1.1 Prologue

This Element reflects on two texts that are markedly different in historical context, form, and function: the De institutione inclusarum, written by the monk Aelred of Rievaulx for his sister, an anchoress (1160–1162), and the Ordo ad faciendum disciplinam (sic) of the Confraternity of the Flagellants of Santo Stefano in Assisi, affiliated with the city’s Franciscan convent (1327–1329). The former is a rule composed by a Cistercian monk for a woman who had entirely withdrawn from the world and dedicated her life to the love of Christ; the latter is a ritual likely authored by a Franciscan friar for a lay male association embedded in the civic sphere, whose aim was the practice of charitable works.

What links these two texts, and why do they matter?

Both shed light on the dynamics through which the devout accessed an imaginative experience, enabling a tangible and participatory encounter with the divine. Although the dynamics differ radically (indeed, they are almost inverse), both foreground a close interplay between the sensory and emotional experience directed outward to the material texture of daily life, and that which turns inward towards the spiritual domain of imaginative devotion, whether meditative or ritual in form.

In the first case, the rule Aelred offers his sister seeks to direct her vocation of enclosure by harmonising the ‘outward’ customs of the body, lived out in the daily solitude of the cell, with the ‘inward’ posture of the soul, oriented solely towards the love of God. This harmony is continuously shaped through a meditative exercise that begins from the memory of Christ’s life, vividly re-enacted and relived by the woman within her mind.

In the second case, the devotion of the Assisi brethren is an ‘esoteric’ lay liturgy (private, exclusive, and immersive) which the group celebrates at Vespers on Good Friday. On this occasion, they gather within the enclosed space of their oratory, don the confraternal habit, and ‘enter’ into a ritual through which they memorialise Christ’s Passion: first mentally re-enacting it, then reliving it bodily through acts of self-flagellation and weeping. This ritual exercise – statutorily prescribed and mandatory – constitutes the very foundation of the sodality and serves as the generative core of their exoteric practices (public, social, and communal acts) that stem from the brethren’s obligations. In both cases, the processes of sensory and emotional perception unfold through a dynamic of exterior-interior, of closure-openness – one that involves not only the physical dimensions of space and time, but also the individual itself, articulated according to the dual logic of homo exterior (body) and homo interior (soul).

Much has been written on the relationship between the senses of the mind and those of the body in the medieval experience of vision – both of immaterial and of material images. I am thinking, for instance, of the work of Hamburger (Reference Hamburger1998, Hamburger and Bouché Reference Hamburger and Bouché2006), Newman (Reference Newman2005), and Karnes (Reference Karnes2011), and more recently of that of Largier (Reference Largier2022) and Van’t Spijker (Reference Van’t Spijker2004, Reference Van’t Spijker2022), to mention those whose contributions have most influenced my own thinking.

My perspective, however, is dramaturgical – one might even say processual and functional. I am interested in examining how the exterior-interior and closure-openness dynamic influences the construction of imaginative experience; how, the latter, in turn, reshapes the subject’s sensory and emotional perception. This reciprocal movement re-forms a new psychosomatic identity (how the subject redefines their relationship to the divine and to other human beings). In the examples I consider, this dynamic appears to be at once oppositional and complementary.

It is oppositional insofar as imaginative experience requires two necessary conditions. First, the devotee must withdraw from the external world and enter an enclosed space (the cell, the oratory). Second, by isolating itself from its surroundings, the body itself becomes an ‘experiential site’: it opens an inner space of vision and becomes the medium for an alternative form of perception. In other words, imaginative vision requires two closures: enter an enclosed space to shut the world out, then close the senses to that world, turning wholly to the immaterial within. Then, the eyes and senses of the body must close themselves off from material reality and reorient entirely towards an immaterial, ‘other’ reality that unfolds within the interior domain. Thus, imaginative experience rests on a twofold physio-sensory movement: a withdrawal and closing off from the outside, and a simultaneous opening and entry into the inside.

