddy discusses the performative value of emotive utterances in The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Chrétien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances, trans. William W. Kibler (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 157. MED, s.v. Grace (n.). Miner, Thomas Aquinas on the Passions, 132–37. Richard Rolle, “The Commandment,” in Richard Rolle: Prose and Verse, ed. S. J. OgilvieThomson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 39, lines 216–17.

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McNamer describes “feeling” as pertaining to “the integration of the somatic, affective, and cognitive in a pre-Cartesian universe”: “Feeling,” 247. Nolan states that pleasure and pain are “the experience of being embodied in a social world in which sensation is managed, regulated and controlled that produces these contradictory feelings: pleasure in conforming to an ideal or indulging in sensation and pain from subjecting the body to limits and controls,” “Medieval Sensation and Modern Aesthetics,” 153; Downes and McNamara note that in Middle English literature experiences of emotion are ambiguous and unstable “from joy to woe, and back again, . . . emotions themselves are not static in these texts,” “The History of Emotion,” 453.

Colin Yeo

7 “The Grave Where Buried Love Doth Live”: Hearts-Imagery and Bakhtinian Grotesque in Early Modern English Poetry Thou art the grave where buried love doth live, Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone Shakespeare, Sonnet 31 In deep discovery of the mynds disease; Is not the hart of all the body chiefe, And rules the members as it selfe doth please? Edmund Spenser, Amoretti 50

As a symbol of love, the heart has had a longstanding historical association with the theme of desire. Baldassare Castiglione, in Il Cortegiano (1528), regards the heart as a key mediator for the senses, conveying the “influence of beauty” from the faculties of sight to the soul.1 The heart, Castiglione writes, is the center of feeling, from which messages of desire originate. It is interesting to note that as a critic writing in the twenty-first century, the language used by Castiglione is identifiable in contemporary culture’s treatment of desire. From handbooks such as Castiglione’s, to poetry of the later sixteenth century and in contemporary textual genres such as popular music, the metaphorical associations of the organ with love is a connection that is one of the most enduring throughout literary and cultural history. It is not surprising then to note that poets of the English Renaissance drew heavily on the imagery of the heart in their love poems. Echoing Castiglione, the heart, as interpreted by Edmund Spenser in Sonnet 50 of Amoretti (1595), is the “chief” of the body, ruling over all other members of the human body.2 Similarly, the speaker of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 31 (1609) considers the loss of one’s heart as a fatal act.3 Sonnet 31 is a contemplation of the heart’s functioning as a core organ, as well as its symbolic relationship with the subject of desire. What happens then when writers conflate realism with metaphor? For one to say “you have my heart” is a statement that is meant to be taken metaphorically, but what if it is taken literally? In this chapter, I explore the relationship

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between the metaphorical and literal uses of heart-imagery in poetry of the English Renaissance. On one hand, poets of the period were inspired by the courtly tradition espoused by writers such as Castiglione. On the other hand, significant advances in the anatomical sciences occurred during the Renaissance, scholarly endeavors that shed light on the functioning of the human body, including the workings of the heart. Juxtaposed against a background of anatomical knowledge, early modern poets often commingled the metaphorical associations of the desiring heart with realism. To aid my discussion, I apply Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of grotesque realism to a reading of poetic texts from the Renaissance that play on the symbolic and literal characteristics of heart-imagery. The ambiguity of hearts as “grotesque” poetic constructs allows for a critical reading, which evokes multifaceted emotional effects that are particularly salient given the organ’s longstanding associations with desire and love. A foundational work that foreshadows the points raised in my discussion of the heart in early modern English poetry is Richard Sugg’s Murder after Death (2007). Sugg’s monograph explores anatomy in early modern English literature and culture, outlining the emergence of corporeal dissection. He discusses the complexities relating to study of the body in the Renaissance, viewing anatomical study as a phenomenon that had profound implications for early modern literary expression. He notes the “peculiar thrill of strangeness” brought about by study of the body, an effect that arose from the advent of scientific study.4 Several of his examples address the work of poets John Donne, Michael Drayton, and Sir Philip Sidney, prompting the discussions raised in this essay. I suggest that the “thrill of strangeness” noted by Sugg can be read as an effect of combining literary devices such as metaphors and figures of speech, with images that carry connotations of realism.

The Heart in Early Modern Studies Existing scholarly work on embodiment and early modern literature is focused on areas such as humoralism, religion, and the burgeoning medical sciences. The works of Gail Kern Paster and Michael Schoenfeldt have offered a humoralist perspective to debates about the role of the body in early modern literary culture. These studies highlight the body’s relation to the world, with an emphasis on the physiological aspects of the early modern self.5 The importance of humoralism to the texts surveyed in this essay, love poetry, cannot be understated. After all, it is the poetic speakers’ love melancholy that drives the disturbing displays of corporeal transgression in the poems of Donne, Drayton, and Sidney.

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But the poet/speaker’s self is but one part of the equation in these texts. Melancholy love poetry is often directed at an addressee, thus advancing an idea of the body beyond the “humoral self”. In Sidney’s Sonnet 29, for example, it is not the poet himself who is the subject of the text but the poet’s mistress. In this respect, it is important to note other critical perspectives that consider bodily and cognitive forms of emotion in conjunction with each other.6 The subversion of Petrarchan poetics in these texts betrays a dynamic that combines both how one perceives the body, and how the body is perceived by others. Critical studies have also invariably outlined connections between the imagery of the heart and religion. Erin Sullivan has recently written on the role of the heart in metaphysical poetry as a means of articulating the effects of devotional transformation.7 A similar argument is developed by Erikson in his monograph, The Language of the Heart.8 This chapter focuses on a secular view of the relation between the heart and emotion. William Slights takes this position in his study on the heart in the age of Shakespeare, accounting for the dynamism of how early modern authors, religious or otherwise, treated heart-imagery.9 Slights’s focus on the striking visual imagery of the heart in his chapter “Reading the Graphic Heart” is an approach that has informed my own in this chapter. While Slights focuses on the religious aspect of gruesome heart imagery in early modern texts, I continue the conversations initiated by Slights through a reading of a heart-imagery within the Petrarchan tradition. Nancy J. Vickers outlines the intersection between science and creative expression in the period as poets’ attempt to emulate the work of anatomists and scientists: “It could be argued that what lay at the heart of both poetic and anatomical practices of dissection was the poet or scientist’s virtuoso display of a fundamentally scandalous art: it is in the masterful publishing of the secrets of the body by means of a masterful wielding of an instrument that the medical dissector’s art meets poet-rhetorician.”10 The poet, armed with the knowledge possessed by dissectors and scientists, could exhibit a mastery over the human body in verse. Simpson’s catalogue, for example, locates more than seven hundred medical references in the plays of Shakespeare.11 Poems such as John Donne’s “The Dampe” and “The Legacy,” and Sonnet 50 from Michael Drayton’s sequence Idea similarly feature the act of dissection. Francis Bacon’s oft-cited 1597 remark that knowledge was the source of God’s power is also relevant.12 Knowledge of the body’s inner workings provided poets with a source of quasi-divine power. Poets’ awareness of the inner workings of the body through these social and cultural sources emerges in their use of imagery that question the concept of the human body as a complete, “ideal” construct. As the body proved to be a compelling site of inquiry for playwrights and poets alike, it is unsurprising that the heart was an organ that fascinated writers of the period.

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The sixteenth century saw a proliferation of texts devoted to the study of the heart, as illustrated texts brought a fresh dimension to anatomical studies. The “prominent place” granted to art in the Renaissance influenced pictorial aids within literary production.13 The work of Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius showcased sketches and illustrations of the body and its various organs, outlining the multiple workings of the heart. In his seminal text On the Fabric of the Human Body, Vesalius devoted a section to the processes surrounding “how to dissect the heart.”14 He challenges Galenic approaches to anatomy as he guides a reader through the procedure. The heart was also the subject of numerous illustrations from Leonardo Da Vinci.15 Most of his illustrations were based on bulls’ hearts, but with at least one of the interior right ventricle of the human heart.16 Da Vinci argued for the use of visuals in a study of anatomy rather than descriptions: “With what words will you describe this heart so as not to fill a book, and the longer you write, minutely, the more you will confuse the mind of the auditor, and you will always be in need of the commentators or returning to experience which is with you very short.”17 He eschewed the use of “words,” stating that the work of a painter would surpass writing. Da Vinci’s note here is somewhat ironic as the work of early modern love poets would subsequently draw from the anatomical study of the heart in their verses and juxtapose this burgeoning scientific realism with figurative treatments of the heart in the literary tradition. Following from the work of Da Vinci and Vesalius, in the early seventeenth century, William Harvey published De Mortu Cordis (An Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals, 1628), a treatise on the heart that outlined the connections between the circulatory functions of the veins, lungs and heart itself.18 As evidenced by Harvey’s work and the illustrations of Da Vinci and Vesalius, the emergence of anatomical study in the Renaissance ushered in new ways of understanding the functioning of the body.

The Heart and Metaphor Advances in the field of anatomy in the Renaissance provided poets with a novel way of viewing the body as well as insight into the way in which the body functioned. The heart was, by the efforts of early modern anatomists’ sketches, laid bare. These new ways of interpreting human corporeality were paired with the firm associations the heart had with metaphor and figures of speech. As a “vehicle” for symbolizing love and emotions, the image of the human heart has a long-standing association with desire and love.19 Love, Lakoff and Johnson write,

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is best understood as an intangible, “metaphorically structured concept.”20 In their view, “emotional concepts” such as love are not clearly delineated in humans’ direct experience and therefore require being comprehended indirectly through the use of metaphor in language. But a reliance on metaphor for conveying the gamut of humans’ emotional experiences also generates the possibility for alternatives tied to the meaning of metaphors. Metaphor was regarded as a useful literary device in the Renaissance, one that informed writers’ conceptualization of the heart in poetry. In The Art of English Poesie, George Puttenham describes of the use of metaphor: “There is a kind of wresting of a single word from his own right signification, to another so not natural, yet of some affinity or convenience with it, . . . therefore it is called by metaphore, or the figure of transport.”21 For Puttenham, metaphor allows for the multivalence of a given concept. He uses the example of a Petrarchan poetic couplet: “Then also do we it sometimes to enforce a sense and make the word more significantive [sic]: as thus, ‘I burn in love, I freeze in deadly hate. I swim in hope, and sink in deep despair’.”22 Emphasis, Puttenham states, is what metaphor can be used to elicit. By the term “sense” in this example, he recognizes the value of metaphor in articulating the intangible. In Puttenham’s citation of Petrarch, emotions such as love, hate, hope, and despair are rendered as palpable sensations. These examples show how metaphor functions as a literary technique for enforcing a specific concept, but also allowing for an interpretation that produces new meanings. Poets’ familiarization with the inner workings of the body through sources such as the writings of anatomists emerges in their use of images that challenge the integrity of the human body. On one hand, the heart was an object of curiosity and discovery, an organ that man knew little about. On the other hand, for many early moderns, the heart had metaphorical connotations of love and emotion. Sonnet 50 from Edmund Spenser’s sonnet sequence Amoretti, for example, outlines the tension between metaphor and realism that pertains to cultural associations of heart-imagery. Spenser plays on the treatment of the heart in love poetry as a symbol of desire, juxtaposed with the corporeal effects of his desire: Long languishing in double malady Of my harts wound and of my bodies griefe, There came to me a leach, that would apply Fit medicines for my bodies best reliefe. Vayne man, quoth I, that hast but little priefe In deep discovery of the mynds disease; Is not the hart of all the body chiefe, And rules the members as it selfe doth please? Then with some cordialls seeke for to appease

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The inward languor of my wounded hart, And then my body shall have shortly ease. But such sweet cordialls passe physicians art: Then, my lyfes leach! doe you your skill reveale, And with one salve both hart and body heale. (lines 1–14) 23

The poem’s two opening lines illustrate Spenser’s awareness of the interconnectivity between the heart and the body, as the poet references the “double malady” of his injured heart and his grieving body. The speaker subsequently comes to an epiphany, realizing that by attending to his heart, he might find some respite from his bodily suffering. This epiphany is followed up by the insight that the solution to his pain lies beyond the realm of medical techniques. Spenser’s double use of “leach,” as a reference to his beloved as well as to medicine, reinforces this dynamic interplay between metaphorical and corporeal healing. After a reference to a “wounded” heart in line 10, line 12 moves to a consideration of the heart as a metaphor, holding the two different meanings of the word in productive tension. As the poem concludes, the speaker grounds his statements in abstraction and realism at the same time, when he suggests that only his beloved can cure his physical pain. Spenser’s speaker confers on his beloved the power to heal him, a description of her supposed abilities that lie beyond the comprehension of a “physicians art.” The poem’s final couplet frames the poem as an indirect vehicle of praise for the speaker’s beloved. His beloved is featured as having the potential to satisfy his desire, resulting in the curing of his physical ailment. Combining an emphasis on corporeality with a metaphorical treatment of the heart, the conclusion of Spenser’s poem highlights the blurred lines between realism and metaphor that exist in early modern love poetry. Spenser’s initial efforts read as an attempt to blend science with poetic language, but the conclusion of Amoretti 50, with its treatment of desire as a concept that has medicinal or curative purposes, complicates the poem’s emphasis on realism. Spenser’s poem exemplifies the tensions between corporeality and metaphor, considering the implications when the heart as a vital organ is considered in tandem with its metaphorical connotations.

Hearts and Grotesque Realism Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of grotesque realism is particularly useful when considering the effects of juxtaposing metaphor with realism in early modern English poetry. Grotesque realism is defined by Bakhtin in his seminal study

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Rabelais and His World (1965). He proposes that grotesque imagery evokes responses through the degradation of the ideal and the complete: “The essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, that is, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to a material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity.”24 Abstract concepts, Bakhtin writes, are transferred to the realm of the material via grotesque realism. Grotesque iterations of abstract concepts ascribe an element of palpability to otherwise intangible ideas. The vocabulary of the grotesque draws attention to the physical world, emphasizing corporeality, rather than the abstract. Bakhtin’s view is that the grotesque in early modern literature carries associations with a burgeoning cultural development, embodying elements of humor and the carnivalesque.25 My reading of the heart-imagery deployed in early modern poetry is that it is used to unnerve and disturb. This is a view that stands somewhat in opposition to Bakhtin’s idea of the grotesque as embodying a festive, carnivalesque spirit centered on folk culture. As I will subsequently examine, the impact of scientific study on Renaissance literary culture affords a more nuanced and complex exploration of the body in early modern love poetry that is disturbing rather than humorous. Bakhtin suggests that, while the carnivalesque is disturbing, it provides an opportunity for the release of tensions that it contains. I suggest that such a resolution is markedly absent from the texts surveyed in this chapter. The relationship between metaphor and grotesque realism allows for the interpretation of multiple levels of meaning in a given concept. Geoffrey Galt Harpham writes that metaphor and the grotesque have similar qualities as both generate impressions of a particular concept whilst embodying another.26 Echoing Harpham, Ralf Remshardt defines this connection: “The grotesque, however, is serious about metaphor; it takes what is essentially a sophisticated trope – so sophisticated, indeed, that cognitive psychology has only a vague understanding of its functioning – and deliberately regards it naively, or incorrectly, or primitively, in hopes perhaps of traversing the graveyard of commonplace metaphor and restoring its onomathic origins. The grotesque takes metaphor literally.”27 Remshardt proposes that the grotesque realizes metaphor, having the ability to draw multiple meanings from an elaborate trope. His observations are particularly significant in a consideration of early modern love poetry, a genre that often focuses on the metaphorical relation of the heart to desire. While the heart carries with it both associations with desire and emotions, a literal reading of the image in poetry, I propose, can evoke unnerving effects. It is not surprising, then, that early modern English poets challenged the boundaries between abstraction and realism in their use of imagery of the heart.

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In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 31, the heart carries connotations of desire and love, but has disturbing implications when read through the lens of grotesque realism. The poem begins with a display of excess, where the poet’s subject wears a set of hearts as trophies. Shakespeare plays on the difference between metaphor and realism in the first section of the poem, using exaggeration to describe his beloved as a figure that is universally adored, as evidenced by his use of the word “all” in lines 1, 3, and 4: “Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts, / Which I by lacking have supposed dead; / And there reigns Love, and all Love’s loving parts, / And all those friends which I thought buried.”28 Each line plays on a different meaning of the word “heart.” The opening line of the speaker’s subject being “endeared” with hearts begs to be read as a metaphor, where hearts represent desire. But the speaker then considers the heart-metaphor literally in the next line where not having a heart will cause death. Following this, the mentions of “Love” and “Love’s loving parts” once again consider the heart as a metaphor. A reference to burial in the fourth line of the poem builds on the conceit of death introduced previously, re-introducing a tone of realism. The symbolic use of heart-imagery alongside its literal uses expose the unnerving implications of being “endeared” with human hearts. The poet himself urges the consideration of both meanings, as evidenced by his use of the word “and” at the start of lines 3 and 4. Blurring the boundary between reality and the metaphorical, Shakespeare’s grotesque vision is juxtaposed against the purely metaphorical connotations attached to imagery of the human heart in this poem. References to the heart as a metaphor are contrasted with references to corporeality, where “lacking hearts” points to its realist connotations. The implication here is that not having a heart will result in one’s death. As the poem progresses, Shakespeare repeatedly references the subject of death, prompting readers to consider the implications of losing one’s heart. It is in lines 5–14 where Shakespeare’s use of heart-imagery takes on a realist dimension. In turn, this enables a reading of the poem that considers the disturbing implication of a woman wearing a trophy-necklace of harvested hearts: How many a holy and obsequious tear Hath dear religious love stol’n from mine eye, As interest of the dead, which now appear But things removed that hidden in thee lie! Thou art the grave where buried love doth live, Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone, Who all their parts of me to thee did give, That due of many now is thine alone: Their images I loved, I view in thee, And thou (all they) hast all the all of me. (lines 5–14) 29

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The phrases “supposed dead” in line 2 and “thought buried” in line 4 are followed up with further references to death; “the dead,” “the grave” and “buried love” suggest that what the poet/speaker is addressing is the loss of an actual human heart. Line 7 extrapolates the relationship between hearts and death when the poet refers to the hearts adorning his subject as synecdochal substitutes for “the dead,” a host of unfortunate others who have died. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 31 takes a well-known and traditional association between love and the heart and exploits the potential for this abstract conceit to be imagined in a different way. My reading of Shakespeare’s beloved in Sonnet 31 as female departs from conventional interpretations of the poet’s addressee as a male “Fair Youth.” Gendered readings aside, this does not detract from the ambiguous power dynamics between speaker and beloved that arise from a consideration of grotesque realism.30 The poem depicts an anti-Petrarchan beloved as a figure that inspires horror. The confronting image of a mistress who wears the hearts of her victims as gruesome trophies is presented to readers as a statement of the power of the “cruel mistress.” The intersecting connotations of metaphor and grotesque realism, coupled with the mistress’s brazen display of grotesque trophies, imbue an existing concept with new meaning. Shakespeare’s grotesque configuration reframes the Petrarchan beloved as an all-encompassing subject that is to be feared. Her ability to wear hearts makes her both desirable and threatening of pain. The grotesque acts to heighten the emotional intensity of what the mistress offers and to tie it into a real embodied feeling – the references to graves and burials particularly drive home that this is not an abstract “higher love” but a grounded, embodied, experiential love. Another poem that plays on the relationship between heart-metaphors and grotesque realism is John Donne’s “The Legacy,” where he explores the relationship between selves, hearts, bodies, and legacies after death. The poet imagines himself taking on the role of one who studies the functioning of the human body. The speaker adopts two different roles, one of which is his poetic self and the other, a dissector: “Though I be dead, which sent me, I might be / Mine own executor, and legacy.”31 As both “executor” and “legacy,” Donne envisions himself dissecting his own body. “Executor” here importantly carries the double meaning of “executioner” and one who manages the estate of the deceased. Taking on the role of a dissector, Donne’s executor-self dissects his subjectself: “I heard me say, ‘Tell her anon, / That myself,’ that is you, not I, / ‘Did kill me,’ and when I felt me die, / I bid me send my heart, when I was gone; / But I alas! could there find none; / When I had ripp’d, and search’d where hearts should lie, / It kill’d me again, that I who still was true / In life, in my last will should cozen you (lines 9–16).”32 The poem begins with the executor examining the subject and attempting to remove the subject’s heart as a promised gift to

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their beloved, something he fails at because his lover is his heart (a collapsing of heart, self and lover). Line 13, “But I alas! . . ., ” also conflates the established relationship between executor and subject, causing both roles to be merged into one. The speaker’s exclamation here conveys a sense of surprise that he cannot find the heart he expects should lie within his body. Instead, he has injured himself. The onomatopoeic resonance of Donne’s word choice – “ripping” – heightens the effect of the speaker’s unsuspecting act of self-harm. “Ripp’d” and “search’d,” reinforce the disturbing implications of tearing out one’s own heart. Both words introduce a corporeal dimension to the metaphorical connection between heart with self and lover. The act of searching charges the line with a tone of curiosity that suggests an attempt at anatomical investigation. The speaker’s concluding remark, that he should expect to find the heart in a specific physical location, also contributes to this feel of realism. The speaker’s dual selves mirrors the poet’s blend of metaphor and realism. “The Legacy,” like Shakespeare’s Sonnet 31, extrapolates and exaggerates the cultural significance of the heart by weaving the subject of death and anatomical study with tropes from love poetry. The consequence is a set of poems that offer an unnerving consideration of what happens when one’s heart is, quite literally, removed; an effect that grounds the physicality of the emotional experience of the lover as heart and is suggestive of love’s destabilizing effects. The concept of the heart as “chief” of the body is explored by Sir Philip Sidney in Sonnet 29 of his sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella. Sidney’s Sonnet 29, in contrast with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 31 and John Donne’s “The Legacy,” presents a treatment of desire that emphasizes metaphor rather than realism. Centered on the idea of the heart as central to the functioning of the body, Sidney contemplates and exaggerates the potential repercussions of the loss of the heart on the rest of an individual’s body. Foreshadowing Donne’s dissectorself in “The Legacy,” Sidney personifies Love as a conquerer, who prompts his beloved Stella to divide herself into fragmented parts of her own volition. Sonnet 29 reads as a degradation of a typical Petrarchan mistress, conveyed through the lens of grotesque realism and an emphasis on corporeality. Instead of being associated with the divine, Stella is aligned with the physical. Sidney’s use of grotesque realism in this poem showcases a horrific scenario of a woman’s body rent into pieces, yet artfully lays the responsibility for the act on Stella’s engagement with the personification of Love. Instead of an organ that is synonymous with desire, the heart and Love are regarded as separate from each other. Love is envisioned by the poet as a conqueror who confronts his beloved Stella. In awe of Love’s power, the poet’s subject Stella surrenders her heart unto Love: “So Stella’s heart finding what power Love

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brings, / To keep itself in life and liberty, / Doth willing grant, that in the frontiers he / Use all to help his other conquerings” (lines 5–8).33 This stanza reads as a disparagement of Stella, an act that, despite the retention of her identity, results in the usurpation of Stella’s body by Love. The removal of Stella’s heart brings a disintegration of her body turning her into a grotesque assemblage used by Love for his purposes: “And thus her heart escapes, but thus her eyes / Serve him with shot, her lips his heralds are; / Her breasts his tents, legs his triumphal car; / Her flesh his food, her skin his armor brave (lines 9–12).” Stella is presented as surrendering to the power of Love, articulated through the metaphor of Stella’s heart fleeing from Love. But what follows next is a list of references that place an emphasis on corporeality – her eyes, lips, breasts, legs, and flesh. Sidney’s shift from the abstract to the corporeal introduces an element of grotesque realism to the tone of the poem. His use of the word “her” before describing each body part reinforces that they belong to Stella. After those parts are used by Love, they are described as belonging to him. Repeated several times in lines 9–12, the combined effect of these references is a grotesque and disturbing vision of a cannibalistic individual devouring a woman and dressing up in parts of her body. The portrayal of Sidney’s Love as a man generates the potential for a reading of this poem that focuses on the shocking implications of Stella’s anatomy being dissected, used, and consumed.34 More importantly, whilst the motif of Stella’s heart “escaping” begs to be read as a metaphor, the excessive detail of Stella’s dehumanization enables a reading of the heart as crucial to the functioning of the body. Without the heart, corporeal fragmentation will soon ensue. The clauses “and thus” and “but thus” in line 9 forge a link between the importance of the heart to the overall functioning of the body. It places an indelible importance on the heart as the “chief” of the body, the lack of which carries fatal consequences. Sidney’s Sonnet 29 begins with the metaphor of Stella’s heart “fleeing” from Love, contains a series of embedded corporeal references, the personification of Love, and concludes with an unnerving vision of a dehumanized female form. From personification to figures of speech and vice versa, the poet delivers a human body that draws particular emphasis to its corporeality. Melding the roles of “poet-rhetorician” with medical dissector, the poem is ultimately an exercise of male poetic power that takes liberties with a woman’s corporeal integrity. Unlike the fearsome cruel fair of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 31 who wears hearts like trophies, Sidney’s Stella is torn apart through the actions of an all-conquering Love. Yet, that Stella chooses to yield to Love creates a tension between her agency and Sidney’s creative power. Her physical self is conquered, but it is an act that results from a display of her agency. Similarly,

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Sidney’s act of creative dissection acts as a form of power but he is himself “given up for a slave,” subject to Stella’s power. The grotesque, then, brings this tension to the fore.

Conclusion The visions of grotesque bodies in early modern poetic treatments of the heart demonstrate a marked shift away from established tropes of courtly love and Petrarchan poetics. The association of love with divinity is “degraded” in poetic efforts that emphasize the corporeal rather than the divine, as evidenced in Donne’s “The Legacy” and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 31. While existing studies have highlighted the importance of the humors, in particular the role of melancholy in love poetry, this essay has focused on the anatomical underpinnings of poets’ creations. Through their sketches and writings on the body’s inner workings, practitioners of the anatomical sciences provided poets of the period with visions of the body that contributed to the development of texts that stood in opposition to well established norms of love poetry. Exploiting the emergence of anatomical sciences in the period, early modern love poets demonstrated a fascination with corporeality that generated new ways of looking at the body in the early modern period. Of particular interest was the functioning of the human heart. Poets tapped into associations between the heart as a symbol of love and as an organ, prompting responses that were at times unnerving and horrific. By introducing the corporeal heart into their poetic treatment of love, the lines between the metaphorical and the real were blurred. Importantly, the corporeal heart allowed the emotion of love to be described as an embodied rather than a spiritual experience. Corporeal metaphors reinforce the bodily effects of love, rendering an intangible experience tangible. In doing so they ultimately reinforced the centrality of the heart, both as an abstract concept and as a marker of an individual’s well-being. From the early modern to the present, what unites poets, critics, anatomists and scientists alike is that the heart is the “chief” of the body. Expounded upon in the Renaissance by creative expression and scientific study, its relation to the physical as well as emotional aspects of the body were explored in novel ways that advanced our perception and understanding of corporeality. The heart might be an organ that has a firm association with love, desire and the beautiful, but the organ itself was not a pretty sight to behold. Early modern poets, sought to “degrade” abstract metaphors of the heart by introducing overtly corporeal elements in their love poems.

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Notes 1. 2.

3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Thomas Hoby (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1928), 316. Edmund Spenser, “Amoretti 50,” in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram, Einar Bjorvand, Ronald Bond, et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 630. William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 31,” in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Katherine DuncanJones (London: Thomson Learning, 2003), 173. Richard Sugg, Murder After Death: Literature and Anatomy in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 1. Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 18; Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 12. Brian Cummings and Freya Sierhuis, “Introduction,” in Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture, ed. Brian Cummings and Freya Sierhuis (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 6. Erin Sullivan, Beyond Melancholy: Sadness and Selfhood in Renaissance England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 146. Robert A. Erikson, The Language of the Heart: 1600–1750 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 41. William W. E. Slights, The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Nancy J. Vickers, “Members Only,” in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (Routledge: New York, 2010), 7. Robert Ritchie Simpson, Shakespeare and Medicine (London: E&S Livingstone, 1959), 3. Francis Bacon, Essays, Religious Meditations (London, 1598), 27. Joshua Otto Leibowitz, The History of Coronary Heart Disease (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 49. Andreas Vesalius, On the Fabric of the Human Body, Book VI: The Heart and Associated Organs, Book VII: The Brain, trans. William Frank Richardson and John Burd Carman (Novato, CA: Norman Publishing, 2009), 106. Leonardo Da Vinci, Anatomical Drawings, ed. Kenneth David Keele and Jane Roberts (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1983), 125. Francis C. Wells, The Heart of Leonardo (London: Springer, 2013), 181. Da Vinci, Anatomical Drawings, 124. Jole Shackelford, William Harvey and the Mechanics of the Heart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 44. Rene Dirven, “Metaphor as a Basic Means of Extending the Lexicon,” in The Ubiquity of Metaphor: Metaphor in Language and Thought, ed. Wolf Paprotte and Rene Dirven (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1985), 89. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 85. George Puttenham, The Arte Of English Poesie, ed. Edward Arber (London: Edward Arber, 1869), 189 (italics in original). Ibid., 190 (italics in original). Spenser, “Amoretti 50,” 630.

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Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 19. Ibid., 96. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 178. Ralf Remshardt, Staging the Savage God: The Grotesque in Performance (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Press, 2004), 104 (italics in original). Shakespeare, “Sonnet 31,” 137. Ibid., 137. Valerie Traub adopts a similarly iconoclastic view of Shakespeare’s lover in Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 251. John Donne, “The Legacy,” in The Songs and Sonnets of John Donne, ed. Theodore Redpath (London: Methuen, 1983), 50. Ibid., 50. Philip Sidney, The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler Jr. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 179. Susan M. Luther, “Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, Sonnet 29,” The Explicator 33, no. 5 (1975): 5. See also Chapter 4 for Love personified.

Susan Broomhall

8 Heart Tombs: Catherine de’ Medici and the Embodiment of Emotion During the 1560s, Catherine de’ Medici (1519–1589), the former queen consort of Henri II of France and now widow and regent, commissioned leading court artists and poets to articulate a range of emotional responses to the death of three kings of France, her husband Henri and her two eldest sons, François II and Charles IX. In these tombs, heart monuments, a mausoleum and poetry, Catherine’s heart and its emotional experiences articulated material and rhetorical performances of power. Through them, both her gendered, grieving body and political agency were simultaneously produced. This chapter investigates the dialectic relationship between early modern embodiment and materiality through poetic and artistic expressions of the feeling heart, which was integral to Catherine de’ Medici’s self-presentation as a political protagonist in France. Although a better-studied emblem of grief in Catherine’s artistic commissions is tears falling on quicklime, the heart also helped to define Catherine’s political role.1 Specifically, what was voiced of Catherine’s heart was its particular feeling qualities and emotional experiences as a wife, widow, and mother, what I am terming here the “feeling heart.” I argue that Catherine’s emblematic representation of tears and presentations of the feeling heart reflected a coordinated emotional performance and embodied political experience. Recent feminist scholarship not only understands the body as a critical way in which gendered and other identities are lived and agency experienced but extends our thinking of embodiment to explore its material dimensions.2 Most commonly this has been examined through the ways that bodies interact with multiple materialities in time and space, and form embodied practices. These analyses reveal “the material processes through which human corporeality is enacted and imagined, produced and unmade.”3 The process is dialectic, for “the co-constitutive entanglements of embodiment and materiality” shape both bodies and objects, and together form lived experiences.4 This chapter applies these insights to textual and material works about the heart connected to Catherine de’ Medici. Scholars have noted the importance of

Note: This research was conducted as part of an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (project number FT130100070). https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513275-009

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widowhood to performances of Catherine’s political identity.5 Catherine’s somber attire emphasizing her viduity articulated a singular devotion to the Valois dynasty of her husband and dedication to a future to be built through their sons as heirs to the French kingdom. This essay nuances these analyses and suggests that Catherine’s artistic programs employing the heart complicates their straightforward interpretation as representations of widowhood, and enabled Catherine to adapt her political participation to changing contexts. Funerary monuments were political texts that acted as dynastic vehicles, evoking power, status, and authority. As Michele Beth Bassett contends, “more than any of her other artistic projects, the funerary commissions argued a clear case for the legitimacy of the Queen Mother’s rise to power.”6 Catherine’s programs for the monuments for her husband and sons made emotions, most commonly her own, central to their political interpretation. These emotional presentations were performances fundamentally shaped by contemporary gender ideologies, assumptions, and concerns about women in positions of power.7 Articulations of Catherine’s feelings were, at least in part, intended to conceptualize, and allay fears about, political power in the hands of a woman. Although men’s mortal remains may have instigated the performance of feelings and power in these material forms, it was Catherine’s emotions that were rendered textually, visually, and materially generative to their production. The entombment of not only men’s bodies but also their hearts in separate monuments, or cardiotaphs, were opportunities to voice the feelings of Catherine’s heart for these men, feelings that did political work for her. These expressions, visualizations, and entombments were part of a rich culture of artistic symbols and conventions, as well as medical understandings, about the heart that flowed through sixteenth-century France, and beyond. The heart had long been a, if not the, staple organ of emotional life and expression in poetic and artistic forms, as well as in Scriptural and classical sources.8 The traditions of French medieval courtly-love poetry and song connected the heart to the intense passions of love, both its joys and sorrows.9 By the later Middle Ages, the sovereignty of the heart, in relation to the head, was gaining ground in political philosophy in ways that were vital to new understandings of rule.10 Just as the heart was considered the principal organ of feeling that gave vital spirit and heat to the whole body in contemporary medical sources, so too did the king as the generative force situated at the conceptual center of his kingdom.11 These ideas corresponded with a new practice of separate burial for the hearts, and sometimes entrails, from the other remains of kings. In the selection of their chosen burial sites for these different remains with distinct political and emotional resonance, monarchs bestowed nuanced spiritual and political favors.12 By the mid-sixteenth century, it was not only monarchs who

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practiced these traditions of heart monuments, but also leading courtiers, including Henri II’s great friend and ally, the constable Anne de Montmorency.13 Catherine’s use of the heart to do her political work drew upon symbols that were already broadly familiar and legible to contemporary audiences. However, in the hands of artists and poets working for the queen mother, different emotional and gendered qualities of these symbols emerged. The boundaries of the Valois family’s corporeal forms and emotional exchange became fluid, as the bodies and hearts of men were transformed to speak for, and through, Catherine in the monuments that she commissioned.

