Affective Literacy: Gestures of Reading in the Later Middle

Ages
Mark Amsler

Essays in Medieval Studies, Volume 18, 2001, pp. 83-110 (Article)

Published by West Virginia University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/ems.2001.0001

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/11578

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Chapter 7 Affective Literacy: Gestures of
Reading in the Later Middle Ages
Mark Amsler
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

In this essay, I use the term “affective literacy” to denote ways we develop
emotional, somatic, activity-based relationships with texts as part of our reading
experiences. One aspect of affective literacy involves the immediate somatic ways
we touch, sense, perceive, vocalize, or perform a text with our eyes, hands, mouths,
and bodies. Another aspect involves the emotive, noncognitive, paralinguistic things
we do with or to texts during the act of reading—for example, holding a book
close like a charm for comfort or protection, or touching or kissing reverentially a
page in a prayer book. A third aspect of affective literacy is the range of emo-
tional, spiritual, somatic responses readers have to a text, such as crying, laughing,
becoming angry, or becoming aroused. While practices of “affective literacy” are
certainly associated with late medieval affective piety, they are not restricted to
religious or devotional experiences. The term “affective literacy” locates a broad
range of somatic, emotive responses to reading a text. Affective literacy seeks out
the life principle, messy and complex, threading through reading activities and
gestures toward bodily economies of reading and transacting texts.
Somatic technologies
In the Middle Ages, ideas about reading and reading practices themselves
were produced within a semiotic network of textualities, acts, and bodies. Gestures
of reading, and representations of gestures, reveal some of the somatic interplay
between medieval readers and texts, how reading practices maintained and
transgressed the borders of bodies and texts. These practices organized somatic
literate technologies, such as coordinating one’s eyes and voice when reading aloud,
running fingers or hands across the page to note words and lines, gesturing with
hands or eyes while reading aloud, articulating phonemes, morphemes, and syllables

Essays in Medieval Studies 18 (2001), 83-109. © Illinois Medieval Association. Published

electronically by the Muse Project at http://muse.jhu.edu
84 Mark Amsler

clearly and expressively with lips, tongue, and voice, and displaying or revealing
affect or emotional responses to the text being read. Such technologies (in Foucault’s
sense of strategies of power for organizing and implementing regimes of truth)
elicited different kinds of attention at different times, but overall were cultivated
and anxiously regulated during the Middle Ages. Gestures toward the text—e.g.,
kissing (or not touching) the page, moving (or not) one’s body performatively
when reading, voicing or not voicing the text, marking or erasing part of the page—
indicate how some later medieval reading behaviors challenged norms of acceptable
reading and blurred the edges between orthodox and heterodox literacies. Some
gestures and the persons performing the gestures (lay person, woman) were
considered transgressive. Gestural technologies were thus sites of struggle for
literate authority and textual power.
These reading activities and affects suggest how some medieval writers,
readers, and reading groups acquired literate power by disrupting traditional, or-
thodox literacy frameworks organized around clerical exegesis and authority. As
a site of discursive struggle, the material page is assimilated into the reading situ-
ation, the “hinge of reading” linking reader and text. Access to the page or book is
the ground of literacy. Affective literacy displaces literate ideology in performative
practice, through the construction of interactive textualities, textuality beyond the
page. As a potentially unruly practice, affective literacy challenges the assump-
tion, in the Middle Ages and today, that reading is unilateral consumption and a
text is a discrete object. In this respect, affective literacy foregrounds the hinge of
reading which opens and closes a gap between reader and text, between the skin of
the page and the reading body, between understanding and response, repetition
and difference.
Reading has often provoked anxiety. In the ancient and early medieval worlds,
the gestures and affects of reading aloud were sometimes described as nodes of
literate identity. Silent reading, or reading without ostensive affect, provoked sus-
picion.1 Vox makes the visible but silent text manifest, intelligible, and appropriate
in the public oral domain. Medieval grammarians and physiologists defined vox as
meaningful speech or as the capacity to vocalize, produce, and comprehend mean-
ingful linguistic sound, as opposed to sonus, audible but not necessarily linguistic
sound produced by the mouth. From Plato and hellenist grammarians to Aldhelm
and monastic grammarians, voice was considered the necessary supplement to
writing. In turn, writing was privileged both for its monumentality and for its aid
to voice and reading aloud. Punctuation and page layout were used to guide voic-
ing and construing the text.2 In a culture of oral reading, vox (voice) is a textual
gesture.
Augustine’s theories of language and signs framed the discourse and vo-
cabulary for many later medieval literacies, including affective literacy. Through-
out his writing, Augustine deployed the body and its senses, literally and figura-
tively, to represent the unstable relations among speech, reading, and cognition.
Affective Literacy 85

His brief narrative of Ambrose reading to himself (Confessions 6.3) articulates

this problem dramatically. One day, Augustine found Ambrose, Bishop of Milan,
alone and silently reading a text. He wanted to approach the bishop, but Ambrose’s
reading practices kept Augustine from doing so: “ . . . when he was not occupied
(which was but a little time altogether), he either refreshed his body with neces-
sary sustenance, or his mind with reading [lectio]. But when he was reading, he
drew his eyes over the pages and his heart searched into the sense, but his voice
[vox] and tongue [lingua] were silent. Often, when we were present (for no one
was prohibited from coming to him, nor was it his fashion to be told of anybody
that came to speak with him) we still saw him reading silently [eum legentum
vidimus tacite], and never otherwise; so that having long sat in silence (for who
dared be so bold as to interrupt him, so intent on his study?) we decided to de-
part.”3 Augustine is puzzled by Ambrose’s silent or subvocal reading, and his
questions suggest the connections between literate technology and ideology and
readers’ motives. Ambrose’s intense, private reading makes him seem unapproach-
able. Also, Augustine’s questions about silent reading, a practice hardly unknown
in the ancient world, prompt him to posit possible justifications for such privatized
reading: Ambrose’s withdrawal from public interpretation, his need to read quickly
or to preserve his preaching voice. That is, Augustine surrounds Ambrose’s read-
ing behavior with surplus assumptions in order to make his gestures comprehen-
sible and acceptable. Without voice, reading’s purpose is in question, and literate
ideology’s work begins.
When reading aloud is normative, as in early medieval culture, a reader’s
immobile or silent tongue was imagined to be severed from language. Augustine
observes Ambrose to be reading with only some of his senses. Ambrose draws his
eyes across the page (the transitive syntax in the narrative is significant), but his
lips, tongue, and voice are still. Based on other representations of ancient and
medieval reading (for example, by Quintilian), we might imagine Ambrose run-
ning his finger across the pages, guiding his eyes through the text. We don’t know
exactly what type of reading Ambrose is performing here, nor the kind of text he
is reading (scroll, codex, scriptura continua, word-separated manuscript?). Is he
leafing through the text quickly or selectively? reading a single page? reading
prayerfully? Augustine doesn’t know either. But the narrative isn’t really inter-
ested in such questions. What matters to Augustine is why Ambrose is reading
without publicly vocalizing. Augustine associates Ambrose’s meditative, silent
reading with ruminatio and the Eucharist, a discursive move which reconnects
Ambrose’s silent reading with his mouth, but as ingestion and reception, not vo-
calization and production. While Augustine the spectator wonders about Ambrose’s
motives for reading without voice, the narrative emphasizes the silence of
Ambrose’s reading and how only parts of his body, especially his eyes, are en-
gaged with the text. Without the reader’s voice, Augustine is left to speculate on
86 Mark Amsler