The exterior-interior dynamic is also complementary, in that external conditions help shape the imaginative experience itself. Both the configuration of the visionary space and the structure of the vision are influenced by several factors: the physical environment in which the devotee’s body is situated (filled with objects, sounds, and images); the texts used in prayer or meditation; the gestures and actions of the ritual; and the specific time or circumstance in which the inner space is opened. Environmental contingencies and temporal circumstances each help shape imaginative experience. They also influence how the devotee projects themself into the inner space and – through a process of sensory introflexion, which turns perceptual and emotional faculties back upon themselves – generate an ‘imaginal’ presence of their own real, physical body. Conversely, the way the imaginal body inhabits the imaginative space – how it perceives, acts, and is acted upon – has effects on the real body, influencing outward attitudes, behaviours, and relationships. Imaginative experience thus functions as a training ground for the senses and emotions: a perceptual exercise that disciplines the subject and gradually forms a consonant unity between intus and foris – an inner-outer coherence that becomes a way of living.

This Element investigates what remains constant – and what shifts – in the process by which imaginative experience is formed across its two case studies. It does so by examining the formative process itself: the physical-sensory closure to the external world, the sensory-emotional opening of an inner space, and the production of an imaginal body through which the devotee projects presence into the vision. I show how shifts in the conditions and circumstances of imaginative experience generate distinct dramaturgies of inner representation. These shifts also reshape the sensual and emotional relations between the devotee’s real body and their imaginal one.

I call the devotee’s imaginal body an avatar – that is, a production of the subject’s own presence and a projective relocation of their sensory and emotional faculties. The avatar is experienced by the devotee as their own ‘personal body’, a fully sensitive corporeal form. Through this body they inhabit the imaginative experience, seeing, acting, speaking, relating, and therefore feeling and being affected emotionally in the first person.

I use the term memorial play for imaginative experience because it is an active act of image-making, one that takes memory as its instrument and mnemotechnics as its craft. As Carruthers (Reference Carruthers1990, Reference Carruthers1998) has shown, this process is fundamentally participatory. The images composed by the devotee in their mind are not static tableaux to be viewed frontally; rather, they are three-dimensional, living scenes in which the devotee takes part. Within them, the subject engages directly with the surrounding environment and with the objects encountered, as well as with other figures, experiencing concrete physical sensations and distinct emotional responses. The ordered sequence of these scenes forms a performance played by the devotee as a real, sensual experience.

Finally, I call theatre of the mind the inner space in which imaginative experience takes shape. This is not a metaphor of my own invention, nor do I employ the term ‘theatre’ in either its classical sense or its later, post‑Renaissance – and fully modern – sense.

The theatre of the mind has theoretical foundations that can be traced back to Tertullian and was more fully systematised by Augustine. It is understood metonymically as the foremost of the spectacula christianorum – those spectacles offered by Christian apologists and Church Fathers in opposition to the ludi of the Roman Empire, which they categorically rejected. Yet this was not a new form of material spectacle. Rather, it constituted a radically different way of seeing, one fundamentally opposed to the pagan model. It corresponded to a dispositive of dramatic, first-person knowledge that the Fathers anchored in the epistemological principles of Christian thought.

I use the term dispositive – in the Foucauldian sense of the dispositif (Foucault Reference Foucault, Defert and Ewald1994: 299–300) – to denote a strategy of vision that shifts the spectator’s viewpoint from outside the scene to within it, disciplining the gaze according to a logic of action that reverses the logic of passive consumption. The shift from a ‘spectatorial’ and bystanding ‘seeing’ to a ‘dramatic’ and actant ‘seeing’ entails a redefinition of both representational processes and perceptual dynamics. On the representational front, vision is no longer conceived as analogical or fictional, but as re-actualising – an iteration or intensification of presence. On the perceptual front, dramatic vision entailed a psychosomatic engagement that went far beyond synaesthesia: it involved the individual as a whole, with no separation between intus and foris, soul and body, emotions, senses, and behaviours.

From the anti-spectacular revolution theorised by the Church Fathers – which I have described as a “dramatic turn” (Bino Reference Bino, Bino and Ricasoli2023) – and from the elaboration of the dramatic dispositive, there emerged a new conception of theatre shifted entirely onto participation and immersion. This shift brought with it a resemanticisation of key terms such as repraesentare, agere, fingere, simulare, and imitare.

