Mary at the Cross, East and West: Maternal Compassion and Affective Piety in the Earliest Life of the Virgin and the High Middle Ages

摘要

According to a prevailing view in the study of medieval spirituality in the Latin West, the late eleventh and twelfth centuries witnessed a revolution in Christian piety when a new style of devotion, often named ‘affective piety’ or ‘affective spirituality’, abruptly burst onto the scene. Very much at the centre of this innovative spirituality stood the Virgin Mary, whose unique witness to the events of the Passion emerged as one of the primary vehicles for ‘affective devotion’. Nevertheless, it is now apparent that the tradition of Mary's compassionate sorrows at the foot of the cross first emerged in its mature medieval form in the earliest Life of the Virgin, a seventh-century Greek composition ascribed to Maximus the Confessor that survives only in Old Georgian. Although other Byzantine precursors were previously known from the ninth and tenth centuries, this oldest Marian biography, which was their collective source, demonstrates the emergence of ‘affective piety’ within the East already at the end of antiquity. While some Western medievalists have elected to disregard the question of potential influence from these Eastern sources, this article considers the increased presence of Greek monks in the West during the tenth and eleventh centuries as a possible vector for the transmission of this mode of spirituality into the West.