Ambrose’s motives and the signification of affect. Is Ambrose a good reader or a

bad reader? Ambrose’s absent voice supplements and structures the narrative scene.
In the early Middle Ages, monastic reading (ruminatio) was identified as a
form of prayer or meditation and drew metaphorically on a rich orality, associated
with the Eucharist and reading aloud. But Augustine’s uneasy gaze on Ambrose’s
devoiced or suppressed-voice reading gave way in eleventh- and twelfth-century
religious discourses to a more interiorized mode of spirituality keyed to individual,
quieter, often silent contemplative reading or textual study. Monks were encour-
aged to use written texts for private devotions. Paul Saenger identifies John, Ab-
bot of Fécamp (990-1078) as the first writer “to employ the term meditatio for a
written text intended for private spiritual use,” in his discussion of mental prayer
linked to private reading.4
Anselm of Canterbury’s (1033-1109) Orationes sive meditationis, a collec-
tion of prayers and meditations intended for private reading, textualizes the rela-
tion between the absent writer and a reader. Anselm’s account of the act of reading
is full of conflicts, especially in terms of how a reader might engage affectively
with a text. On the one hand, the meditating reader supplements and performs the
writer’s text by reading aloud. But in the Monologium (Preface), Anselm declared
he is writing down a meditatio that had existed only orally before. Then in
Monologium, 9-10, Anselm distinguished writing from images as well as spoken
words, inner mental speech, and mental images (Opera omnia, 1:24-25).5 Anselm’s
theory of mental language destabilizes the idea that the reader’s voice completes
or supplements the text the writer writes. Anselm describes a reader as looking at
(videre, inspicere) the page as one would gaze at a painting—the spectating reader
constructs the text.
Anselm’s concern with meditative reading and the material text was part of
a wider reshaping of manuscript conventions and mise en page that began in the
eleventh century. These new material technologies, sometimes supporting, some-
times igniting somatic reading technologies, included new forms of indices, con-
cordances, and tables of contents, diacritical and construe marks by scribes, later
readers, and teachers, marginal notations of textual arrangement, rubrications, and
others.6 While these technologies and formats elaborated hyperliterate features to
assist readers, they also fostered different ways to use texts, for example, skipping
through a text in search of specific topics or juxtaposing specific passages rather
than reading linearly from beginning to end. In his Orationes sive meditationes,
Anselm produced an open text whose diacritics and formatting encouraged a reader
to dip in and out at various points as the devotional experience directed:
The purpose of the prayers and meditations that follow is to stir up the
reader’s mind [ad excitandam legentis mentem] to the love or fear of
God or to self examination . . . The reader should not trouble about
reading the whole of any prayer, but only as much as, by God’s help,
she/he finds useful in stirring up the spirit to pray [valere ad
Affective Literacy 87

ascendendum affectum orandi] or as may give her/him pleasure. Nor

is it necessary for her/him always to begin at the beginning, but wher-
ever the reader pleases. Thus, sections are divided into paragraphs, so
the reader can start and stop wherever she or he chooses.
(Opera omnia, 3:3)
Although Anselm deployed manuscript features to guide or encourage affective
reading, he also wanted to regulate some possible consequences of these new for-
mats. Modelling reading on monastic meditation (ruminatio), Anselm cautioned
that monks not read too fast or inattentively. While he encouraged a reader to skip
around in the text and abandon the text for interior contemplation, Anselm framed
his meditational text within an ideology of the right reader. Properly read, the text
should incite the reader’s affectio (passionate, volitional, spiritual response) to
reach out toward God, not to focus on the textual images in themselves.
The technique of silent reading, fostered by the construction of a spectating
reader, created other performance anxieties within monastic literate communities.
Anselm writes: “They are not to be reading in a busy place but in a quiet one, nor
reading superficially or hastily but slowly [a bit at a time, paulatim], with attentive
and careful [stubborn?, morosa] meditations” (Opera omnia, 3:1) In themselves,
the techniques of silent or rapid reading were probably not regarded as sinful or
wrong, especially given the complex demands of monastic administration, the
proximity of readers to one another, and the practical need to find information
within documents. But Anselm’s prescription reveals the social ambiguities stirred
up by new literacies. Even as ecclesiastical authorities sought to discipline medi-
tating readers to slow down, new manuscript formats were deployed to facilitate
reading through a text quickly and discontinuously, skipping from passage to pas-
sage. Anselm associates fast reading with haste and worldly attention, but he en-
courages discontinuous reading and privileges pious affect and response over the
“whole” text. When the techniques of textual division are manipulated by a monk
or a countess skipping around in a prayer book, reading at a slower pace and
responding affectively, Anselm imagines the reader to be reading with deeper
spiritual attention. Like Augustine, Anselm abducts the right motives for reading
with non-normative gestures.
Anselm’s contradictory responses to hasty, skipping reading reflect the com-
plexity of readers’ physical, somatic, and affective relations with books which
informed medieval concepts of literacy. New manuscript technologies (dividing
and tagging sections of a word-separated manuscript, tables of contents, topical
indices, pagination, hyperliterate rubrications, schema, marginalia, and initials)
encouraged faster, more complex reading and writing. Divided manuscripts, and
the rapid, quieter, or more complex reading they supported, disrupted social ex-
pectations for meditative reading, slow, careful reading aloud, or performative,
emotive reading. Such material technologies were closely linked with more
interiorized devotion, discontinuous reading, and less overtly affective, performative
88 Mark Amsler

