Devotion and Emotion: Creating the Devout Body in Late Medieval Bruges

Abstract

The words emotion and devotion are used as terms of convenience by modern historians when discussing various aspects of late medieval religion. The phrase emotive devotion has been used to describe an affective form of piety, focused on the sufferings of Christ, that is often regarded as the dominant form in fifteenth-century towns. However, if closer attention is paid to late-medieval usage of the terms devotion and emotion (or rather the “passions”) a different picture emerges. This article uses evidence from Bruges, then one of northern Europe’s most important towns, to argue that the “devotion” most favored, at least among those in authority, was one that was tied to social order. Descriptions of rebellion within the town in 1488 are semantically linked to a familiar scholastic discourse regarding the nature of the body and its “passions.” They are also linked to a vocabulary relating to order—and a “devotion” that in this period was specifically connected with “general” or supplicatory processions. The increasing use of this type of procession in the fifteenth century represents a qualitative change in the way that the citizen body was managed by civic authorities in Bruges and, by implication, in other late medieval towns.