This idea constitutes a structural and inescapable cornerstone of Christian thought. It contributes to the historical and epistemological grounding of the contemporary category of performance, a concept widely (and often over-) used in medieval studies. Today, performance functions as a methodological principle not only in research on the visual culture of the Christian West (Starkey and Wenzel Reference Starkey and Wenzel2005), but also in major contributions to the cultural history of the senses (Newhauser Reference Newhauser2014), the historical anthropology of emotions (Morrison and Bell Reference Morrison and Bell2013, Rosenwein Reference Rosenwein2015, Boquet and Nagy Reference Boquet and Nagy2018), devotional, meditative, and homiletic literature (Muessig Reference Muessig2002, Steenbrugge Reference Steenbrugge2017, Dutton and Kirakosian Reference Dutton and Kirakosian2023), and public and private practices of reading and prayer (Starkey Reference Starkey2004, Brantley Reference Brantley2007, Gertsman Reference Gertsman2008). In particular, the notion of performance has become a key interpretive paradigm in image theory and art history. These fields have drawn attention to the agentive potential of images. Scholars have emphasised how perception was shaped by the physical and material properties of images – understood both as sensory, tactile qualities and as tangible manifestations of abstract concepts (Nelson Reference Nelson2007, Pentcheva Reference Pentcheva2010, Flora Reference Flora2010, Bynum Reference Bynum2011, Reference Bynum2020, Kessler Reference Kessler2019, Jørgensen et al. Reference Jørgensen, Skinnebach and Laugerud2023). Although grounded in different historical-critical premises, these lines of research all point to the persistence of a performative model of representation – often encapsulated in the notion of ‘experience’. This applies both to studies on the meaning of embodied gestures and to actions within ritual and liturgy (Palazzo Reference Palazzo2014), and to more recent work on the role of emotion in devotional practice (Stevenson Reference Stevenson2010, Gertsman Reference Gertsman2015), or on the affective dimension of meditative, contemplative, and mystical vision (McNamer Reference McNamer2010, Johnson Reference Johnson2019, Mancia Reference Mancia2019, Sanmartín Bastida Reference Sanmartín Bastida2023). In these approaches, scholars consistently highlight the agency of an embodied gaze. This gaze is not abstract, but spatially and temporally situated. It possesses a tangible, almost personal presence, capable of interacting with the elements of a scene that is sensory, dynamic, and operative.

I will begin by outlining the key moments in the patristic development of the dramatic dispositive, highlighting its consequences for the sensory and emotional perception of divine and worldly experience.

It is on this theoretical ground that I will base my reading of the two examples under consideration.

1.2 The Dramatic Turn: Seeing from Within

The first formulation of the dramatic dispositive of vision emerged between the second and fifth centuries, within what Lugaresi (Reference Lugaresi2008) has termed “the Christian discourse on spectacles”. This was not a moral condemnation of the pagan ludi, nor a polemic against their content. Rather, it was an epistemological and gnoseological reflection on the relationship between being and appearance, truth and falsehood, likeness and simulation – issues that had been reconfigured by the personal nature of the God-Truth and by the Incarnation, a paradoxical unity of the invisible and the visible.Footnote ¹ That discourse, though rooted in Late Antiquity, developed into a powerful ideological framework that opposed spectacularity and continued to influence Christian thought well into the early modern era. The Church Fathers – especially Tertullian, Origen, Lactantius, and Augustine – explored how, and through what means human beings could come to see and know the truth of God, made accessible through the incarnate Logos. This divine Word entered the world, acted in history, and revealed the unity of the divine economy of creation.

The core premise is this: because revealed truth is indivisible, spectacle proves inadequate as a dispositive for knowledge. By its very nature, it is double: it entails both a separation between what is and what appears produced by fictional mimesis, and a distancing of the spectator, who remains removed from what is seen and alienated from it.