literacy. These reading practices destabilized and renegotiated later medieval con-
structions of how a reader’s voice, body, soul, and intellect are connected in the
act of reading.
The Ancrene Wisse
Working within monastic discourse, the writer of the English Ancrene Wisse
(c. 1225-35) also related public and private reading and prayer, perhaps encourag-
ing female solitaries and religious to adopt some form of silent reading. The
anchoress’s reading practices, more than the texts she should read, are a continu-
ing topic in the Ancrene Wisse, although this aspect of the material “instruction”
has not received much comment from modern readers.7 Here, I’ll focus on reading
practices in the Ancrene Wisse and the question of affective literacy.
The clerical writer identifies reading as a remedy for the sin of accidie (idle-
ness), thus making reading a kind of useful labor, along with physical work and
prayer, which links body and soul (AW, Pt. 1; Pt. 4; Pt. 8). The writer quotes and
translates Jerome’s letter (no. 22) encouraging religious women to “Let holy read-
ing [sacra . . . lectio] be at all times in your hands” (AW, Pt. 4), but he amends the
reading to primarily texts in “English or French” (AW, Pt. 1) rather than Latin.
Texts and reading permeate the anchoress’s spiritual practices. The writer directs
each anchoress to “segge hire vres as ha haueth iwriten ham . . .” (say her hours as
she has copied them out . . .; AW, Pt. 1), “Leteth writen on an scrouwe hwetse ye ne
cunnen” (‘Have written on a scroll whatever you don’t know’; AW, Pt. 1), and “Of
this boc redeth hwen ye beoth eise euche dei leasse other mare. Ich hopie thet hit
schal beon ow, yef ye hit redeth ofte, swithe biheue, thurh Godes muchele grace;
elles Ich hefde uuele bitohe mi muchele hwile” (‘Read from this book each day,
when you are at leisure, less or more. I hope that, if you read it often, it will be very
profitable to you through God’s great grace—otherwise, I have wasted the long
time I spent on it’; AW, Pt. 8). In the last passage, the clause “when you are at
leisure” might seem to contradict the trope of reading as spiritual labor. But the
writer is referring to the psychophysical environment of the anchoress’s reading
(not hurried) and the kind of text she is reading (“this book,” a guide for religious
devotion). The writer stipulates, “ye ancres ahen this leaste lutle stucche reden to
ower wummen euche wike eanes athet ha hit cunnen” (‘You anchoresses ought to
read this last section [the Outer Rule] to your women once each week until they
know it’; AW, Pt. 8). The Ancrene Wisse is a book of instruction and contempla-
tion, that is, a disciplining text.
The Ancrene Wisse situates reading within a wider discipline of bodily regu-
lation and spiritual reflection. As a devotional book, this material guide for
anchoresses gathers together various intentiones of the anchoress’s eyes, ears, and
mouth as she reads aloud or silently: “These servants are the five native senses,
which should be at home and serve their lady well when she employs them well
about their soul’s needs, when the eye is on the book or on some other good thing,
Affective Literacy 89

the ear to God’s word, the mouth at holy prayers” (AW, Pt. 3). Here, the reader is
imagined to focus her senses on an external material object, the verbal and picto-
rial signs on a page, in order to incite her affectio. In the Ancrene Wisse, texts
figure more prominently than images or relics. In the service of God, the anchoress
both looks at and voices her book of prayer and instruction, or bits of text to
remind her of prayers. Such pious reading focuses the female body’s senses on an
inward, contemplative experience organized by the mediating text. The writer simi-
larly encourages the anchoress to focus on her desires during Mass and imagine a
physical gesture, the kiss of peace, with sexualized sacred affect: “Efter the measse
cos, hwen the preost sacreth, ther foryeoteth al the world, ther beoth al ut of bodi,
ther i sperclinde luue bicluppeth ower leofmon, the in to ower breostes bur is iliht
of heouene, ant haldeth him heteueste athet he habbe iyettet ow al thet ye eauer
easkith” (‘After the Mass kiss, when the priest consecrates the elements, there you
should forget the world. There be entirely out of the body. There in shining love
embrace your beloved, who has come into your heart’s bower from heaven, and
hold him close until he has granted you all you ask’; AW, Pt. 1).
While these somatic and affective experiences are located in or on the body
as part of corporeal presence, they are authorized as literate technologies for the
soul or heart. So the writer assigns spiritual texts and reading practices to the Inner
rather than Outer Rule: “Ancre ne ah to habben na thing thet utward drahe hire
heorte” (‘An anchoress ought not to have anything that draws her heart outwards’;
AW, Pt. 8). Writing is assigned to both rules, depending on the context. The
anchoresses are forbidden to write or receive letters since such texts foster worldly
interactions and are an occasion for worldly distractions which can lead to sin. The
senses employed in reading link the body with the soul, thus inhabiting a liminal
position between the inner and outer worlds. The literate senses are also points of
translation. The senses, receptors of the world, can lead to sin or spiritual salva-
tion, depending on the anchoress’s intentio. With a contemplative intentio, a reader
perceives the page of a devotional text and then creates and participates in an
interior experience or pious contemplation. In the Ancrene Wisse, reading is active
rather than passive, especially because the reading recluse engages with the text to
create images and affects of devotion:
Accidies salve is. gastelich gleadschipe. ant froure of gleadful hope.
thurh redunge. thurh hali thoht. oer of monnes mue. Ofte leove sustren
ye schulen uri leasse. forte reden mare. Redunge is god bone. Redunge
teche hu ant hwet me bidde. ant beode biyet hit efter. Amidde e redunge
hwen e heorte like. kime up a devotiun is wur monie benen.
Inertia’s remedy is spiritual gladness and the consolation of glad hope,
through reading, through holy thinking, or from other people’s mouths.
Often, dear sisters, you must pray less in order to read more. Reading
is good prayer. Reading teaches how and what to pray, and prayer
90 Mark Amsler

obtains it afterwards. During reading, when the heart is pleased, a de-

votion arises which is worth many prayers. (AW, Pt. 4).
The English “devotiun” seems to be a good translation for Anselm’s affectio.
Within the frame of a disciplining literate technology, the Ancrene Wisse
writer contrasts the disciplined with the undisciplined mouth (AW, Pt. 4). Sinful,
foul, hurtful words (contentio) can pass through the undisciplined mouth and “hurt
a well-disciplined ear and sully pure hearts” (AW, Pt. 4). The Ancrene Wisse writer
associates an undisciplined mouth with other unruly behaviors and gestures, often
coded as feminine in medieval antifeminist discourse: “with airs and graces, with
expressions and gestures, such as carrying the head high, arching the neck, purs-
ing up the mouth, making derisive gestures with hand or with head, throwing one
leg over the other, sitting or walking stiffly as if she were staked up, giving men
love-looks, speaking like an innocent and putting on a lisp” (AW, Pt. 4).
By contrast, the writer associates a body’s well-disciplined senses, as well
as devout speech and silence, with reading practices. First, whatever prayers an
anchoress might not remember should be written on a “scrouwe” (scroll) (AW, Pt.
1). Then the writer presents a schedule of daily prayers and readings. In the text,
individual Latin prayers are punctuated with directions that prescribe gestures the
anchoress should make in her cell or on her body. The text indicates when and
how the female reader should mark her reading and prayers with the sign of the
cross. Some readings and prayer require that she kneel, others that she stand. For
example, after the Latin and English versions of a prayer to the Virgin, the writer
directs the female reader to “. . . fall to the earth and kiss it at this last verse,
whoever is in good health, and then Aves, in tens together, . . . and kiss the earth at
the end, or a step or bench or something higher, . . .” (AW, Pt. 1). Finally, this
constellation of gesture, prayer, and vocalized reading is also deployed as penance
for careless errors of pronunciation during devotion: “yef ye thurh yemeles gluffeth
of wordes other misneometh uers, neometh ouwer Venie dun et theorthe with the
hond ane, ant al fallen adun for muche misneominge, and schawith ofte ed schrifte
ouwer yemeles herabuten” (If through carelessness you get words wrong or mis-
take a verse, make your Venie [pardons] with only your hand down on the earth.
Fall right down for great mistakes and often make plain in confession your care-
lessness about this; AW, Pt. 1).
The anchoress’s body, especially her mouth and eyes as primary reading
senses, is a conflicted site, open to the world and the page and needing, according
to the male clerical writer, to be regulated in the anchorhold and on the page she
gazes on. But in so far as speech meanders between the mouth as a sense organ and
the soul, the female anchoress’s physical connections with the world are persis-
tently in tension with her desire for heightened spirituality. In the Ancrene Wisse
the female body is a site for creating powerful spiritual experiences through, among
other things, the flesh and affective reading: “ . . . my dear sisters, guard your
heart. The heart is well locked up if the mouth and eye and ear are locked up
Affective Literacy 91