“Their United Heart Bears Witness to Their Enduring Love”: Multi-Modal Emotional Embodiments In 1559, the 40-year-old monarch, Henri II, died unexpectedly as a result of a horrific tournament injury. Despite his widely known devotion to Diane de Poitiers, Henri had supported his wife in official roles of service and appointed her as regent three times during his reign.14 They had formed a functioning and coordinated team. However, as their eldest son François, a boy of fifteen, assumed the throne, the uncles of his wife, Mary Queen of Scots, assumed responsibility for guiding the young king. Catherine, the king’s mother, was sidelined from power.15 By December 1560 though, François had died and her second son, Charles, was consecrated king. Appointed official ‘governor’ for her young son, Catherine’s position for commissioning material evidence of her new status was now enhanced. Among the first commissions she made, in 1561, was a multi-modal monument to contain the heart of Henri II (see Figure 8.1).16 Catherine, whose mother was French and father Florentine, drew upon artistic talent that reflected her own natal origins on both sides of the Alps. The work was a collaboration of the French sculptor Germain Pilon, who created marble statues of the Three Graces, or Charities, and the Florentine Domenico del Barbiere, who made the sculpture’s base and the mould for the bronze urn.17 The work’s creative team echoed Catherine’s own Franco-Italian origins, as did its artistic program. Fittingly for the woman who had commissioned the work, the sculpture pointedly referenced pagan symbols that, in the ancient world, had represented conjugal fidelity.18 In addition to the cardiotaph’s visual elements, its textual component likewise spoke to a focus on Catherine’s heart and emotions. At the base, Latin verses composed by Pierre de Ronsard made clear that:

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Figure 8.1: Germain Pilon and Domenico del Barbiere [called The Florentine], Funerary monument of the heart of Henri II (1519–1559), king of France, 1.5 m × 0.755 m, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Here Catherine deposited this heart of her husband the king, although wishing to be able to keep it in her own bosom. Their united heart bears witness to their enduring love before men, their united spirit before God. The heart, once the seat of the Charities, Three Charities raise up to the highest.19

The centrality of the heart was a commonplace in courtly love poetry.20 But Catherine’s poets were making ideas already circulating in contemporary culture work for her politically. While Petrarchan poetic conventions placed the poet’s heart in a perpetual agony of longing for unrequited love, this was not Catherine’s dilemma. Ronsard declared that the royal couple’s mutual affection and shared purpose in life brought their hearts together in new forms at Henri’s death. These verses emphasized two political messages. Catherine’s everlasting love for Henri meant that her heart was united with his in the physical tomb; that is, she intended to devote her life to her husband’s memory and was ‘dead’ to other potential suitors and alliances. Secondly, it suggested that, through her enduring love, in Catherine’s chest beat a heart that combined the spirit of another monarch and father of the present king, with her own; that is,

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Catherine could speak as and for her deceased husband. In making these claims, Henri’s cardiotaph was clearly and importantly framed as the intimate creation of a wife for her husband. It was no monument of a nation in mourning, but it was a monument for a nation in mourning, to read and understand the power of emotions and the power of Catherine, the governor of France. A French sonnet by Ronsard, “On the heart of the late King Henri II,” was also engraved on the wall of the chapel of the Dukes of Orléans in the Celestine Convent in Paris where Henri’s cardiotaph was placed in 1562. This articulated further the transfer of the king’s spirit, through his heart, to his wife: By a queen in whom are all graces Three Graces are placed on this heart, The heart of a great Prince, an invincible conqueror . . . Be not amazed taking in his greatness, That so little space in so small a circumference Surrounds a heart that won so many battles; For a great heart, a great space is needed as well But only its shadow is here For Catherine, the wife of this king Instead of Attic or Parian marble Taking the heart, put it in her breast And as a tomb, keeps it beside her own.21

Ronsard’s verse, with its allusions to classical marble, coupled with the Three Graces visually and textually referenced in the cardiotaph, also linked Catherine’s heart monument to her husband with conventions of the ancient world. In particular, as has been widely noted, the widowed Catherine consistently drew upon the model of the classical figure of Artemisia for artistic and textual creations, as did clients seeking her patronage.22 Artemisia II of Caria, who took the throne briefly after the death of her husband, famously constructed the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus for her husband, Mausolus, and was said to have imbibed her husband’s ashes. Thus, Catherine’s cardiotaph staged a similar act of bodily incorporation of a powerful dead ruler and his equally powerful living widow. Although Marian Rothstein has recently interpreted Catherine’s connection to Artemisia as “supporting the claim of the marital androgyne,”23 I would argue that Catherine was never other than female in these particular texts. Indeed, they functioned through her status as a woman loving and grieving. Moreover, Catherine was not quite a widow, for this husband remained alive within his wife and through her love. Unlike the Latin verse, in the French poem, Catherine had only placed some of Henri’s heart in the tomb, and kept other parts of it inside her, where now the spirit of both husband and wife flowed through a single heart. Through emotions that only a

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wife – this wife – could feel for a husband, Henri’s cardiotaph performed a very particular symbolic transition of power with practical consequences, from male to female, from Henri to Catherine.

“All as the Queen Commands it”: The Hearts of François II and Charles IX Henri’s cardiotaph, installed in 1562, represented a powerful multi-modal interpretation of Catherine’s new status as governor. In the next decade, the queen mother would be involved in creating two further heart monuments for her sons François II and Charles IX, which expressed different emotional and political programs of the grieving and loving heart. François II, who had died in 1560, became a subject in a new set of sculptures that Catherine sought to create during the early 1560s. She commissioned Philibert de l’Orme to arrange two statues, of Henri II and François II, which were intended for the Grande Salle du Palais.24 The contracts associated with this commission made it clear that Catherine was fully engaged in these works, which were to be “all as her majesty the Queen commands and as she might yet order it to be made.”25 In July 1563, Catherine firmly instructed de l’Orme: send me a sketch with the clothes and the inscription with their title that they had at their funeral, their age, and the length of their reign and how you will treat their colors and devices, so that in every aspect you can understand my intention.26

In particular, Catherine’s letter featured a concern for physical resemblance in the works that echoed an earlier request to Michelangelo. De l’Orme was to make them “as lifelike as possible,” “resembling them as much as is possible.”27 Each was to be depicted holding the scepter in one hand and the baton of justice in the other.28 However, Catherine also insisted upon important distinctions between the status of her husband and son. Henri was to be six feet tall, François five; Henri’s arms were to be raised, those of François shown below his belt.29 For the depiction of Henri, Catherine explained to de l’Orme: “I want you to remember to take care that they are made as is usual for kings who are warring and conquerors, which are typically with their hands high to show that they are not idle.”30 As to François II, Catherine directed: “you must watch that it is done right for his greatness too, and as one expects for a young king that youth and a sudden death prevented from doing great things.”31 In Catherine’s mind, the age and achievements of the two monarchs was discernably different and would be reflected in their lithic representations.

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Similarly, the final program of François’s cardiotaph, which was designed for installation in the Cathedral of Orleans under Catherine’s watchful eye, embraced a different political message to that of the cardiotaph of Henri II. The monument for the heart of the youthful king, designed primarily by Primaticcio, was to include a central column and three marbled angels. One was a winged youth engraving the name of François on a plaque, which had been created by Frémyn Roussel from a drawing by Primaticcio, who himself was inspired by the famous classical work, the Spinario, that had been given to the people of Rome by Sixtus IV in 1471.32 However, a series of political disruptions in Orleans led to a revised construction of the cardiotaph, which was moved to the Church of the Celestins where his father’s heart tomb was situated. The revised monument for François featured three two-foot high white marble putti-like spirits carved by Ponce Jacquio, which had been originally intended for the tomb of François I (see Figure 8.2).33 The babes made some artistic correspondence with the program of the heart monument of François’s grandfather and namesake, François I, which had included two, far smaller figures seated on his urn amid a far more extensive, artistic program. Now, re-placed in the heart tomb of François II, the three child-like attendants became central to its program. The young king was to be forever immortalized as both as a child of the Valois dynasty and a child himself. Furthermore, the cardiotaph of François II specifically identified him as the son of Catherine de’ Medici. The monument’s visual cues reflected the perspective of the one living individual for whom François would always remain a child. Moreover, its Latin inscription concretized his mother’s pivotal role in preparing the work in the first of three panels at its base: To God, most good, most great and [in] lasting memory of François II, king of France, his successor Charles IX during his reign, urged by his mother Catherine, had this column erected in the year 1562.34

As with that of her husband Henri, the textual complement of François’s cardiotaph centered upon the emotions of Catherine, his mother. That Catherine’s sentiments mattered was conveyed not only by the information that another dutiful son, the reigning king Charles, recognized and acted upon them, but by the very materialization of those feelings into the stone form of the monument before the reader. Additionally, while the first panel immortalized the role of Catherine (and Charles), that François had a wife of his own, Mary, Queen of Scots, no less a queen regnant in her own right, only becomes apparent in the second panel, in which she is first mentioned. Mary had by this time left France to return to her natal dynasty and lands in Scotland. François’s

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Figure 8.2: Primaticcio, Ponce Jacquio, Jean Picard, Frémyn Roussel, The Heart Monument of François II, Basilica of Saint Denis. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Estampes RESERVE Pe11a-Pet. Fol.

cardiotaph, in both its visual and textual content, made clear that the sorrowful sentiments of his mother took precedence over those of his own grieving widow. A similar heart monument for Charles IX, whose death in May 1574 coincided with the commencement of a fifth outbreak of religious fighting in France, has not survived intact. However, a single frieze panel has been proposed compellingly by Colin Eisler as a possible component of such a monument.35 If one accepts Eisler’s argument, this panel too suggests Catherine’s participation in a planned cardiotaph for her son Charles. The frieze centrally depicts Jupiter with additional figures of putti-style Gemini twins, Mercury and Sagittarius. It also includes a fountain spouting five streams, possibly the five kings of the Valois dynasty to date (François I, Henri II, François II, Charles IX, and Henri III), and dolphins, the symbol of the heir to the French throne (see Figure 8.3).36

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Figure 8.3: Artist active in France. The Reign of Jupiter, ca. 1575. Marble, 38.1 cm × 48.3 cm. ©The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, The Annenberg Foundation Gift, 1997 (997.23).

Significantly for this analysis, the panel for the planned cardiotaph also prominently features a classically-inspired rotunda. This appears likely to have been a reference to the Chapel of the Valois. Designed by Primaticcio, and attached to the side of the Basilica of Saint Denis, the traditional burial place of French kings, this was a key contribution in Catherine’s funerary emotional performances. Just as Artemisia had created the Mausoleum to her husband’s memory, so too would Catherine. This monumental structure consisted of a marble temple encased in a two-story peristyle of doric and ionic columns and six radial chapels, with varied statues of virtues, religious figures, and the royal family. It was intended to house the mortal remains of Henri, Catherine, and their descendants, as well as the magnificent tomb that Catherine was preparing for her husband and herself.37 In referencing Catherine’s great architectural legacy to her marital dynasty, Charles was thus not foremost the husband of Elisabeth of Austria, but the son of the Valois dynasty and Catherine de’ Medici, the creator of the Chapel. It was likewise Catherine, rather than Elisabeth, who was foregrounded in the associated poetic representations made at Charles’s death. In the Tombeau de feu roy Charles that Pierre de Ronsard and Amadis Jamyn produced, each

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reference to the two weeping women mentioned the grieving Catherine, the king’s powerful mother, a dominant force at court, before Elisabeth, the king’s young widow who would shortly return to Vienna and her natal dynasty.38 Significantly, Jamyn also addressed other verses to the “Queen mother, Regent, made after the death of Charles IX,” in which the putative subject, Charles, was rendered almost invisible. Instead, Jamyn emphasized Catherine’s political status in her own right, and her ability to steer France in troubled times because of “her virile and magnanimous heart.”39 Another of his verses dedicated to Catherine proposed that “The Queen in a feminine body carries a courageous heart, / Worthy of commanding in these times and in misfortune.”40 These works recalled Ronsard’s verses accompanying Henri II’s cardiotaph but made no explicit suggestion that the heart contained within Catherine’s chest was that of Henri. These features rendered Catherine suitable for the governance of France that Jamyn implied, although in practice Catherine’s term of official governance had ended many years earlier when Charles had reached his majority. Jamyn’s verse instead offered Catherine a political role in her own right.

“Your Heart Serves Him Always as Eternal Tomb”: Renovating Henri’s Cardiotaph Amadis Jamyn had begun to explore further the connections of Catherine and Henri’s bodies and hearts in other works. These echoed Ronsard’s earlier texts, but pushed further the political possibilities of feeling hearts and heart tombs. In a sonnet that was published in his Œuvres poetiques of 1575, Jamyn suggested that Catherine’s love surpassed that of Artemisia: Your heart serves him always as eternal tomb, and you have enclosed your amorous flame, that none can extinguish, in the grave with him: Faithful in your love, like the turtledove, who, widowed, never ceases to mourn in the woods without ever searching for a new love.41

Jamyn focused upon Catherine’s heart as the stony tomb that monumentalized her love for Henri, while the flame of her continuing love burned within Henri’s grave. This sonnet was followed by an epigram that further emphasized the constancy of Catherine’s feeling heart:

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Within this figure is the name of HENRY To yours united in a loving way But your heart by a strong friendship By so many ties holds such a husband Close to it, that even pale Death Cannot dominate this love so extreme.42

These works reflected a shift in the artistic program associated with Henri’s funerary monuments and Catherine’s political identity, for, by the early 1570s, new materializations associated with Henri and his heart were underway. In the early 1570s, Catherine had commissioned renovations involving redesigned elements to Henri’s cardiotaph. The religious fighting from 1568 to 1570 had barely abated when the horrific violence of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572 broke out, and the subsequent military action persisted until the Edict of Boulogne in July 1573. In times of war, a new symbolism for Henri’s heart monument became key. The changes that were proposed for the cardiotaph in the contract signed in June 1573, to be supervised by the architect Jean Bullant, included three new, bronze female figures to be placed at the base of a new pedestal for the monument, possibly with an intention to remove the Three Graces of the original monument.43 These figures, representing the three Roman provinces of ancient Gaul (Gallia Aquitania, Gallia Belgica and Gallia Lugdunensis), were to have the gestures of melancholies, and behind each was to be a great trough of weapons and accoutrements of war.44 As Bassett has argued, this design referenced classical conventions of the lamentation of conquered provinces for their deceased conqueror. Moreover, in Henri’s lifetime, the three provinces of ancient Gaul had provided decorative motifs for the royal entry into Paris of 1550.45 Although these renovations were ultimately never implemented due to financial constraints in the period, this particular emotional and martial program marked a considerable, and important, disjunction with the original emphasis of the monument. No longer an intimate expression of a wife/widow for her husband, the proposed alterations represented a new way of conceptualizing the emotional dynamics of the Valois dynasty, and Henri, with the nation. At the same period, Henri’s cardiotaph had also been joined in the Orleans Chapel in the Church of the Celestins by two other heart tombs. One was the imposing cardiotaph of Anne de Montmorency, Henri’s close friend and constable, which had been commissioned by his widow, Madeleine de Savoie. According to Montmorency family history, it had been Henri’s desire that his friend’s heart lie with him.46 By 1573, that innovative work dominated the space of the chapel in which both monuments were placed. Scholars have argued that the changes to Henri’s cardiotaph may have reflected a desire to provide a monument larger than that of Montmorency. Additionally, the chapel now also contained the heart

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monument of François II. This had originally been housed in the Cathedral of Orleans, but Protestants had ransacked the cathedral in 1562, desecrating the work. Furthermore, pointedly rejecting Catherine’s emotional performance of motherhood through the monument, they removed and burned Francois’s heart. This made a dramatic political statement of their own that a staunchly Catholic king was by no means the life force and emotional center of the political and spiritual structure of which they desired to be members. Within this new grouping, therefore, the proposed changes to Henri’s cardiotaph could have reflected a concern that Henri, Catherine’s husband and Charles IX’s father, be shown as the principal figure.47 Moreover, the new schema clearly attempted to convey the power of the Valois monarchs over all the lands and people of the French kingdom.48 The specific theme of war was both pertinent to Henri personally and spoke to the contemporary context.49 Poetic tributes had long cast Henri as a warring monarch, whose successful interventions in the later stages of the Italian Wars were lavishly glorified.50 Catherine too had supported this artistic program in statues that she had sought to commission, from Michelangelo and Da Volterra on the Italian peninsula and from de l’Orme in France. The design of the Italian statue depicted Henri in military attire on horseback, and Catherine had explicitly insisted that “the armour and horses’ harnesses be of some modern design.”51 To de l’Orme, she had requested that Henri’s statue should be as “for kings who are warring and conquerors.” It seemed that now Catherine no longer needed Henri’s heart in her breast, or Henri’s cardiotaph to stage her political authority, because other emotional and political programs were becoming available to utilize. Catherine had begun to develop a new site through which to project these new conceptualizations of her political status, emotions, and their relationship to Henri’s heart and body. From the 1560s, she had also commissioned pieces for a tomb befitting the monarch, which was to be the centerpiece of the Valois Chapel attached to the Basilica of Saint Denis. This complex work involved a number of artists and displayed multiple representations of the royal couple in prayer and lying in death. In 1565, Girolamo della Robbia had prepared a striking transi figure of Catherine in death. However, the artist died in 1566, leaving only the draft model that remains. Catherine commissioned an alternative gisant of herself from Pilon, which replaced Della Robbia’s graphic depiction of a sunken corpse by a more sensual representation of Catherine as a living entity, resting alongside her dead husband.52 Jeanice Brooks has provided an important musical and textual complement to study of the monument in her analysis of Jamyn’s verse and composer Adrien Le Roy’s Airs de cour mis sur le luth, which was published in 1571. In particular, the air “My heart, my dear life,” Brooks argues, speaks in a female

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voice recalling the request of a male lover on his deathbed to “enclose in my tomb our love,” thus echoing the tomb’s visual program that symbolically buried the living Catherine beside her deceased husband.53 As Jamyn’s verse emphasized, Catherine sought no new love, for she held within her a permanent flame of ardor lit by Henri. This was a “love so extreme” that not even death could diminish it. These conceptualizations of Catherine’s emotional state corresponded with her device: “ARDOREM EXTINCTA TESTANTUR VIVERE FLAMMA” (the flame lives as witness [although] the fire is extinguished). It was also echoed in her emblem showing tears falling on quicklime, a material that becomes hot on contact with water, just as Catherine’s falling tears continually reignited the flame of her love.54 In a coordinated series of presentations, therefore, Catherine made clear not only her continued attachment to Henri and to the political rule of the Valois dynasty but her own power to reanimate the vital spark of her husband (and by extension his dynasty’s political fortunes) through her feeling heart.

“A Work that I Hold So Much To Heart”: Reanimating the Valois Chapel Catherine’s magnificent classically-inspired rotunda, in which the tomb of the royal couple was to be the centerpiece, rose from the ashes of her husband, with two storeys of the monument completed by the 1580s. However, faced with the complications of war, the death of key artistic personnel, and diminishing finances, progress on the work began to stall during that decade. In the correspondence that pushed for continuing progress, Catherine’s heart became the driving impulse to inspire its completion. Catherine expressed concerns about the on-going progress of the Chapel in letters to key officials about how the marble components were being stored during construction. To Pierre Bourgeois, the Prior of Saint Denis, she wrote of her “will that I still have to be able to complete the sepulchre of the King Monseigneur, which is being made in your church.”55 To Antoine Nicolay, President of the Chambre des Comptes, then acting as superintendent to the construction, she wrote that an inventory on the marbles should be undertaken, and assured him “of the happiness that I have in the care that you take for the conservation and achievement of a work that I hold so much to heart.”56 Catherine’s concerns of the heart could also be enacted by others, even to encourage the queen mother herself to action. In 1577, Catherine persuaded her son, Henri III, to direct the revenue of a tax on tavern-owners and innkeepers towards

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continuation of the work. However, the men of the Parlement of Paris baulked at registering the edict and demanded that its income be spent exclusively on wartime expenses. Nicolay wrote to Catherine, warning that considerable effort would be required by her and the king to ensure that the funds were indeed directed towards the purpose for which Henri had initially created the new tax.57 To “leave this work unfinished,” Nicolay argued in lines surely designed to inspire Catherine to action, would be “to the shame of this France that has not yet had the heart to think of sheltering this great king Henri, your Lord.”58 Moreover, Nicolay could evoke Catherine’s feeling heart in order to continue work on the monument. At the site, Bourgeois warned Catherine that more laborers were needed to hasten completion. Nicolay assented on Catherine’s behalf and was keen to highlight her emotional engagement with the continuing program: “in order to please the Queen, I beg you, as soon as there is an augmentation in the number of workers, write to her and tell her of the diligence that they have for her building, for she will have great pleasure in knowing it.”59 Catherine’s intense interest in the work provided the motivation for directives to varied personnel. Bourgeois prepared in 1583 for delivery of a block of marble intended for “the creation of two figures that the Queen wants made in the Chapel,” further effigies of Henri and Catherine to be made by Pilon.60 Likewise, in 1586, Nicolay wrote to request new transfers of marble for varied statues being prepared by artists, clearly foregrounding Catherine’s continued personal attention to the site: “The queen has today asked me to have delivered to Monsieur Pilon some white marble to have made a statue of the Virgin,” “The queen has just now asked me to have delivered two blocks of marble.”61 In the epistolary and administrative records that surround the progress of the Valois Chapel, it was Catherine’s feelings that were made the animator of action. If the heart of France was weak, that of Catherine was not.

“To the Shame of This France Which Has Not Yet Had the Heart”: Conclusions Ultimately the hearts of Catherine and French society, and the emotions that animated them, were too much in conflict. Grief was always an emotion in public view, felt in individual experience and as a socialized, communal practice. What Catherine presented publicly in these monuments, and in the texts that co-produced them, was her love and grief as a wife and as a mother, feelings that were powerful yet intimate and exclusively her own. These were not sentiments that were intended to be, or indeed could be, shared by others, because

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Catherine’s claim to political authority through her feeling heart could not be shared. Catherine’s feelings and politically authoritative body were produced through the capacity of her female physical form, and it alone, to hold the emotional and political inheritance of her husband’s dynasty. Moreover, these ideas of the heart and its emotions were deployed not only as artistic programs in the works, they were also embedded in the correspondence and records that supported and surrounded these monuments, and which likewise participated in constructing Catherine’s feeling and political body visually, materially, and textually. All these performances fetishized the heart in an attempt to construct new and long-lasting narratives, not only about the Valois kings whose hearts and bodies they contained, but also about the relationship of women and power, and that of Catherine in particular. None could participate in Catherine’s exclusive feeling community beyond her clientele of artists and poets, and there were few in the nation who could even sympathize, it seems, with Catherine’s emotions and their expression in these forms. The Huguenots purposively disrespected her sentiments and gave these monuments new emotional meanings of their own when they broke into François’s cardiotaph and dramatically destroyed his heart during religious fighting. The Catholic officials of Parlement, and the monarchs of another dynasty that followed the Valois, were responsible for declaring the dilapidated ruins of the incomplete Chapel of the Valois fit for demolition and redistribution in 1719.62 Catherine’s expressions of the feeling heart served her historical moment but being representations of intense intimacy, they could hold little political potency for others, either in her own lifetime or in subsequent generations.

Notes 1.

2.

On Catherine’s tears, see Isabelle de Conihout and Pascal Ract-Madoux, “Veuves, penitents et tombeaux: reliures françaises du XVIe siècle à motifs funèbres, de Catherine de Médicis à Henri III,” in Les funérailles à la renaissance: XIIe colloque international de la Société, ed. Jean Balsamo (Geneva: Droz, 2002), 225–68; Susan Broomhall, “Catherine’s Tears: Diplomatic Corporeality and Gender at the Sixteenth-Century French Court,” in Fluid Bodies: Rethinking Expressions of Bodies and their Fluids in Premodern Literature, Theology and Art, ed. Anne M. Scott, Deborah Seiler, and Michael Barbezat (Leeds: ARC Humanities Press, 2019), 55–72. See the issue and editorial: Anna Lavis and Karin Eli, “Corporeal: Exploring the Material Dynamics of Embodiment,” M/C Journal: A Journal of Media and Culture 19, no. 1 (2016), accessed August 3, 2017, journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/issue/view/ corporeal.

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6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

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Lavis and Eli, “Corporeal.” Ibid. Sheila ffolliott, “Catherine de’ Medici as Artemisia: Figuring the Powerful Widow,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 227–41; Crawford, “Catherine de Médicis: Staging the Political Woman,” in her Perilous Performances: Gender and Regency in Early Modern France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 24–58. Michele Beth Bassett, “The Funerary Patronage of Catherine de’ Medici: The Tomb of Henri II, Heart Monuments and the Valois Chapel” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1999), 5. Judith Butler, “Gender as Performance,” in A Critical Sense: Interviews with Intellectuals, ed. Peter Osborne (London: Routledge, 1996), 109–25; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1999). See Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000). See, for example, Simon Gaunt, Love and Death in Medieval French and Occitan Courtly Literature: Martyrs to Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), passim. Jacques Le Goff, trans. Patricia Ranum, “Head or Heart? The Political Use of Body Metaphors in the Middle Ages,” in Fragments for a History of the Human Body: Part Three, ed. Michel Feher (New York: Zone, 1989), 12–26; Jacques Le Goff and Nicolas Truong, Une histoire du corps au Moyen Âge (Paris: Liana Levi, 2003); Heather Webb, The Medieval Heart (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 41–42. Le Goff, “Head or Heart?,” 23. Ralph E. Giesey, The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France (Geneva: Droz, 1960), 20. For contemporary examples elsewhere in Europe, see Estella Weiss-Krejci, “Heart Burial in Medieval and Early Post-Medieval Central Europe,” in Body Parts and Bodies Whole, ed. Katharina Rebay-Salisbury, Marie Louise Stig Sorensen, and Jessica Hughes (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2010), 119–34. “Musée du Louvre, Barthélemy Prieur, Monument of the Heart of Duke Anne de Montmorency (1493–1567), Constable of France,” accessed October 6, 2017, http://www. louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/monument-heart-duke-anne-de-montmorency-1493-1567constable-france See Susan Broomhall, “Counsel as Performative Practice of Power in Catherine de’ Medici’s Early Regencies,” in Queenship and Counsel in the Early Modern World, ed. Helen Graham-Matheson and Joanne Paul (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2017), 135–59. For a more detailed analysis of how Catherine’s epistolary activities during this period materialised her heart’s multiple attachments, see Susan Broomhall, The Emotions of Catherine de’ Medici (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). On ceremonial aspects of the burial of French monarchs at this period, see Giesey, The Royal Funeral Ceremony. Léon de Laborde, ed., Les Comptes des Bâtiments du Roi (1528–1571) (Paris: J. Baur, 1880), vol. 2, 55–56; Contrast of Barbiere, June 18, 1561, Catherine Grodecki, ed., Documents du Minutier Central des Notaires de Paris: Histoire de l’art au XVIe siècle (1540–1600) (Paris: Archives nationales, 1986), vol. 2, 77–78. Victoria L. Goldberg, “Graces, Muses, and Arts: The Urns of Henri II and Francis I,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 29 (1966): 206–18.

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19.

20.

21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33.

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“Hic cor deposuit Regis Catharina mariti id cupiens proprio condere posse sinu / Cor iunctum amborum longum testatur amorem ante homines iunctus spiritus ante deum. Cor quondam charitum sedem cor summa secutum Tres charites summo vertice iure ferunt.” All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. Including in Ronsard’s own verses to his various lovers in which he drew upon similar ideas, see, for example, Sur la mort de Marie (1578). For analysis of wider use of such metaphors in the period, see Chapter 7. “Par une Royne où sont toutes les graces / Trois Graces sont mises dessus ce cueur, / Cœur d’un grand Prince, invincible veinqueur / . . . / Ne t’esbahis, admirant sa grandeur, / Qu’un peu d’espace en si peu de rondeur / Enserre un cœur qui conquist tant de places. / Pour un grand cœur falloit grand place aussi: / Mais l’ombre en est tant seulement ici, / Car de ce Roi l’espouse Catherine, / En lieu de marbre Attique ou Parien, / Prenant ce cœur le mist en sa poitrine, / Et pour tombeau le garde aupres du sien.” Les Œuvres de Pierre de Ronsard (Paris: Gabriel Buon, 1584), 837. Translation by Marian Rothstein, The Androgyne in Early Modern France: Contextualizing the Power of Gender (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 143–44. Perhaps most famously Nicolas Houel, as has been discussed by ffolliott, “Catherine de’ Medici as Artemisia”; Valérie Auclair, “De l’exemple antique à la chronique contemporaine. L’Histoire de la Royne Arthemise de l’invention de Nicolas Houel,” Journal de la Renaissance 1 (2000): 155–88; Jeanice Brooks, Courtly Song in Late Sixteenth-Century France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 209–26. Rothstein, The Androgyne in Early Modern France, 144. De l’Orme’s contract with the sculptor Simon Leroy is in Grodecki, Documents du Minutier Central des Notaires de Paris, vol. 2, 104–6. “tout ainsi que la majesté de la Royne l’a commandé et qu’elle le pourroyt encore ordonner.” Ibid., 105. July 3, [1563], “m’en envoyez ung portraict avec l’habit et inscription où soit son tiltrew qu’il eust à son enterrement, son aage et le temps qu’il a regné et comme vous prendrez l’entour de ses couleurs et ses devises, affin que sur le tout je vous face entendre mon intention.” Lettres de Catherine de Médicis, ed. Hector de la Ferrière-Percy (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1885), vol. 2, 67. “après le naturel qu’elles ressemblent le plus que faire ce pourra tant au feu Roy Henry qu’au feu roy Françoys second,’ ‘ressemblant après le naturel le plus que faire se pourra.” Grodecki, Documents du Minutier Central des Notaires de Paris, vol. 2, 106. Ibid., 105. Ibid., 106. “bien vous veux-je recorder de prendre garde à ce que l’on a accoustumé faire aux roys qui ont esté belliqueux et conquérans, lesquelz ont accoustumé d’avoir les mains haultes pour tesmoigner qu’ilz n’on esté oyseux.” Lettres, ed. La Ferrière-Percy, vol. 2, 67. “il faudra regarder de le faire de sa grandeur et ce que l’on a accoustumé à jeunes roys que le bref aage et la mort soudaine a empesché de faire de grandes choses.” Ibid., 67. Laborde, ed., Les Comptes, 119–20. See “Musée du Louvre, Frémyn Roussel, Ange rappelant sur une tablette la mémoire du roi François II,” accessed October 6, 2017, http://www.lou vre.fr/oeuvre-notices/ange-rappelant-sur-une-tablette-la-memoire-du-roi-francois-ii. Ibid., 4.

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35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44.

45. 46.