The duplicitas of the spectacular dispositive unfolds across three distinct visual processes, each producing sensory, emotional, and behavioural effects on the viewer. These are explained through analogies with the imperial ludi (circenses, scaenici, and munera), whose impact on the audience is encapsulated in the well-known Christian formula “spectacula furiosa, vel cruenta vel turpia”, widely echoed throughout the later tradition. The circus spectacle is a visual process grounded in illusion: it releases uncontrollable impulses (furor) that overwhelm perception and stir irrational desire for what is vanitas – a deceptive stand-in for the desire for veritas. The theatre spectacle is a visual process that functions through simulation and generates ‘deformity’ (turpitudo): it alters reality so powerfully that it severs being from appearance, dulls sensory responsiveness, and deforms perception and conduct. Lastly, the amphitheatre spectacle is a visual process driven by distance and results in inhumanity (crudelitas): the physical, legal, and social separation between those in the arena and those watching from the stands becomes almost ontological, enabling the spectator to derive pleasure from the suffering and death of someone perceived as radically other.

These three visual processes demonstrate that the spectacular dispositive is not only an inadequate gnoseological device, but also a dangerous one. Rooted in illusion, simulation, and distance, it produces a gaze that is blind, distorted, and remote, incapable of distinguishing what is from what merely appears. The result is a collapse of discernment that appearance comes to replace truth, with the illusory displacing the real.

From a perspectival error, spectacle becomes a cognitive tension fundamentally opposed to revealed truth and intimately bound up with desire and emotion. Tertullian (De Spectaculis 14–15) counts spectacle among the pleasures of the flesh (voluptas concupiscentiae), which shatter the integrity of the soul (concussio spiritui). By contrast, Lactantius (Divinae Institutiones 6:20) sees it as an endless visual pleasure (voluptas), one that binds the senses to their object. Augustine makes a decisive contribution to the nexus of spectacle, knowledge, and desire – one that will prove foundational for the anthropology of Western Christianity. Spectacle, he argues, satisfies a specific form of desire, which he defines as the lust for spectacle (cupiditas spectaculi) or the greed of the eyes (concupiscentia oculorum). Both definitions are brought together in the term curiositas, which designates a desire to know and to understand that remains confined to what is visible and perceptible – that is, to mere appearances. Alongside sensual pleasure (desiderium voluptatis) and the ambition to excel (ambitio excellentiae), curiositas is one of the three desires that constitute the love of the world (dilectio mundi): a love defined as diligere ad beatitudinem – a self-enclosed enjoyment that seeks fulfilment in its own gratification. According to Augustine, this is the only form of love available to human beings after their fall, when they chose to rebel against God and were cast far from him. Since then, as Augustine explains, the human being has desired and loved the world independently of God, because from a distance he can no longer see that the world is created, nor recognise that he himself is made in the likeness of the divine image. Christian revelation identifies this kind of love for the world as adulterinus – at once a betrayal of God, in which the human being replaces the Creator with his creatures, and a corruption of the divine image in which humanity was made (In Epistolam Ioannis ad Parthos 2:11–13). The three desires of the world have sight in common – metonymically, Augustine takes sight to stand for the whole of human perceptual capacity (Confessiones 10:35:54; Sermo 112, 7). What drives this capacity towards earthly things and holds it fast to them is an affectus misdirected by the voluntas; it turns the human tension for knowledge into ‘scopophilia’, or ‘spectacularity’ – a love of visibilities (Bino Reference Bino2015: 56–59). When a perverse voluntas generates inverted affectus (Boquet Reference Boquet2005: 86), these in turn produce ‘perverse imitations’ of the love of God, which the human subject keeps at a distance:

For Augustine, perverse imitation is simulation: it is hypocrisy – the deliberate split between being and seeming, intus e foris. In sum, the spectacular dispositive concerns perception, desire, and action. It is a remote, outward mode of seeing that sets a misdirected affective process in motion and culminates in a stance of simulation. In the end, it is a duplicity that breeds duplicity.