sensibly; for they, as I said there, are the heart’s wardens, and if the wardens go
out, the home is badly protected. . . . However, speech is not the mouth’s sense, but
taste is: however, both are in the mouth” (AW, Pt. 2). Individual books and pieces
of text in English, French, and Latin are sites for not only spiritual regulation of
the senses and religious discipline but also devotional imagination (“During read-
ing, when the heart is pleased, a devotion arises which is worth many prayers”).
Reading reading in the Ancrene Wisse deepens our understanding of affec-
tive literacy in the Middle Ages. The writer’s prescriptions for regulating the
anchoress’s relation to the page, for the gestures accompanying her reading, and
for reading as both solitary and group activity characterize the textual discipline of
the enclosed female confronted with the world. The material page and visible lan-
guage are part of a spiritual discipline which can draw inward, interiorize, the
potential wayward and worldly (female) body. But constructing a female body as
more accessible to the world also establishes the discursive ground for represent-
ing the female recluse’s body as more available to sense experience and affective
response, thus representing her as a particularly acute, active devotional reader.
The devout yet unruly female reader is distinctly represented as handling a text,
reading quietly and aloud, and using a material text with a range of supplemen-
tary, performative textual gestures to support her memory and incite her affective
response. And just as reading in the Ancrene Wisse is situated between the body
and the heart or soul, between the Outer and Inner Rules, writing is also located
between the inner and outer worlds, but in a more distinctly gendered way. In
literate socialization, male writing constitutes the framework for instruction and
discipline, whereas female writing is located distinctly with the Outer Rule. The
writer of the Ancrene Wisse cautions the anchoresses not to become teachers or
scribes, lest they get too distracted by worldly affairs (AW, Pt. 8).
By the twelfth century constructions of reading were structured on two
models. New Benedictine devotional practices challenged customary modes of
devotional reading, cultivated silent reading, and encouraged a privatized, isolated
reader of texts, a reader without ostensive breath, voice, or gesture, as a new model
of spiritual contemplation.8 But some clergy and lay readers promoted or enacted
more somatic, performative modes of reading, such as weeping at the imagined
scene of the crucifixion or yearning with eroticized sacred desire as they read or
viewed images of Jesus as infant or lover.9 At the hinge of textuality, both silent,
gestureless reading and more affective models for literate piety destabilized the
previous literate consensus, triggering a conflict within the medieval social and
disciplinary imagination about what counted as good, bad, or troubling reading.
Without regulated or scrutinizable voices and gestures, a motionless and voiceless
reader, whether in public or private, could be interpreted as mis-reading or reading
in a heterodox fashion. But when contrasted with an extravagant affective reader
such as Margery Kempe, the privatized reader was also interpreted as reading with
greater discernment or deeper spiritual rumination. In the later Middle Ages,
92 Mark Amsler

interpreting literate performativity was framed by a dynamic tension between silence

and gesture.
Images of Reading
Although Benedictine reforms and changes in manuscript format encour-
aged silent or voiceless reading, much later medieval reading remained largely
oral and public (the court) or semi-public (the family table or chapel). Many visual
representations of reading continued to contrast the somatic, gestural, and oral
aspects of reading a text with those of solitary, private, or silent reading. Some
devotional reading practices pressured the boundaries of appropriate or “legiti-
mate” somatic, affective literacy. In particular, affective literacy transgressed and
blurred traditional distinctions between texts, bodies, and responses. This conflict
is embedded within many visual representations of medieval literacy.
Frequently, medieval images of literacy show a reader with one or both
hands on the book. The reader gestures at the page or points at a word or line on
the page. Alternatively, someone reading aloud to instruct an audience was de-
picted with one hand on the page and the other (usually right) hand gesturing
toward the audience (Fig. 1). Representations of St. Ann or the Virgin Mary as
readers typically show the figure with one or both hands on a scriptural text, pre-
sumably a prophetic or Gospel text (Fig. 2; this image is available only at the
Bodleian Library’s website; see the list of figures for the URL). The image of the
Virgin with a book and a child is especially evocative in books of hours and other
devotional texts. Such images construct an intimate reading scene in which a fe-
male body and the infant Jesus are visually or physically linked with a text. The
reader of a book of hours could see herself or himself refigured in the image of the
Virgin reading.
Later medieval images of the Annunciation contextualize the event within
the scene of reading. In paintings and manuscript illuminations, Mary’s hands
sometimes touch, sometimes pull away from her book as the angel interrupts.
Sometimes she is intent on her reading, other times she turns toward Gabriel, who
is holding a banderole to announce Mary’s pregnancy as the fulfillment of the
scriptures. In a leaf from a book of hours produced in the workshop of the Master
of the Gold Scrolls (Flanders, 1410-1415) (Fig. 3), the Virgin turns away from the
open codex in front of her to hear/see the angel’s proclamation on a banderole:
“Ave, Maria, plena . . . dominus . . .” In this image, the act of reading is an ambigu-
ous signifier, connoting Mary’s pious devotion and relation to prophecy as well as
her engagement with the world and text which the announcing angel and the di-
vine seed intervene into. Mary’s maternity and attention to God’s spoken word
(represented by a scroll) compete with her active literacy (represented by a co-
dex). As a reader, Mary can be interpreted as a repetition of the pious female
reader of a devotional text, each captured by the male, oral, divine speech. But as
a private reader, Mary is dramatically interrupted by the speaking angel. Her hands
Affective Literacy 93