47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

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“DEO. OPT. MAX. ET PERENNI MEMORIÆ FRANCISCI II. FRANC. REGIS CAROLUS NONVS EIVS IN REGNO SVCCESSOR SVADENTE REGINA MATRE CATHARINA HANC COLVM: NAM ERIGI CVRAVI ANNO SALVTUS M.D.LXII.” Colin Eisler, “Fit for a Royal Heart?: A French Renaissance Relief at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 38 (2003): 145–56. Eisler suggests instead that the fountain streams may reflect the five rivers of France: ibid., 148. The most detailed studies of the history of this monument are Arthur de Boislisle, “La Sépulture des Valois à Saint-Denis,” Mémoires de la Société de l’Histoire de Paris et de l’Ile-de-France III (1876): 241–92; Thomas Lerch, “Die Grabkapelle der Valois in SaintDenis” (Thesis, Munich: Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität, 1995); Bassett, The Funerary Patronage of Catherine de’ Medici. Ronsard, [and Amadis Jamyn], Tombeau de feu roy Charles (Lyon: Benoist Rigaud, 1574); Amadis Jamyn, “Epitaphe de feu roy Charles IX,” in Œuvres poetiques (Paris: For Robert Estienne by Mamert Patisson, 1575). “son cœur magnanime & viril.” Jamyn, Œuvres poetiques, fol. 15r. “Royne en corps feminin portant un braue cœur, / Digne de commander au temps & au malheur.” Ibid., fol. 35r. “Ton cœur luy sert tousiours d’un eternal tombeau, /Et tu as enfermé ton amoureux flambeau / Sous la tombe avec luy sans qu’on le puisse esteindre: / Constante en tes amours comme la Tourterelle / Qui veufue par les bois ne cesse de se plaindre, / Sans poursuiure iamais autre amitié nouvelle.” Ibid., fol. 38r. Translation by Brooks, Courtly Song, 226. “Dedans ce Chiffre est le nom de HENRY / Au vostre uni d’une amoureuse sorte: / Mais vostre cœur par une amitié forte / De tant de laqs enlace un tel mari / Aupres de soy, que mesme la Mort bléme / Ne peut domter cet amour si extréme.” Ibid., fol. 38v. Grodecki, Documents du Minutier Central des Notaires de Paris, vol. 2, 135. Regina Seelig-Teuwen, “Barthélemy Prieur, contemporain de German Pilon,” German Pilon et les sculpteurs français de la Renaissance, Actes colloque Louvre octobre 1990, ed. Geneviève Bresc-Bautier (Paris: La Documentation française, 1993), 381. Ibid., 382. André Du Chesne, Histoire généalogique de la maison de Montmorency et de Laval (Paris: S. Cramoisy, 1624), 413. On Henri’s emotional relationship with Montmorency, see Susan Broomhall, “Corresponding Romances: Henri II and the Last Campaigns of the Italian Wars,” in Writing War in Britain and France, 1370–1854: A History of Emotions, ed. Stephanie Downes, Andrew Lynch, and Katrina O’Loughlin (London: Routledge, 2018), 107–125. Ibid., 382. Bassett, The Funerary Patronage of Catherine de’ Medici, 55. The Latin epitaph to Charles IX who died in 1574 likewise references war, traitors, rebels, and ambitious princes in a strongly worded (albeit Latin) commentary of the difficulties which the young king overcame during his reign. Michel Felibien, Histoire de l’abbaye royale de Saint-Denys en France (Paris: Fréderic Leonard, 1706), 567–68. See works cited above by Ronsard and Jamyn, for example. “Vuole l’armatura di qualche bella fogia alla moderna, et il fornimento del cavallo similmente,” writes Bartolommeo del Bene on October 30, 1560, with Catherine’s specifications, Il Carteggio di Michelangelo, ed. Giovanni Poggi, Paola Barocchi and Renzo Ristori (Florence: Sansoni, 1965), vol. 5, 237.

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52.

53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58.

59.

60. 61.

62.

161

Brooks, Courtly Song, 215. See “Musée du Louvre, Girolamo della Robbia, Ébauche de la statue funéraire de Catherine de Médicis destinée au tombeau du roi Henri II et de la reine à Saint-Denis,” accessed October 6, 2017, http://cartelfr.louvre.fr/cartelfr/visite? srv=car_not_frame&idNotice=1874. Brooks, Courtly Song, 219–23. See discussion in Rothstein, The Androgyne in Early Modern France, 141–43. November 24, 1580, “la volunté que j’ay tousjours eue de pouvoir parachever la sépulture du roy Monseigneur qui se faict à vostre église.” Lettres, ed. Gustave Baguenault de Puchesse (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1889), vol. 7, 516. November 24, 1580, “contantement que j’ay du soin que vous prenez à la conservation et parachèvement d’un oeuvre que j’ay telement à cœur.” Ibid., 296. Bassett, The Funerary Patronage of Catherine de’ Medici, 117–19. [1583] “laisser cest oeuvre imparfaict, à la honte de ceste France qui n’a pas encores eu le coeur de penser mettres à couvert ce grand roy Henry, vostre seigneur.” Arthur de Boislisle, Pièces justificatives pour servir à l’histoire des Premiers Presidents de la Chambre des comptes de Paris (1506–1791) (Nogent-le-Rotrou: A. Gouverneur, 1873), 161. Bassett offers alternative dates for this sequence of letters, The Funerary Patronage of Catherine de’ Medici, see 119, n. 91. See, for example, an illustration of the Chapel, Israël Silvestre, View of the Sepulchre of the Valois at Saint Denis (1652). Engraving, Musée Carnavalet, Paris, G.438. [July 25, 1582], “plus d’ouvriers au bastiment de la sépulture qu’il n’y en a, pour ce que la Royne me l’a ainsi commandé . . . et affin de contanter la Royne, je vou s prie, aussi tost qu’il y aura augmentation d’ouvriers, luy mander et luy tesmoigner la dilligence que l’on faist à son bastiment, car elle en aura grand contantement.” Boislisle, Pièces justificatives, 158. [July 20, 1583], “la façon des deux figures que la Royne veult estre faites en la sépulture.” Ibid., 161. April 1586, “La Royne m’a ce jour demandé de faire délivrer à Monsieur Pilon du marbre blanc pour faire une image de la Vierge.” January 1586, “la royne me vient de commander présentement de faire délivrer deulx blocz des marbres blancz.” Boislisle, “La Sépulture,” 274. Ibid., 289.

Part 3: Productive Hearts

June-Ann Greeley

9 The Medieval Spirituality of “Purity of Heart” and “Heart-piercing Goodness” in Selected Works of St. Anselm of Canterbury “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment.” Matthew 22:37–38

For the medieval Christian, a trinity of internal loci formed the dynamic site of religious devotion. As the “great commandment” of the New Testament taught (itself based on the teaching of Deuteronomy 6:5), a holy correspondence among three indwelling sites of piety could assuredly affiliate the individual with God: the heart (Latin, cor), the soul (Latin, anima) and the mind (Latin, mens). It was understood that each site is distinctive and animates its own particular dynamism and yet, linked together, the three were believed to create a perfect triad of feeling, contemplation, and understanding.1 Medieval writers acknowledged that, of the three, the human heart, while not the only vessel of the Christian faith, enjoyed a kind of primacy of place since it was considered the origin and location of personal identity: the heart was considered the center of human emotion and individual will and so integral to the formation of each distinct person that the mind and soul could not achieve an authentic experience of faith without its initial deliberation of belief.2 Over the long passage of the Middle Ages, notable teachers of the Christian faith like St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Gregory the Great expressed a consummate devotion to God that entailed the full engagement of the heart, soul, and mind; however, it was “the father of scholasticism,” St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), who so eloquently articulated a personal love of and for God that had its origins in the human heart, which he understood to be both the physical organ within the body and the conceptual site of personal identity, the locus of individual memory and will.3 The human heart was necessarily the initial place of turning to God and beginning the ascent to God: that is, one must first be aware of an inherent desire to “recall” the reality of the Divine Presence before one can truly experience the truth of God. The writings of St. Anselm that most powerfully address the concept of heart as interwoven into the practice and condition of devotion are not his

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intricate philosophical writings but his compilation of prayers and meditations, including the Proslogion, which he wrote while a monk in the Norman abbey of Notre Dame in Bec.4 While the modern era celebrates St. Anselm for his philosophical writings, the Middle Ages and early modern era honored St. Anselm as the author of prayers and meditations which became “the most influential and widely read of all his works.”5 In his prayers and meditative writings, Anselm presented an intensely personal and unflinchingly affective piety that inspired new expressions of devotion in the Middle Ages. While he composed his prayers for personal reflection, he eventually allowed their more general distribution. Modern scholars have since described St. Anselm’s corpus of prayers and meditations as “revolutionary” because its densely intimate spirituality would transform the religious culture of the Middle Ages.6 Throughout the prayers, Anselm invokes the three interior loci, a true trinity of heart-soul-mind and while there is not a perfect consistency in his references – at times the three are conjoined, at other times he lingers on one – the prayers and meditations express a trajectory of contemplation and spiritual purification that incorporate all three places of human endeavor and piety. As this chapter will show, for St. Anselm, the heart is the most particularized, emotive, and volatile of the three spiritual centers, the site of the “pluck” of compunction by which God awakens each individual to redirect the soul toward its purity and goodness in the light of faith and divine reason within the mind. Without the will from the heart, without self-awareness and self-understanding that arises from the heart in memory and recollection, the spiritual journey to God cannot begin, or, if begun, will never be completely realized. The chapter will present a vivid and intriguing portrait of St. Anselm and the breadth of his wisdom. Contrary to much modern scholarship on St. Anselm, it argues that the prayers of St. Anselm are constitutive signifiers of his theology and reveal his thinking to be a richly new synthesis in medieval theology. By examining the concept of the heart, a previously unexplored theme in his prayers, the essay reveals how St. Anselm was able to combine the monastic spirituality which preceded him (and of which he remained a part throughout his life) with the systematic approach to theology that his own work was initiating.

Briefly, Anselm Until and At Bec St. Anselm of Canterbury was born in 1033 in Aosta, an ancient Roman town in northern Alpine Italy. In the eleventh century, the region was a strategic locus in the southernmost region of the kingdom of Burgundy, as it lay along a populous

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pilgrim and trade route amid the western Alpine region and also in the march area of the rival kingdom of Lombardy.7 By the time of his death in 1109, Anselm himself would be numbered among the most influential men in European history: “there is no side of the great change in the mind and imagination of Europe that (Anselm) did not in some way touch or stimulate.”8 The intellectual and cultural abundance of the era was mirrored by the intellectual and spiritual fruitfulness of St. Anselm himself. His biographer, the monk Eadmer, suggests that Anselm was graced with a sympathetic spirituality from a very young age. He was a pious and studious boy and utterly devoted to his mother, Ermenberga, who was native to Aosta and possibly of an ancient aristocratic house.9 His relationship with his father, Gundulf, a Lombard, however, was complicated and quite unhappy. In 1056, at the death of his mother, a grief-stricken Anselm left the region he loved so well and began a journey that would lead, in many aspects, far from his home to a prolific but complicated life.10 After much consideration, in 1060, he entered into the Benedictine order at the monastery of Bec near Rouen, France, under the vigilant tutelage of the renowned monk, Lanfranc of Bec.11 Three years later, when Lanfranc left Bec to become the abbot at Caen, Anselm was named prior of the monastery. In his early residence at Bec, and in his later years as a scholar of distinction, Anselm straddled two theological approaches: the more traditional, but waning, influence of early medieval culture on religious understanding that argued for a kind of facile didacticism, strict regulation of inquiry, and obedience to normative values; and, the stimulating effects of an emerging humanism in western Christianity that looked to new sources and new paradigms for analysis and investigation, including personal reasoning and subjective feeling.12 Many of Anselm’s compositions are now credited with having been an initial part of, if not actually heralding, that evolving theological discourse in the Latin West that encouraged a deep sense of personal connection and emotive engagement in devotion, as well as a healthy regard for the place of reason and speculative analysis in the life of faith. While the form of Scriptural study that applied reason to tenets of faith did not originate with Anselm – Augustine had certainly made that inroad several centuries before – Anselm did help to recalibrate in the eleventh century that mode of theological inquiry that would later be described as “scholastic”; that is, the application of logic and reason to traditional claims of religion, especially textual analysis and questions of authority. Much of that work brought great recognition and esteem to Anselm over the subsequent centuries, but during the medieval era his most durable source of appreciation came from other writings, such as the Prayers and Meditations, the

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Monologion, and the Proslogion. Moreover, because those works range so comprehensively and incorporate so fluidly varying dimensions of speculative, scholastic, and mystical theology, Anselm has been assigned any number of intellectual and spiritual classifications: poet, philosopher, theologian, and mystic.13 These texts articulate the “heart” of Anselm’s corpus of works as they brought into popular parlance the intimate and emotive rhetoric of monastic piety that had been imbued with his authentic, quite personal, voice.

Theological Tradition of “The Heart” for the Writings of St. Anselm Moreover, concerning his prayers, which he himself wrote and published at the desire and the petition of his friends, it is enough to see and for me to be silent about with what care, fear, hope, and love he spoke to God and his saints and also taught others to speak. If only someone should attend to those piously, I also hope that his heart will be touched and he will realize himself helped and be joyful in them and through them.14

In the composition of his prayers and mediations, Anselm was of course indebted to the long-standing theology of prayer and penitential devotion in Christianity. Both the eastern and western Church Fathers, as well as specific luminaries like Augustine, Benedict of Nursia, Gregory the Great and, more contemporary to Anselm, spiritual teachers like John of Fecamp, wrote about the practice of prayer and wrote sets of prayers and affective petitions, particularly to God, Christ and the Trinity, that were evident extensions of their spiritual theology.15 The Greek Fathers taught that the biblical injunction of constant prayer, as found, for example, in 1 Thessalonians 5:17, meant that prayer should be at the very core of the life of the faithful and prayer began in the human heart: the heart was often referenced as the “earth” which offered rich substance for the seedlings of prayer: it was also considered the ground from which moral and spiritual understanding grew.16 The Latin Fathers extolled continual prayer (oratio), regarding it as the most authentic expression of the human heart. John Cassian (ca. 360–ca. 435) argued that continual and affective prayer was the most proper Christian devotion.17 His writings found their way into the western and eastern monastic canons as guides for instruction in a strict Christian spirituality, the ultimate goal of which was, in his estimation, puritas cordis, purity of heart. Alluding to 1 Corinthians 13: 1–3, he deemed the latter synonymous with caritas, or love: “whence it is plainly shown that perfection is not immediately realized by divesting of or freeing from all goods or by refusing honor, unless love has been

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present . . . which consists only of the purity of the heart.”18 Without a pure heart, which is love, a life of faith can have no meaning. Cassian thus emphasized the heart as the ground of spiritual vitality, as the deep well of compassion, mercy and goodness, the locus of the interior life of faith, and prayer the most effective means of animating and enlivening the heart.19 For Cassian, authentic prayer is driven by the enthusiastic yearning of the heart, mind, and soul linked in collaboration for an experience that defies human language and exceeds human sensation. It is the inexpressible connection between the human and the divine that centers on the incipient locus, the human heart. Anselm also called upon prayer and the purity of the heart in his spiritual writings and even in his general correspondence of Christian direction. In a prayer to Saint Mary, Anselm invokes her as “the Queen of angels, Lady of the world, mother of him who cleanses the world,” but is embarrassed: “I confess that my heart is too much impure so that, deservedly, it blushes to turn toward such purity nor, deservedly, can it reach such purity by intending (to do so). Therefore, mother of the illumination of my heart . . . all my heart beseeches you.”20 Anselm avers that simply hoping for a clean or pure heart can never be sufficient nor will prayer emerging from an “unclean heart” be able to fulfill its purpose. Another example can be found in a letter to the royal nun Gunhilda, who had abandoned monastic life for her lover, Count Alan Rufus of Richmond. Anselm appealed to her integrity; while broadening his concept of purity to include physical purity (virginity), he also reaffirmed to Gunhilda that purity of the heart was the critical aspect of an authentic piety, whatever she may have done with her body.21 Anselm counseled her to consider “how distant are manly embraces and carnal pleasure from the embraces of Christ and the delight of chastity and purity of the heart” and admonished her to “return, Christian woman, return to your heart” because only with her heart would she be able to rediscover God.22 Anselm closed the letter with the zealous entreaty that “almighty God visit your heart and pour into you His love,” indicating that the human heart is the essential locus for God’s relationship with humanity. As he wrote to Gunhilda, the heart is not only the place where God must be present but also where the Love of God settles, if the heart is open to the Divine Presence, and where humanity can access the love of God and return that love. Anselm implored Gunhilda to realize that without purity of the heart, a heart clear and welcoming to God, she would not experience the healing love of God nor find her way back to holiness. Anselm similarly petitions God in an emotional and anxious prayer that begins his great meditative work, the Proslogion. In its opening, Anselm laments his spiritual tumult and his beseeches denote a certain duality in the experience of his faith:

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“Enter the chamber” (Mt. 6:6) of your mind, shut out everything except God and those things that may help you for seeking Him, and “with the door closed” (Mt. 6:6), seek Him. Say now, all “my heart,” say now to God: “I look for your face, your face, Lord, I seek.” (Ps. 26:8, modern 27:8) O! now, therefore, Lord my God, teach my heart where and how it should seek You, where and how it might find you.23

Anselm edited his citation from the Gospel of Matthew by inserting the word mentis (mind) into the passage, which in the Vulgate reads “Moreover, when you pray, go into your little room, with the door closed” (Tu autem cum oraveris, intra in cubiculum tuum, et clauso ostio).24 The original intent of that Gospel passage was to contrast two forms of prayer: Jesus encouraged his followers to think of prayer not as an exposed and public spectacle, as was the common mode of worship, but rather as a private and quiet devotion at home – literally, with the door to the outside closed. Anselm transformed “the little room” into a metaphoric reference to his inner self, the “little room of the mind,” emphasizing prayer as singularly interior and personal, “closed” to external influences. The focus on internal prayer is in keeping with Anselm’s monastic background. In Benedictine spirituality, prayer was both common and individual. Monks were to pray continuously and they were to pray communally, especially during liturgies, but they were also expected to pray separately and independently, in silent and contemplative meditation.25 Anselm understood and practiced such personal prayer, but for him, initially, it seems to have been a prayer “of the mind” during which all else is “closed out” and that seemed somehow insufficient.26 Thus, he came to realize that authentic prayer, which is a kind of holy suffusion of the Divine Presence, must incorporate other dimensions, including the revelation of affective devotion. In fact, Anselm explained that he wrote the Proslogion as someone not wavering in belief, but still hoping to deepen that faith life: he composed the Proslogion as one “trying to raise his mind to the contemplation of God” (conantis erigere mentem suam ad contemplandum Deum), which the mind alone could not effect.27 Anselm came to understand that in true devotion he must work from not just the mind but the heart, that he must move his heart to “look for the face of God.” While Anselm asserted that the Proslogion should be read as a mediation of “faith seeking understanding,” it is not clear that his search was simply an attempt to introduce reason into a conversation with faith. Anselm also seemed aware that his mind (reason) must correlate with his heart, the very essence of a person’s individuality and the seat of emotions and will. When Anselm beseeches God to “teach (his) heart where and how it should seek” God, even though he believes in God and can articulate reasonably about that belief, it is apparent that Anselm cannot fully “perceive” God in his current spiritual condition. Thus, he cries out to God in a petitionary prayer for guidance. A few

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sections later in the Proslogion, Anselm again invokes the Psalms to capture the depth of his anguish: I was reaching out to God and I stumbled against my very self. I was seeking rest within myself and “I discovered tribulation and sorrow” (Ps. 114.3) in my innermost self. I was wishing to laugh from the joy of my mind but I was compelled “to groan from the sighing of my heart” (Ps. 37.9). I was hoping for joy and behold! How my cries crowd together!

A few lines later he implores God: “my heart is made bitter by its desolation, sweeten it with your consolation.”28 In both instances, Anselm evidences the disturbing quandary in which he found himself: on one hand, there is a sense that the mind has a comprehension and a basic understanding of God (“the joy of my mind”), but the heart seems not to be part of that experience, in fact, just the opposite. Anselm is left with feelings of frustration (stumbling “against his very self”), sorrow and spiritual emptiness, “desolate” in its bitterness. He was experiencing his faith without the “purity of heart” that was deemed so essential for the full experience of God. Again, “purity of heart” did not simply signify a condition of humble innocence or virtuous integrity, although both humility and virtue coalesce in the pure heart; rather, “purity of heart” also bespoke a kind of sincere spontaneity of feeling that could transcend the dexterity of the mind in the search for God. Anselm experienced belief but what he experienced seemed incomplete, unfinished, for he did not allow God to flood his heart, the very core of his being. At the end of the first chapter, Anselm makes an intriguing admission: “but I desire to understand something of your truth which my heart believes and loves” (sed desidero aliquatenus intelligere veritatem tuam, quam credit et amat cor meum).29 His heart participates in his belief and is also the place of belief and love. The love in his heart desires a kind of enhancement through understanding (intelligere), an appeal to his rationality, that will afford his belief (which in his heart he knows to be truth) a reasonable support. Again, Anselm reveals a need to bring together what seems to be sundered. Yet there persists a flickering of the heart, an unpredictability, that troubles him because he knows that the heart is at the center of individual belief. This is born out in a famous passage of the Proslogion: Truly, how did he say in his heart what he was not able to think: or how he was not able to think what he said in his heart, since it is the same to “say in the heart” and “to think”? But if he truly (indeed, because truly) both thought, because he said in his heart, and did not say in his heart, because he could not think: there is not only one way something is said in the heart and is thought about.30

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Anselm reflects on the line from Psalm 13.1 (modern 14.1), which has the Psalmist crying out that “the fool says in his heart there is no God” and finds that he must entertain the possibility if only to prove its fallacy.31 From the very first line, Anselm makes a sharp distinction between the concept of understanding (intelligere) and that of thinking, ruminating, reflecting (cogitare). Moreover, Anselm identifies the latter word as synonymous – at least at this juncture – with the heart (cor). Anselm’s quest is not trying to prove God exists: God’s existence for him is a prima facie condition. Not only does he already believe that God exists, to some degree he can even understand that God exists. However, the “fool says in his heart” or the fool “thinks” that God does not exist, so it seems that the fool is not one who just denies God’s existence but is also one who does not realize that the heart is more than a simple place of acquiescence to a proposition. Rather, it is the place within the individual into which pours God’s love and divine blessings, connecting to the essential dimension of the individual. The mind might “think” about God and the soul might apprehend the Divine Spirit but, as Anselm himself testified, without the heart, the mind and the soul only struggle to claim the truth of God’s presence. Thus, Anselm argues that it is the heart that lacks “purity” that gives way for the fool to speak; it is the heart that is insufficient in complete openness to God and the invitation to Divine Love that induces the fool to deny God. The fool is separated from God – and so is Anselm. The real conundrum for Anselm is that he is not the “fool” rejecting God and yet he cannot seem to experience God in his life. If he can allow such love in his heart, he concludes, his heart will be truly purified and he will surely be in the Presence of God, be raised in true contemplation of God. He exclaims: Truly, how much and how great a joy it is where there is so much and such great goodness? Human heart, needy heart, heart experienced in hardships, indeed, (heart) overwhelmed with hardship: how much would you rejoice, if you were abundant in all these things (of God)?32

Anselm condensed the blessed “things” of God to the inexpressible joy (gaudium) that can be experienced in the heart-mind-soul if the human heart is willing to receive “the goodness,” the Love of God, into its innermost being. Anselm realized that the human heart is the place of emotions that erupt instinctively in ordinary daily life, but also that it is not possible to contain or regulate such spontaneous, heart-felt reactions. Indeed, Anselm gently conceded that the human heart, though needy (indigens) for God, naturally becomes overwhelmed with the obstacles to joy that are part of life. Sadness and disappointment can so pervade a human heart – make the heart, effectively, impure – that any movement toward joy, toward God, will be easily impeded. If

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the individual truly desires to “know” God, to experience fully God’s presence in this life, then s/he must be willing to open her/his heart to the bounty of God’s Love, to purify the heart by laying aside pride and resentment and prattling discourse, and allow the “pure heart” to rest in God. Moreover, Anselm cautions that the degree to which one is willing to “purify” one’s heart has other consequences: Therefore, in that perfect love of innumerable blessed angels and men, where no one loves another less than (he loves) himself, not otherwise will each one rejoice for each of the others as for himself. If, therefore, the heart of man scarcely will grasp its own joy from so great a good, how will it be able to grasp so many and such great joys?33

As a monk in the Benedictine order, Anselm was very sensitive to the communal dimension of love, the call to love within a community. Thus, he clarified that his call to purity of heart and openness to God’s love was not solely for sake of the individual, but that “perfect love” was a love that cares for others, for “no one will love anyone less than he loves himself.” The love of God that is welcomed into the heart enlightens the individual with a new and more profound understanding of “perfect love,” so that the individual can extend love to others. The joy he will then experience will not be only for his own blessedness, but for others as well. The converse is also true: if the individual does not welcome God’s love into his heart, then he will never truly know love or how to love others; he will never truly be joyful and bring joy to others. Anselm cherished the spiritual interconnectivity within a community but understood that all such devotional communion begins in the heart of each person, and it is to the individual he turns in the final section of the Proslogion: “I have discovered a certain joy that is complete and more than complete. In fact, when the heart is filled with that joy, the mind is filled, the soul is filled, the entire human being is filled: still, joy beyond measure will abide.”34 The “discovery” might seem obvious but it is worth repeating: Anselm revels in the joy of the presence of Divine blessings, Divine Love, but underscores that it must initiate in the heart. Once the pure heart is able to rejoice in authentic experience of the blessings and goodness of life, then the mind and soul become replete with joy as well. The “entire” person rejoices.

Compunction in the Prayers of St. Anselm: “Heart-Piercing” Devotion Another dimension of the human heart that Anselm expresses is the condition of “heart-piercing” or compunction, the spiritual condition that a medieval reader,

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certainly the monastic audience but educated lay audiences as well, would quickly identify as the first stage of religious awakening and self-understanding. Indeed, it can be argued that many of the prayers of St. Anselm are best understood in terms of compunction, which involves an enlivening and deepening of the human heart as a necessary dimension of genuine prayer and relationship to God. The medieval conception of compunction was grounded in the New Testament narration of the piercing (compunctus) of the hearts of the faithful upon hearing the truth of the Gospel and realizing themselves sullied by sin.35 Medieval spirituality, however, considered compunction to be a more persistent condition, a contrite state of spiritual accountability which becomes the pain of the spirit, a suffering resulting . . . from two causes: the existence of sin and our own tendency toward sin . . . [it] is an act of God by which God awakens us, a shock . . . God goads us as if with a spear . . . the attention of the soul is recalled to God.36

Two early medieval sources, both important to Anselm, refined and defined the place of compunction in medieval Christian spirituality. The first source was the original Regula of St. Benedict of Nursia, which he composed as guidance and definition for generations of Benedictine monks.37 The Regula alludes to compunction in two brief but significant passages. In the initial reference, “purity of heart and tears of compunction” are identified as the proper demeanor and intention for authentic prayer.38 Compunction is meant to induce a feeling of sorrow, even regret, for sinfulness and moral weakness, and authentic compunction should cause remorse enough to generate the cleansing tears of confession, petition and penance: it is the essential condition of self-awareness and self-acknowledgement in prayer, as well as personal accountability for one’s choices and actions in life. Compunction was deemed a state of spiritual vulnerability and genuine confession that would allow the truth of sinfulness to “pierce” the heart, thus to purify it. The second reference to compunction in the Regula attests to its necessary prevalence in the daily life of a monk. Benedict wrote that the proper observance of daily monastic life should not be unlike the observance of Lent.39 Thus, each monk should consistently incorporate into his piety the disciplines of spiritual ablution, such as penitent prayer, lectio divina, and compunction, the penetrating self-reflection that pierces the heart with the candor of its vision. A second monastic source for compunction that Anselm would have known was the corpus of St. Gregory the Great (ca. 540–604).40 Gregory had been a Benedictine monk before becoming pope and was especially relevant to Anselm’s own spirituality.41 Gregory’s teaching about compunction was so vital to the spiritual tradition of Christianity, that he is often referred to as “Doctor of Compunction.”42 He wrote that the proper life of a Christian is a

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life of continual prayer, marked by a series of stages or degrees of spiritual readiness. The necessary and initial stage of prayer, Gregory taught, must be a condition of compunction, that is, an authentic “heart-piercing” acknowledgement of moral frailty, of the persistence of sinfulness and of the need for Divine forgiveness: “[t]here be especially two kinds of compunction: for the soul that thirsts after God is first sorrowful in heart for fear, and afterward upon love. For first it is grieved and weeps, because, calling to mind former sins committed.”43 As Gregory explains, compunction begins with sorrow because the natural state of the soul is to long for God but inherent sinfulness and impiety precludes, at least at this stage, any connection to God. The grief will not be assuaged unless and until the heart is “pierced” by an admission of sinfulness, a recognition of culpability and a desire to repent and reform. Yet compunction was not just a remorseful state of regret; rather, Gregory suggested, compunction could also encompass a subsequent condition of joy and gratitude: when long anxiety and sorrow hath banished away that fear, then a certain security of the hope of pardon does follow: and so the soul is inflamed with the love of heavenly delights, and whereas before it did weep for fear of eternal pain, afterward it pours out tears, that it is kept from everlasting joys.44

The condition of compunction evolves along with the spiritual perspicacity of the individual. The truly contrite heart will not endure eternal punishment and damnation but come to experience divine mercy and forgiveness: a man has compunction in one sort, when on looking within he is frightened with dread of his own wickedness, and in another when on looking at heavenly joys he is strengthened with a kind of hope and security. The one emotion excites tears of pain and sorrow, the other tears of joy.45

Such a wondrous moment washes away the tears of sorrow. Gregory the Great reflected on that experience of repentance as a transformative occasion, as the prayerful advances spiritually from the sorrowful to the joyful stages of compunction, but he insisted that such repentance must take root in the heart before the soul can begin its purification: we should also, by contrition of heart, sacrifice ourselves unto almighty God: . . . Careful also must we be, that after we have bestowed some time in prayer, that, as much as we can by God’s grace, . . . [not let] any foolish mirth enter into our heart lest the soul, by reason of such transitory thoughts, lose all that which it gained by former contrition.46

The relationship between heart and soul that Gregory proposed was in keeping with the other spiritual teachings: the human heart seems ever to possess its own will, or, more properly, is the source of the unconscious will of the

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individual so that, unless there be concord between the heart and the soul (and mind), the aspiration of experiencing the Divine presence cannot be achieved. The soul is bound to the heart as the core of individual personality, and so, without the initial compunction of the heart, that is, the literal piercing with sorrow central to contrition, it cannot experience the presence of God. Anselm echoed, albeit somewhat more poetically, his spiritual predecessors in understanding the heart as the primary locus for authentic prayer and as the site of the moral “piercing”. Collectively, the prayers express persistent feelings of deep contrition, describe tears of sorrow and groans of regret, voice petitions for forgiveness and compassion, and articulate repentant yearning for God. The Prayer to Christ, presents the heart of Christ, full of forgiveness and pure love, as the Anselmian model for every human heart. Christ is, in Anselm’s reckoning, “the only one from His [i.e., God’s] Heart born equal to Him,” and so exists for all time as the Heart of God.47 Anselm affirms that as the principal image of Christ, invoking him as the “hope of my heart.” Unless he assumes in his own heart the heart of Christ, he will never be able to love, to experience peace, to dwell in serene contemplation of God. Anselm prays to Christ: Turn, most merciful one, my tepid love into a most fervent love of you. Most clement one, this, my prayer, is directed to this, this memory and contemplation of your kindnesses, that I may kindle your love within myself . . . and just as an orphan deprived of the presence of a very gentle father, crying and wailing, incessantly embraces his kind face with his whole heart, so also I, not as much I ought but as much as I am able, am mindful of your passion, mindful of your blows, mindful of your scourges, mindful of your cross, mindful of your wounds.48

Anselm kneels before Christ and confesses his true failing, his spiritual sloth (“tepid love”), the condition of a weak will that obstructs him from achieving the depth of love that is enjoined upon every Christian. He also prays for Christ to enter completely into his heart and stimulate it (and thereby also the mind and soul) with deep charity and compassion. As if to underscore that fervid desire, Anselm describes his desire to welcome Christ within his very core, as a loving and generous act, an “embrace” by his heart will meld him together with Christ. Nor was that desire a periodic want. Anselm’s meditations similarly lament the spiritual inadequacy of his heart (mind-soul) and it is to Christ that Anselm commonly pleads for guidance and help in his attempts to satisfy that deficiency. In his “Meditation on Human Redemption,” Anselm calls upon his soul to be cognizant of the miraculous grace of divine forgiveness and holy sacrifice that brought forth the redemption of humanity; however, the soul seems unable to absorb fully the wonder of such salvific acts, and so Anselm then implores