Christian writers opposed the duplicitas of spectacle to the simplicitas of drama – another dispositive involving perception, desire, and action, but operating in reverse. Simplicitas is a perceptual stance that triggers affective processes and culminates in ways of seeing. As I have argued elsewhere (Bino Reference Bino, Bino and D’Acunto2025), the notion of simplicitas enters patristic exegesis already laden with Old- and New Testament resonances. The simple corresponds to the Hebrew tāmîm: a whole, blameless person who listens to and practises God’s word and is now able to see – indeed, to know – the Word revealed in Christ. Haplous – literally ‘undivided’ – is the key term in the Gospel saying about the ‘sound’ (or ‘single’) eye found in Matthew 6:22–23 and Luke 11:34. It names a gnoseologic and existential posture: a way of knowing and of being. The haplous person ‘looks to God’ with their whole being – heart, eye, word, and deed. For them, God, now accessible to every sense, becomes a living model that can be imitated. This unified, integral vision of the world is incompatible with the distance of spectacle and with the danger inherent in its duplicity. Tertullian (De spectaculis 2) calls it an intimate, inward vision – he uses the term penitus. It assumes an experiential point of view that arises ‘from within’ the drama of salvation: a drama whose ratio the individual has come to understand and in which they recognise themselves as a first-person participant, being a creature made in the image and likeness of God. This dramatic inclusion prevents them from adopting the stance of a spectator who looks on from the outside. Constantly an actor within the drama, the participant enacts their role without any split between intus and foris, between being and seeming; they are not trapped by appearances and will not be deceived by them. Though visible to others, they display themselves only before God – the sole participating spectator, whom Clement of Alexandria calls synagonistès, a co-actor (Lugaresi Reference Lugaresi2008: 406–417). Besides being ‘inward’, the simple gaze is also ‘close-up’ or, better, proximate. This means not only that the individual ‘sees from nearby’, but that they recognise their likeness to God and to other human beings – their very neighbours. Augustine explains that “it is not by spatial intervals that we approach God or distance ourselves from him. By your unlikeness to God you have gone far from him; as you become like him, you draw very near” (Enarratio in Psalmum 99, 5).

This awareness defines the responsibility of the gaze: what one sees depends entirely on the subject’s intention in directing that gaze. Set as the foundation of all knowledge, this principle of responsibility leads to four consequences. First, it reorders desires and affectus: they no longer stop at what is merely visible or remain self-referential; instead, they reach beyond and become transitive. One loves the world not for how it appears, but because it is created; one loves human beings not for their appearance or possessions, but because they share the same ontological likeness. Second, it clarifies that humanity’s role on the world’s stage lies in being creatures similar-but-not-equal to the image of God revealed in Christ. Third, it makes clear that the aim of dramatic action is to recover the lost likeness by taking up the filial role of which Christ is the perfect model. Fourth, it shows that to enact the filial role, the human being must ‘work on themselves’, bringing eyes, words, and deeds into accord with their constitutive status as imago Dei. This ‘doing as’ is an imitation that harmonises and unifies intus and foris, homo and habitus, in opposition to simulation, which tears them apart. In short, the simple gaze generates unity.

Just as the spectacular dispositive unfolds in three visual processes, so the dramatic dispositive takes shape in three ways of seeing – three specifically Christian spectacles, each set in opposition to its pagan counterpart. Augustine states outright that the faithful must be offered spectacles in place of spectacles, almost as an antidote (Enarratio in Psalmum 39, 9). Thus, Christian spectacles replace their pagan counterparts in three ways: participatory contemplation of creation’s beauty – offered in praise of the Creator – supplants the blind frenzy for the vanitates of the circus; the drama of salvation history, enacted in the theatre of the mind, displaces the simulated fabulae of the pagan boards; and acts of mercy towards suffering fellow-human beings in daily life take the place of the pleasure once drawn from the pain of the other in the arena. The conjunction of these three processes of vision constitutes the enactment of the dramatic strategy by which human beings orient their gaze towards reality in order to gain knowledge of the truth and ground their action upon it. For this reason, the three spectacula christianorum are intertwined and mutually interdependent.

However, everything begins with the participatory visualisation of the drama of salvation in the theatre of the mind. This is the only Christian spectacle that is dramaturgically structured, and it serves as the imaginative exercise that first re-orients the gaze towards the world and then shapes action within it.

1.3 The Theatre of the Mind: Agere Memoriam

The re-orienting force of imaginative representation is already present in Origen’s idea of the heart’s inner chamber (tameion) (Perrone Reference Perrone2006) and in Chrysostom’s spiritual theatre (pneumatikon theatron) (Lugaresi Reference Lugaresi2008: 803–805). Augustine, however, remains the best guide to the theatre of the mind as an instrument for disciplining the gaze. His “psychology of human knowledge” – to use Gerard O’Daly’s phrase (Reference O’Daly1987) – gave the Latin Middle Ages the theological framework for understanding the dynamics of interior perception, its relation to sense perception, and the soul’s imaginative capacity.