are often depicted as withdrawn from the page she is reading, as if divine interven-
tion supersedes textual mediation, pulling Mary away from her modern codex
toward the older scroll, whose inscription both precedes and follows her book,
completes it, and is registered in Mary’s body as the Incarnate Word.
The center panel of Robert Campin’s Merode Altarpiece (c. 1425-1428)
triptych (Fig. 4) complicates this Annunciation motif by presenting not the mo-
ment of intervention but two images of reading. First, Mary is reading intently, her
eyes focused on the open codex she holds in her hands. Meanwhile, the codex
lying on the table behind her, a mirror image of her own, is being leafed through,
but no human reader or hand touches the pages. In Campin’s painting, unlike
many other Annunciation images, no banderole represents divine speech. God’s
word is without voice in the painting, present only indexically. Perhaps the divine
breath which has blown out the candle on the table is the divine breath (voice) of
God silently entering the voiceless, material text. Campin’s painting contrasts
Mary’s engaged, silent reading, focused on a single page, with the Bible on the
table, opened to multiple pages in the image of discontinuous reading. To engen-
der the Living Word, God penetrates Mary’s body and the text all at once, not line
by line. Campin’s painting metaphorically links the Virgin’s productive flesh and
the page.
Campin also links Mary’s maternity with discontinuous, privatized reading
in “The Madonna and Child with Saints in the Enclosed Garden” (c.1440/1460)
(Fig. 5). In the center, Mary holds the Christ child, while St. Catherine sits on the
left looking intently at and thumbing through a large, open, double-columned illu-
minated codex. On the right, by contrast, St. Anthony looks at the infant Jesus (or
is he looking at St. Catherine across the garden?) while holding a closed scroll. We
don’t know precisely what text Catherine is reading, but her manner of reading is
foregrounded. Rather than simply touching or pointing at the page, Catherine’s
fingers are stuck into the pages of her open book. She appears to be reading dis-
continuously in her Bible or devotional book. Deploying pictorial conventions of
juxtaposition and framing, we can interpret Catherine as searching for and reading
the story of Christ’s birth and perhaps earlier prophetic passages. In the painting,
Catherine gazes on the pages, while the scene she is looking for or mentally con-
templating on the page is visually projected for the viewer. And St. Anthony’s
gaze hovers between the Word and the open writing before him.
Many viewers are struck by the naturalized domestic detail of the scene or
by Campin’s revision of the aristocratic female scene of reading in the garden. But
as a representation of affective literate behavior, I think the painting’s provocation
is located elsewhere. St. Catherine gazes not on the maternal scene before her but
rather on the book she holds. In the painting, she is a very engaged reader, her
fingers stuck between the pages as she leafs through the book, the gesture of skip-
ping reading. Meanwhile, the mental representation of her reading, the image of
the Virgin and child, is depicted as a public scene for the viewer of the painting to
94 Mark Amsler

contemplate. The codex book in St. Catherine’s hands is a fluid material object
which occupies her gaze and her spiritual attention. Catherine’s discontinuous
reading is counterbalanced by St. Anthony’s closed up scroll, a sign of textual
mystery and also an earlier literate technology. The scroll presents textuality as
fundamentally linear, closed, less available to skipping, discontinuous reading and
detailed typological interpretion in which the reader compares and links various
passages.10 Between these two kinds of texts and the hands holding them, the
Virgin’s hands holding the child are overlapped in a gesture of caring and praying.
In Campin’s painting, the martyred St. Catherine is reimagined as a devout, fe-
male, discontinuous reader. Unlike St. Anthony, Catherine’s seated, leisurely pos-
ture and literate gestures repeat the image of the Virgin and child but recode the
Christ child as her open text. The Word becomes Text. This material textual ma-
ternity, rendered subtlely in Campin’s painting, is depicted more emphatically in a
Rohan book of hours illumination (Fig. 6). There, the infant Jesus lies in a manger
formed from a closed book—a living Word nestled within a material written word.
Such representations of reading scenes resacralize the materiality of the later
medieval codex within an economy of mostly female bodies. Affective literacy
disturbed this relation even further by blurring or dissolving the borders between
texts and bodies, between one kind of skin and another. Affective literacy operates
most openly at the hinge of reading, where the manuscript reader is at once split
and linked by the text as an object, whose object-ness can be approached, dis-
turbed, or transgressed by the gesturing, responding reader. Therefore, affective
literacy produces textuality and reading responses in the fluid space between ma-
terial language, comprehension, and imagination, between writing and the reader’s
reading body. To elaborate this more transgressive aspect of reading, I turn to
some material traces of affective literacy and transgressive reading. In doing so, I
want to open up the question of eroticized reading in the later Middle Ages.
Transgressive Reading
Earlier, I characterized affective literacy in terms of readers’ emotional, so-
matic gestures and interpretive responses to texts and images. Reading responses
might be pious or heterodox, spiritual or sexually arousing (for example, Guibert
de Nogent’s account of reading Ovid’s Amores or the lovers Paolo and Francesca
in Dante’s Inferno, canto 5), or some of both. One explicit gestural index of affec-
tive literacy are the erasures of words or images, as when a provocative word or
the face or genitals of a god or demon are disfigured on the manuscript page.11
Such textual interventions seek to negate or control the power of the written or
pictorial image, and therefore the gesture presupposes the power of the page which
the affective reader is responding to. Such gestures, pleasures, and anxieties of
affective literacy were disseminated over sacred and secular reading. Late medi-
eval readers’ responses to texts, whether in silent or vocalized reading, whether
part of contemplation or textual trans-figuration, could be intellectual, emotional,
Affective Literacy 95

naive, sophisticated, appropriative, a combination of responses, or something else

again. Textual responses and interpretations are socially framed and contextualized,
but they are not necessarily closed or prescribed in advance.
Medieval devotional readers present a range of interactions with scriptural
or meditational texts. Reading gestures and behaviors, as somatic, emotional, and
interpretive responses, are always part of a broader literate technology for enact-
ing sacred writing, devotional reading, and prayer. Some medieval readers may
have regarded their prayer books and books of hours as necessary fashion acces-
sories, while others like Anselm considered them functional texts for triggering
contemplation and spiritual affectiones. Still others interpreted books of hours as
special or sacred objects. Books of hours concretize prayer and reading as inti-
mate, privatized activities and so presuppose that reading and imaginatively gaz-
ing (inspicere) at the page enable the reader to compose and affectively contem-
plate the divine through the mediation of material form. The textuality of books of
hours brings us closer to the somatic-textual environment, the hinge, of affective
literacy in the later Middle Ages.
As the visual representations of reading show us, the reader’s touch is a key
aspect of the gestural semiotics of reading and also a critical locus for anxieties
regarding silent or private reading. Part of participating in a literate technology as
social practice is understanding the implications of holding the book as a gesture
of textual, writerly, or readerly authority. The one who holds the book—grammar
teacher, preacher, Christine de Pizan in the illustrations for her texts, the Virgin
Mary in a book of hours illumination—holds authority in the imagined textual
community, whether that community affirms or transgresses conventions of offi-
cial literate authority. The image of a reader thumbing through a book, reading
discontinuously, skipping around in the text, deployed elite, scholastic modes of
hyperliterate reading. But such images and gestures also prompted critics of wider
lay literacy to question such readers’ motives and orthodoxy, especially when the
readers were women or wore nonaristocratic clothes.
Margery Kempe (b. c.1373) carried with her the sign of literate authority,
the “Book” of her spiritual life and struggles. But Kempe claimed to be “illiterate”
and unable to decode the written page, and her literate touch and affective literacy
were circumscribed. She could dictate her text, but once inscribed, she apparently
could not gaze on it with linguistic intention, nor touch it with comprehension, nor
revoice it. She might orally recapitulate the narrative, but it would be text as she
remembers it, not text she holds or sees. To access her text as material object
(written language, ink, and skin), she had to hand over her book to other hands,
male clerical readers or scribes, whose voices could open Kempe’s own words
and other books to her. Kempe’s aural perception of texts read aloud, her weeping
and moaning, faintings and “roarings,” depend on her participation in a literate
community and engagement with a narrow range of devotional, affective texts.
But, unlike other real and imagined reading scenes we have considered, Kempe’s
96 Mark Amsler

