Medieval Spirituality: Textual sociology and the formation of interiority (12th-15th c.) – SPIRITUS

The SPIRITUS project will study the circulation and reception of widely copied spiritual texts in the central and late Middle Ages (12th – 15th c.). To do this, the project will treat a corpus of five 12th-century spiritual works known in some 1,970 manuscripts which, paradoxically, were very widely accessible in the Middle Ages, but have been virtually ignored by historians. The study of this little known European patrimony will demonstrate that spiritual literacy implies an individual and collective transformation at every level of society, including among the laity. Our corpus includes important authors such as Anselm of Canterbury (Orationes sive Meditationes), Hugh of St Victor (De arrha animae), and William of St Thierry (Epistola ad fratres de Monte Dei), and two other works transmitted under prestigious attributions: the Meditationes of Pseudo-Bernard and the Soliloquia of Pseudo-Augustine. The project will combine the fields of codicology, philology, and library history with textual sociology, a new approach that will harvest data in a global, qualitative study of the spiritual readership. The inquiry will branch out in three complementary directions:
- The general circulation of the corpus at all levels of medieval society and its adoption by different “communities of interpretation”, throwing light on some little known readers of the Latin works, especially among the laity, nuns, and new spiritual movements (Devotio moderna, the Celestine order).
- The influence of the corpus on the composition of new spiritual works, especially within the Devotio moderna, which prolonged the impact of these texts in the 15th century and engendered works never before studied from this perspective, such as the Imitatio Christi.
- The role of the corpus in the propagation of devotional exercises, including spiritual reading, meditation, and contemplation, showing how the “technologies of self” (Michel Foucault) favored a more direct relation between the reader and God, both within institutions and on their periphery.
To do this, links will be established between manuscripts, a milieu of reception, and the major evolutions in medieval society such as access to manuscripts and religious texts; the practice of spiritual exercises of reading, meditation, and contemplation; relations between the faithful and the religious institution. Thus, the study of reception, literary imitation, and spiritual exercise ought to renew our understanding of reading in medieval society, from the monastic milieu to the aristocracy and the increasingly literate simple folk.
Two complementary, open-access tools will be used: the database FAMA (recently developed by the CNRS and the École des chartes: fama.irht.cnrs.fr), which will trace the spatio-temporal and social circulation of the corpus using a multi-criteria search for texts and manuscripts; and the SPIRITUS website, which will provide interpretative tools for the data in FAMA, including cartography of circulation in the medieval West, digitization of the most remarkable manuscripts, and the TEI-XML edition of unpublished versions of texts in the corpus.