However, theatre of the mind should not be taken to encompass Augustine’s entire theory of interior vision, refined over more than thirty years of reflection. Instead, it refers specifically to the aspect concerned with a gaze converted and re-oriented by faith towards humanity’s true wisdom, which is cultus Dei: namely recognising the ontological image of God in the human being and actively remembering it (De Trinitate 14:1). Indeed, Augustine employs the noun theatrum for the inner space of vision only when he means that the eye of the mind is focused on the spectaculum spiritale (Sermo 373, 5), the spectaculum divinum (Enarratio in Psalmum 80, 23), the spectaculum verbi Dei (Enarratio in Psalmum 143, 15). Within this context, Augustine distinguishes between the theatrum cordis (Sermo 343, 5), where the drama of salvation – or the deeds of the martyrs – are staged before the mind’s eye, and the theatrum conscientiae (Sermo 306E, 2 and 154A, 3), where the struggle unfolds between the mind that heeds the lex and the flesh that resists it.Footnote ² In fact, Augustine is not speaking of two separate inner spaces but of a single locus – the theatrum pectoris of Sermo 315, 7:10 and 163B, 5 – where two kinds of spectacle follow one another. God and the human being share the same stage, but in different roles. In the first spectacle the human being is a witness: they see, first-person, a scene in which God is the protagonist – or editor who sets it in motion. In the second spectacle, the human being is the performer: a charioteer, a tightrope-walker, the Pauline athlete who strives to align desires and affectus with right will. Here God plays the role of spectator, aiding the human and continually reminding them of what they saw in the first spectacle, which thus becomes the model for conduct.

The inner eye opens onto God’s spectacles in two situations: when a person meditates on Scripture, and when they listen to its public reading – followed by the sermon – during the liturgy. Although these settings differ, they share two features. First, God’s spectacles are utterly incompatible with cupiditas spectaculorum; to ‘see’ them, a person must willingly shut the doors of the senses to external stimuli and purge the eye of the soul of curiositas. Second, both circumstances initiate a process that actualises the ‘memory of God’ already present within the mens of the human being, created in His image and likeness.

Meditation is the technique – or rather, the art – by which memory constructs the presence of the divine (Carruthers Reference Carruthers1998): entirely interior, it demands silence and recollection. As Gehl (Reference Gehl1987: 131) notes, for Augustine silentium is not mere absence of sound but “the pregnant precondition” for the inward hearing of the Word and the vision of the Verbum caro. It is an all-encompassing withdrawal from worldly things, indispensable both to the study of the things of God and to the revelation of eternal wisdom (Leclercq Reference Leclercq1961, Carruthers Reference Carruthers and van Loon2018, Henriet Reference Patrick, Gomez-Géraud and Valette2019). This is the active silence in which Ambrose reads (Confessiones 6:3:3), and the dialogic silence that absorbs Augustine and his mother at Ostia, where – cut off from the world – they glimpse, for a moment, the firstfruits of the Spirit. Such silence, Augustine says, generates a different sensory attention that enables the perception of the divine, immersing the human being into an “inward joy”:

The idea that voluntary interior silence re-orients the senses appears again in De Vera Religione (49–51). Augustine links it to meditative reading of Scripture: only by choosing not to rest the mind’s eyes on the phantasmata with which memory is imbued – and which screen the truth – can a person empty the inner theatre of everything that sends thought wandering (vaga cogitatione) and fill it with God’s spectacles. By contrast, those ‘salutary’ spectacles refresh a soul troubled by vana curiositas and serve as a medicine that heals the inner eye, making it ever more capable of sight. This cyclical purification of the inner eye is continence, a cooperative work of both human being and God. It is not a rejection or elimination of visible and sensible objects, but rather “a collection of the soul’s energy of attention and affectus which has been ‘poured out’ onto sensible objects” (Miles Reference Miles1983: 133). Continence is, first, the human capacity to colligere et redigere in unum (Confessiones 10:29:40): a sensory recollection and re-ordering that restores the unity of intus and foris. It is also the grace of God that frees the inner person from the slavery of concupiscentia. Finally, continence is the ostium – the gate of the heart’s mouth – that guards this restored unity (De Continentia 1–2) and turns it into the theatre of the interior spectacle.