affective literacy was located in her desire to textualize her spiritual story and on
her own responsive body, rather than in her physical contact with texts them-
selves.12
As objects and sites of multiple responses and interpretations, medieval
manuscripts bear the histories of their readings in several ways. Inscribed inter-
ventions—scribal and readerly marginal glosses, notations, doodles, etc.—are key
strategies of medieval literate technology and well-known traces of medieval read-
ing.13 But affective literacy opens a wider field of textual connections and reading
hinges between books and readers. An embodied reader leaves behind other traces
of the touch of reading and textual response, traces which complicate our under-
standing of reading response, the object-ness of a text, and the range of somatic
textual engagements. The Benedictine trope of inspicere, gazing on the page with
its visible language and pictorial images, foregrounded the devotional book as a
complex sign, as functional text and sacred object. Campin’s painting “The Ma-
donna and Child with Saints” juxtaposes Catherine’s discontinuous, contempla-
tive gazing on the pages of her book with the image of the Madonna and Child.
The contiguity of figures in the painting is the condition for reading across the
distance/difference between the two woman as well as between image and viewer.
Within such an ambiguous semiotic scene, a sacred text could be a metonym for
the reader’s desired or imagined engagement with the divine, or for an eroticized
object or body of desire. Sexual intercourse and erotic passion were frequent tropes
of the medieval mystic’s affective response to sacred texts and images. The ges-
tural traces of embodied affective reading are manifested on the skin of the page.
Metonymy motivates the material economy of affective literacy.
Within this literate economy, some later medieval readers participated in
affective literacy in transgressive somatic ways, remaking the book as an object
and textual sign while engaging it with their hands, lips, eyes, bodies. Consider,
for example, two gestural traces of affective reading in devotional texts: a cruci-
fixion illustration from a book of hours and the image of Christ’s side wound from
a manuscript of Gautier de Metz’s Image du monde (Fig. 7, 8). The illuminated
Amiens book of hours was produced around 1490 for the prosperous general read-
ing market rather than for an elite patron.14 The illustrated text of Gautier de Metz’s
Image was copied in Paris in the 1320s for Guillaume Flotte, a concillor of Philip
the Fair and later Chancellor (1399).
The Amiens illumination shows Christ on the cross surrounded by the Vir-
gin Mary and St. John. The illustration accompanies the prayer for Matins, “Domine,
labia mea aperies . . .” (Lord, open my lips . . .). While the faces of Mary and John
are distinct, Christ’s face is smudged. A reader or readers have repeatedly touched
or kissed Jesus’s painted face as they hold or gaze on the book.15 The warmth of
their lips or fingers has loosened the dried paint on the vellum and blurred the
image. Incrementally, the painted image has moved from the page to readers’
bodies. Like the Host, the image of Jesus in the book of hours is ingested by
Affective Literacy 97

ruminating readers, while readers’ mouths have mingled on the page. Thus, the
material page repeats the linguistic and erotic ambiguity of the prayer. As the
reader prays in Latin, “Lord, open my lips . . .,” aloud or silently, he or she begins
a mental contemplation and a physical response to the image of the crucifixion
scene. When did the paint on the page become softened? After how many readings
did Jesus’s face begin to blur under the worshipper’s lips? People often speak of
how in the act of reading they are “transported” into the “world” of the text. But in
the Amiens book of hours, at this hinge of medieval textuality, the trace of affec-
tive literacy on Jesus’s face is signified by the absence of Jesus’ face on the page.
The manuscript page retains both writerly and readerly signs. The more Christ’s
image disappears from the page, the more the page manifests the image of reading
and re-reading. Unlike inscribed traces (grammatical diacritics, construe marks,
glosses, finger-pointing hands), the trace of reading on the Amiens page is an
indexical sign of bodily gesture whose enactment literally reshapes the figure of
the page itself.
Affective reading, then, is marked as a trace on the skin, in and out of time
and on/in the book. Traces of such reading always confront readers with prior acts
which transmute textuality but only partially determine future readings. The ges-
tural trace of affective literacy on the Amiens book of hours page retains a scandal
at the heart of late medieval piety. While praying for Christ to come into his or her
mouth, the reader motivates the hinge of textuality, closes the distance between
reader and book, between referent and iconic sign, and then kisses the image on
the page/skin.16 The textual image of Christ becomes the object of desire. Such a
reading gesture repeats the priest’s kissing the scriptures or lectionary during Mass.
The image on the page might be an iconic figure or an illuminated initial (arbitrary
letter), but each is imbued with sacred textual power as an image. Each reader’s
kiss warms and loosens the image on the page.
But sometimes a kiss is not just a kiss. A lay reader who kisses Jesus’s face
in a book of hours traces a kind of presumptive act which transmutes the textuality
of the text. This sort of pious reading is a very personal piety and an intimate
literate experience. One or many lay readers’ kisses on the page poach on the
clerical authority to approach the page and control the hinge of textuality in liturgy
and worship. Smudged figures or letters, like the erased demonic or sexual images
I noted earlier, reveal in their blankness affective literacy as an affective negative.
The traces of such reading constitute an absence which simultaneously presup-
poses and reveals the power of the image and writing as image, a power which
readers seek to control, assimilate, or entertain. Like erasures, the reader’s kiss
transforms the page. Traces of reading are available in the absences they leave
behind as much as in the voicing or writing they produce.
While the smudged face of Christ is a striking transgressive trace of affec-
tive gesture, we need to remember that a book of hours is a complex textual sign.
As functional object, the text regulates readers’ responses, focusing them onto the
98 Mark Amsler