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Christ to join in an alliance of hearts since he is unable to learn how to “taste by love what I taste by knowledge”: Behold, Lord, my heart is before you. I try but can do nothing by myself: do you what I cannot. Admit me into the inner room of your love. I seek, I ask, I knock. You who made me seek, make me receive. You give me to ask, give me to discover. You teach me to knock, open to the one beating.49

Anselm reveals his entire self by placing his heart before Christ. In that state of humility, Anselm admits that human understanding (“I seek, I ask . . . ”) and human efforts (“I knock”) are insufficient. It will only be when the human heart is fully exposed, and so learns to love authentically (“make me receive”), that it will be able to experience (“discover”) God. In another prayer addressed to God, Anselm pleads for support in learning how to shift his own will to the Divine will as necessary to spiritual transformation: “to believe, to hope, to love, to live in what manner and how as you know and you will. (To have) Heart-piercing piety and humility, prudent self-discipline and propriety of the flesh. To love, to pray, to praise, to meditate upon you, to act always according to your will.”50 Anselm admits a desire for the attainment of his individual humanity, as well as perfection of his moral condition, yet he also insists that such an attainment, such perfection, can only be realized by the work of “heart-piercing piety” and humility. As God is complete and perfect, Anselm reasons, so the heart must relinquish its will to the Divine will and human understanding to Divine wisdom. If not, cautions Anselm, lack of self-awareness and emotional resistance to truth will impede the spiritual journey to God. Other prayers reiterate the significance of self-awareness and the need for willingness to proceed from that consciousness: the lack of will in Anselm’s heart to release himself completely to God and his inability to weep for his sins form the fulcrum around which his pious life turns. One example comes from a prayer to St. Paul in which Anselm confesses that he stands before Paul as a sinner to be reconciled, much as Paul was himself finally reconciled to God after a sinful life.51 Anselm reflects on the impediments to fulfilling his spiritual life: You [addressing his sins] drive me to eternal destruction, you keep from me all help. And so that my situation may be even more wretched, you do whatever you do to make me wretched. In addition, this you add so that my misery may be overloaded: that although this situation is true, so to me it does not seem to be so. For truth shows itself to be so but I am not affected or sense it. So reason teaches, yet my heart does not grieve. So I see because it is so, and, heu! I am unable to dissolve into tears, because it is so. If I were able to do this, perhaps I might hope, and, by hoping, pray.52

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It is evident to Anselm that the disengagement between his heart and mind, between his rational perception and his spiritual discernment, persists, even though he dearly wished it were otherwise. Anselm harbors a suspicion that he is not being truthful with or about himself: he piteously asserts that he is aware that he suffers from a surfeit of unhappiness, overwhelmed with the barriers that sin has placed between himself and God. Further, while he knows all that to be true, he cannot truly say it is so (“it does not seem to be so”). His heart is not in accord with his mind-soul and thus Anselm recognizes that the real complication to his achievement of spiritual wholeness and contemplation of God is himself, his pride and his will. He is not even sure that he truly desires the moment of “heart-piercing,” but he does at least abstractly understand that his inability to pour forth the tears of sorrow precludes as well experiencing tears of joy. Anselm understands himself in a rational, sensible way, and yet he cannot fathom his own depths. A second example can be found in the prayer to St. Nicolaus.53 Until about the late tenth century, the preferred recipients of prayers in the western Church were the persons of the Trinity.54 However, during the Carolingian Empire, prayer became both a private and personal, as well as a public and communal, practice throughout the empire, and collections of liturgical and as well as individual devotions to particular saints were composed. Individual saints were usually attached to certain geographical regions and were popular among specific communities: the saints often became the bridges of memory and myth that spanned the increasing chasm between God and humanity. In the last quarter of the eleventh century, Anselm infused his prayers to certain saints with his own emotional abundance, indicating that while he knew the hagiographic tradition, he wished to make their stories part of his own spiritual narrative. His invocation of Saint Nicolaus provides a fitting example. In the prayer, Anselm includes the common epithet of saints (“friend of God”) to endow St. Nicolaus with the universality of a popular saint, but also identifies him as a “confessor,” a descriptive particularity that resonates with his own life. Anselm prays to Nicolaus for comfort and guidance, again alluding to his abject sinfulness and a gnawing fear of severance from God. However, he does not suggest that his situation is inexplicable, for in a subsequent section, Anselm brashly excoriates himself for such spiritual despondency: Certainly, if my heart had been contrite, if my innermost self [i.e., the heart] had been stirred, if my soul had been turned to water, if for a long time rivers had flowed from my eyes, then I would hope that St. Nicolaus would be present to my imprecations. Therefore, arouse, St. Nicolaus, my lord, arouse my spirit, inspire my heart . . . But, alas, with how much lukewarmness my mind languishes, with how much stupor has my heart been hardened, with how much dullness has my soul been overwhelmed!55

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Anselm confessed to St. Nicolaus that the source for his distress lay in the obduracy of his heart, which he seemed also to suggest had contaminated his mind and his soul. The “heart-piercing “ he had so extolled and that gives birth to tears of remorse and purification, in short, the heart of compunction, was not his heart, regardless of his most resolute intent. More troubling to Anselm was that the spiritual tepidness of his heart seemed to have infected his mind and his soul. Although Anselm implored St. Nicolaus to inspire his own heart so that he might achieve the compunction of sorrow and transcend toward joy, he was also aware that he should not rely completely on another, even a saint, to arouse his heart: he must first find within himself the spiritual vigor to ascend to such a moral reckoning. Anselm echoed those themes in a third example, his prayer to St. Benedict, the one whose Rule he had vowed to observe. He now appeals to Benedict in his affliction that has been tinged with a melancholy disquiet that he has lead a deceptive life: For I profess a life of holy dealings with people, which I promised [to do] in the name and habit of a monk, but I am convicted by this life calling out for a long time, by my conscience, that I have lied to God and to the angels and to men.56

It is quite probable that Anselm exaggerated the depravity of his life and in his prayer described himself as being far more dissolute than history would ever bear out; nevertheless, if Anselm perceived himself in such a manner then it must be accepted that Anselm feared an accusation of hypocrisy and moral deceit before God, the realm of spirits, and man. To St. Benedict as his confessor he revealed a bedeviling anxiety that he has led a false and counterfeit life: For my perverse heart is made of stone and dried out when deploring the sins that have been committed, yet truly docile and unscrupulous when resisting [sin]. My depraved mind is swift and tireless for studying useless and noxious things or for considering wholesome things it is impatient and obdurate. My blinded and distorted soul is quick and ready to cast itself into and tumble about in vices.57

Not only, then, is Anselm troubled by his apparent lack of “purity of heart” concomitant with an apparent inclination for hypocrisy, he is also, but more acutely, disconcerted by what he has determined to be the root cause of his spiritual failure, a heart inexplicably (in its tenacity) impenetrable to holiness or moral sensation. Anselm never quite explains why this is so except to refer to the seductive allure of the world outside of his monastic life. Still, again, however, Anselm realizes to his extreme consternation that the moral turpitude into which (he believes) he has fallen cannot be delegated to a single cause: his hardened heart has made possible a reckless and negligent mind as well as an

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imprudent and foolish soul. It is a condition of complete spiritual disorder. He needs the guidance and support of the saints, his spiritual models and teachers, yet no single teacher or spiritual guide can release his heart from its obduracy and fear. That Anselm must achieve himself.

In Closing, A Heart-to-Heart Dialogue Anselm of Canterbury does not offer a systematic analysis of the heart in his spiritual works, nor does he compose a scholastic analysis of the heart and its collaboration with the mind and soul in the moral development and spiritual maturation of the individual. On the other hand, no medieval author before him, with the exception of Augustine, was willing so frankly and valiantly to display some of the deepest ruminations of his heart, not only in his private meditations but in writings that were disseminated for public use. Even if today Anselm seems to be a voice from the distant past and his constant selfflagellation seems at odds with his professed religion of love and forgiveness, it cannot be denied that the prayers, meditations, and other spiritual writings that he bequeathed to later generations manifest the serious contemplation of an individual who was sincerely seeking to understand himself and the inner and quite emotional turmoil that was disturbing his spiritual complacency. Anselm was a student of the human heart and while he concentrated on it primarily as the instrument of purity, moral discernment, and holy compunction, there is in those texts also the musings of a young man attempting to make some sense of himself and that locus within him that neither his intellect (mind) nor his faith (soul) could master. There is a touching humanity that seems, at least to this reader, rather contemporary and certainly so humane as not to be discounted as merely religious rhetoric. One of the prayers Anselm composed was to a saint much beloved in the Middle Ages, Mary Magdalene, and to her more than any other saint in his collection of prayers does he reveal his most complex feelings.58 It might seem remarkable that the young monk Anselm would even consider offering a prayer to the Magdalene and more remarkable still that he addressed not simply the familiar trope of the salvation of a sinful man, but also the boundless mercy that became her saving grace and the depth of her sincere contrition that invoked such mercy. In fact, in the prayer, Anselm identified himself with Mary Magdalene and called upon her to be his guide and teacher, not of higher theological concepts, but of mercy, of enabling himself to open his heart to mercy and experience the love and forgiveness she enjoyed when she had encountered Jesus. The prayer evokes

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a wondrous image, the profound humanity of a complicated woman who became a cherished saint and the profound humanity of a complicated man who would himself become an admired saint – but not before he had learned to love and be loved, to believe in his heart that he was as capable of not merely tears of sorrow but also tears of joy.

Notes 1.

2. 3.

4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

See, for example, commentary about the linkage among the heart, soul, and mind in Augustine’s Confessions in Robert E. Wood, “The Heart in/of Augustine’s Confessions: A Contribution to Religious Phenomenology,” in The Beautiful, The True and the Good (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2015), 154–69. Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), xv. On the heart as the place of or synonymous with memory, see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 48–49. Gregory Schufreider, Confessions of a Rational Mystic: Anselm’s Early Writings (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1994), 3. R. W. Southern, Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 91. See also Mary Agnes Edsall, “Learning from the Exemplar: Anselm’s Prayers and Meditations and the Charismatic Text,” Medieval Studies 72 (2010), 182. G. R. Evans, Anselm (Wilton, CT: Morehouse-Barlow, 1989), 27–28. Southern, Saint Anselm, 11. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 7. Eadmer’s description (I.iiii) of Anselm’s experience of his mother’s death is quite moving and evidences a very personal dimension in the life of the saint: “ . . . navis cordis eius quasi perdita anchora in fluctus seculi pene tota dilapsa est . . . ” which translates as: “ . . . the ship of his heart having lost, as it were, its anchor, it slipped away almost completely among the waves of the world . . . ” (emphasis mine). Original Latin can be found in Eadmer, Vita Anselmi, ed. R. W. Southern (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), I.ii (hereafter Eadmer). All translations from the original Latin by the author of this chapter. Southern, Saint Anselm, 31–21. For contemporary studies on Anselm as a dynamic voice in the theological history of emotions, see Sally N. Vaughn, “Saint Anselm and His Students Writing about Love: A Theological Foundation for the Rise of Romantic Love in Europe,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 19, no. 1 (2010): 54–73. In agreement, see Eileen C. Sweeney, Anselm of Canterbury and the Desire for the Word (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 3–5. Eadmer, I.viii. For an excellent discussion of John of Fecamp and the rhetoric of his prayers, see Sarah McNamer, “Genealogy of a Genre,” in Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 58–85, passim. See

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16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

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also Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 1988), 61–62. Robert Romanchuk, “The Idea of the Heart in Byzantium and the History of the Book,” in Textual Cultures: Cultural Texts, ed. Orietta DaRold and Elaine Treharne (London: Boydell & Brewer, 2010), 170f. Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century (New York: Crossroad, 1995), 218–19. John Cassian, Conference 1.vi, accessed July 20, 2017, Latin text from https://archive.org/ details/iohanniscassian00petsgoog. Ibid., 10.xi Anselm, “Oratio VII. Ad sanctam Mariam,” in S. Anselmi Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi: Opera Omnia, ed. Francis Salesius Schmitt (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1946), vol. 3, 18. All subsequent quotations from the prayers will be taken from this source and translated by the author of this chapter. On Gun(n)hilda, daughter of Harold, the last Anglo-Saxon king, and long-time friend of Anselm, see Southern, Saint Anselm, 262–64. Ep. 168. Original Latin text from Sancti Anselmi Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi, Opera Omnia, ed. F. S. Schmitt (Edinburgh: T. Nelson, 1946–63), accessed November 9, 2017, https://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/366.html Anselm of Canturbury, Proslogion 1.1, accessed July 7, 2017, Latin text from http://www. thelatinlibrary.com/anselmproslogion.html. Translations by the author of this chapter. Vulgate Matthew 6:6, accessed November 9, 2017, http://www.sacred-texts.com/bib/vul/ mat006.htm#006. A brief summary of forms of monastic prayer can be found in Jean Leclercq, “Western,” sec. 2 in chap. 16, “Ways of Prayer and Contemplation,” in Christian Spirituality: Origins to the Twelfth Century, ed. Bernard McGinn, John Meyendorff, and Jean Leclercq (New York: Crossroad, 2000), 415f. See Proslogion, Prooemium. Ibid. Both quotations from Proslogion 1.I. Ibid. Proslogion 4. A concise and thoughtful analysis of the text from a philosophical perspective can be found in Schufreider, Confessions, 177–88. See M. J. Charlesworth, ed., St. Anselm’s “Proslogion” (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1968), 3–7. Proslogion 25. Ibid. Proslogion 26. See Acts 2:37; also Bernard McGinn, The Growth of Mysticism: Gregory the Great through the 12th Century, vol. 2 of The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1996), 48. LeClercq, Love of Learning, 29–30. There is much scholarship on Benedict and his Regula. For an introduction, see LeClercq, Love of Learning, 11–19. “Regula S.P.N Benedicti,” chap. 20, accessed May 20, 2017, http://www.thelatinlibrary. com/benedict.html. Ibid., chap. 49.

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40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58.

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On Gregory the Great, see McGinn, Growth of Mysticism, 34–79; Carole Straw, Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). For Anselm’s knowledge of Gregory the Great, see Southern, Saint Anselm, 234–35. For his admiration for Gregory, see ibid., 386–88; Sweeney, Anselm, 15–16. McGinn, Growth of Mysticism, 48–49. Dialogues of St. Gregory the Great, trans. and ed. Edmund G. Gardner (London: Philip Lee Warner, 1911), 3.34, accessed November 9, 2017, http://www.saintsbooks.net/books/ Pope%20St.%20Gregory%20the%20Great%20-%20Dialogues.pdf (modernization mine). Ibid. Gregory the Great, Moralia on the Book of Job, 24. 6. 10., accessed November 9, 2017, http://www.lectionarycentral.com/GregoryMoralia/Book24.html. Dialogues IV.59. Anselm, “Oratio VII. Ad sanctam Mariam,” 21–22. Anselm, “Oratio II. Ad Christum,” 7. Anselm, “III. Meditatio redemptionis humanae,” in Schmitt, S. Anselmi, 91. Anselm, “Oratio I. Ad Deum,” 5. Anselm, “Oratio X. Ad sanctum Paulum,” 33. Ibid., 34. Anselm, “Oratio XIV. Ad sanctum Nicolaum,” 55. On saints and prayers, see Southern, Saint Anselm, 96–99. For an excellent study in the early history of saintly cults and hagiographic compositions, see Peter Brown, The Cult of Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). See also Jaroslav Pelikan, The Growth of Medieval Theology, vol. 3 in The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 174–84. Ibid., 57. Anselm, “Oratio XV. Ad sanctum Benedictum,” 62. Ibid. Anselm, “Oratio XVI. Ad sanctam Mariam Magdalenam,” 64f.

Eleonora Rai

10 Spotless Mirror, Martyred Heart: The Heart of Mary in Jesuit Devotions (Seventeeth–Eighteenth Centuries) Since early Christianity, the heart of Mary, mother of Jesus, has been an object of interest in the Christian world. The heart is the fulcrum of human life and sentiments, the place in which Mary accepted God and his invitation to give birth to his human and divine Son. Augustine (354–430) suggests that Mary first “conceived” Jesus in her heart and that she thus became metaphorically pregnant with his divine love.1 Mary’s answer to God, the so-called fiat (literally “let it be done”), embodies the attitude of an immaculate heart, keen to serve God.2 With her obedience of heart, Mary untangled the knot created by Eve with her original disobedience. The Gospels also reveal that, since her fiat and despite the joys of motherhood, Mary’s heart sorrowed for Jesus’s fate. Marian devotion grew enormously in early modern Europe and Mary’s heart was venerated by theologians and devotees as the center of her physical and emotional life. Two cults were engendered by such veneration: the devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, which exalts her purity of heart conceived free from the original sin; and the devotion to the Mater Dolorosa (Our Lady of Sorrows), which recognizes the inconsolable pain in Mary’s heart for Jesus’s Passion and death. This chapter explores the cult of the heart of Mary as it was promoted by two Italian Jesuits in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Giovanni Pietro Pinamonti (1632–1703) and Liborio Siniscalchi (1674–1742). It investigates the emotional dimension of devotion to Mary’s heart and its connection to the Passion of Christ, and, by extension, the cult of the Sacred Heart.3 In particular, it focuses on two devotional books composed by Pinamonti and Siniscalchi, Il Sacro Cuore di Maria Vergine (1699) and Il Martirio del Cuore di Maria Addolorata (1735) respectively.4 These little-known books contributed to the growing veneration of the hearts of Mary and Jesus and allow us to investigate how devotion to the immaculate and sorrowful nature of Mary’s heart was promoted by Italian

Note: This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 757314). https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513275-011

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Jesuits with the intention of encouraging devotees’ internal conversion. Pinamonti and Siniscalchi’s books fostered the image of Mary as loving mother and protector and offer insight into how the heart of Mary, thus her emotions and interior life, was described and used as a pathway to the heart of Catholics in early modern Italy. Several early modern Jesuit authors addressed the figure of the Virgin Mary composing treatises and devotional books, paving the way for Pinamonti and Siniscalchi’s works (e.g., Francis Coster’s books of meditations on Mary). Although there is an important corpus of scholarship exploring the role of the devotion to the Sacred Heart (i.e., the heart of Jesus) in Catholic history, there is little on the heart of Mary, and especially the emotional side of the cult as a tool encouraging internal conversion. This article will address this issue with the intent of contributing to cover this gap.

Marian Devotions and the Sacred Hearts of Mary and Jesus The cult of the heart of Mary is indissolubly connected to the heart of Jesus. The mother’s and the son’s hearts are joined through love, and early modern devotional books highlight that devotees cannot access Jesus’s heart without passing through Mary’s heart.5 Traditional iconography of Mary’s sorrowful heart presents it as a martyred object pierced by swords, while in classical representations of the Immaculate Heart, the purity of Mary’s heart is indicated by the roses that surround it. Jesus’s injured heart is the product of the Passion and is especially connected to his wounded side, pierced by a spear whilst on the cross. The cult of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary arise from the Passion, engendered immediately after the crucifixion.6 The Gospels illustrate the moment of indescribable suffering when Mary’s heart breaks at the sight of her son’s death. Devotion to Mary’s heart is closely connected to the cult of the Seven Sorrows, the seven painful events in Mary’s life, including meeting with her son on the way to Calvary, Jesus’s crucifixion, and old Simeon’s prophecy foretelling the pain she would suffer at her son’s fate: “A sword will pierce through your own soul.”7 The devotion to Mary’s Sorrows has ancient roots, but the cult of the Heart of Sorrows was authorized only in 1668, when the Servite Order was granted permission to celebrate the Feast of the Seven Dolors.8 Historians have extensively explored the devotion to the heart of Jesus, which was widespread in early modern Europe, and highlighted its importance to apparitions, politics, and eighteenth-century disputes about the veneration of the carnal heart, which Jansenists considered idolatry.9 Between the seventeenth

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and the eighteenth centuries, the Sacred Heart became an object of prayer for the atonement of sins and reparation and, at the same time, the symbol of the Christ king and his reign on earth.10 Jesus’s heart is typically represented as a “crucified” heart and visualized by mystics as a wounded object. In images, the heart is usually visible as an external object against Jesus’s chest or in his hand, surrounded by fire or a crown of thorns, and continuously bleeding. The Sacred Heart became the predominant symbol of Jesus’s holy wounds. By comparison, the history of early modern devotion to Mary’s heart is a little-studied topic. While some work has investigated the contributions of French authors, including Jean Eudes and Louis de Montfort, the promotion of devotion to Mary’s heart in early modern Italy is still to be explored properly.11 The historical and contemporary significance of this cult means that there is much work to be done to understand the emotional and spiritual implications of this devotion. Marian devotions exploded in early modern Europe, and have been identified as “one of the ways in which early modern Catholic elites sought to manage religious conflict and diversity in Central Europe.”12 After the battle of Lepanto in 1571, Mary was raised to protector of Christianity against the Ottoman threat; during the Thirty Years War, she was elected as protector of Bavaria; Jesuit Francis Coster (1532–1619) promoted the restoration of Mary as protector and leader of all Catholic countries. This production of the triumphant “Our Lady of Victories” can be contrasted with the diffusion of the idea of Mary as a domestic icon of maternal love, purity, and sorrow. In the eighteenth century, a process described as the feminization of Catholicism spread, with the diffusion of a more personal spirituality, the promotion of novel female models of sanctity, the development of affectionate and sensitive devotional practices, and a growing interest in sentimental themes pertaining to the Passion and the warm, affectionate Sacred Heart. Contemporaneously, the role of women in Catholic societies evolved through the establishment of female networks committed to new socio-religious activities, such as the education of young girls.13 Eighteenth-century Italian religiosity was often distant from the rationality promoted by many representatives of the Catholic Enlightenment, a movement striving for rationalizing cults and devotions, in anti-baroque perspective; old and new religious orders, such as Franciscans, Jesuits, and Redemptorists, spread emotional and affectionate devotions, and enhanced a piety that has latterly been defined as feminine.14 Mary played a central role in this process. In the early modern period, the Jesuits contributed to the fostering of devotion to Mary through the establishment of Marian congregations, which mainly consisted of students of the Jesuit colleges and Jesuits of the professed houses, and were used by the Jesuits as a pathway to forge links with the European

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elites.15 Marian devotion also increased at the end of the eighteenth century during the advance of Napoleon’s French army into Italy. The threat of French atheists, who sacked and desecrated churches, produced a wave of fear on the Italian peninsula.16 In this context, Marian “miracles” multiplied, and many images and paintings of the Virgin across Italy were seen moving their eyes in affection and sympathy with their beholders. Believers perceived these movements as expressions of Mary’s compassion; her eyes looked at praying devotees, changed color, and cried.17 These phenomena, which increased after the Suppression of the Society of Jesus, emphasized the traditional role of Mary as a loving, comforting mother.

The Sacred Hearts as Visual Objects for Internal Conversion Since the mid-sixteenth century, Jesuit authors published several devotional and theological books concerning the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, and the Virgin Mary per se, to raise awareness of Mary’s experience and move devotees’ emotions and open their hearts. In 1666, Philippe Kiesel composed eighty sermons pertaining to the Sacred Hearts, while Jacques Nouet summarized the major spiritual tenets of the cult. Claude de la Colombiére (1641–1682) spread the devotion to the Sacred Heart in England, when he moved to London as the duchess of York Maria Beatrice Este’s chaplain. Thanks to him and the diffusion of the devotion within the Stuart entourage before the Glorious Revolution and the exile, the Sacred Heart became a Catholic political symbol adopted against Protestants and anti-Catholic movements. Jean Croiset’s successful La devotion au Sacré-Coeur, which was reprinted several times, represents a turning point in the development of the devotion.18 Croiset emphasized this devotion as an intimate practice and tied the Sacred Heart to the Eucharist, as complementary aspects of the veneration to the body of Christ. In Croiset’s view, the devotion was firstly sensible, as it referred to the physical heart of Jesus, which was considered to be a tender, sweet, and warm object; it was not a symbol of the suffering Jesus to be read in its penitential dimension, but instead represented a lovable, affectionate Savior.19 Croiset stressed that such tenderness was found in devotion to Mary; in passing through her heart, which loved Jesus most of all, devotees reached Christ’s heart. The tenderness of Mary’s heart was especially significant at the turn of the eighteenth century, when Enlightenment rationalism promoted a distinction between intellect and emotions (both earlier considered elements of the heart) and identified the

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heart as an emotional organ.20 But there were voices of dissent: in L’homme religieux (1657), Jean-Baptiste Saint-Jure claimed that the heart assigned intellect and will, which were the basis of thought and emotions.21 A new sensibility within Catholicism fostered the emotional dimension of devotion to the Sacred Hearts. In the eighteenth century, Jesus’s heart became a symbol of the identity of the Suppressed Society of Jesus, and an anti-Jansenist symbol. Different theological orientations were reflected in the iconography of the cult, which was disseminated through paintings, images (frequently distributed by the Jesuits in internal missions), and costumed processions. Theologians and religious men worried about the proper representation of the heart, which they feared was in danger of being depicted too abstractly or, on the contrary, as an excessively concrete object.22 Corporeality was particularly stressed by the cult of the Sacred Heart and its iconography: the physical heart of Jesus is adored as the heart of a divine person and incarnated God, and as the naturalistic symbol of God’s love for humanity. It is a real heart made of flesh that embodies Christ’s human nature.23 In the 1760s, Pompeo Batoni’s painting of Jesus’s Sacred Heart, realized for the Gesù (the main Jesuit church in Rome), established an iconographical model, which became (and still is) the image per excellence of the cult, especially within the family environment.24 Batoni drew inspiration from the apparitions of the Sacred Heart to Marguerite Alacoque (1647–1690) in the monastery of Parais-leMonial in 1673, which had provided a new impulse to this devotion (also thanks to Marguerite’s spiritual father, the Jesuit Claude de la Colombière), fostering the reparative element of the cult and connecting it to the devotion to the Holy Wounds. As in Alacoque’s apparitions, Batoni’s iconographical model shows a feminine image of Jesus, which keeps in one hand his visibly wounded heart engulfed by flames, surrounded by the crown of thorns and topped by the Cross. Reparation and tenderness co-existed in the devotion to the Sacred Hearts and both these elements were expressed in the Jesuit books that nourished it. As in the case of Jesus’s heart, Mary’s heart represented a tangible, emotive object, which devotees could easily understand and visualize. It was a visual object designed to encourage internal conversion that symbolized both maternal love and a pathway for repairing one’s sins. Jesuit Marian congregations were a privileged place to express devotion to Mary in early modern Europe. Members of the sodality consecrated themselves using a chivalrous formula, addressing Mary as their mistress, patron, and protector.25 Their daily routine was marked by prayers to Mary, especially the Rosary, with the aim of nourishing humility.26 Marian feasts were celebrated and involved the neighborhood in important socio-religious gatherings. As an illustration, during Lent the sodalities organized costumed processions. At the

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beginning of the seventeenth century, the Augustan Marian Congregation processed a statue of the Mater Dolorosa, following a depiction of the Passion.27 This was not an isolated event. In 1619, a costumed representation of the Passion of Christ was held in Neubourg (Germany), which included the Mater Dolorosa with her heart pierced by seven swords.28 Early modern devotional books and preaching on the heart of Mary inspired mental images of this object as a beacon of hope for souls. Pinamonti’s and Siniscalchi’s books provide two useful examples for investigating the evolution of the expression of devotion to the pure and sorrowful heart of Mary. Both authors promoted the heart of Mary as a source of consolation, love, and purity; and as a martyred object whose suffering, due to Jesus’s Passion, could move human hearts. They pursued the same purpose with different literary techniques. Pinamonti used a gentle tone and style, which expressed the sensible heart, while Siniscalchi aimed at shaking his readers with very dramatic and realistic accounts of Mary’s pain. Siniscalchi’s text provides an example of how an eighteenth-century author living in a period characterized by rationalization of devotions nevertheless composed highly emotional, dramatic, and “theatrical” works showing a baroque influence.

