Cultivating the Heart

Cultivating the Heart reveals the languages of feeling in a range of religious texts from the High Middle Ages.

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Cultivating the Heart examines the nurturance of feeling – especially the intertwined affective stirrings of compassion, love, and sorrow – in a range of religious texts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. These texts encourage, stimulate, define and attempt to express the ‘cultivation of hearts’, an image inspired by Part VII of Ancrene Wisse, whereby readers and audiences of the texts nurture a range of sophisticated ‘affective literacies’. In addition to extensive analysis of English, Latin and Anglo-Norman texts, this book makes substantial reference to the affective strategies of wall paintings in parish churches, demonstrating how the affective strategies of wall paintings cannot be perceived as inferior to or irreconcilable with the affective import of textual media.