Affective Vengeance in Titus and Vespasian

Abstract

Belief that the historical event of Jerusalem's fall was God's righteous retribution for Jewish deicide held primacy of place in medieval Christian thought, signified by its use in the liturgy as well as its prevalence in both Latin and vernacular writings.1 This essay focuses on Titus and Vespasian, late-fourteenth-century rhyming verse poem that recounts the fall-ofjerusalem narrative within the context of penitential romance that evokes the heightened emotionalism com mon to late-medieval piety. The poem's affective stance bridges the gap between text and reader and reader and God, simultaneously forging an empathetic union with God and fomenting outrage against Jews and hatred for them. Titus and Vespasian articulates series of contemporary concerns regarding divine punishment, individual and communal salvation, and the fate of Christendom within God's plan, anxieties that the poet resolves by positioning the poem as an expression of affective piety culminating in the penitential act of vengeance. In its devotional focus Titus and Vespasian engages with the contempo rary culture of affective piety. In their introduction to Cultures of Piety, Anne Clark Bartlett and Thomas Bestul define affective piety as a form of spirituality that emphasi[zes] ... self-examination, the inner emotions, and the cultivation of an interior life [and whose] dominant forms of expressions were notable for heightened degrees of emotionalism and preoccupation with the tortured body of Christ.2 Images of Christ's suffering on the Cross invited pathetic responses in the devout, kindling remorse in the penitents as they meditated upon the pain Christ suffered for their sins. By infusing his narration of Jerusalem's destruction with the emotionalism of affective piety, the poet of Titus and Vespasian transforms the combination of events?the Jewish deicide and the Christianized Roman vengeance that follows?into participatory encounter with the divine, producing the affective responses of love, pity, guilt, and finally the experience of vengeance as penitential action.

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