Devotion to the Pure and Sorrowful Heart of Mary Pinamonti was a Jesuit missionary committed to the re-evangelization of the Central and Northern parts of the Italian Peninsula.29 He was part of a wave of rural missions in European areas following the Council of Trent (1545–1563), reflecting a soteriological anxiety about religious ignorance, disaffection to the sacraments, and moral corruption. Pinamonti was born in 1632 and entered the novitiate of the Society of Jesus at fifteen. He spent his life conducting internal missions, engaging people through meditations on the Passion of Christ, staging theatrical representations of religious subjects aimed at improving catechistic understanding, organizing processions, preaching, and writing. For twentysix years, he was the companion of Paolo Segneri Senior (1624–1694), one of the most remarkable Jesuit missionaries and orators of the era. He died on mission to Orta (Piedmont, Northern Italy). Pinamonti, as many Jesuit missionaries, understood the importance of religious iconography for a successful mission.30 Visual culture allowed people to better understand dogmas and religious teaching and facilitated internal conversion. The arma Christi (instruments of the Passion, such as the crown of thorns and the flagellum), as well as

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the images of Mary, the Sacred Hearts, and the saints, but also images of Hell, were valuable allies in the process of reconquering souls.31 In his Il Sacro Cuore di Maria Vergine, Pinamonti uses concrete images of the heart of Mary to capture and cultivate the reader’s visual imagination and to stimulate an emotional response. With benignity, skillfulness, and patience (as we read in a biography composed at the beginning of the eighteenth century), Pinamonti “pierced every heart, also moving the harshest, and inflaming the coldest.”32 The pure and sorrowful heart of Mary was an ideal visual object for stimulating the imagination and moving people to devotion. Liborio Siniscalchi (1674–1742) similarly understood its potential in composing a much more dramatic book than Pinamonti’s. Little information survives about Siniscalchi’s life.33 He was born and died in Naples and spent his life in the priesthood, during which time he wrote several spiritual and devotional books. He was also the rector of a Jesuit House between 1739 and 1741. The theme of the martyrdom of Mary’s heart on the Golgotha, which is the focus of Siniscalchi’s Il martirio del Cuore di Maria Addolorata, lends itself to highly emotional and corporeal descriptions of Mary’s suffering. Siniscalchi’s theatrical style aimed at provoking an interior emotional upheaval that advanced repentance and internal conversion. Where Pinamonti employed delicate imagery to induce soul-searching, Siniscalchi used dramatic rhetorical artifices. Pinamonti’s and Siniscalchi’s works capture the Jesuit emphasis on providing images of concrete objects to stimulate the imagination and move the heart, as part of the so-called religio carnalis; that is, concrete devotion, a piousness felt through human senses. Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises (composed by the founder of the Society of Jesus) promoted the use of imagination and mental images, especially in the meditation on the Passion. The practical value of the heart of Mary is highlighted by Siniscalchi: before images of Our Lady of Sorrows (Addolorata), he writes, sinners experience a deep contrition of the heart. He provided the example of the death of a uomo scelleratissimo (heinous man), who was guilty of his father’s homicide, in front of a painting representing the Addolorata. His contrition on viewing the image was so strong that it physically broke his heart; a miraculous sign that confirmed to the confessor of the dead man that his soul was immediately taken to Heaven.34 Siniscalchi’s narration suggests that compassion for the sorrowful Mother of God and her wounded heart saved souls by inspiring men to repent; it illustrates, moreover, how the physical image of the Addolorata and her pierced heart moved sinners to an interior contrition and conversion. As a visual object, the heart of Mary has been defined, represented, and understood in the early modern Catholic world using recurring devices, which also played a substantial role in Pinamonti’s and Siniscalchi’s devotional

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books. The Gospels present the heart of Mary as the fulcrum of her sentiments and life. In them, the heart represents the center of human existence, the origin of feelings, emotions, will, nature, and conscience. The term “heart” appears in the Bible hundreds of times and is often interchangeable with the idea of soul.35 The cult of the heart of Mary is rooted in Luke’s Gospel: “But Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart.”36 As a physical part of her body, Mary’s heart is a sensible object that symbolizes her inner life and virtues, joys and sorrows, purity and, above all, her compassionate, virginal, and maternal love for God the Father, her divine Son Jesus, and humanity. Luke locates Mary’s heart as the foundation of her wholehearted devotion to Jesus. Paolo Segneri Senior thus suggested in his treatise Il Devoto di Maria Vergine (“The Devotee of the Virgin Mary”), that Mary’s heart is “a furnace of Divine Love seven times more intense than the heart of all the Saints together.”37 Devotion to the cult of Mary’s heart was designed to increase love for both God the Father and Christ through reflection on and imitation of Mary’s virtues and unconditional love for her son. Love is, hence, the result of this devotion, rather than its object.38 As a human heart, Mary’s heart is also marked by suffering, and directs sinners to repentance and atonement. Segneri Senior thought that Mary should be called tutta cuore (all heart) for her compassion for men’s degradation, noting that “She is nonetheless all hands to relieve us from it [misery].”39 This echoes Saint Epiphanius’s (315–403) description of Mary as multocula (with many eyes, all eyes) due to her attention to human misery. Segneri thought Mary’s heart as ample as “the skies”, and capacious to such an extent that it could embrace humanity with an unmatched affection.40 He argued that “in creating Mary [God wanted] to summon in one heart all the talents that are shared among all the others; a heart that, like the sea, does not overflow for such fullness.”41 Pinamonti’s and Siniscalchi’s books similarly locate Mary’s heart as an infinite source of love and charity. The traditional image of the Virgin as advocata nostra – literally our advocate before a judging Christ – emerges particularly in Pinamonti’s work. Mary’s scientia (knowledge) is trustworthy, as her heart is enlightened by divine light.42 The heart of Mary is human, but free from sin; it is, in this sense, a powerful connection between humanity and God. That Mary’s heart was a carnal heart is particularly evident in artistic representations of the Mater Dolorosa in which it is pierced by swords. Within his treatise, Pinamonti clarifies that “heart” refers to Mary’s soul and will, but that it was also an oggetto sensibile, a real tangible object. There is a need, he writes, for something concrete to be moved and stimulated to devotion and internal conversion.43 Mary’s heart was to be honored as the most precious relic of her virginal body.44 The devotion to Mary’s heart thus presents two complementary

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elements: a reflection on Mary’s interior life and perfections; and the cult of the physical heart as part of her untouched body. The use of corporeal, bloody, and dramatic images was common during the Baroque, and whilst discouraged by an eighteenth-century branch of the Church that promoted Enlightened piety, it did not vanish. Indeed, as an illustration, at the time of Siniscalchi’s work, the Church approved the devotion to the blood of Christ (1721), while in 1765 the Congregation of Rites authorized the liturgical celebration of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Immaculate Heart: Giovanni Pietro Pinamonti “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God,” notes Matthew’s Gospel.45 Yet, hearts were, as the Gospel of Mark suggested, subject to corruption, first by original sin and latterly by the decisions taken in the heart itself.46 Satan planted the idea to betray Jesus in Judas’s heart, noted John the Evangelist.47 The idea that the innocence of Mary’s heart gave humanity greater access to God was fostered in the seventeenth century during the diffusion of the cult, and is notable in the devotional book composed by Pinamonti. Free from original sin, Mary was a unique example of purity. Pinamonti presented such limpidity as a guiding light for humanity and a remedy for moral corruption. Mary’s heart is a specchio senza macchia, a spotless mirror.48 According to the Jesuit, a pure heart was Mary’s defining characteristic and consisted of her virtues, first and foremost charity, and innocence. Pinamonti tracked the difference between the charity de’ nostri cuori terrestri (of our earthly hearts) and Mary’s heart, in which God’s fire of love burns perpetually. As a spotless mirror, Mary’s heart perfectly reflects Jesus’s innocence and absence of sin. To explore this idea, Pinamonti uses a traditional allegoric exegesis of the Song of the Songs (6:10) that identifies Mary as the moon and Christ as the sun.49 Mary’s unique holiness came directly from Christ: God predestined her ab aeterno (before the Creation) to be saint and immaculate. Her human heart, meaning the place where men could be corrupted and sin arise, was as pure as Jesus’s heart.50 As a result, Mary’s heart was devoid of passioni disordinate (wild passions): “for where there was no root of guilt [original sin], there could be no branches.”51 Even an unclouded mirror, notes Pinamonti, cannot accurately convey the image of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, who is God’s primogenita (first-born) in the order of Grace.52 Pinamonti often uses poetic (and at the same time realist) similes and comparisons to present Mary’s heart to readers in a manner that could capture their

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understanding: “Just with her presence, [Mary] generated purity in those who looked at her, just as the snow freezes you even when you see it up close.”53 A believer can become purer by praying to and reflecting on the heart of Mary, whose purity is a key for internal conversion. It instils a desire for holiness in devotees, who turn to it asking for pardon, help, and enlightenment. Praying to the heart of Mary provides consolation and strength. Continuing dedication to this religious practice increased the worth of the Virgin in the devotee’s mind and allowed her or him to eventually earn such affection necessary for human requests to be granted and to deserve the title of devotees of Mary and her Sacred Heart.54 “We honor every day her Heart,” Pinamonti writes, “in order to change our heart to a heart that meets her Heart.”55 Pinamonti also plays with the differences and similarities between the heart of Mary and the heart of common man. He asks: “But now how should a sinner, all mud, as am I, stand blushing before you?,”56 and observes “the greater misery, the greater your mercy will be.”57 During internal missions, religious men like Pinamonti and Segneri presented themselves as common sinners to induce the audience, composed of secular people, to soul-searching and repentance. Pinamonti exhibits the same humble attitude in his book by meditating on a personal encounter with Mary. He suggests that the more miserable and sinful a man, the greater the glory of Christ and Mary, advocata nostra before her judging son, in forgiving such a sinner. Men are pardoned and saved through the merits of Christ, with the potential intercession of Mary: “Here you are my defaced heart, so that you sanctify it [i.e., absolve from sin, “justify”]. If it is foul, you might purify it through your intercession before God.”58 After this exaltation of the purity of Mary’s heart, Pinamonti focuses on the resemblance between her heart and that of every man, thus aiming to make his readers feel closer to her and increase their devotion and hope of salvation. Segneri Senior wrote very significantly that Mary’s mercy toward humanity means that she is the first to arrive in sinners’ hearts and the last one to depart.59 Emotions are personified protagonists in Pinamonti’s reflections on the Sacred Heart of Mary. Love and suffering fill Mary’s heart: limitless love for her son Jesus (and as a consequence for humanity) and immeasurable pain for his tragic death. Yet, Pinamonti also establishes a connection between Mary’s anguish and an ordinary mother’s suffering. In this respect, the devotion to the heart of Mary was appealing because it presented once again a point of union between the human and the divine. Devotees could not only feel closer to God through praying to Mary’s Immaculate Heart, but take comfort in the common experience of suffering. Pinamonti uses the tension between Mary’s pure and nonetheless human heart to produce both connection with his readers and inspire their devotion.

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A Martyred Heart: Liborio Siniscalchi Starting with the title of his work, The Martyrdom of the Heart of Our Lady of Sorrows, Siniscalchi draws attention to Mary’s inconsolable pain and stresses that her “Passion” of the heart had been prophesied by old Simeon. The Jesuit tells the reader of Ignatius of Loyola who, from his conversion, wore on his chest an image of the Sorrowful Mother that showed her grieved heart pierced with swords. Daniello Bartoli (1608–1685), a Jesuit scholar who composed a life of Ignatius, narrates the story of this hand-colored image.60 Siniscalchi highlighted the importance of bearing images of the Madonna Addolorata (Sorrowful Madonna), as a form of protection against the Devil and temptation. He wonders who could possibly explain the raw brutality with which Mary felt her heart torn apart.61 This provocation leaves readers with a reflection that emerges clearly from the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuit literature on the topic: the purest heart ever created came to exemplify, ultimately, the deepest suffering. Drawing on a tradition that dates to Jerome (347–419/420), Siniscalchi defines Mary as Regina de’ Martiri (Queen of Martyrs). Mary’s martyrdom was considered more painful and extraordinary than any other as it was a martyrdom of the heart (not a physical martyrdom).62 Mary experienced in her heart all the wounds of Jesus’s Passion and death. The connection between Jesus’s tormented flesh and Mary’s emotions of the heart is evident on the Calvary, where Christ’s physical death corresponds with the “death” of Mary’s heart. Pinamonti refers to this martyrdom in his work, but Siniscalchi focuses exclusively on it. Two inseparable elements define Mary’s heart and, consequently, the devotion toward it in Siniscalchi’s reflections: pain and compassion, in its etymological sense (i.e., suffering with). Mary’s heart agonized with Jesus because of her infinite love for him. Devotion to Mary’s tormented heart is thus promoted by Siniscalchi as a form of compassion. True friends, we read, reveal themselves in time of need: crying with Mary for her sufferings could satisfy her much more than rejoicing for her happiness.63 Over the centuries, Catholic theological reflections on Mary’s suffering and role in the history of salvation have suggested the Virgin as co-redeemer along with Christ. In 1964, in the dogmatic constitution Lumen Gentium, Paul VI defined Mary’s unique cooperation in the economy of salvation, although with a soteriological function clearly subordinated to that of Christ, who is considered the only Mediator. Centuries earlier, several authors, among them Pinamonti and Siniscalchi, shared the image of Mary as co-operator in the economy of salvation, through their suggestion that Mary lived a Passion of the heart. Pinamonti argues that, although Christ did not need any help and Mary was

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not “Redentrice, ma Redenta” (Redeemer, but Redeemed), Mary still deserved the title of Redentrice (Redeemer) for her special redemption and her infinite love for humanity.64 Mary’s and Jesus’s hearts were one, unified heart due to their “scambievole amore” (mutual love): “Mary, who loved Jesus much more than herself . . . felt more anguished for Jesus’s torments than she would have been if tormented herself.”65 Mary’s heart was crucified on Golgotha, along with the body of Jesus, writes Siniscalchi.66 He describes Mary’s spasms of pain at the sight of her son’s crucifixion: “The injuries to Jesus ripped Mary’s heart to shreds.”67 Siniscalchi dramatically evoked all the events of the Passion by reconstructing their pitiful effects on Mary’s heart: Jesus’s flagellation at the column, the suffering of the crown of thorns, the via dolorosa (painful path) to Calvary, and the crucifixion. He describes these events using powerful, moving, and often fictionalized images of Mary’s Passion of the heart; her suffering was such that, metaphorically, she died with Jesus. The use of dramatic and theatrical rhetoric was typical of Jesuit orators and missionaries. Topics such as the Passion and Mary’s sufferings were particularly suitable for dramatization. Embellishing the Passion was a strategic choice to stimulate the readers’s imagination and move them to compassion. Siniscalchi reinforces this imagery with revelations received by mystics, to whom Christ or the Virgin disclosed details of the Passion (e.g., Bridget of Sweden). Mary, we read, felt like dying when she saw the “sanguinoso macello” (bloody slaughter) of her son’s flagellation: “the wounds of Your flagellated Son were all impressed in Your heart.”68 Siniscalchi pities and is moved by Mary’s suffering. He bursts out: “Oh Mother of All Sorrows, I can no longer bear to see you with such a cruel dagger in your chest. Tear it out, and thrust it into my own heart, which is certainly more deserving of such a fate.”69 Through compassionate engagement, devotees were taught to understand and feel Mary’s wounds of the heart and to sympathize with her suffering. Mary knew that Jesus’s destiny was pain and death, and, for this reason, Siniscalchi states, Mary has always been addolorata (sorrowful).70 He notes: “Indeed, Mary’s Heart always bore the piercing thorn of her Son’s future death.”71 The description of the encounter between Mary and Jesus on the via dolorosa is one of the most touching episodes in Siniscalchi’s narration. Mary’s dreadful pain is ineffable. In front of her tortured Son bearing the cross, the Mother is desperate and talks only with her eyes: “Mary remained, yes, highly wounded in the heart when she saw her Son under the Cross.”72 Siniscalchi’s dramatization was designed to emotionally engage readers and gradually build to the climax of crucifixion. On the way to Calvary, he describes Mary collapsing several times from shock and her heart breaking at the sight of Jesus’s blood. He does not embroider

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the image of a heroic mother; on the contrary, he fosters the image of Mary as a human icon of suffering. Along with St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), who claimed to receive this revelation from the Virgin herself, Siniscalchi states that Mary fainted when Jesus’s executioners unclothed him for crucifixion.73 On the Golgotha, we read, both the cross and the crucifix were laid in Mary’s heart; a cross was made, in fact, to torment Christ’s body and Mary’s heart.74 Siniscalchi also recalls the Stabat Mater (the Mother Stayed), a thirteenth-century sequence (i.e., a Catholic liturgical poetic hymn). The emotional sequence describes Mary at the foot of the cross, tormented by sorrow. The value of Mary’s sorrowful heart within Catholicism can be seen in the abundance of artistic representations of the Mater Dolorosa. The heart is the point of convergence of Mary’s sufferings. The representation of the swords piercing it recalls Simeon’s prophecy, but nonetheless provides an image of real pain. “I look at you dying, and yet I do not die;”75 “You, pierced in the body, and I, in the heart.”76 The metaphor of Mary’s Passion of the heart recalls a human carnal heart lacerated by grief and dying for sorrow, and the idea of the concrete martyrdom of Mary’s physical, virginal heart. The frequent use of verbs referring to the physical effects on the heart, such as “tear apart”, “pierce”, and “strike,” allows the readers to easily imagine the tangible results of Jesus’s killing on the heart of his mother. In Siniscalchi’s work, Mary seems to die of a broken heart, but nonetheless does not die and suffers a continuing martyrdom. Devotees could empathize with the human heart of the Son of God’s mother, share her suffering, and find strength and consolation. Women could identify themselves with Mary as mothers, and everyone could appreciate the protection of their celestial mother.

Conclusion Pinamonti expressed concern that the devotion to the heart of Mary could be considered femminile; a feminine devotion, a cult for women. The “emotionalization of devotion” that was involved in awakening a tender piety sat in tension with the Enlightenment rationalization of cults within eighteenth-century Catholicism. Paola Vismara has stressed in this regard the diversity and complexity within early modern Catholicism, in which different moral, theological, and devotional orientations coexisted.77 Pinamonti reassured readers that the cult was not just for women by hypothesizing that God required this emotional devotion to spread in order to counter the coolness and indifference of Catholic hearts. According to Pinamonti, devotion to Mary’s heart, which loved God

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above all, achieved this aim through increasing the devotees’ love for Christ. It was a model of devotion that venerated Mary’s heart as a complex organ that could capture love and compassion. An investigation of Pinamonti and Siniscalchi’s devotional books allows an exploration of the literary production of Mary’s heart by Jesuits across two generations. From missions, Pinamonti learnt how to talk to ordinary people to move their sentiments, and developed a personal style that was very different from his companion Segneri’s. Pinamonti’s book offers a gentle and safe way to access divine mercy through devotion to Mary’s heart. With a very effective simile, Pinamonti explains that, just as a medical doctor provides treatments to heal his patients, the devotion toward the heart of Mary is a good medicine that will heal the world from evil. He identifies the purity of Mary’s heart as a source of inspiration to humanity. Liborio Siniscalchi’s dramatic literary style demonstrates the space for religious baroque expressiveness within eighteenth-century Catholicism.78 The themes of Passion and suffering offered a fertile ground for dramatization. Siniscalchi’s literary work has the virtue of involving readers in the visceral narration of Jesus’s and Mary’s “Passions” on the Calvary. Siniscalchi’s first purpose is that of moving his audience to compassion, and through compassion to repentance, internal conversion, and moral control. The connection between Mary’s heart and human hearts developed in Pinamonti and Siniscalchi’s books suggests that in early modern Catholicism the heart was understood as a place of emotional upheaval and change, where human beings felt guilt for their moral corruption and sins, and found the inspiration to change their life and become closer to the divine. The heart emerged as a most secret and personal space for men and women, and a place of encounter with God; it is the place where internal conversion begins. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, devotion to Mary and her heart expressed a domestic attitude, while simultaneously holding political and eschatological functions. Louis Marie de Montfort (1673–1716), a priest and missionary who composed the Traité de la vraie dévotion à la Sainte Vierge (“Treatise of the true devotion to the Sacred Virgin”), strongly contributed to developing such a familial dimension and reinforcing Marian devotions. He taught that the true devotion to Mary is affectionate and full of trust, as a child’s attachment to his mother.79 The Jesuit Alfonso Muzzarelli (1749–1813), moreover, prescribed the cult of Mary to be practiced in the month of May in the home, within the family, by means of the collective prayer of the Rosary and the Litany of Loreto, in front of an image of Mary. He also promoted the domestic practice of the “fiori di virtù” (literally flowers of virtues, i.e., sacrifices, offerings to God or the Virgin), to be dedicated to her.80

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Devotion toward the heart of Mary has relentlessly continued until the present day. Over the centuries, the cult of Mary has functioned in support of the Papacy against its opponents: Protestants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; Enlightenment ideals and French “atheist” attacks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and Soviet Communism in more recent times. The recent history of the Catholic Church shows extraordinary encouragement to the devotion to the Sacred Hearts. In 1899, Pope Leo XIII consecrated humanity to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which is presented (similarly to Mary’s heart) as a remedy for the ills of “modernity”. In 1942, Pius XII fostered the image of Mary as help for Christians in the middle of World War II, and consecrated all of humanity and the Church to Mary and her Immaculate Heart. This consecration was requested several times by Alexandrina Maria da Costa (1904–1955), a Portuguese mystic beatified in 2004 and recognized as a stigmatic.81 Devotion to Mary’s heart was closely connected to Alexandrina’s experience of the Passion and the reparation of sins. On May 13, 1967, the anniversary of the first Marian apparition of Fatima (when Mary required the consecration of Russia to her Immaculate Heart as a strategy for peace amidst a raging revolution), Paul VI exhorted Catholics to renew their consecration to the Immaculate Heart. In 1984, John Paul II rejuvenated this consecration, thus illustrating the attention of the contemporary Church to this specific Marian devotion. In 2013, Pope Francis, a Jesuit, stated that on Calvary, “Mary is united to the Son in the martyrdom of her heart and in the offering of his life to the Father for the salvation of humanity.”82 Over several centuries, the cult of the Heart of Mary has provided devotees opportunity to get closer to the divine, by imitating Mary’s love for Jesus and the interior virtues symbolized by her pure and sorrowful heart. As a sensible object, able to capture devotees’ imagination and arouse their emotions, the heart of Mary has become a key element in Catholic devotions, a symbol of purity and patient suffering, and an inspirational model for Catholics.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

Augustine, Sermo 215, 4. Luke 1:38. For a first approach to Jesuit history see John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). Giovanni Pietro Pinamonti, Il Sacro Cuore di Maria Vergine, onorato per ciascun giorno della settimana con la considerazione de’ suoi meriti e con l’offerta di varii ossequii (Florence: Pier Matia Miccioni, 1699). I used an edition published in Monza (Tipografia Corbetta) in 1836; Liborio Siniscalchi, Il Martirio del Cuore di Maria Addolorata, ovvero

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5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

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Considerazioni, Colloqui, Aspirazioni, Esempi, e Pratiche divote su i Dolori della SS. Vergine, per tutti i Sabati dell’Anno (Naples: Francesco Ricciardi, 1735). I used an edition published in Venice (Lorenzo Baseggio) in 1761. See, for example, Ristretto della divozione al Sacro Cuore di nostro Signore Gesù Cristo tratta dall’opera del Padre Claudio de la Colombiére (Venice: Antonio Zatta, 1794). Karmen Mackendrick, Word Made Skin: Figuring Language at the Surface of Flesh (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 117. Luke 2:35. Mackendrick, Word Made Skin, 119. See Jeanne Weber, “Devotion to the Sacred Heart: History, Theology and Liturgical Celebration,” Worship 72 (1998): 236–54; “Cœur (Sacré),” in Dictionnaire de spiritualité ascétique et mystique. Doctrine et histoire, ed. M. Viller (Paris: Beauchesne, 1953), vol. 2, 1023–46; Mario Rosa, Settecento Religioso (Venice: Marsilio, 1999), 17–46. On this subject see Daniele Menozzi, Sacro Cuore: Un culto tra devozione interiore e restaurazione cristiana della società (Rome: Viella, 2001). See, for example, Jean Séguy, “‘Millénarisme et ordres adventistes”: Grignion de Montfort et les Apôtres des Derniers Temps,” Archives de sciences sociales des religions 53, no. 1 (1982): 23–48; Paul Milcent, Saint Jean Eudes: Un artisan du renouveau chrétien au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1985). Bridget Heal, “Mary ‘Triumphant over Demons and Also Heretics’: Religious Symbols and Confessional Uniformity in Catholic Germany,” in Diversity and Dissent: Negotiating Religious Difference in Central Europe, 1500–1800, ed. Howard Louthan, Gary B. Cohen, and Franz A. J. Szabo (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 153–72. See Marina Caffiero, “Femminile/popolare. La femminilizzazione religiosa nel Settecento tra nuove congregazioni e nuove devozioni,” Dimens 2 (1994): 235–45; Claude Langlois, Le catholicisme au féminin. Les congrégations françaises à supérieure générale au XIXe siècle (Paris: Le Cerf, 1984). On Catholic Enlightenment (or Enlightened Catholicism) see, for example, Ulrich L. Lehner, The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016; Christopher M.S. Johns, The Visual Culture of Catholic Enlightenment (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015). Louis Châtellier, L’Europe des dévots (Paris: Flammarion, 1987). I used an Italian edition (Bologna: Pardes Edizioni, 2013). See also Lance Gabriel Lazar, Working in the Vineyard of the Lord: Jesuit Confraternities in Early Modern Italy (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2005), 125–52. Roberto Salvadori, 1799: Gli ebrei italiani nella bufera antigiacobina (Florence: Casa Editrice Giuntina, 1999), 43; Marina Caffiero, “La fine del mondo. Profezia, apocalisse e millennio nell’Italia rivoluzionaria,” Cristianesimo nella storia 10, no. 2 (1989): 389–442 and La Nuova Era. Miti e profezie dell’Italia in rivoluzione (Genoa: Marietti, 1991); Eleonora Rai, “L’apocalittica come spiegazione ai ‘mali’ del XIX secolo. Il caso di Giacomo Maria Montini (1874),” Ricerche storiche sulla Chiesa Ambrosiana 27 (2009): 167–90. On the crying Madonne and miracles connected to the French invasion of Italy at the end of the eighteenth century, see Massimo Cattaneo, Gli occhi di Maria sulla Rivoluzione. “Miracoli” a Roma e nello Stato della Chiesa (1796–1797) (Rome: Istituto nazionale di studi romani, 1995); Giovanni Marchetti, De’ prodigj avvenuti in molte sagre immagini specialmente di Maria Santissima secondo gli autentici processi compilati in Roma memorie estratte e ragionate da d. Gio. . . . (Rome: Vincenzo Poggio, 1797).

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18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

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Augustin and Aloys De Becker, and Carlos Sommervogel, Bibliothéque de la Compagnie de Jésus (Leuven: Editions de la Bibliothèque S.J, 1960), vol. 2, 1661–86. Rosa, Settecento, 35. Ibid., 23. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 38. Kevin McNamara, “Devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary,” The Furrow 36, no. 10 (1985): 599–604. David Morgan, The Sacred Heart of Jesus: The Visual Evolution of a Devotion (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008). For Batoni’s painting, see Martha M. Edmunds, “French Sources for Pompeo Batoni’s ‘Sacred Heart of Jesus’ in the Jesuit Church in Rome,” The Burlington Magazine, 149.1256 (2007), 785–89. See also https://commons.wiki media.org/wiki/File:Batoni_sacred_heart.jpg, accessed November 4, 2017. Châtellier, L’Europe, 22. Ibid., 33. Ibid., 54. Ibid., 155. “Pinamonti, Jean Pierre,” in Sommervogel, Bibliothéque, vol. 6, 763–92. See Bernadette Majorana, “Lingua e stile nella predicazione dei gesuiti missionari in Italia (XVI–XVIII secolo),” Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez 45, no. 1 (2015): 133–51; “Missions et missionnaires jesuites en Italie (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle),” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 2 (2002): 297–320. Gian Francesco Durazzo, Raccolta delle virtù del P. Gian Pietro Pinamonti missionario della Compagnia di Giesù (Rome: Antonio de’ Rossi, 1709), 73. Ibid., 70. All translations from Italian into English are mine. “Siniscalchi, Liboire,” in Sommervogel, Bibliothéque, vol. 7, 1226–32. Siniscalchi, Il Martirio, 180–81. See, for example, Deuteronomy 6:5; 26:16; Matthew 22:37; Mark 12:30. Luke 2:19, 51. “Fornace di Amor Divino sette volte più accesa che non è il cuore di tutti i Santi congiunti insieme.” Paolo Segneri Senior, Il Devoto di Maria Vergine istruito ne’ motivi, e ne’mezzi che lo conducono à ben servirla (Bologna: Giovanni Recaldini, 1677). I used the edition published in Venice (Giovanni Battista Indrich) in 1678, here 126. “Devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary,” Catholic Encyclopedia, available at http://www.catholicity.com/encyclopedia/h/heart_of_mary,devotion_to_immaculate. html, accessed October 22, 2017. Segneri Senior, Il Devoto di Maria Vergine, 101. Ibid., 118. “Così nel formar Maria radunasse in un cuore tutte le doti che son divise frà gli altri; cuore, che; come il Mare, non ridonda per tal pienezza.” Ibid., 49. Pinamonti, Il Sacro Cuore, 122. Ibid., 9–10. Ibid. Matthew 5:8. Mark 7:21. John 13:2. Pinamonti, Il Sacro Cuore, 21–25.

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49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

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Ibid., 22. See, for example, Hebrews 9:14. “Perché dove non era la radice della colpa, non potevano essere i rami.” Pinamonti, Il Sacro Cuore, 23. Ibid., 25. “Solo coll’aspetto ingenerava la purità ne’ riguardanti, a guisa della neve che par che solo veduta da vicino vi agghiacci.” Ibid., 23. Ibid., 18–19. Ibid., 11. “Ma intanto un peccatore tutto di fango, quale son io, con che rossore deve comparirvi davanti?” Ibid., 34. “Sarà tanto maggiore la gloria della vostra misericordia, quant’è maggiore la mia miseria.” Ibid., 35. “Ecco che io vi presento questo mio cuore tutto imbrattato, perché lo santifichiate. Se egli è immondo, voi lo potete mondare colla vostra intercessione appresso Iddio.” Ibid. Segneri, Il Devoto, 141. Daniello Bartoli, Della Vita e dell’Istituto di S. Ignazio fondatore della Compagnia di Gesù (Rome: Domenico Manelfi, 1650), I–V. I used the edition published in Turin (Giacinto Marietti) in 1825. Here II, 85. See Siniscalchi, Il Martirio, 6. Siniscalchi, Il Martirio, 110. Ibid., 106. Ibid., Introduction, VIII. Pinamonti, Il Sacro Cuore, 88–95. “Anzi Maria amando Gesù assai più di sè medesima . . . provava assai maggior tormento pe’ tormenti di Gesù, che se fusse stata Ella stessa tormentata.” Siniscalchi, Il Martirio, 110. Ibid. “Le ferite di Gesù squarciarono tutto il Cor di Maria.” Ibid., 111–12. “Le Piaghe del Vostro Figliuol flagellato tutte s’impressero nel Vostro cuore.” Ibid., 156. “Ah Madre Addolorata, io non mi fido più vedervi con un sì crudo pugnale nel petto. Strappatelo pure, e vibratelo nel mio cuore, che questo solo merita.” Ibid., 91. Ibid., 34. “Maria, portò, è vero, sempre nel cuore la pungentissima spina della futura morte del Figlio.” Ibid., 72. “Restò Maria, sì, altamente ferita nel cuore per la vista di suo Figlio sotto la Croce.” Ibid., 102. Ibid., 111. See also Klaus Schreiner, Vergine, madre, regina: I volti di Maria nell’universo cristiano (Rome: Donzelli Editore, 1995), 156. Siniscalchi, Il Martirio, 118. “Miro il tuo morire, e pur non moro.” Ibid., 338 “Tu trafitto nel corpo, ed io nel cuore.” Ibid. See, for example, Paola Vismara, Cattolicesimi: Itinerari sei-settecenteschi (Milan: EBF, 2002). The Catholic scholar and religious man Ludovico Antonio Muratori (1672–1750) was one of the protagonists of these demands of regulations of cults and his works on the topic had enormous success in Italy and influenced preaching methods. On Muratori see, for example, Paola Vismara, “Lodovico Antonio Muratori (1672–1750). Enlightenment in a Tridentine Mode,” in Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe. A Transnational History,

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81. 82.

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ed. Jeffrey D. Burson and Ulrich L. Lehner (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2014), 249–68. Louis Marie de Montfort, Traité de la vraie dévotion à la Sainte Vierge, Italian trans. by Battista Cortinovis (Rome: Città Nuova, 2014), 2, 107, 93. Alfonso Muzzarelli, Il Mese di Maria o sia il Mese di Maggio consegrato a Maria Santissima coll’esercizio di varj fiori di virtù da praticarsi dalle persone secolari nelle pubbliche Chiese o nelle case private (Ferrara, 1785). On victim souls see Paula M. Kane, “‘She Offered Herself Up’: The Victim Soul and Victim Spirituality in Catholicism,” Church History 71, no. 1 (2002): 80–119. Pope Francis, General Audience, Saint Peter’s Square, October 23, 2013.

Bridget Millmore

11 “An Heart that can Feel for Another”: Love Tokens and the Icon of the Heart in Eighteenth-Century Britain Engraved on a late eighteenth-century British copper coin is a heart neatly pierced by two arrows with the date 1805 and the words, “An Heart that can feel for another.”1 The re-engraved coin carries both symbols and language associated with love. An initial reading of the sentiment conveyed by this token might be to associate the image of a pierced heart and words of endearment with the expression of love between sweethearts or a married couple. However, when the coin is turned over, the engraving reveals that it celebrates the birth of a child. The words, “To His Dear Mother, JOHN ADAMS, Son of John & Mary Adams, Born Jan, 19 1805,” record both a family event and a message of love from a son to his mother. This chapter investigates depictions of the heart on love tokens crafted from low value coins, a practice that was particularly popular in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century. Rather than consider what the heart ‘is’, it questions what the heart ‘does’ and in particular explores how communities relied on its symbolism to build and sustain relationships. The feeling heart is construed in this chapter in terms of the emotional relationships it produced during everyday practices. The discussion focuses on how the icon of the heart was used to express feeling through the exchange of these tiny mementos that were customarily made by the British working population.2 Whilst historians of medieval and early modern Europe have begun to chart the rich and complex meanings of the heart in different domains, with the notable exception of Fay Alberti’s discussion of the impact of new sciences on heart representations, how the heart was understood and used in the eighteenth century is relatively underexplored.3 This chapter contributes to our understanding of the sentiments of those who are barely heard in the archives. It provides insights into the ways in which they articulated their feelings through the embedding of emotions in objects. The icon of the heart dominates the material manifestation of their sentiments. When exploring the expression of feelings, and in particular love and affection, among the lower ranks over two hundred years ago, the historian is faced with two key challenges. Firstly, how can the emotions of those who, as the historian E. P. Thompson comments, “did not leave their workhouses stashed with

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documents for historians to work over,” be uncovered?4 Secondly, once a relevant source, such as love tokens made from coins, has been identified, what critical approaches will aid the exploration of the inner lives of the lower orders and help with the difficult task of extracting feelings from things? This chapter brings together two fields of enquiry: the history of emotions and history from below. It employs the study of affective objects to cast light on the emotional lives of those who left few first-hand accounts. In particular, it asks questions about the use and meaning of one icon, the engraved heart. This chapter proposes that the heart was understood as a metaphor for all types of love, not just romantic love. Indeed, it was used as a symbol for life itself. It further argues that the image of the heart was adapted to reflect the emotional needs of families and communities, and to secure feelings of belonging at times of family disruption in an increasingly industrialized Britain. These “readings” of the icon demonstrate how the lower ranks, with varying levels of formal education, relied on a visual and material literacy to express and interpret emotion. The love tokens that are the foundation for this research were made primarily from copper halfpennies and pennies, the currency of the laboring poor. They are now held by the Ashmolean, British, Cardiff, Cuming, Foundling, Huddersfield, Hull, Maidstone, National Maritime, and Oldham museums in England and Wales, the National Museum of Australia in Canberra (particularly convict tokens), and in the private collections of Alison Barker, Sim Comfort, Gary Oddie, and the late Richard Law. From the examination of the inscriptions on tokens in these fifteen collections, I was able to establish that they cover a similar range of life-cycle events and themes. It was then possible to develop a method for organizing tokens based on their key features. This approach uses a taxonomy that divides tokens into three groups: firstly, tokens that refer to family attachment such as birth, courtship, and marriage; secondly, tokens that reflect people’s attachment to a wider group forged through circumstances of occupation and location; and thirdly, tokens that involve separation such as imprisonment, exile, and death.5 I have transcribed the spellings as they were originally found on the coins. This taxonomy offers a way of looking at the tokens that takes into account the subject range of their inscriptions but also goes beyond the content to consider their affective meanings.