page itself, just as the Ancrene Wisse text disciplines the anchoress’s reading.17
The reader’s gestures and vocalizations manipulate the book of hours, a network
of images and visible language, as a sacred object. The prayers which accompany
the illustrations are drawn from the Psalms, Song of Songs, sermons, songs, and
liturgy. If a reader prays aloud, she vocalizes the text and attaches voice to written
language and pictorial images. The written text precedes orality and becomes the
site of oral repetition as well as the regulating object of interpretation and re-
sponse, affective or intellectual, that organize acts of reading. When a reader kisses
Christ’s face on the page, the semiotic gesture remotivates the reading lips as a
complex site of oral/aural textual production, the locus of pious, erotic desire, and
an embodiment of the ingestion metaphor linking the Eucharist and reading.
Now consider a second trace of affective literacy: the image of Christ’s side
wound on the final page of a manuscript of Gautier’s popular encyclopedia, Image
du monde. Christ’s wounds were a fetishized focus of intense imagistic and tex-
tual power in later medieval affective piety and a material as well as conceptual
medium for somatic and affective identification.18 In the center of the illumina-
tion, the image of the wound is partly erased and the black and red paint rubbed
off. Medieval readers don’t usually describe what they have done to a manuscript,
but given that the paint on the rest of the manuscript page is intact, it is quite likely
that the center of the image was gradually rubbed off as it was touched or kissed
by readers of the book. A reader wouldn’t actually have to read the book or even
the words on the page to affectively respond to the image. The pragmatic gesture,
whereby the reader places a finger on the book and points at a word, line, or im-
age, is transposed in the Image du monde illustration into a pious gesture of affec-
tive literacy and a trace of reading. The reader’s hand or lips search the image on
the page, the dark space ambiguously depicting the wound (vulna) as vagina (vulva),
with a reading gesture at once sacred, erotic, scandalous, and transgressive.19 Me-
dieval artists and patrons, fascinated with representing Jesus’s wound as “actual
size” on the vertical axis, associated the crucifixion with the sexualized, maternal
female body. Sometimes, Jesus’s suffering (passio) was analogized as childbirth
(labor). When the reader touches the image of the wound with his/her mouth or
finger, the act provokes the erotic tension of the vulna/vulva overlap. Moreover,
repeatedly touching the image in fact wounds (alters) the page as the contempla-
tive reader composes the meditational scene and enters the text at the wound.
This gesture of affective literacy complicates the gendered and transgres-
sive signification of such reading. As an open devotional image, the open wound
is a metonym for Christ’s body, torn and penetrated, while it also semiotically
associates Jesus’s body with the female body, sexualizing Christ on the cross and
in the book while resacralizing female physiology.20 Repeated gestures partially
erase the sexualized image, thus distinguishing the gestures from the erasures of
demonic images in motive but not in result. But such reading does create another
kind of open text, different from the open text read by a skipping reader or framed
Affective Literacy 99

by scribal glosses. Writing organizes Gesture, while Flesh—reader’s body and

page’s skin—becomes a complex site on which affective gesture, expression, and
writing intersect. Responding with affectiones to images of Christ’s wounds, the
reader of the Image manuscript could engage with the “image” of Jesus as a tex-
tual mediation which deploys an hypostasized part of a woman’s body as the avail-
able locus of sacred experience. The textual image stages its own transgression.
Late medieval affective literacy foregrounds crucial aspects of the semiotics
of reading. The material religious text, as object and as disciplinary language,
could regulate and organize a reader’s somatic, gestural, cognitive, and affective
behaviors and responses. Texts such as Anselm’s Orationes and the Ancrene Wisse
mediated and structured readers’ spiritual experiences and prescribed for private
devotion the linguistic and somatic gestures which could incite appropriate Chris-
tian affectiones. However, like seemingly affect-less reading, affective reading
disrupted the medieval consensus about reading as a performative and pressed the
limits of textuality and bodies, as well as assumptions about orthodox, heterodox,
and normative literacies. Discontinuous reading shifted literate power to a more
active, textually-immersed reader, while more transgressive devotional gestures
toward verbal and pictorial signs on the page reimagined reading as textual perfor-
mance and somatic enactment. Readers’ motives slip behind their affective or af-
fect-less responses, and medieval gestures of reading challenge our own.

Notes
1. See, e.g., Ovid, Heroides, 31.1-2, ed. Arthur Palmer (1898; rpt. Hildesheim,
1967); Horace, Satires, 2.5.51-55, ed. and trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, Sat-
ires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica (Cambridge, 1939); Martial, Epigrammata,
11.16.9-10, ed. and trans. Walter C. A. Ker, Epigrams (Cambridge, 1961);
Suetonius, Augustus, 39, from Lives of the Caesars, ed. and trans. J. C. Rolfe
(Cambridge, 1914-28); G. L. Hendrickson, “Ancient Reading,” Classical Jour-
nal 25 (1929), 182-96.
2. Boethius’ Latin translation of Aristotle’s (De interpretatione) definition is typi-
cal: “Therefore the noun is a vox [linguistic element] which signifies
[significativa] according to convention and without time, no part of which is
significant on its own”; Commentarii in librum Aristotelis Peri hermenias, ed.
C. Meiser (Leipzig, 1877), 1.2. Voces could designate words or spoken words.
Aldhelm (c. 640-709) was one of the first medieval writers to use the affective
term passiones instead of the customary grammatical term prosodiae for
graphic signs such as the diastole and hyphen which helped readers voice
texts aloud and expressively; see Epistola ad Acircium sive liber de septenario
et de metris et enigmatibus ac pedum reguli, cited in Paul Saenger, Space
Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford, 1993), pp. 84-85.
100 Mark Amsler

3. Augustine, Confessiones, ed. Lucas Verhaijan, CCSL, v. 27 (Turnhout, 1981).

Translations are mine, but I have consulted R. S. Pine-Coffin’s (Harmondsworth
and Baltimore, 1961).
4. See John of Fécamp, De vita ordine et morum institutione, cited in Saenger,
Space Between Words, pp. 202-3.
5. Orationes et meditationes, in S. Anselmi opera omnia, ed. F. S. Schmitt (Sekau,
1938-61; rpt. Stuttgart, 1968) (hereafter cited in the text). Translations are
mine. Cf. Saenger, Space Between Words, pp. 202-3, 397n.8; Brian Stock,
The Implications of Literacy (Princeton, 1983), pp. 338-40. Manuscripts of
the Orationes differ markedly. Anselm began the text while prior at Bec (c.
1063-78) and in 1104 dedicated a version to Matilda, Countess of Tuscany;
see Thomas Bestul, “The Collection of Private Prayers in the ‘Pontiforium’ of
Wulfstan of Worcester and the ‘Orationes sive meditationes’ of Anselm of
Canterbury,” in Les mutations socio-culturellees au tournant des XIe-XIIe
siècles (Paris, 1984), pp. 355-64.
6. See esp. Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, Preachers, Florilegia and
Sermons: Studies on the Manipulus florum of Thomas of Ireland (Toronto,
1979); Suzanne Reynolds, Medieval Reading: Grammar, rhetoric, and the
classical text (Cambridge, 1996), 73-87, 118-19.
7. On reading practices in the Ancrene Wisse, see Kari Kalve, “A Virtuous Mouth:
Reading and Speaking in the Ancrene Wisse,” Essays in Medieval Studies 14
(1997), http://www.luc.edu/publications/medieval/vol14/kalve.html; Elizabeth
Robertson’s unpublished essay, “‘This Living Hand’: Thirteenth-Century Fe-
male Literacy and the Female Reader of the Ancrene Wisse.” References to
the Ancrene Wisse are from The English text of the Ancrene Riwle: Ancrene
Wisse (Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 402), ed. J. R. R. Tolkien, EETS,
OS 249 (London, 1962), hereafter cited in the text; Middle English thorn, eth,
and yogh have been given as Modern English th and y.
8. In a marginal doodle from a Fécamp ms. (Rouen, Bibliothèque Municipale
489, f. 65r), the sketched reader stares at an open book but is making no ges-
ture (reproduced in Saenger, Space Between Words, p. 207).
9. See, for example, the accounts of the passionate piety of Margaret of Cortona
and Angela of Foligno in Rudolph Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago, 1985), pp.
92-113. According to her own narrative, Angela began to avoid gazing on
images of the crucifixion because they were inadequate to her mental imag-
ery. But the spiritual narratives of such women were often mediated by male
clerics, and their accounts are complex textualizations of affective piety.
10. In one allegory of Christ the suitor wooing the female soul, the Ancrene Wisse
writer contrasts the “leattres isealet” (sealed letters) carried by Old Testament
patriarchs and prophets with “leattres iopenet” (letters patent), that is, the
Affective Literacy 101

