From Judgment to Passion

November 25, 2002
In this intellectual tour de force, Fulton, an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago, examines the development of a central feature of medieval Christianity: the devotion to the crucified Christ and to the Virgin Mary. Using hermeneutic theory, textual exegesis, and historiography, she probes the "thoughts, ideals, anxieties, ambitions, and dreams that the men and women of the Middle Ages brought to... their imaginings about God." The fixation on divine suffering grew out of sentiments of pity and tenderness during these centuries, and artists, writers and theologians expressed their empathy in poems, treatises, paintings and prayers. Fulton begins her story in the ninth century, when devotion to Christ was expressed primarily in the sacrament of the Eucharist. After 1000, when Christ failed to return to earth as many Christians had thought he would, the character of devotion changed. During the 11th century, Fulton notes, Christians expressed their piety in great holy pilgrimages to Jerusalem; in the popular use of crucifixes; in grammatical debates over the Eucharistic formula, "Here is my body"; and in greater efforts to become unified with Christ through ascetic practices and prayer. By the 12th century, theologians used commentaries on the Song of Songs to construct Mary as a compassionate mother who suffers her son's pain vicariously. Fulton's argument is sometimes obscured by jargon, but she paints in breathtaking strokes a gorgeous tapestry of the loyal devotion to the Man of Sorrows and the Mater Dolorosa.