History From Things For the historian, coins and tokens of all types are a particularly rich and yet relatively untapped source of social history. They relate to people’s work, income,

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trade, and consumption. In the case of coins altered into love tokens, they are part of the social practice of marking important life events. By placing love tokens alongside other material and visual sources that employed a similar lexicon of affection, how they were used in such customary practices can be uncovered. This “history from things” approach starts with the objects themselves to appreciate the repertoire of the heart on tokens and then works outwards from them, using other sources to build a picture of how the iconography was understood.6 Sources for this enquiry include the visual evidence of the heart inscribed on other everyday objects and the love stories, songs, and woodblock illustrations found in eighteenth-century British ballads and broadsheets. Love tokens belong to established rituals of altering coins into religious, superstitious, lucky, and amorous keepsakes. For example, coins bent into “S” shapes were known as “benders” and offered as lovers’ gifts.7 This custom is illustrated in Joseph Addison’s 1710 essay, “The Adventures of a Shilling,” which describes the changes made to a coin by the different people who acquired it during its circulation. In one instance, the shilling is altered into a “bender” and given to a sweetheart who then deserts his lover and turns it back into a coin, before spending it at the alehouse.8 They are also part of the customary practice of inscribing everyday objects with biographical and sentimental details. The images and idioms engraved on love tokens are also found, for example, on tobacco tins and tradesmen’s tools. In domestic settings, rolling pins, candle boxes, knitting sheaths, love spoons, marriage bottles, thimbles, and lace bobbins were decorated with initials, names, and affectionate images and phrases.9 Some of the tokens left by mothers for their babies at the Foundling Hospital in London were personal items engraved with names and symbols of remembrance, such as a thimble, a gambling token, and a buckle.10 At sea, sailors crafted scrimshaw, ornamented wooden boxes and decorated staybusks with intricate images and symbols.11 In the graveyard, head- and footstones were carved with clasped hands, weeping willows, and angels, as well as the tools or emblems of a person’s trade. Prisoners scratched names, dates, and memorable symbols on gaol walls; sailors and convicts tattooed their bodies with sets of initials and signs of attachment.12 All these symbols and idioms were drawn from a familiar vocabulary of affection and belonging. As Alice Dolan and Sally Holloway remark, “material objects . . . provide a wealth of opportunities for reconstructing material vocabularies of emotion.”13 The love tokens at the center of this study provide just such an opportunity. Love tokens were created by first rubbing away the portraits of the King and Britannia from the coin. Biographical details, as well as symbols and words of love and affection, were then inscribed on the blank surfaces, either

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through lines of engraving or by means of a series of pinpricks. The love token in Figure 11.1, for example, is engraved with the outline of a courting or married couple. It is also decorated with an anchor and a heart suggesting this is a sailor’s token. Altered from a copper halfpenny, a loop has been added so that the token could be worn around the neck, highlighting the intimate nature of the object.

Figure 11.1: Love token engraved with loving couple (1952,0904.332). © The Trustees of the British Museum.

There is little written evidence about the craft of love token making. However, the skill of engraving was used in a wide range of occupations at this time, including printing and metalworking. We can speculate that if someone did not have the abilities to make a love token themselves, they knew someone who did. There is also evidence that people made them even if they were unschooled in engraving.14 The production of love tokens demanded forethought and motivation. Phrases, images, and symbols were chosen before each token was crafted. The process of rubbing the copper surface of a coin smooth and inscribing it took time and labor, but above all the desire to leave a mark. Each token was individually fashioned, even when copied. These observations highlight how, in the course of creating a token, feelings of affection and belonging were quite literally cut into the metal of these artefacts by their makers. The act of making, giving, receiving, and keeping love tokens belonged to social practices that were passed on within families, from relation to relation

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and generation to generation. These performances of creation and circulation instilled shared values, beliefs, and feelings. Objects that were exchanged as part of the practice of marking family events offer us a material manifestation of the role of emotions in asserting family bonds. As Katie Barclay observes, “family was a significant component in self definition” in the early modern period.15 Situating these affective objects within the context of customary practice provides an appropriate critical approach for the analysis of the heart. Monique Scheer argues that a practice theory approach to the history of emotions offers an analytical perspective from which to investigate and infer more about what people were doing and consequently feeling. She recommends looking at the “objects used in emotional practices of the past,” to access the experience of emotion.16 Emotional practices are shaped by broader cultural ideals and beliefs. Thus the fact that the icon of the heart inscribed on tokens already carried meanings that were commonly held and understood provides us with an access point to personal feeling.

History of Emotions and History From Below This investigation builds on established frameworks of emotions history and history from below. Historians of emotions have relied predominantly on written sources in their debates about whether and how emotions change over time. The methodologies developed, for example, by Peter and Carol Stearns, Barbara Rosenwein, and William Reddy and built on by others, such as Ute Frevert and Thomas Dixon, enable us to understand emotions as socially and historically produced.17 However, their reliance on the written word provides challenges for historians working with those who left few such sources. Understanding emotion through language does not take into consideration the fact that feelings are also embedded in things. John Styles’s work on the Foundling Hospital tokens in London highlights how those leaving babies in the care of the institution were mostly illiterate. Instead of words, they used the language of things since “theirs was a world where the use of certain objects to mark events, forge relationships and express emotions was familiar, and the meaning of those objects widely shared.”18 With this in mind, this chapter explores the embodied nature of emotions in objects. In doing so, it engages with a developing field in the history of emotions that is concerned with emotional objects.19 From the depictions on love tokens, it is clear that they were exchanged by those who depended on some form of manual labor to survive. They include,

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for example, bricklayers, butchers, blacksmiths, farriers, coopers, barbers, gamekeepers, woodcutters, soldiers, sailors, servants, and watermen. These are the people that feature widely in histories from below, a term used to refer to research that pays attention to the unheard voices of the marginalized. Since Thompson’s influential work, The Making of the English Working Class, history from below scholars have investigated a wide range of subjects.20 Some studies focus, for example, on popular culture, whilst others are more concerned with the welfare of the poorer sorts.21 Recent scholarship that brings together the history of emotions and history from below introduces approaches that explore and complicate the experiences of the laboring poor. Barclay, for example, examines how men from different social orders navigated relationships expressed through the emotional language of gratitude.22 Joanne Bailey investigates parenthood and highlights how emotion was displayed through the act of providing and caring for children.23 Joanne McEwan considers the behaviors associated with child murder, paying particular attention to the spaces where emotions were performed and shaped.24 Language, performance, and space augment the ways in which emotion historians can understand feelings through the study of routines and rituals. This chapter contributes to the field by focusing on the social behaviors and values associated with emotional objects exchanged between families and friends. During the eighteenth century, long established practices in how people lived and labored in Britain were changing. Customs were under threat. Traditional household practices were being disrupted by, for example, the introduction of enclosures on the land, growing industrial production, commercial development, and the expansion of towns. On an individual level, the withdrawal of customary perquisites made a significant impact on people’s daily incomes.25 As a result, families became accustomed to separations and reunions. This included: relocations from the countryside to the town; partings as family members went into service or to sea; absences as children took up apprenticeships or joined the households of relatives; separations as people traveled to the colonies and beyond, or were exiled to America and Australia. Hans Medick observes that customs are and have never been static.26 This is borne out in the evidence of surviving tokens that illustrate how the lexicon of attachment and remembrance was adapted to reflect changing circumstances, including the introduction of transportation to Australia. The aim of this chapter is to discover more about the inner lives of the poorer sorts through their love tokens and in particular the image and idiom of the heart. The heart was clearly used as a form of shorthand. How was this shorthand adapted and understood? What did the heart on a love token mean to those who gave and received these mementos; what associations did it

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already embody; how were idioms about the heart understood, and what do these findings add to the field of the history of emotions from below?

The Heart on Love Tokens: Attached, Suffering, and True Hearts The heart is the most commonly found image and idiom on love tokens. The variations in how the heart is depicted visually are remarkable: pierced, dimidiated, flaming, bleeding, and winged hearts are all common. In terms of the language used on tokens, three themes dominate the expressions associated with the heart. These are the physical attachment of love, the pain and suffering of love, and the belief in true love. The physical attachment of two people is represented on a love token by two hearts touching or overlapping, joined in some way. The words used to convey physical closeness are found in phrases that describe the combining of hearts, and of hearts and hands. Idioms, such as “Two hearts together joind forever” and “My heart will never be at Ease Till our hearts and hands be joind like these,” emphasize the linking of physical bodies and the desire never to part.27 The verses speak of the physical effect of love and the need for closeness, as found in the example “May we have in our arms Whom we love in our hearts” and “our hands and heart shall never part.”28 The strength of the bond is compared to that of a seal in the use of the biblical phrase “Set me as a seal upon thine heart for love is strong as death.”29 Similar patterns can be found on other materials. There are buttons with the inscription “Love for Love,” accompanied by the figure of a couple joined in an embrace.30 In contrast, love tokens made by prisoners refer to the body being absent, but the heart staying with the loved one, “Let my body be Were it will my heart shall Be with you still” and “Tho far apart you have my hart.”31 There is little evidence that describes how people reacted to the gift of a love token. However, by examining the icon of the overlapping or touching heart on tokens that circulated among people facing short and long-term separations from loved ones, the significance of the heart as a symbol of physical closeness can be appreciated. In these images and idioms, the heart represented the physical attachment of love. In the case of separation, the icon was employed as shorthand for the absent person. The heart stood in place of the one who was no longer physically present, and in place of the actions and sentiments associated with them, perhaps drawing on an older association of the heart with the self. Images of the heart pierced and bleeding also highlight the pain and suffering associated with love. The accompanying phrases invoke the hurt of a

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wounded heart and allude to the depth of pain. They include “My bleeding heart is full of smart” and “O see my heart is Pierc’d thro I bore it all for love of you.”32 The loss of blood implies the physical impact of love. The piercing of an organ as vital as the heart emphasizes the all-consuming nature of the hurt. Tokens also speak of the suffering of separation. There are phrases that describe the heart as aching, conveying the physical pain of parting: “weep not for me my Elisabeth dear with heavey heart.”33 A pair of arrows is commonly shown piercing the heart diagonally. M.B.’s token dated 1789 is inscribed with a heart pierced by a single arrow.34 In contrast, multiple arrows shot from more than one direction are engraved on William Lander’s token dated 1777.35 The image is accompanied by the words “Wounded but by one,” highlighting the potency of an individual’s desire. The use of arrows on tokens illustrates the power of love whether it is in the form of a solitary arrow that pierces the heart or the arrow that competes against many others to achieve the same result. The language of a suffering heart is an important motif in eighteenthcentury popular British literature. Courtship and love were popular themes in ballads and broadsides, with the figure of Cupid, hearts, bows, arrows, and doves featured widely in the accompanying black-and-white woodcuts.36 The Art of Courtship or the School of Love, for example, includes a woodblock illustration with depictions of Cupid with his bow and arrow, a pair of billing doves, and a pierced heart.37 The song, Cupid’s Courtisie, describes how love spurned may result in a wounded heart. The text refers to the physical effect of Cupid’s arrows with the words, “this gallant heart sorely was bleeding; and felt the greatest smart.”38 Cupid is similarly quoted on love tokens. Figure 11.2, for example, is engraved with the words “Draw Cupid draw and make that Heart to know The Mighty Pain its suffering Swain does for it undergo.” The image that accompanies this phrase shows Cupid drawing back his bow to shoot an arrow at an unwounded heart. In her discussion of the physical experience of emotions in the past, Karen Harvey observes how “descriptions of physical suffering could be a proxy for the subject’s emotional distress.”39 Drawing on a long European heritage, the icon of the heart pierced and wounded in these images and idioms is used as a metaphor for suffering, as shorthand for the emotion of love and loss.40 The process of wounding in effect changes the heart into a suffering one and alludes not only to feelings of love but also unhappiness, despair and even death, if the love is not returned. The theme of constancy and commitment, even in the face of death, is reflected in idioms, such as “No heart so true as mine to you” and “A true heart ought never to be forgotten.”41 Other phrases refer to the idea of the “fixed” heart, of not changing your mind about the choice of a lover. For example, “My heart is fix’d it cannot range I love my choice too well to change.”42 Items such

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Figure 11.2: Love token engraved with Cupid, hearts and arrows (1952,0904.121) © The Trustees of the British Museum.

as embroidered silk garters and inscribed lace bobbins carried similar phrases. These idioms echo the lines from Cupid’s Love Lessons, “Such liking in my choice I find / That none but death can change my mind.”43 Expressions on love tokens about overcoming obstacles in order to remain true are found in phrases, including “Time may pass[,] years may fly[,] every oak decay and die[,] and every joyful dream may set[,] but you dear Sarah I never shall forget,” and “let all our foes say what they will, you will find my heart is with you still.”44 The language of never-ending love is captured in words such as “love till death,” and “rec[eive] this trifle from a friend whose love for you shall never end.”45 Given that many tokens marked unexpected life events, such as imprisonment and transportation, a preoccupation with concerns about constancy and true love is not surprising. In these examples, the heart appears to symbolize fidelity and loyalty, as it does in other contexts.46 However, there are other interpretations available. When read against the grain, inscriptions, such as “No heart More true Than mine to you 1782,” may have also reflected underlying concerns and fears about a beloved’s fidelity.47 Produced at times of betrothal or separation, inscriptions can be read as warnings against acts of infidelity and abandonment at moments of emotional risk (whether the long-term commitment of marriage or challenges of being apart). The employment of such idioms acknowledged the tensions that unfamiliar circumstances and absences created and that relationships were vulnerable in such situations. The language of the “true” heart was adapted to reflect the emotional ambiguity that some unexpected events provoked.

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In some contexts, then, the engraved heart not only expressed love, but also fears about failed promises of love and fidelity. The sayings found in the popular stories of fidelity, constancy, and remembrance in ballads and broadsides were ready-made to be adapted for this purpose. These phrases offered a form of shorthand for the sentiments associated with family duty and obligations. These included that couples should be faithful; people should be aware of the impact of their actions on others; and family members should be dutiful and offer reciprocal support.48 Tokens made by convicts carried phrases invoking family sympathy, such as “Mother I hope you will think of My wife and Child for that Is all my thought Your undutiful Son G Johnson.”49 During the eighteenth century, the duty to care for family members, for wives, and children was prescribed and unavoidable.50 Reciprocal behavior, as a sense of duty and solidarity, was embedded in the language of love and friendship. The sayings and images on love tokens were used to remind people of the ties of family. In this way, the heart could also be read as a symbol used to mediate relationships threatened by interruption and separation. The icon of the heart offered a physical reminder of both love and loss. Whether love token idioms reflected a language of expected social norms is difficult to fully substantiate, but it is one way of viewing the “stock phrases” on these artefacts. It is a reading reinforced by wider evidence. Sailors’ sweethearts and wives, for example, were frequently left to fend for themselves when mariners were at sea for long periods of time. Although couples promised fidelity, the reality was often different. Women without the support of family and friends found it difficult to survive and many were forced to resort to prostitution, poor relief, and the workhouse.51 Others started new relationships and sometimes married again when husbands did not return. The icon of the heart in these situations reflected social values, rather than practices. It communicated the aspiration of a loved one to be true, whilst acknowledging that this was not always realized. The “true” heart carried multiple meanings. It could be interpreted as the desire to be faithful, as confidence in another’s constancy, but it also alluded to anxieties about the future and a loved one’s commitment to remaining constant.

The Heart: Symbol of Life From inscribed candle boxes made at home and buttons bought at the fair to broadsides posted on alehouse walls, people in eighteenth-century Britain were immersed in a rich array of images and words relating to the heart. A detailed exploration of how the heart has been depicted visually over time is beyond the

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scope of this chapter. However some appreciation of how the heart developed into a familiar symbol for love is important. Fay Bound Alberti and Eric Jager, in their work on the history of the heart, offer classical, biblical, medieval, and medical interpretations of its presentation and symbolism.52 The heart was variously a metaphor for an inner book, a memory trope, a king at the center of his kingdom, a source of energy, the center of the body, and of life. Over time, the heart has been associated with the location of the emotions, the location of the mind and the soul, as well as the site of wisdom, judgement, memory, and imagination. In Greek and Roman texts, the heart was considered to be the location of the soul. The use of phrases such as “warm-hearted” and “coldhearted” can be traced to the medical theories of the Roman physician Galen. His humoral body significantly influenced early thinking about the link between the heart and emotions.53 The Christian theologian Augustine described a restless heart that was torn between love of the world and of God, a heart that was stilled once man repented of his sins.54 In medieval European art, the heart symbolized both sacred and secular love. In religious paintings, the sacred heart often referred to the heart of Jesus and his devotion to the world. In secular contexts, the heart was portrayed in scenes of courtly love where the knight offered his heart to show his commitment. The heart appeared in emblems, a popular form of imagery that combined title, motto, and image to convey a moral message. It was also used in medieval heraldry as a symbol for sincerity. The image of the inscribed heart was depicted in early modern writing and art, suggesting that the heart offered a place for contemplation through the act of “writing” on it.55 By the eighteenth century, religious, courtly, and emblematic images of the heart were clearly established as symbols of love. More than this, the symbol of the heart brought together body and soul, human and divine, as well as reason and emotion.56 Love tokens drew on this familiarity with the metaphor of the heart, whilst employing the language found in broadsides and ballads, and on decorated household items. The icon of the heart was frequently reused by families and groups, such as sailors on board ship and prisoners awaiting trial or transportation. Although, as we can see from the above examples, there are minor variations in popular phrases, the range of core idioms with which people were familiar remained relatively static.57 In other words, those making, giving, receiving, and keeping tokens were familiar with a “material vocabulary of emotion” and it was the icon of the heart that dominated this vocabulary.58 This exploration of the representation of the heart brings us back to the token that introduced the chapter and leads us to consider the heart as a symbol of life as well as love. John Adams’s token commemorated the start of life, a birth, as well as acting as a celebration of family love. The words on the token “An heart

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that can feel for another” can be traced to the refrain of the ballad entitled Jack Steadfast, whose last lines are: “For sailors, pray mind me, though strange kind of fish, / Love the girls just as dear as their mother, / And what’s more they love what I hope you all wish, / Is the heart that can feel for another.”59 In this ballad, the heart that can feel for another speaks of a sailor’s love both for his sweetheart and his mother. It also refers to how the sailor loves being loved by others, including his fellow sailors.60 In the twenty-first century, the heart, and in particular the pierced heart, is read as a metaphor for romantic love. However, on eighteenthcentury love tokens, people did not make this kind of distinction. Tokens engraved with pierced hearts were addressed, for example, to mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, and siblings. Mothers and fathers appear on many tokens as in “Dear Father Mother A gift to you From me a friend Whose love for you Shall never end 1818.”61 “A present from his Uncle and Aunt Edw. and Elizabeth Evans” demonstrates the giving of tokens by aunts and uncles.62 Siblings are also found, “Dear Sister from your unfortunate brother Saml Phillips Transported May 2nd 1820.”63 The heart clearly enacted feelings of connection, constancy, and belonging against a backdrop of absence resulting from both voluntary and forced separation. This was not to say that love could not take different forms in different relationships, but rather that the same iconography of the heart could be used to represent love in an array of contexts. This may reflect the multivalent meanings of love itself during the period. Within marriage, for example, love could mean obedience, obligation, and duty as well as desire and romance.64 The heart on a love token was also used as a symbol of a person’s life. R. Bly’s token is engraved with his name.65 Dated 1752, the words are inscribed inside the outline of a heart. John Stockbridge’s token is engraved with a heart on one face of the coin. On the reverse is his name and the words “Lagd Augt 7 1797.”66 The term “lagd” refers to being sentenced to imprisonment. The token is a record of Stockbridge’s banishment. Convict archives reveal that he was tried at the Surrey assizes and convicted, as his token records, on August 7, 1797. His sentence was transportation to Australia for seven years. Stockbridge was exiled to New South Wales on the convict ship the Hillsborough leaving England in October 1798 and arriving in Australia in July the following year.67 The heart on his token refers to Stockbridge’s life and its possible loss during exile. Not surprisingly, sailors also chose the symbol of the heart, representing a person’s life, to carve, engrave, inlay, and sew onto artifacts.68 Mariners’ lives were often at risk as a result of war, shipwreck, or poor living conditions on board ship. The heart could stand as a marker for important life events that ranged from birth, betrothal, and marriage to a life at risk and relationships interrupted by a sentence of exile; it could stand for life itself.

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One question remains in our analysis of the icon of the heart and that is how the British working population “read” the images and idioms inscribed on love tokens. Styles approaches this question in terms of literacies, noting “verbal literacy existed in conjunction with a material literacy.”69 To read and understand the meanings of these inscribed objects, people relied on a visual and material literacy that viewed objects and their texts holistically. Tokens have a presence of their own, which is read visually, aurally, tangibly, and materially. Interpreting a love token involved experiencing through the senses a combination of multiple ingredients. These include the feel of the coin, the grooves of the engraving as well as the shape and texture of the inscriptions on its surfaces. In addition, the rhythms and sounds of the engraved phrases, as well as the interactions between words and images, act intertextually to provide meaning. These would combine with both the broader cultural meanings attached to hearts, particular phrases, and love tokens, and the personal relationships that love tokens were designed to encourage. Used in the production of love, relationships, family obligations, connections, and self, love tokens provide a key access point into the emotional world of their users. The important role of the heart in enabling it to ‘do’ its work was reflective of its ongoing cultural significance in eighteenth-century Britain.

Conclusion This analysis of the icon of the heart on love tokens offers new insights into how the poorer sorts in eighteenth-century Britain used objects to convey feelings of love and affection. The engraved heart was employed as a symbol of attachment to sweethearts, family, and friends. Additionally it was a metaphor for life itself. Love tokens were part of customary practices that facilitated how people navigated life events. They sit alongside other inscribed objects and printed publications that shared a similar vocabulary of affection. Tokens already carried emotional associations when they were made and given. To these were added the meanings and feelings prompted by the individual circumstances of their exchange. This chapter explored how tokens were read in a manner now difficult to envisage and reproduce in a twenty first-century culture where words assume primacy. A visual and material approach enables the researcher to imagine objects holistically, opening up their meanings from the perspective of their producers and users. The imagery and language of the heart unequivocally expressed the feelings of the giver. What could be more forthright than the words “I love you”

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accompanied by the image of two entwined hearts?70 Nevertheless this vocabulary of emotion also masked stories of rejection and abandonment and made allowances for the pragmatism needed to keep life going in circumstances where many were unable to live up to their promises. Spouses, sweethearts, and family members could dream of joyful reunions and enduring love. However, convicts would not always return; families could lose touch; children might never see parents again; lovers could be abandoned; and households would struggle and even fail to make ends meet. The language of the heart both re-enforced the sentiments associated with the lives they commemorated and acted as an acknowledgement that what was expected did not always happen. The heart was a multivalent symbol that invited feelings of love and belonging—love of an individual, of a family, of a community, and of being loved.

Notes 1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Love token from the private collection of the late Richard Law. I refer to the working population as the “lower ranks,” “lower orders,” “poorer sorts” and “laboring poor.” I have used the words of eighteenth-century commentators, such as Daniel Defoe and James Nelson, rather than attempt to chronologically acknowledge the transformation from rural poor to industrial working class within the evidence I discuss. Penelope J. Corfield, ed., Language, History and Class (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 101–30. Fay Bound Alberti, Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine, and Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London: Penguin, 1991), 17–18. Using this taxonomy some examples cross categories and some have insufficient details to be classified. Giorgio Riello, “Things that Shape History: Material Culture and Historical Narratives,” in History and Material Culture: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources, ed. Karen Harvey (London: Routledge, 2009), 26. The British Portable Antiquities Scheme has examples of coins bent into “S” shapes. Portable Antiquities Scheme, available at http://finds.org.uk, accessed August 26, 2017. Joseph Addison, “The Adventures of a Shilling,” The Spectator, November 10, 1710. W. van Nespen, Love and Marriage: Aspects of Popular Culture in Europe (Antwerp: Ministerie van Nederlandse Cultuur en Nationale Opvoeding, 1975). Janette Bright and Gillian Clark, An Introduction to the Tokens at the Foundling Museum (London: The Foundling Museum, 2011). J. W. Henderson and R. P. Carlisle, Marine Art & Antiques: Jack Tar: A Sailor’s Life 1750–1910 (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1999), 155–77. James Bradley and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, “Convict Tattoos: Tales of Freedom and Coercion,” in Convict Love Tokens, ed. Michele Field et al. (Kent Town, SA: Wakefield Press, 1998), 47–53.

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13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

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Alice Dolan and Sally Holloway, “Emotional Textiles: An Introduction,” Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture 14, no. 2 (2016): 155. “Reports of the Inspectors Appointed to Visit the Prisons of Great Britain,” House of Commons Parliamentary Papers Online (1836); Timothy Millett, “Leaden Hearts,” in Convict Love Tokens, 17–21. Katie Barclay, “Family and Household,” in Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction, ed. Susan Broomhall (London: Routledge, 2017), 246. Monique Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (And Is That What Makes Them Have A History)? A Bordieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion,” History and Theory 51 (2011): 217. Carol Stearns and Peter N. Stearns, “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards,” The American Historical Review 90, no. 4 (1985): 813–36; Barbara Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History,” American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002): 821–45; William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Ute Frevert, “Defining Emotions: Concepts and Debates over Three Centuries,” in Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling 1700–2000, ed. Monique Scheer et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Thomas Dixon, “‘Emotion’: The History of a Keyword in Crisis,” Emotion Review 4, no. 4 (2012): 338–44. John Styles, “Objects of Emotion,” in History and Material Culture: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources, ed. Karen Harvey (London: Routledge, 2009), 171. See, e.g., Angela McShane, “Material Expressions of Love and Loyalty in Seventeenth Century England,” Journal of British Studies 48, no 4 (2009): 871–86; Anna Moran and Sorcha O’Brien, eds., Love Objects: Emotion, Design and Material Culture (London: Bloomsbury, 2014); John Styles, Threads of Feeling: The London Foundling Hospital’s Tokens, 1740–1770 (London: The Foundling Museum, 2010); Sarah Tarlow, “Emotion in Archaeology,” Current Anthropology 41, no. 5 (2000): 713–46. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1963). Anthony Iles and Tom Roberts, All Knees and Elbows of Susceptibility and Refusal: Reading History from Below (London: The Strickland Distribution, 2012); Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Peter Burke, ed., A New Kind of History and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1973). Katie Barclay, “Negotiating Independence: Manliness and Begging Letters in Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century Scotland,” in Nine Centuries of Man, ed. Lynn Abrams and Elizabeth Ewan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 142–59. Joanne Bailey, Parenting in England 1760–1830: Emotion, Identity and Generation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 8. Joanne McEwan, “‘At My Mother’s House’: Community and Household Spaces in Early Eighteenth-Century Infanticide Narratives,” in Spaces for Feeling: Emotions and Sociabilities in Britain, 1650–1850, ed. Susan Broomhall (London: Routledge, 2015), 12–34. Thompson, Customs in Common, 18. Hans Medick, “Plebeian Culture in the Transition to Capitalism,” in Culture, Ideology and Politics; Essays for Eric Hobsbawm, ed. Raphael Samuel et al. (London: Routledge, 1983), 89. British Museum, London, J.3290 and 1952,0904.117, available at www.britishmuseum. org/collection, accessed August 26, 2017.

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28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49.

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Maidstone Museum & Art Gallery, M021, available at https://lovetokens.omeka.net, accessed August 26, 2017 and British Museum, London,1952,0904.229, available at www. britishmuseum.org/collection, accessed August 26, 2017. Ella Pierrepont Barnard, “Examples of Engraved Coins selected from a Collection formed by Mrs Ella Pierrepont Barnard,” British Numismatic Journal 14 (1918): 109. Margaret Spufford, The Great Reclothing of Rural England: Petty Chapmen and Their Wares in the Seventeenth Century (London: Hambledon, 1984), 97. National Museum of Australia, Canberra, 2008.0039.0312, available at http://love-tokens. nma.gov.au, accessed August 26, 2017; and private collection of Alison Barker. Private collection of the late Richard Law and S. Comfort, Forget me Not, A Study of Naval and Maritime Engraved Coins and Plate (1745–1918) (London: Sim Comfort Associates, 2004), EC54. National Museum of Australia, Canberra, 2008.0039.0040, available at http://lovetokens.nma.gov.au, accessed August 26, 2017. Maidstone Museum & Art Gallery, M129, available at https://lovetokens.omeka.net, accessed August 26, 2017. Ibid. Victor E. Neuburg, Chapbooks: A Bibliography of References to English and American Chapbook Literature of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London: Vine Press, 1964); Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). The Art of Courtship: Or The School of Love (London, 1775). Cupid’s Courtisie (Newcastle upon Tyne: T. Saint, ca.1768). Karen Harvey, “The Body,” in Early Modern Emotions, 167. See Chapter 10. British Museum, London, J.3294, available at www.britishmuseum.org/collection, accessed August 26, 2017; and Maidstone Museum & Art Gallery, M108, available at https://lovetokens.omeka.net, accessed August 26, 2017. Maidstone Museum & Art Gallery, M010 and M093, available at https://lovetokens. omeka.net, accessed August 26, 2017. Samuel Pepys’ Penny Merriments: Being a Collection of Chapbooks, Full of Histories, Jests, Magic, Amorous Tales of Courtship, Marriage and Infidelity, Accounts of Rogues and Fools, Together with Comments on the Times, ed. Roger Thompson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), vol. 1, 1047. Michele Field, Convict Love Tokens, 95; National Museum of Australia, Canberra, 2008.0039.0290 available at http://love-tokens.nma.gov.au, accessed August 26, 2017. British Museum, London, J.3290, available at www.britishmuseum.org/collection, accessed August 26, 2017; and Maidstone Museum & Art Gallery, M072, available at https://lovetokens.omeka.net, accessed August 26, 2017. See Chapter 2. Maidstone Museum & Art Gallery, M069, available at https://lovetokens.omeka.net, accessed August 26, 2017. Vic Gammon, “Song, Sex and Society, 1600–1850,” Folk Music Journal 4, no. 3 (1982): 208–45. British Museum, London, J.3308, available at www.britishmuseum.org/collection, accessed August 26, 2017.

11 “An Heart that can Feel for Another”

50. 51.

52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

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Katie Barclay, Love, Intimacy and Power: Marriage and Patriarchy in Scotland, 1650–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 46–47. Margarette Lincoln, Naval Wives and Mistresses (London: National Maritime Museum Publishing, 2007), 148; Jennine Eamon-Hurl, “Insights into Plebeian Marriage: Soldiers, Sailors, and their Wives in the Old Bailey Proceedings,” London Journal 30 (2005): 34. Alberti, Matters of the Heart; N. Boyadjian, The Heart: Its History, Its Symbolism, Its Iconography and Its Diseases (Antwerp: ESCO Books, 1980); Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Alberti, Matters of the Heart, 4. Louisa Young, The Book of the Heart (London: Flamingo, 2002), 167–68. Jager, Book of the Heart, 105. Robert A. Erickson, The Language of the Heart, 1600–1750 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 26. Barbara Rosenwein offers a similar finding, referring to stock phrases that can be reused in new contexts as “boilerplate”. Barbara Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions 600–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 42. Dolan and Holloway, Emotional Textiles, 155 The Heart That Can Feel for Another (London: Jennings, between 1790 and 1840). Joanne Begiato (Bailey), “Tears and the Manly Sailor in England, ca.1760–1860,” Journal for Maritime Research 17, no. 2 (2015): 122. National Museum of Australia, Canberra, 2008.0039.0026 available at http://love-tokens. nma.gov.au, accessed August 26, 2017. Maidstone Museum & Art Gallery, M055 available at https://lovetokens.omeka.net, accessed August 26, 2017. National Museum of Australia, Canberra, 2008.0039.0044 available at http://love-tokens. nma.gov.au, accessed August 26, 2017. Barclay, Love, Intimacy and Power, 125. Photograph supplied by Tolson Museum, Huddersfield, http://www.kirklees.gov.uk/ beta/museums-galleries-history/tolson-museum.aspx. Maidstone Museum & Art Gallery, M114, available at https://lovetokens.omeka.net, accessed August 26, 2017. “Information from Australian Convict Transportation Registers, Other Fleets & Ships, 1791–1868,” available at http://search.ancestry.co.uk, accessed August 26, 2017. Henderson and Carlisle, Marine Art & Antiques, 253. Styles, “Objects of Emotion,” 171. Maidstone Museum & Art Gallery, M037, available at https://lovetokens.omeka.net, accessed August 26, 2017.