Gospel, carried by Christ himself and written by him with his own blood (AW,
Pt. 7).
11. See Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medi-
eval Art (Cambridge, 1989), e.g., pp. 62, 71, 96.
12. Karma Lochrie, in Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh (Philadel-
phia, 1991), makes a somewhat different, but related, argument about Kempe’s
literacy in the midst of orality: “Kempe situates her own failed speech in a
Latin mystical tradition, at the same time drawing upon it and leaving it be-
hind. Hers is not an enterprise of instruction, but one of desire. This desire, in
turn, seeks out the hearts of her readers where it longs to make an impression
like that of written characters upon the sight. Her voice charges the bound-
aries of uncharitable hearts and textual traditions” (p. 126). While concerned
with the somatic bases of Kempe’s mysticism, Lochrie does not address so-
matic reading beyond mentioning Kempe’s roaring and weeping.
13. See Reynolds, Medieval Reading, pp. 97-120; Gernot Weiland, The Latin
Glosses on Arator and Prudentius in Cambridge University Library, MS
Gg.5.35 (Toronto, 1983).
14. On the network of scribes and illuminators working in the Amiens book trade,
see Susie Nash, Between France and Flanders: Manuscript Illumination in
Amiens (London, 1999), esp. pp. 38-58, 127-48.
15. See Michael Camille, “Gothic Signs and the Surplus: The Kiss on the Cathe-
dral,” Yale French Studies, special issue (1991), 160.
16. Jesse Gellrich argues that illuminators elaborated on the ambiguities and con-
nections among Moses’ rod, a speaker’s tongue, and a writer’s pen; see “The
Art of the Tongue: Illuminating Speech and Writing in Later Medieval Manu-
scripts,” in Virtue and Vice: The Personifications in the Index of Christian
Art, ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton, 2000), pp. 93-119.
17. I am drawing here on Lev Vygotsky’s theory of mediated activity through
self-regulation, other-regulation, and object-regulation; e.g., “Prehistory of
the Development of Written Language” (III, pp. 131-48) and “Sign Opera-
tions and the Organization of Mental Processes” (VI, pp. 39-44), in Collected
Works, ed. Robert Reiber and trans. Marie Hall (New York, 1997). Cf. James
Wertsch, Vygotksy and the social formation of mind (Cambridge, Mass., 1985),
pp. 150-52, 163-66, 178-82, and Voices of the Mind: a sociocultural approach
to mediated action (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).
18. See, e.g., Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture
(Cambridge, 1991), pp. 301-03; Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Re-
ligion, and Society in Medieval English Writing (London, 1993), p. 41; Eamon
Duffy, Stripping the Altars (New Haven, 1992), pp. 238-48; Douglas Gray,
“The Five Wounds of Our Lord,” Notes and Queries, 208 (1963), 50-51, 82-
102 Mark Amsler

89, 127-34, 163-68; Flora Lewis, “The Wound in Christ’s Side and the Instru-
ments of the Passion: Gendered Experience and Response,” in Women and
the Book, ed. Jane H. M. Taylor and Lesley Smith (London, 1997), pp. 204-
29. Scholars have begun to argue convincingly that later medieval affective
piety was more complex and contradictory than it is often understood to be
when interpreted within grand récits of the rise of modernity, individualism,
secularization, vernacularization, or feminization; see, e.g., Andrew Taylor,
“Reading the Body in Le Livre de Seyntz Medecines,” Essays in Medieval
Studies 11 (1994), http://www.luc.edu/publications/medieval/vol11/
taylor.html.
19. In the fifteenth-century Annunciation and Nativity play from Chester, when
the skeptical midwife touches Mary’s vagina, her hand immediately shrivels
up; see The Chester Mystery Cycle, ed. David Mills (East Lansing, 1992), pp.
118-19.
20. See Elizabeth Robertson, Early English Devotional Prose and the Female
Audience (Knoxville, 1990), 32-43; Dyan Elliott, Spiritual Marriage: Sexual
Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock (Princeton, 1993); Lochrie, Margery Kempe
and Translations of the Flesh, pp. 167-202.

Illustrations
Fig. 1. Christine de Pizan, Incipit to Proverbes moraux. London, BL, MS Harley
4431, f. 259v. By permission of the British Library
Fig. 2. Virgin and Child and female worshipper. Book of hours, late fifteenth
century. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Buchanan e 3, f. 74r. (Available
only at http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/medieval/mss/
buchanan/e/003.b.htm). By permission of the Bodleian Library, Uni-
versity of Oxford.
Fig. 3. The Annunciation, Mary interrupted while reading. Master of the Gold
Scrolls workshop, Bruges, 1410-15. Cleveland Museum of Art, Jeanne
Miles Blackburn Collection, no. 21. By permission of the Cleveland
Museum of Art.
Fig. 4. Robert Campin, Merode Altarpiece, Flanders, 1425-28. New York, Met-
ropolitan Museum of Art, Cloisters Collection. Photograph. All rights
reserved. By permission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Fig. 5. Robert Campin (and assistants), Madonna and Child with Saints in the
Enclosed Garden, Flanders, 1440/1460. Washington, D.C., National
Gallery of Art, Samuel Kress Collection, 1959.9.3 (1388)/PA. Photo-
graph copyrighted by Board of Trustees. National Gallery of Art, Wash-
ington. By permission of the National Gallery of Art.
Affective Literacy 103

Fig. 6. Mary with Jesus cradled in a book. Book of hours. Paris, BN, MS lat.
9471, f. 133r. By permission of the Cliché Bibliothèque nationale de
France, Paris.
Fig. 7. Leaf from northern French book of hours, c. 1490. Cleveland Museum
of Art, Jeanne Miles Blackburn Collection. By permission of the Cleve-
land Museum of Art.
Fig. 8. Gautier de Metz, Image du monde. Paris, BN, MS fr. 547, f. 140r. By
permission of the Cliché Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
104 Mark Amsler

Fig 1
Affective Literacy 105

Fig. 3
106 Mark Amsler

Fig. 4
Affective Literacy 107

Fig. 5
108 Mark Amsler

Fig. 6
Affective Literacy 109

Fig. 7
110 Mark Amsler

Fig. 8