Elizabeth C. Macknight

12 The Hearts of a Private Archive from France, Saxony, and England A tiny pencil drawing of two hearts lay in the pocket of the memorandum case. It belonged with the miniature French flag and Catholic keepsakes also tucked there. When the memorandum case was opened all of these items could be taken out from the pocket to contemplate. They were accompaniments to a printed 1817 calendar and notebook containing handwritten commands in French for military drill. Scrawled in black ink, the notes were preserved under the case’s forest-green leather cover. Originally the memorandum case served a practical purpose for its owner Ernest de Liebhaber (1785−1837). In nineteenthcentury France, people often carried with them this type of small notebook with calendar, known as a mémorandum, to jot down ideas and information. To record is to remember (se souvenir). The French word souvenir embossed on the front of the case is a reference to its purpose and holds a further meaning as a memento or object to be remembered by (see Figure 12.1).1 From the handwritten notes inside, we may deduce a little about the case’s provenance. A nineteenth-century army officer prepared a personal aide-memoire on military drill for much the same reason that he fashioned handmade mnemonic cards for the study of battle tactics. During the physical act of writing down military commands, the mind stored instructions to the body on the repetitive motions instilled in training for warfare. The pencil drawing of the two hearts, miniature French flag, and Catholic keepsakes provide further clues, for little symbols of patriotism and faith were among the personal effects that nineteenth-century soldiers kept in their uniform pocket or army kit. Under the drawing of the hearts is an expression of religious piety: “à Jésus, à Marie, je consacre ma vie 1822.” Assembled together, the contents of the memorandum case illustrate both the role of the mind to think and the role of the heart to feel. In didactic writings from nineteenth-century France, the roles of these two organs were often matched with prescriptive ideas about “natural” gender roles that were separate and specific for each sex. Man, guided by the mind, was attributed with intellect and capacity for reason. Woman, guided by the heart, was attributed with emotional intuition and capacity for nurture.2 The memorandum case confounds that neat division. This historical artefact is a composite of elements that transcend the culturally constructed boundaries between masculine and feminine, between intellect and emotion, between reasoning and feeling. To open the memorandum case was to engage both mind and heart. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513275-013

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Figure 12.1: Memorandum case with contents, Archives départementales du Rhône et de la métropole de Lyon AD69 11J/79.

This chapter explores the significance of the feeling heart for the creation of the private archive in which the memorandum case is preserved. While there is a rich body of literature on the iconography of the heart and its meanings, a focus on material culture and archival practices allows us to think about its role in producing social identities. There are three patronyms in the title of the archive that refer to three families: Comarmond, Baroud, and Liebhaber. In this archival collection (fonds) are traces of the past lives of nobles from France, Saxony, and England who were related to one another by blood and marital alliance. A marriage in 1781 linked the Comarmond family with the Baroud family. A marriage in 1816 linked the Comarmond family with the Liebhaber family. The first part of the chapter explains a number of representations of the feeling heart contained in the private archive and sets those representations in historical context. Among the archival items are objects made of paper, cloth, cardboard, wax, and wood. The feeling heart is incorporated in a coat of arms

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for expression of social status and familial identity. It is incorporated in letters and diary entries for expression of emotions and filial or marital identities. It is incorporated in drawings and printed works for expression of faith and religious identity. The second part explores how the feeling heart was implicated in the coproduction of this private archive that involved individual family members as well as professional archivists. It analyses the feeling heart as both a symbol for affective purposes and constituent force in the dynamics of relationships. Like other scholars who work with sources of a personal or private nature, I am interested in the ways in which human emotions contribute with other factors to an explanation of why those sources have survived.3 When a person dies it often falls to relatives to select what is to be kept and what is to be thrown out from among the possessions of the deceased that are not mentioned in a will. In this decision-making process, the emotions of relatives tend to shape judgments about which items hold “value” and for whom. Documents, photographs and potentially small objects constitute the deceased person’s “archive,” whether or not they are identified by that term in a will. In France, the Code du Patrimoine contains the definitions and regulations for public and private archives. There is a legal requirement for public archives to be deposited systematically and permanently in the state’s collections. The producers of public archives include the government, the regional administrations, the judiciary, and institutions providing social services. Private archives are very broadly defined as materials that do not constitute public archives. Like other forms of private property, they may pass from one owner to another via inheritance following the provisions in the Civil Code.4 The producers of private archives include families, individuals, religious orders, civic associations, businesses, political parties, and trade unions. Private archives may enter the French state’s repositories in a variety of ways and not necessarily on a permanent basis. There may be one lot or several lots of material deposited by an owner on contract at a single point in time and recoverable by the owner if the contract is terminated (dépôts). There may be multiple lots of material that enter gradually as gifts from an owner at different points in time (dons). There may be material in lots or separate single items that appear for auction on the collectors’ market and are purchased by the state (achats).5 For all archives held by state repositories in France, professional archivists undertake the intellectual work to appraise and classify material according to the principles encapsulated by the phrase respect des fonds. During appraisal, professional archivists select items to be kept or destroyed. Judgments about what is of “value” are based upon professionally determined criteria, not upon emotions.6

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I use the term “co-production” in this chapter to analyze the complex process by which a single fonds relating to three families with ties to France, Saxony, and England has come into being. My analysis treats the lived experiences of noblemen and noblewomen who, for a variety of reasons, moved between countries and had to negotiate different cultures and communicate in different languages. Parts of the archive too have moved from country to country, and comprise documents in French, German, and English that have gradually entered the French state’s collections to be appraised and classed by professional archivists. The conclusions I draw from research in this private archive deal with the evidence of emotional expression by individuals in a particular historical context and with archival practices that are also specific to place and time.7 In providing a case study focused on one archive, my aim is to promote scholarly reflection about the role that the feeling heart has played in the survival and the interpretation of other archives.

The Feeling Heart in a Coat of Arms and Patronym We begin with the Comarmond family that belonged to a category of nobility known as noblesse de robe in the France of the ancien régime. Unlike the nobility of “extraction,” whose noble ancestry dated to “time immemorial,” the robe nobility was ennobled as a result of holding office. Ennoblement by office (l’anoblissement par charge) was the most common route into the French nobility; in the eighteenth century alone some 5,500 individuals were ennobled by office compared with around 1,000 individuals ennobled by letters (l’anoblissement par lettres).8 Michel François Comarmond (1635−1712) was a consul and contrôleur du roi au grenier à sel in the town of Saint-Symphorien-le-Château near Lyon. Through the purchase of rentes pertaining to properties in the vicinity of SaintSymphorien-le-Château, Michel François developed the fortune and prestige of the Comarmond. The family continued to improve its social standing in the next generation because Michel François’s son, Jean-François Comarmond (1662−1709), became royal notary and lieutenant for the jurisdiction of SaintSymphorien-le-Château as well as investing in more real estate. Title deeds and related documents in the fonds testify to the family’s steady accumulation of resources, among which the so-called noble rentes attached to lands were of particular economic and symbolic value.9

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It was Jean-François Comarmond, the royal notary, who registered his family’s coat of arms in the Armorial général de France. Among the many heraldry works produced in the early modern period, the Armorial général was a famous commission ordered by Louis XIV in 1696. An exercise of ambitious scope, its compilation was intended to aid in the identification of persons for fiscal purposes and thereby to improve the collection of taxes across the realm. Nobles, bourgeois, and town communities were invited to register their coats of arms for a fee.10 In the description of the Comarmond coat of arms we find “a flaming heart” (un coeur enflammé) as a central stylistic element.11 Placed on a blue (azur) background signifying France, the heart is accompanied by two silver crescents and surmounted by a golden sun. A band of gold with three blue stars appears across the top of the escutcheon (écu).12 A coat of arms functions like a patronym as a signifier of lineage and identity for nobility. Nobles’ attitudes on the subject of arms were connected with the values inculcated in aristocratic education where honor and allegiance to the “house” (l’esprit de famille) were paramount. In the same way as a patronymic name or an aristocratic title, a coat of arms is a form of property to which rights of ownership apply in French law. As a symbol of identity for nobles, coats of arms featured on household items from silverware to linen, in correspondence on seals and stationery, and in public display on gateways and doors, carriages, and ceremonial banners. At weddings, the representation of two coats of arms together signified the alliance of the bride’s family with the groom’s family.13 A brief outline of the genealogical connections established by two marriages is needed before turning to the evidence of intimacy and emotions in the Comarmond, Baroud, and Liebhaber archive. In 1781, Claude Antoine Comarmond, the grandson of Jean-François, married Antoinette Elisabeth Baroud from a family of notaries and lawyers based in Lyon and owning properties in Bresse and Beaujolais. This first marital alliance left many complications in its wake that impacted descendants tasked with administering the Baroud succession. Antoinette Elisabeth’s brother, Claude Odile Joseph Baroud (1753−1824) was a notary, then later a banker and publicist, who attracted controversy in late eighteenth-century France owing to his international business dealings and large financial debts. Claude Odile Joseph Baroud was virtually bankrupt when he died in 1824 at the home of his nephew, the doctor Ambroise Comarmond. Responsibility for Baroud’s affairs passed to his only surviving son, Louis Marie Joseph, who died without issue in 1829.14 Members of the Comarmond and Liebhaber families subsequently had to clear up the business mess left unresolved at the time of Claude Odile Joseph Baroud’s death.

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The second marital alliance involved one of the daughters of Claude Antoine Comarmond and Antoinette Elisabeth Baroud. In 1816, Euphrasie Comarmond married Ernst Erich Ludwig von Liebhaber, known for most of his adult life as Ernest de Liebhaber because of his naturalization as a French citizen.15 The Liebhaber family originated from Saxony. Ernest’s father, Erich Daniel von Liebhaber (1726−1801), was a protégé of the duc of Brunswick and made a baron of the Holy Empire by Emperor Frederick I. Erich Daniel fathered five children by his first wife. When she died, Erich Daniel made a second marriage to Charlotte Adolphine Fréderice von Bruningk (1748−1793) with whom he had nineteen children. Ernest was the eleventh child from his father’s second marriage. Born at Blankenburg on April 2, 1785, he was raised by an uncle at Rossdorf prior to entering the military academy and serving in the Austrian army from 1799 to 1803. During the Napoleonic wars, the French army’s invasion of Prussian and Austrian territory meant that in 1804 Ernest was drafted into the Hanoverian legion to serve France.16 A family story about Ernest as a young man reveals how the feeling heart found its way into oral narratives about the patronym Liebhaber that were eventually written down. According to the version told by Euphrasie Comarmond in an unpublished biography of her husband, Ernest was invited to a soirée when he was an army cadet.17 During a moment of flirtatious banter with some female guests, Ernest was asked his name. His response “Liebhaber” charmed the German-speaking female company for the patronym combines the German noun Die Liebe (love) with the verb haber (to have). There is no way of telling whether Euphrasie’s version of this story about the soirée is an accurate account. It seems plausible, however, that at some point Ernest discussed “Liebhaber” with one or more ladies of his acquaintance and that he shared his memory of such a conversation with Euphrasie. She is likely to have remembered the story and put it in the biography because she was a loving wife and took the same patronym as her husband when the couple wed. A piece of embroidery contained in the private archive offers a striking graphic representation of the Liebhaber coat of arms (see Figure 12.2).18 Brightly colored, with a mix of red, gold, silver, cream, and blue in the escutcheon and heraldic features, this piece of embroidery measures about 20cm × 20cm. The identity of the embroiderer is unknown but most probably it was Ernest’s greatgranddaughter, baroness Hilda de Liebhaber, who made this piece in the twentieth century. Among the baroness’s many talents and interests, she was known to be “an artist in crochet and tatting.”19 We shall return to Hilda’s role in the cultivation of family history and memorabilia later, but let us stay for the moment with her nineteenth-century ancestors Ernest de Liebhaber and Euphrasie Comarmond.

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Figure 12.2: Liebhaber coat of arms embroidery, Archives départementales du Rhône et de la métropole de Lyon, AD69 11J/87.

The Feeling Heart in Letters and Mementoes Euphrasie Comarmond (1794−1874) met Ernest de Liebhaber (1785−1837) whilst staying in the home of her elder sister Joséphine who was married to Denis Berlié. Joséphine and Denis lived at Cruas in the southern French department of Ardèche. Euphrasie was partly paralyzed in the legs, owing to an accident she had suffered in childhood. For health reasons, she was advised to take a “cure” involving treatment with thermal waters in a village of Ardèche. Ernest de Liebhaber was living in the south of France at this point because of injuries he had sustained in Portugal while fighting in Napoleon’s Iberian Peninsula campaign of 1807−13. For convalescence, Ernest had taken leave from the French army and set up residence in the department of Gard, next to Ardèche. Euphrasie later recalled: “It was in 1812, I think, I was then fifteen years old [sic]. Amid the rocks of St. Laurent I saw Monsieur de Liebhaber for the first

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time. He was then aged twenty-four [sic].”20 There are reasons to doubt the exactitude of Euphrasie’s description because the year 1812 and the ages do not correspond. In any case, the pair must have been formally introduced to one another, possibly at some social event she attended with the Berlié in 1812 or thereabouts. After asking for Euphrasie’s hand in marriage, Ernest’s loving feelings are evidenced in the couple’s correspondence, and also in letters to other people where Ernest writes about his fiancée. From the Mediterranean town of Nîmes (Gard), during their engagement, Ernest described to Euphrasie his joy that she reciprocated his love: “I read [your letter] many times and always seemed to find there a stronger expression of those feelings toward me that I consider myself so happy to believe are your own . . . Soon I will be joined to you by indissoluble ties; soon the title of husband that is today my pride and my hope shall give me the exclusive right to be able to make you happy.”21 Ernest returned to active service in the French army and, because he was stationed in Nîmes, he was able to visit Cruas only once in 1815. Prior to this visit, Ernest corresponded with his future brother-in-law, Denis Berlié, who was representing the Comarmond family in the negotiations over marriage contract terms. The forthright tone of Ernest’s letters to Berlié points to a business-like mindset that nobles adopted when discussing the legal and fiscal arrangements for control of property that were a core concern in marriage contracts. But the feeling heart was not absent from these letters. While deploring the delay in reaching agreement with Berlié, Ernest reveals how the discussions he was having with his future brother-in-law were provoking deeper personal reflections. From Ernest’s perspective, certain clauses in the marriage contract were disadvantageous to his own interests. The conditions “flowed naturally from the new position in which my marriage will place me [and] that will detach me entirely from my peace because of the religion professed by all who surround me in France . . . The difference of religion between the two families will forever place me in a position of such isolation.”22 Euphrasie later explained in a sensitively written passage in her unpublished biography of Ernest: “At this time [1815] he accomplished the most important and most solemn act of his lifetime; that is to say, he renounced the Lutheran faith that he had professed up until then. He ceded to an intimate conviction and embraced the Catholic religion.”23 The wedding took place in the Berlié home at Cruas on January 11, 1816. Euphrasie was then twenty-two years old and Ernest was thirty-one years old. A nine-year age difference between this bride and groom was perfectly in keeping with the norms of nobility; men were expected to seek young wives because of the better prospects for fertility.24 Fourteen months after his marriage, Ernest

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undertook a further momentous step when he became naturalized as a French citizen on March 4, 1817. Both the conversion to Catholicism in late 1815, and the naturalization as a French citizen in March 1817, occurred when Ernest’s prospects for furthering his military career in France were about to decline. He had held the rank of lieutenant prior to his injury in Portugal. By 1814, he was a captain serving under maréchal Suchet, and during Napoleon’s Hundred Days campaign Ernest fought on the royalist side for Louis XVIII as chief of battalion. Under the ministry of maréchal Gouvion-Saint-Cyr, however, Ernest was made to retire from the army on a modest pension fixed at the rate for a lieutenant. Ernest’s efforts to find a new position of employment, in the service of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs or in teaching, lasted into the 1820s.25 During periods in which Ernest was travelling alone and apart from his young wife, Euphrasie continued living with Joséphine and Denis Berlié. The nature of Joséphine’s rapport with Ernest de Liebhaber is not well documented in the private archive; it is highly likely they corresponded but the letters have not been preserved in the fonds. As Euphrasie’s eldest sibling – there was a twelve-year age gap between the sisters – Joséphine was a very important figure in the marriage negotiations because she undertook the legal role of guardian (curatrice) for Euphrasie following the death of their mother Madame Comarmond. Ernest de Liebhaber would certainly have needed to win Joséphine’s support and approval. In the Civil Code, parental or guardian consent was required for an individual to marry if they were under twenty-one years of age. Negotiations about the proposed marriage between Ernest and Euphrasie took several years and during that time Euphrasie was still a minor. Possibly Joséphine was the real center of influence and decision-making power in the Berlié household, even though for legal reasons it was her husband Denis who concluded the contract for the marriage of Ernest and Euphrasie. When Euphrasie gave birth to a son Conrad in 1819, this little boy was raised in the home of his aunt and uncle, Joséphine and Denis Berlié. Although the archive does not contain correspondence between Ernest and Joséphine, there is, in the folder of materials relating to Joséphine, an item that is perhaps more telling than any letter could be about Ernest’s relationship with his sister-in-law. Located with Joséphine’s possessions is the forest-green memorandum case, a souvenir of Ernest de Liebhaber, containing the Catholic keepsakes, miniature French flag and printed calendar for 1817, the year of Ernest’s naturalization. For Ernest to have given the case to Joséphine suggests she had played a very influential part in the personal decisions of a Saxon Lutheran nobleman to become a French Catholic.

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The Feeling Heart in a Memorial and Personal Diary The feeling heart appears in two further items in the fonds that belonged to Joséphine Berlié née Comarmond (1782−1840). From these materials, we can interpret some aspects of Joséphine’s role and sense of identity both within the Comarmond family circle and as a Catholic noblewoman within the French society of the early nineteenth century. Historians of the Catholic Church have examined the fundamental contributions made by women to restore traditions of Catholicism in France following the blows of the French Revolution when church lands were sold off and many nuns, monks, and priests fled the country. After Napoleon’s 1801 Concordat with the pope, Catholic women founded and joined religious communities, promoted lay charity work, and networked with ecclesiastical authorities. Such activities helped to swell the numbers of practicing faithful and strengthen the profile of the Church.26 The first of the two items is a manuscript version of a work published in 1835 under the title: Vie du jeune Henri Comarmond étudiant au séminaire de Viviers (see Figure 12.3). Its author, Philippe-Irénée Boistel d’Exauvillez, completed the manuscript in 1820 and dedicated it to Henri’s eldest sister Joséphine in a passage written inside. There he explains his profound friendship with fellow seminarian Henri Comarmond who died at seventeen years of age. On the page opposite the dedication is a “sonnet” composed to the memory of Henri by Boistel d’Exauvillez where the latter’s own feeling heart is evoked, a heart that “can only whisper after the pleasure to burn with him (Henri) from the fires of the same love.” In this discreet allusion to the intimacy between the men is an example of the way homoerotic passion and religious passion intermingled in same-sex relationships of the nineteenth century and was commemorated.27 Philippe-Irénée Boistel d’Exauvillez pays homage to Joséphine who had loaned him some of the family correspondence, “the most precious and the most interesting materials,” for writing about Henri’s life. The manuscript is bound in red leather and the gold lettering embossed on the cover reads “Mme Berlié Cd.” Letters are quoted in the manuscript and publication, so Joséphine was in a sense an assistant to the principal author and may have answered his questions during the writing phase. The work stresses the religious piety of the Comarmond family and one purpose behind Vie du jeune Henri Comarmond is Christian moralizing. It is akin to a medieval saint’s hagiography, described as “the simple and true story of the modest virtues of our young hero” who was “entirely exempt from the faults of childhood.” Henri entered training for the priesthood when fourteen years old and, by the time of his death three years

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Figure 12.3: Manuscript Vie d’Henri Comarmond 1820, Archives départementales du Rhône et de la métropole de Lyon, AD69 11J/79.

later, his behavior and attitudes are depicted as saintly. The feeling heart attributed to Henri Comarmond is the pure loving emblem of Christ’s Passion found in the French Catholic cult of the Sacred Heart.28 The second item is a notebook (cahier) that served as Joséphine’s personal diary. Young well-to-do women in nineteenth-century France were encouraged to record their thoughts and feelings in a notebook like this one and most women continued to keep a personal diary until they were married. As in some other cultures, writing in a diary along with writing letters were forms of écritures intimes that fostered the development of an active interior life and sense of self.29 Some historians have distinguished personal diaries from personal correspondence but there was overlap between these genres of écritures intimes. For example, women sometimes began a diary entry with the words cher cahier, as though commencing a letter to a close friend. Letters were occasionally transcribed or paraphrased as part of a diary entry. Reflection upon or reconstruction of the past, typical to autobiography, was common in diaries

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and letters. Where women changed their writing style, destroyed or scribbled over sections when they knew or perceived someone else might read their personal diary, it becomes harder for a researcher to develop an understanding of the text, but examining other écritures intimes may clarify factors that impacted upon diary production.30 On the opening page of Joséphine’s personal diary is an entry for March 1805. Words and phrases in Italian suggest that Joséphine was learning this language at the time. As the eldest of seven children and twenty-three years of age, her primary concern was care for her mother, Madame Comarmond, who was suffering from ill health.31 After the March 1805 entry, Joséphine appears to have abandoned the diary until August 1806 when a second entry is made about the death of her mother “my heart’s idol.” The grieving young woman described how “everything is frozen around me, no more strong emotions.” There is the daunting prospect of providing care for her father, brothers and sisters “to whom I will sacrifice my life, my repose, my happiness.” In the next two entries, September 3, 1806 and October 6, 1806, Joséphine discussed her love for her siblings and the way recollection of her mother’s concerns for their welfare are “brought together” with her own concerns “in my heart.” The writing expresses a blurring of an eldest sister identity and a “maternal” identity, as Joséphine was adapting to the new responsibilities associated with caring for her younger brothers and sisters. She described the pleasures of siblinghood as a form of “secret complicity.” “They love what I love, their feelings are my own; I share their sensations and conform to their tastes.” With her brothers and sisters, Joséphine felt part of a group of travellers crossing “the desert of life.” At the same time, her unique position within the group is signalled in the descriptor “little mum” (petite maman) that Joséphine began to use in reference to herself.32 Clues to the personality of Joséphine in her early twenties, and how she kept the young children occupied, are found in the diary. Pasted onto many of the pages are dried flowers, herbs, and leaves, sometimes arranged as bouquets (see Figure 12.4). One of these floral creations has a note written under it “Felix [a brother] will always love his little mum;” perhaps it was this brother who picked the flowers and shafts of wheat, or who watched as Joséphine assembled them on the page. Inserted in the diary’s pages are also intricate drawings and paper stencils, about the size of a postage stamp in each case. They include a soldier of the Napoleonic Guard, a monkey clasping a branch, two birds perched in a tree, and a vase filled with flowers. It was not uncommon for women and men in nineteenth-century France to place dried flowers in the pages of correspondence, and in well-to-do families sketching was an art d’agrément like embroidery, dancing, and piano playing. It may have been Joséphine or her younger siblings who produced the paper stencils during lessons and games together.

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Figure 12.4: Flowers in the personal diary of Joséphine Berlié (née Comarmond), Archives départementales du Rhône et de la métropole de Lyon, AD69 11J/79.

Overall, the appearance of the diary points to its creator’s imaginative and creative inclinations.33 After a short entry for November 2, 1806, in which Joséphine reflected upon the year that has passed since her mother’s death, the personal diary abruptly “stops” because about fifteen pages have been torn out of the notebook. It recommences with entries for February 24, 1808 and June 14, 1808, where Italian words appear again. Then on August 22, 1809 “Birth of Antonia” (Joséphine’s daughter). The personal diary then concludes with a brief set of milestones for the young mother and baby including “at six months she [Antonia] said mama and papa.”34 We will never know what the pages torn out of Joséphine’s personal diary for the period 1806 to 1808 contained, or even whether it was her own decision to remove them from the notebook. The motive of Joséphine or another person with access to the diary to destroy those pages is unclear, but we do know that during 1808, Joséphine married and began sexual relations with her husband Denis Berlié. The daughter of this couple, Antonia, was an

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only child who died at the age of eleven in 1820. This was one year after Joséphine’s sister Euphrasie and Euphrasie’s husband Ernest de Liebhaber became parents and it was their little boy Conrad, born in 1819, who was raised in the home of the Berlié couple.

Co-Production of a Private Archive The baron Conrad de Liebhaber (1819−1905) was educated in a prestigious French tertiary institution, the École polytechnique, then served the French government as an engineer in the ministry for public works.35 In 1853 Conrad moved from France to England with his wife Louise Metz; their only son Éric Daniel de Liebhaber was educated at St. Charles College in Bayswater and the family lived at Wembley. Although this branch of the Liebhaber family never left England, there continued to be contact with relatives who remained in France, including Conrad’s mother Euphrasie who died in 1874 and was buried at Avallon, department of Yonne. There was also contact with other branches of the Liebhaber family living in Thüringe, to the west of Saxony. Conrad’s son, the baron Éric Daniel de Liebhaber (1863−1955), married an Englishwoman, Julia Susannah Robson, with whom he had five children (Louise, Edith, Ernest, Hilda, and Nellie). It was the third daughter, Hilda de Liebhaber (b. 1898), who became interested in the family history and worked with her father to bring together various sets of correspondence, title deeds, portraits for Comarmond and Baroud relatives and other extended kin, Joséphine’s personal diary, the memorial for Henri, and numerous other inherited items originating from France, Saxony, and England. Lists and notes reveal the prominent roles played by Hilda and her father Éric Daniel in the coproduction of the archive. Their intimacy with other members of the nuclear family shines through in the use of nicknames in lists of photographs (Hilda’s eldest sister Louise who became a nun is “Googoo,” for example).36 It seems most likely that Hilda’s skills in needlework led to the addition of the Liebhaber coat of arms embroidery. What cannot be established is whether Hilda or Éric Daniel had possession of more correspondence which they decided should not be preserved. Relatives will not necessarily share the same sentiments or opinions about items that originally belonged to their ancestors. Cultural and generational differences, as well as emotions, may play a part in the way relatives undertake a non-professional, personal appraisal of objects left by deceased persons.37

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The baron Éric Daniel de Liebhaber made notes on “value” as he perceived and assigned it – as an English-born nobleman of Saxon-French ancestry married to an English woman. In Éric Daniel’s notes, the act of French naturalization for “my grandfather” (Ernest de Liebhaber) was kept in an iron case and described as “very important.” Also “very important” were the wills of “my father” (Conrad de Liebhaber). Various birth and marriage certificates were “important.” Locks of hair and funeral notices were described as having “sentimental value.” Mortgage deeds and letters of congratulation for the golden wedding anniversary of Éric Daniel and Julia Susannah were “not important.”38 Perhaps most revealing of the impact of cultural and generational difference is that Éric Daniel described wax seals of Germanic ancestors as: “not very important (interesting).” In the Middle Ages, seals were “some of the most potent markers of personal identity available to the lay aristocracy” so originally these items were very important and would for some generations have continued to hold a powerful mnemonic charge for descendants in Saxony.39 For a twentieth-century nobleman who had been born and raised in England, the wax seals were interesting memorabilia but did not carry the same meaning as they did hundreds of years earlier. The container in which these wax seals are stored points to a “cultural crossing” of archival items produced in one historical context then “re-produced” in an entirely different one.40 The Germanic wax seals were kept in a wooden cigar box and on the inside of the lid is printed “British Made” (see Figure 12.5). In the way that this box has been classed in the archive as Hilda’s possession, we see Éric Daniel and Hilda, who were both English, recognized as producers of the archival material. Professional archivists’ appraisal of these same materials and many other items from the Comarmond, Baroud, and Liebhaber families occurred at several points during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Archives départementales du Rhône in Lyon purchased sets of archival materials relating to the three families in 1924, 1957, and 1961. It was Hilda de Liebhaber and her Lyon-based intermediary René Jamme who were responsible for the 1961 shipment of the materials to France and their transfer to the archives.41 More materials were added by donations in 1977 and 2008. The documents comprising the second donation had been packaged up by Hilda’s heirs and addressed to “Museum in Lyon” – they eventually reached the Archives départementales but the heirs seem either to have been ignorant of, or not to have paid attention to, Hilda’s earlier efforts to keep family records together in this institution. Archivists appraised and classed the archival collection in 2004, then again in 2013.42

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Figure 12.5: Wax seals pertaining to Liebhaber kin, Archives départementales du Rhône et de la métropole de Lyon, AD69 11J/88.

Conclusion The “Fonds des familles Comarmond, Baroud et Liebhaber” is a composite of materials produced across the period 1371−1962 in three separate countries. Many of the items that the baroness Hilda and her father the baron Éric Daniel de Liebhaber assembled in the twentieth century were items typically preserved and transmitted from generation to generation in noble families following patterns established during earlier centuries. There are wax seals, letters patent, family portraits and miniatures, the embroidered coat of arms, genealogies and correspondence – all forms of tangible and intangible cultural heritage relating to a noble family’s past. The co-production for this private archive draws heavily upon very ancient practices of ancestral commemoration involving female and male nobility. It reflects customs of “memory making” that have survived over the longue durée.43

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In the commemorative traditions that have persisted over the centuries, the feeling heart in metaphorical evocation and in representation on objects serves as a signifier for various identities. The feeling heart is depicted as the heraldic figure “un coeur enflammé” in the Comarmond coat of arms, a symbol of familial and noble identity. The feeling heart appears in the story telling by Euphrasie about her husband’s patronym Liebhaber, a symbol of familial and marital identity. The feeling heart is evoked in the letters and souvenirs about Ernest de Liebhaber’s conversion from German Lutheranism to French Catholicism and in the memorial of Henri Comarmond, all symbols of religious identity. The feeling heart informs the entries of Joséphine Comarmond in her personal diary about her identity as a loving elder sister with maternal responsibilities. Reliance on kin for emotional and practical support, including arrangements for care of children, was a feature of aristocratic life stretching back to the Middle Ages. Continuities are evident in the way Ernest and Euphrasie’s son Conrad de Liebhaber was brought up in the home of Denis and Joséphine Berlié during the early nineteenth century. Missing or damaged pages remind us that discontinuities and ruptures were also part of the complex interactions arising out of the feeling heart that took place between each individual, their nuclear circle and extended family.44

Notes 1.

2. 3.

4.

Archives départementales du Rhône (Lyon) (hereafter AD Rhône) 11J/79 Fonds des familles Comarmond, Baroud et Liebhaber; Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). Susan Groag Bell and Karen M. Offen, eds., Women, the Family, and Freedom: The Debate in Documents vol. 1, 1750–1880 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983). Julia Hirsch, Family Photographs: Content, Meaning and Effect (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001); Gerhard Jaritz, ed., Emotions and Material Culture (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2003); Susan M. Stabile, Memory’s Daughters: The Material Culture of EighteenthCentury America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Maryanne Dever, Sally Newman, and Ann Vickery, The Intimate Archive: Journeys through Private Papers (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2009); Beth Fowkes Tobin and Maureen Daly Goggin, eds., Women and the Material Culture of Death (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013); Susan Broomhall, ed., Spaces for Feeling: Emotions and Sociabilities in Britain, 1650–1850 (London: Routledge, 2015); Alice Dolan and Sally Holloway, “Emotional Textiles: an Introduction,” Textile 14 (2016): 152–9. Articles L. 211–4 and 5, Code du patrimoine (Paris: Legifrance, 2004).

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5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

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Françoise Hildesheimer, Les Archives privées: Le traitement des archives personnelles, familiales, associatives (Paris: Christian, 1990); René Favier, ed., Archives familiales et noblesse provinciale: Hommage à Yves Soulingeas (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires Grenoble, 2006); Christine Nougaret and Pascal Even, eds., Les Archives privées: Manuel pratique et juridique (Paris: La Documentation française, 2008). On French archival practices pertaining to fonds see Françoise Hildesheimer, Les Archives, pourquoi? comment? (Paris: L’Erudit, 1984), 23–37, 119–20; Jean Favier, ed., La Pratique archivistique française (Paris: Archives Nationales, 2008), 76–79. William R. Reddy, Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); Michel Duchein, “The History of European Archives and the Development of the Archival Profession in Europe,” American Archivist 55 (1992): 14–24; Terry Cook, “What is Past is Prologue: a History of Archival Ideas since 1898 and the Future Paradigm Shift,” Archivaria 43 (1997): 17–63. François Bluche and Pierre Durye, L’Anoblissement par charges avant 1789 (Paris: L’Intermédiaire des chercheurs et curieux, 1965); Alain Texier, Qu’est-ce que la noblesse? (Paris: Tallandier, 1988), 16–17, 22–65, 78–79, 530–45; Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: From Feudalism to Enlightenment, trans. William Doyle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 28–30. Noble rentes for 1671−1702 and 1727−1771 in AD Rhône 11J/27−8 and 29−42 Fonds des familles Comarmond, Baroud et Liebhaber. Rémy Mathieu, Le système héraldique français (Paris: J. B. Janin, 1946), 75−87. “D’azur à un coeur enflammé de même accosté de deux croissants d’argent et surmonté d’un soleil d’or; au chef d’or chargé de trois étoiles d’azur.” Jouffroy d’Eschavannes, Traité complet de la science du blason (originally published 1880) (Puiseaux: Pardès, 1994), 23, 40, 171; Michel Pastoureau and Michel Popoff, eds., Les Armoiries: lecture et identification (Saint-Aignan-de-Grand-Lieu: La Documentation française, 1994), glossary fig. 231; Théodore Veyrin-Forrer, Précis d’Héraldique (Montreal: Larousse, 2004), 116−20; Michel Pastoureau, Traité d’Héraldique, 4th ed. (Paris: Picard, 2003). Texier, Qu’est-ce que la noblesse?, 386−406; Éric Mension-Rigau, Aristocrates et grands bourgeois: Éducation, traditions, valeurs (Paris: Pluriel, 1994); Elizabeth C. Macknight, Aristocratic Families in Republican France, 1870−1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012). Baroud papers in AD Rhône 11J/67−9 and 70 Fonds des familles Comarmond, Baroud et Liebhaber; Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, Gens de finance au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Complexe, 1972). Ernest’s naturalization record in Archives nationales (Paris) BB/11/123/2; Ségolène de Dainville-Barbiche, “Les Archives du Sceau: naturalisations, mariages, changements de nom, titres,” La Gazette des archives 160, no. 1 (1993): 127−51. Letters from Saxon relatives and engraving Ansicht von Blankenburg in AD Rhône 11J/71 Fonds des familles Comarmond, Baroud et Liebhaber. On the Napoleonic wars and kingdom of Saxony, see Reiner Grosse, Geschichte Sachsens (Berlin: Editions Leipzig, 2001), chap. 6; Otto Kaemmel, Sächsische Geschichte (Dresden: Hellerau Verlag, 1997), 111−19.

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17. “Récit de la vie d’Ernest de Liebhaber” (1841) in AD Rhône 11J/77 Fonds des familles Comarmond, Baroud et Liebhaber. 18. AD Rhône 11J/87 Fonds des familles Comarmond, Baroud et Liebhaber. On Saxon nobility, see Silke Marburg and Josef Matzerath, eds., Der Schritt in die Moderne: Sächsischer Adel zwischen 1763 und 1918 (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2001); Otto Titan von Hefner and G. A. von Mülverstedt, Die Wappen des sächsischen Adels (Dresden: 1972). On Franco-Saxon exchange, Michel Espagne and Matthias Midell, eds., Von der Elbe bis an die Seine. Französisch-sachsischer Kulturtransfer im XVIII. und XIX. Jahrhundert (Leipzig: Universitäts-Verlag Leipzig, 1993). 19. Obituary in unidentified English newspaper, AD Rhône 11J/89 Fonds des familles Comarmond, Baroud et Liebhaber. 20. “Récit de la vie d’Ernest de Liebhaber” (1841) in AD Rhône 11J/77 Fonds des familles Comarmond, Baroud et Liebhaber. 21. December 14, 1815 in AD Rhône 11J/75 Fonds des familles Comarmond, Baroud et Liebhaber. 22. December 8, 1815 in AD Rhône 11J/75 Fonds des familles Comarmond, Baroud et Liebhaber. 23. “Récit de la vie d’Ernest de Liebhaber” (1841) in AD Rhône 11J/77 Fonds des familles Comarmond, Baroud et Liebhaber. Priest’s declaration in Latin for the conversion in 11J/71. 24. Macknight, Aristocratic Families, chap. 2. 25. Papers on Ernest’s military career in AD Rhône 11J/72 Fonds des familles Comarmond, Baroud et Liebhaber. Correspondence on professional difficulties in 11J/76. 26. Ralph Gibson, A Social History of French Catholicism, 1789–1914 (London: Routledge, 1989); Jean Delumeau, ed., La Religion de ma mère: Le rôle des femmes dans la transmission de la foi (Paris: Le Cerf, 1992); Claude Langlois, Le Catholicisme au féminin: Les congrégations françaises à supérieure générale au XIXe siècle (Paris: Le Cerf, 1984); Raymond Jonas, France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart: An Epic Tale for Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Phil Kilroy, The Society of the Sacred Heart in Nineteenth-Century France, 1800–1865 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2012). 27. Manuscript bound in leather and the publication Philippe-Irénée Boistel d’Exauvillez, Vie du jeune Henri Comarmond étudiant au séminaire de Viviers (Paris, 1835) in AD Rhône 11J/ 79 Fonds des familles Comarmond, Baroud et Liebhaber; Elizabeth C. Macknight, “In Memory of Myriad Selves: The Baronne Mathilde de Mackau (1837–1886),” Magistra 12 (2006): 46–72. 28. Boistel d’Exauvillez, Vie du jeune Henri, foreword and 18, 27−28, 32−33, 37, 41, 50, 122−23, 136; Jonas, France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart; Kilroy, The Society of the Sacred Heart. See also Chapter 10. 29. Philippe Lejeune, Le Moi des demoiselles: Enquête sur le journal de jeune fille (Paris: Seuil, 1993); Verena Von der Heyden-Rynsch, Écrire la vie: Trois siècles de journaux intimes féminins (Paris: Gallimard, 1990); Michelle Perrot, Les Femmes ou les silences de l’Histoire (Paris: Flammarion, 1998); Colette Cosnier, Le Silence des filles: De l’aiguille à la plume (Paris: Fayard, 2001). 30. Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 15−46, 69−70; Lejeune, Le Moi des demoiselles, 25, 27, 39, 41, 69−70, 85−86, 95−96, 109; Philippe Lejeune, “Cher cahier . . . ” Témoignages sur le journal personnel (Paris: Gallimard, 1989).

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31. On Joséphine caring for her ill mother and younger siblings, see Boistel d’Exauvillez, Vie du jeune Henri, 20−22. 32. Journal intime in AD Rhône 11J/79 Fonds des familles Comarmond, Baroud et Liebhaber. 33. Macknight, Aristocratic Families, chap. 7. See also Martha Tomhave Blauvelt, “The Work of the Heart: Emotion in the 1805–35 Diary of Sarah Connell Ayer,” Journal of Social History 35 (2002): 577–92; Ina Lindblom, “The Botany of Friendship and Love: Flowers and Emotional Practices in the Gjörwell family ca. 1790–1810,” Scandinavian Journal of History 41 (2016): 410–26. 34. Journal intime in AD Rhône 11J/79 Fonds des familles Comarmond, Baroud et Liebhaber. 35. Records of Conrad’s professional career in AD Rhône 11J/82−3 Fonds des familles Comarmond, Baroud et Liebhaber; Bruno Belhoste, La Formation d’une technocratie: L’École polytechnique et ses élèves de la Révolution au Second Empire (Paris: Belin, 2003). 36. AD Rhône 11J/86 and 87−89 Fonds des familles Comarmond, Baroud et Liebhaber. 37. Jaritz, Emotions and Material Culture; Catherine Richardson and Tara Hamling, eds., Everyday Objects: Medieval and Early Modern Culture and Its Meanings (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010); Peter N. Stearns and Susan J. Matt, History of Emotions: Doing Emotions History (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013); Anna Moran and Sorcha O’Brien, eds., Love Objects: Emotion, Design and Material Culture (London: Bloomsbury, 2014); Barbara H. Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 38. AD Rhône 11J/90 Fonds des familles Comarmond, Baroud et Liebhaber. 39. Nicholas L. Paul, To Follow in Their Footsteps: The Crusades and Family Memory in the High Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 107. 40. E. Jane Burns, “Saracen Silk and the Virgin’s Chemise: Cultural Crossing in Cloth,” Speculum 81 (2006): 365−97. 41. Correspondence 1961−1962 in AD Rhône 11J/90 Fonds des familles Comarmond, Baroud et Liebhaber. 42. Classing decisions discussed in the inventory for AD Rhône 11J/90 Fonds des familles Comarmond, Baroud et Liebhaber. 43. Michel Lauwers, La Mémoire des ancêtres, le souci des morts: morts, rites, et société au Moyen Âge (Paris: Beauchesne, 1997); Elisabeth van Houts, Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe 900−1200 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1999); Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 44. Amy Livingstone, Out of Love for my Kin: Aristocratic Family Life in the Lands of the Loire, 1000–1200 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010); Macknight, Aristocratic Families.

Further Reading Alberti, Fay Bound. Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine, and Emotion. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and his World. Translated by Helene Iswolsky. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1984. Barclay, Katie. Love, Intimacy and Power: Marriage and Patriarchy in Scotland, 1650–1850. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011. Boyadjian, N. The Heart: Its History, Its Symbolism, Its Iconography and Its Diseases. Antwerp: ESCO Books, 1980. Boyle, Marjorie O’Rourke. “Aquinas’s Natural Heart.” Early Science & Medicine 18, no. 3 (2013): 266–90. Brault, Gerard J. “Chrétien de Troyes’ Lancelot: The Eye and the Heart.” Bulletin bibliographique de la Société internationale arthurienne 24 (1972): 142–53. Broomhall, Susan, ed. Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction. London; New York: Routledge, 2017. Broomhall, Susan, ed. Ordering Emotions in Europe, 1100–1800. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Camille, Michael. The Medieval Art of Love. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998. Carruthers, Mary. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Clark, S. L., and Julian N. Wasserman. “The Heart in ‘Troilus and Criseyde’: The Eye of the Breast, the Mirror of the Mind, the Jewel in Its Setting.” The Chaucer Review 18, no. 4 (1984): 316–28. Cummings, Brian, and Freya Sierhuis, eds. Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013. Doueihi, Milad. A Perverse History of the Heart. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Erikson, Robert A. The Language of the Heart: 1600–1750. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Eubanks, Charlotte. “Reading by Heart: Translated Buddhism and the Pictorial Heart Sutras of Early Modern Japan.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 220 (2013): 7–25. Field, Michele, and Timothy Millett, eds. Convict Love Tokens. Kent Town, SA: Wakefield Press, 1998. Frevert, Ute, et al. Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling 1700–2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Godwin, Gail. Heart: A Personal Journey through Its Myths and Meanings. New York: William Morrow, 2001. Gouk, Penelope, and Helen Hills, eds. Representing Emotions: New Connections in the Histories of Art, Music and Medicine. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2005. Harris, C. R. S. The Heart and the Vascular System in Ancient Greek Medicine from Alcmaeon to Galen. Oxford: Clarendon, 1973. Hilman, David, and Carla Mazzio, eds. The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe. New York: Routledge, 2010. Holderness, Graham. “‘The Single and Peculiar Life’: Hamlet’s Heart and the Early Modern Subject.” In Shakespeare Survey Online, ed. Peter Holland, 296–307. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513275-014

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Further Reading

Høystad, Ole Martin. A History of the Heart. London: Reaktion Books, 2009. Jager, Eric. “The Book of the Heart: Reading and Writing the Medieval Subject.” Speculum 71, no. 1 (1996): 1–26. Jager, Eric. The Book of the Heart. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000. Jonas, Raymond. France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart: An Epic Tale for Modern Times. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Kemp, Martin. Christ to Coke: How Image Becomes Icon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Kilroy, Phil. The Society of the Sacred Heart in Nineteenth-Century France, 1800–1865. Cork: Cork University Press, 2012. Knuuttila, Simo. Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Lecuppre-Desjardin, Elodie, and Anne-Laure van Bruaene, eds. Emotions in the Heart of the City (14th–16th Century). Les Émotions au Coeur de la Ville (XIVe–XVIe siècle). Studies in European Urban History (1100–1800) 5. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2005. Le Goff, Jacques. “Head or Heart? The Political Use of Body Metaphors in the Middle Ages” Translated by Patricia Ranum. In Fragments for a History of the Human Body: Part Three, edited by Michel Feher, 12–26. New York: Zone, 1989. Leibowitz, Joshua Otto. The History of Coronary Heart Disease. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1970. Luttrell, Claude. “The Heart’s Mirror in Cligès.” In Arthurian Literature 13, edited by James P. Carley and Felicity Riddy, 1–18. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995. McLisky, Claire. ‘“A Hook Fast in his Heart’: Emotion and ‘True Christian Knowledge’ in Disputes over Conversion between Lutheran and Moravian Missionaries in Early Colonial Greenland.” Journal of Religious History 39, no. 4 (2015): 575–94. Meek, Richard, and Erin Sullivan, eds. The Renaissance of Emotion: Understanding Affect in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. Morgan, David. The Sacred Heart of Jesus: The Visual Evolution of a Devotion. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008. Paster, Gail Kern. Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Peto, James, ed. The Heart. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. Pollard, William F. “Richard Rolle and the ‘Eye of the Heart’.” In Mysticism and Spirituality in Medieval England, edited by Robert Boenig and William F. Pollard, 85–105. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997. Reddy, William M. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Romanchuk, Robert. “The Idea of the Heart in Byzantium and the History of the Book.” In Textual Cultures: Cultural Texts, edited by Orietta DaRold and Elaine Treharne, 163–86. London: Boydell & Brewer, D. S. Brewer, 2010. Rosenwein, Barbara. H. Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions 600–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Schoenfeldt, Michael. Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Searle, Alison. “‘My Souls Anatomiste’: Richard Baxter, Katherine Gell and Letters of the Heart.” Early Modern Literary Studies 12, no. 2 (2006): 7.1–26. Shackelford, Jole. William Harvey and the Mechanics of the Heart. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Further Reading

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Shogimen, Takashi. “‘Head or Heart?’ Revisited: Physiology and Political Thought in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries.” History of Political Thought 28, no. 2 (2007): 208–29. Slights, W. E. The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Stone, Harriet. “A Battle for Hearts and Minds: Turenne and Louis XIV.” Seventeenth-Century French Studies 36, no. 1 (2014): 73–83. Sullivan, Erin. Beyond Melancholy: Sadness and Selfhood in Renaissance England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Van Gent, Jacqueline. “The Burden of Love: Moravian Conversions and Emotions in EighteenthCentury Labrador.” Journal of Religious History 39, no. 4 (2015): 557–74. Vesalius, Andreas. On the Fabric of the Human Body, Book VI: The Heart and Associated Organs, Book VII: The Brain. Translated by William Frank Richardson and John Burd Carman. Novato, CA: Norman Publishing, 2009. Vinken, Pierre. The Shape of the Heart. New York: Elsevier, 2000. Vinken, Pierre. “How the Heart was Held in Medieval Art.” Lancet 358, no. 9299 (2001): 2155–57. Webb, Heather. The Medieval Heart. New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2010. Weber, Jeanne. “Devotion to the Sacred Heart: History, Theology and Liturgical Celebration.” Worship 72 (1998): 236–54. Weimer, Adrian Chastain. “Affliction and the Stony Heart in Early New England.” In Puritanism and Emotion in the Early Modern World, edited by Alec Ryrie and Tom Schwanda, 121–44. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Weiss-Krejci, Estella. “Heart Burial in Medieval and Early Post-Medieval Central Europe.” In Body Parts and Bodies Whole, edited by Katharina Rebay-Salisbury, Marie Louise Stig Sorensen, and Jessica Hughes, 119–34. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2010. Wells, Francis C. The Heart of Leonardo. London: Springer, 2013. Wood, Robert E. The Beautiful, The True and the Good. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2015. Yalom, Marilyn. The Amorous Heart: An Unconventional History of Love. New York: Basic Books, 2018. Young, Louisa. The Book of the Heart. London: Flamingo, 2002. Zarri, Gabriella. “Eyes and Heart, Eros and Agape: Forms of Love in the Renaissance.” Historical Reflections 41, no. 2 (2015): 53–69.

Notes on Contributors Katie Barclay is Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions and Associate Professor in the Department of History, University of Adelaide. She is the author of the award-winning Love, Intimacy and Power: Marriage and Patriarchy in Scotland, 1650–1850 (2011) and numerous articles and chapters on emotions in family life. She has recently edited two collections in the history of emotions, one on childhood death and the other on emotion, ritual, and power, and is one of the editors of the journal Emotions: History, Culture, Society. Susan Broomhall is Professor of History at The University of Western Australia and researches gender, emotions, material culture, cultural contact, and the heritage of the early modern world. She was a Foundation Chief Investigator in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions and now holds an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship, researching emotions in the political activities and correspondence of Catherine de’ Medici. Clare Davidson is an Associate Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. She is a sessional lecturer in English and Cultural Studies at The University of Western Australia (UWA) where she completed her PhD in 2017. Her dissertation focused on the rhetoric of physiological and mental arousal in fourteenth-century Middle English literature. Her current research examines sensory human experience, particularly in relation to aesthetics, reading practices, and the history of the body. June-Ann Greeley, PhD is an associate professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, CT. Her areas of research and publication cover a range of topics relevant to medieval affective piety; medieval Christian mysticism; spiritual themes in medieval sacred art (Christianity and Islam); the interface of classical influences with medieval Latin theology; medieval and early modern women’s spirituality; comparative medieval angelology; Celtic studies; medieval hagiography and ‘sacred space’, and medieval pilgrimage and ‘sacred place’. She is currently developing a project in comparative medieval piety and prayer. Elizabeth C. Macknight is Senior Lecturer in European History at King’s College, University of Aberdeen and a Scottish Crucible alumna of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Educated in Australia and France, her primary field of research is the history of European nobilities, with particular interests in gender, power, and emotion. Bridget Millmore is a material culture historian, interested in the biography of objects. She completed her AHRC-funded PhD at the University of Brighton, England. She is an independent scholar working on eighteenth century tokens in the Coins and Medals department of the British Museum and a Visiting Lecturer in the History of Art and Design at the University of Brighton. Eleonora Rai is a postdoctoral researcher at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven). She is an expert in the history of Christianity and Roman Church in Italy and Spanish Low Countries (sixteenth–nineteenth centuries), and focuses on various topics, such as early https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513275-015

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modern theological debates, Jesuit history, and causes of canonization. Her monograph La Santa Parola was published in 2013. Bronwyn Reddan is a cultural and literary historian who works on the history of women’s writing and the representation of gender and emotion in early modern fairy-tale traditions. Her recent publications examine the gender politics of love and magic in seventeenth-century French fairy tales. Patricia Simons is Professor Emerita in the Department of History of Art at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her books include The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and the co-edited Patronage, Art, and Society in Renaissance Italy (Clarendon Press, 1987). Her studies of the visual and material culture of early modern Europe have been published in numerous anthologies and peer-review journals, ranging over such subjects as female and male homoeroticism, gender and portraiture, the cultural role of humor, and the visual dynamics of secrecy and of scandal. Her current book project is on beards during the Renaissance. Kathryn L. Smithies is a medieval historian and Research Associate in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. At present, she is researching how medieval popular literature could serve as texts of exclusion, marginalizing and censuring certain groups in society, such as usurers, Jews, and lepers. She is currently an Honorary Associate Investigator with the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, researching emotional responses to the medieval leper. Chloé Vondenhoff is a PhD candidate in the department of Comparative Literature (Middle Ages) at the University of Iceland and Utrecht University. Her research interests are emotion and narration in Arthurian romance, and she is currently investigating their interrelation for Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain and its different European translations. Carol J. Williams is an Honorary Associate Investigator (AI 2012) with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. As an adjunct research fellow of the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies of Monash University, she has an established academic career in both musicology and history. She is one of the collaborating editors and translators of the Ars Musice of Johannes de Grocheio (Medieval Institute Publications, 2011) and the Tractatus de tonis of Guy of Saint-Denis (Medieval Institute Publications, 2017). Solo publications include the essay “Modes and Manipulation: Music, the State, and Emotion” in Ordering Emotions in Europe, 1100–1800 (Brill, 2015) and “The tonary as analytic guidebook for the performance of chant’ in Music Performance and Analysis (University of Western Australia, 2017). She is also a performing musician, singing and playing harp, vielle and rebec in the early music ensemble Acord. Colin Yeo has research interests in early modern studies, film criticism, and Gothic studies. Drawing from two of these interests, his recently completed doctoral thesis explored the concept of “Gothic” in early modern poetry.

Index affect (emotion) 8, 61, 99, 115 affection (emotion) 4, 6, 23, 59, 60, 90n17, 99 affection (love) 12, 27, 146, 187, 191, 193, 203, 205–6, 215 affective piety 10, 165–83 agency 7, 9, 13, 51, 55, 63, 81, 89, 114, 117, 121, 122, 139, 143 Alighieri, Dante 7, 33, 34, 59–60, 62–67, 73 anger 21–23, 33, 68, 99 Anselm of Canterbury 10, 165–83 Aquinas, Thomas 21, 99, 100, 102–5, 114–16, 122 Aristotle 2, 20, 22–23, 25, 49, 54, 60–61, 65, 73, 75n34, 81, 99, 102, 103, 107, 110n37 arrows 1, 3, 24, 26, 29, 31, 33–6, 41n82, 51–2, 203, 210 art (visual) 1, 4, 13, 19–42, 132, 188, 190, 213, 231 Augustine 19, 30, 36, 61, 63, 165, 167, 168, 180, 184, 213 Bakhtin, Mikhail 134–5 battle 35, 79–89, 98, 101–3, 107, 186, 220 beauty 52, 65, 79, 82–85, 127n35, 129 blood 2, 12, 21, 23, 46, 81, 115–6, 132, 192, 195, 210, 221 Bodel, Jean 8, 9, 97–112 cannibalism 7, 33, 64, 147 Castiglione, Baldassare 129–30 charity 30, 31, 176, 191, 192, 229 Charity (goddess) 6, 19, 31,32, 34, 145–6 Charles IX 143, 148–52 Chaucer, Geoffrey 114–18, 120, 124125n10, 126n16 children 35, 82, 208, 212, 216, 225, 231, 233, 236 circulation (blood) 2, 81, 91n24, 98 cognition 1, 5, 8, 13, 46–47, 48, 81, 88, 113–17, 124, 125n3, 125n8, 172 https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513275-016

community 1, 6, 10, 11, 12, 14, 45, 55, 97, 100, 122, 124, 157, 173, 178, 203, 204, 216, 224, 229 compassion 103, 109n24, 169, 176, 187, 190, 191, 194–5, 197 compunction 3, 10, 166, 173–80 conversion 3, 11, 185, 187–91, 193–4, 197, 228, 236 corporeality 2, 4, 5, 7–9, 11–14, 20, 21, 24, 32, 34, 35, 51, 53, 55, 72, 132–40, 143, 145, 188, 190, 192 courage 6, 8, 13, 20, 33, 46, 53, 81, 83, 98–107, 152 courtship 80, 83, 204, 210 Cupid 3, 26, 27, 34, 36, 42n88, 210, 211 Daniel, Arnaut 59, 71–3 death 3, 22, 28, 33, 52, 62–64, 99, 103–7, 127n35, 136–8, 143, 146–8, 150–55, 181n10, 184, 185, 190, 193–95, 204, 209–11, 231 Descartes, René 2, 20–21, 81, 86 desire 8, 9, 12, 19, 33, 34–6, 52, 60, 65, 68, 72, 73, 74n8, 79, 81–7, 89, 114, 116, 118, 120, 122, 124, 125n3, 129–40, 165, 168, 175, 177, 193, 209, 210, 214 devotional practice 9–11, 25, 31, 73, 120–4, 131, 165–80, 184–98 – singing 61, 73 Donne, John 9, 130, 137–40 embodiment 61, 88, 106, 130, 143–5 emotion see also affect, individual emotions (e.g. grief, anger, etc) – collective 7, 10, 12 – and gender 24, 27, 82, 89, 220 – history of 4, 207–8 – methodology 4, 90n17, 143, 204, 207–8, 115 – personification of 7, 19, 29, 31, 32, 35, 79–94, 138–39 – rhetoric 59, 63, 67, 73, 88, 102, 168, 180, 195 Eucharist 36, 187

248

Index

family 3, 6, 10–12, 82, 148–57, 188, 197, 203–7, 212–16, 221–36 fear 21, 22, 46, 72, 99, 102, 104–6, 168, 175, 178, 180, 187 fidelity 68, 71, 145, 152, 211–12 Fournival, Richard de 49–50 François II 143, 145, 148–52, 154 friendship 14, 79–85, 88–89, 91n19, 153, 194, 208, 211, 212, 214, 215, 229, 230 funeral 108n9, 148, 234 Galen 2, 20, 22–23, 213 Gift-giving 33, 86, 205, 209, 214, 127n35, 137 Gregory the Great 165, 168, 174, 175 grief 9, 12, 143, 156, 167, 175, 196 Grocherio, Johannes de 61 Guilhem 62, 64 Harvey, William 2, 20, 23, 81, 132 hearing 5, 6, 13, 48–51, 174 heart – anatomy 2, 13, 19–23, 130–40 – book of 2, 213 – broken 1, 100, 190, 196 – burial 3, 9, 136, 144, 153 – chief/head 3, 129, 133, 138–40, 144 – conquered 7, 27, 85, 88, 138, 139, 147, 148, 153, 154 – as container 5, 7, 11, 72, 73, 80, 81, 82, 89, 115, 172 – and disease 22, 97–112, 129 – doubled/united/joined 64, 121–23, 145–48, 185, 198, 209–10, 216 – exchange of 33, 53, 114, 117–18, 120–23, 124, 127n35 – flaming 1, 5–6, 12, 19–42, 64, 72, 155, 186, 188, 209, 224, 236 – gendered 3, 24, 88 – hard/dry 3, 179 – language of 9, 73, 84, 87, 169, 209–11, 215 – and movement 6, 21, 25, 43, 48, 53–54, 55, 88, 101, 118, 120, 124, 170, 172, 186, 189–91, 195 – red 1, 14, 16n38, 31, 32, 34, 225

– relation to mind 6, 9, 10, 23, 29, 46, 47, 50, 54, 65, 66, 68, 81, 88, 113–14, 116, 132, 165–81, 213, 220 – permeable/porous 2, 3, 5, 7, 169 – pierced 1, 3, 24–5, 30, 34, 51–52, 174, 175, 185, 189, 190, 191, 194, 196, 203, 209, 210, 214 – pulse 21–23, 38n19 – self 1–14, 89, 113, 116, 120, 137–9, 171, 177, 178, 209, 215 – shape 1, 25 – and sovereignty 22–23, 47, 65, 79, 84–89, 119, 122, 144 – symbol 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 11–14, 19, 20, 26, 46, 81, 129, 131, 133, 140, 186, 187, 188, 198, 204, 208, 209, 212–16, 222, 236 – source of heat 2, 20–23, 33, 60, 80, 81, 115, 116, 144 – as term of endearment (e.g. sweetheart) 3, 154, 205, 214 – thorns 186, 188, 189, 190, 195 Henri II of France 143–61 heraldry 1, 12, 213, 221, 223–6, 233, 236 humoral system 19–23, 81, 98–99, 130, 131, 140, 213 identity 1, 5, 10, 12, 13, 99, 113, 116, 139, 144, 153, 165, 222, 224, 229, 231, 234, 236 imagination 113, 167, 190, 195, 198, 213 intimacy 12, 69, 157, 224, 229, 233 Jesuits 10, 184–202 Jesus Christ 6–8, 11, 19, 24–29, 31, 33, 98, 104, 123–24, 168–170, 176, 177, 180, 184–202, 213, 220 joy 9, 10, 21, 22, 34, 68, 69, 99, 100, 101, 107, 117, 119, 128n55, 171–73, 175, 178, 179, 181, 227 kiss 105, 111n58, 118 Le Pays, René 86–89, 93n68 leprosy 8, 97–112

Index

letter-writing 82, 86, 148, 169, 227, 228, 230–31 liturgy 170, 178, 192, 196 lovesickness 22, 52, 61, 85 love tokens 1, 11, 203–219 marriage 12, 83, 84, 87, 204, 205, 211, 214, 221, 225, 227, 228, 234 martyr 104, 107, 194–6 Mary (Virgin) 7, 10, 11, 19, 24, 156, 169, 184–202 – of Sorrows 24, 184, 185, 189, 190, 191, 194, 195, 196, 198 – of Victories 186 Mary Magdalene 180 materiality 9, 143 material culture 11, 13, 205, 221 Medici, Catherine de’ 9, 10, 143–61 medicine, history of 2, 5, 19–23, 33–34, 37, 80–81, 85, 98–99, 109n14, 130–31 melancholy 23, 131, 140, 179 memory 2, 7, 9, 43, 49–50, 54, 61, 146, 148, 151, 165, 166, 176, 178, 213, 225, 229, 235 miracle 53, 97 monastic 25, 166–70, 174, 179, 188 monument(s) 143–161 motherhood 24, 28, 29, 32, 33, 34, 143, 145, 148–50, 152, 155–6, 167, 169, 184–8, 190, 191, 194–7, 203, 212, 214, 228, 231–3, 236 mourning 63, 147, 152 music 1, 4, 13, 35, 59–78, 129 nation 3, 6, 147, 153, 157 Norse 4, 6, 13, 43–58 nuns 24, 27–29, 169, 229, 233 obedience 167, 184, 214 Ovid 34, 52 Passion of Christ 25, 31, 104, 109n24, 123, 170, 184–86, 189, 190, 194–98 passions 4, 6, 19–42, 60, 61, 80–86, 90n17, 93n67, 99, 100, 104–07, 114, 120, 229, 230

249

Petrarchan poetry 34, 71, 131, 133, 137–8, 140, 146 physiology 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 19–23, 45, 52, 60, 81, 113–8, 124, 130 piety 97, 165–83, 186, 192, 196, 220, 229 Pinamonti, Giovanni Pietro 11, 184–202 Plato 20, 21, 22, 60, 61, 65, 81, 82, 92n36, 126n25 pleasure 24, 34, 60, 61, 68, 79, 83, 84, 86, 177, 124, 128n55, 156, 169, 229 power 23, 35, 52, 60, 62–3, 69, 73, 79, 131, 210, 228 – displays of 9–10, 143–61 – gender 47, 52, 53, 84–88, 134, 137–40, 143–61 – political 23, 143–61 prayer 24, 31, 154, 168–70, 174–180, 186, 197 purification (spiritual) 3, 99, 165–83, 184–6, 189, 191–3, 197 rationality 80, 88, 113, 178, 186 see also reason reason 1, 7, 8, 20, 29, 33, 52, 60 65, 73, 79–94, 113, 122, 123, 166, 167, 170, 171, 175, 177, 195, 213, 220 see also cognition reciprocity 8, 80, 88, 94n81, 118, 119, 121, 122, 124, 212, 227 See also gift-giving relic 97, 191 ritual 53, 102, 105, 111n58 Sacred Heart 3, 184–202 – of Jesus 24, 31, 184–202, 213, 230 – of Mary 10, 24, 184–202 Scudéry, Madeleine de 79–81, 88–89 senses 5, 6, 13, 43, 49–54, 60–61, 66, 69, 73, 74n7, 114, 115, 126n25, 129, 169, 177, 190 see also hearing, sight, touch Shakespeare, William 9, 129, 131, 136–7 siblings 79, 82, 83, 88, 214, 227, 228, 231, 233 Sidney, Philip 130, 138 sight 5, 6, 7, 13, 29, 49–53, 63, 65, 68, 83, 85, 101, 116, 126n25, 129, 140, 185, 187, 191, 195 sin 174, 178, 179, 184, 191, 192, 193

250

Index

singing 6, 59–73, 114, 121–24 Siniscalchi, Liborio 11, 184–202 sorrow 8, 10, 12, 23, 24, 99, 100, 115, 118, 144, 150, 171, 174–6, 178, 179, 181, 184, 186, 196 soul 2, 3, 8, 9, 10, 12, 20–24, 29, 31, 33, 46, 74n7, 81, 85, 87, 99, 104, 106, 107, 113, 115, 116, 126n25, 129, 165–6, 169, 172–80, 185, 190, 191, 213 spears 1, 3, 24, 31, 36, 174, 185 Spenser, Edmund 9, 129, 133–4 statuary 1, 36, 143–61, 189 suffering 8, 11, 19, 24, 28, 29, 35, 51, 62, 69, 72, 85, 97–112, 123, 134, 174, 178, 184–202, 209–10 tears see weeping theology 31, 61, 102, 166–68, 180, 184, 187, 188, 194, 213

touch 5, 13, 167 translation 44–45 troubadours 6, 7, 33, 59–78, 120 Troyes, Chrétien de 6, 43–58, 120, 122, 125n2 Valentine’s Day 1, 19 Ventadorn, Bernart de 59, 68–71 Venus 6, 19, 33–34, 35, 36 Vesalius, Andreas 2, 22, 132 voice 6, 7, 48, 50, 59–62, 73, 120, 121, 144, 155, 168, 176 war 13, 87, 99, 100, 102–4, 107, 118, 148, 153–55, 186, 198, 214, 220, 225 weeping 1, 64, 73, 85, 152, 175, 177–79, 187, 205, 210 will 1, 2, 3, 12, 13, 81, 84, 88, 104, 107, 165, 169, 175, 177, 178, 188, 191 see also cognition