To summarise: through the twin movement of emptying-silence and recollection-sensory introflexion – what Butler (Reference Butler1951: 29–31) aptly calls “introversion” – a person becomes present to themselves and simultaneously situates themselves in the very presence of the spectaculum Verbi Dei. That spectacle then serves as the disciplina – in Augustine’s sense (De Trinitate 14:1) – by which the inner person learns to shape the outer person.

A different imaginative process unfolds when Scripture is heard in public assembly. In that setting, the listener must deliberately turn body and soul away from the tangible voluptates theatrorum. The eyes of the flesh must close to the spectacula nugatoria et vana, blocking the machinery of sensual desire and its after-effects; only then can the eyes of the mind open to the holy spectacles that set desire and emotion back in order. This interior reversal depends on a radical choice of place: the church rather than the theatre. It also rests on a radical choice of object: the truth of Scripture rather than the fiction of the fabula. From that initial renunciation, the composition of the vision begins – a process Augustine describes in several of his homiletic writings.Footnote ³

First, the vision depends on the time in which it is produced. This is not merely what we would now call an ‘occasion’. Augustine posits a strong link between ritual time and real time, grounded in memory’s power to make the past present again, and he explains that link with the verb repraesentare. Thus, the anniversary of the martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicity “recalls the day to memory (in memoriam revocat) and, in a certain way, presents it anew (et quodam modo repraesentat) the day on which the saints … gloriously attained eternal blessedness” (Sermo 280, 1); the celebration of Christ’s Passion is a recordatio that “almost makes present (quasi repraesentat) what happened long ago and stirs us as though we saw the Lord hanging on the cross” (Enarratio in Psalmum 21II, 1); Easter, likewise, commemorat the Resurrection and “in some way brings that event again before our eyes (quodammodo … aspectibus repraesentat)” (Sermo 229D, 2). Employing the verb repraesentare in all its polysemous shades – on which I shall return shortly – Augustine teaches that festal time brings the celebrated event back into the now, fixes it vividly in memory, and presents it before the eyes of the mind. On this ‘return’ of the event in praesentia rests the entire procedure of imaginative representation, which, in a homiletic context, unfolds in two stages. First comes the auditory, sensuous reception of the Scriptural reading, directly linked to the opening of the mental eye: “the sound is in the ears, the vision in the mind”, Augustine observes (Sermo 315, 3:5). Second follows the participatory vision of the spectacle, of which the sermon is the form and the preacher the guide. The orator leads the hearer ‘inside’ the scene: he not only shows what is to be seen – constantly urging them to look, to attend, to compose a living, three-dimensional scene in motion – but also teaches them how to look, becoming virtually an emotional craftsman of mental images. Augustine himself describes this emotional interchange between preacher and audience. In his short handbook on teaching the faith (De Catechizandis Rudibus 15:23) he explains that words ‘strike’ the hearer – the verb is afficere – imprinting in the listener’s soul the very face of the speaker’s affectus. The preacher, in turn, is ‘struck’ by the listeners’ response. This reciprocal co-action, rehearsed in the imagination, readies memory for its enactment in the ritual celebration, where the individuals share – truly and effectively – in the event now made present.

To summarise: the feast brings the event into time; the reading makes it audible to the faithful’s outward senses and opens their inward senses; the sermon presents it before their minds as a spectacle that engages their affectus; the rite realises its presence.

Whether in meditation or in listening to Scripture, the composition of God’s spectacle always turns on presence and is governed by memory. In her study of memory in Augustine, Cillerai (Reference Cillerai2008: 351–352) shows that memory is “the foundation … of the very nature of the homo interior and of his relationship with God”. What makes memory the ‘venter’ of the mens is its power to produce presence and make it perceptible: presence in time, presence in knowledge, and the self-presence that lets a person recognise themself as capax Dei. This self-memory rests not on a Platonic theory of innate ideas but on an ontological affinity between mind and intelligible reality, between the human being made ad imaginem et similitudinem and God. By turning its cognitive tension from worldly things to truth, the individual ‘makes memory of God’: recognising Him as present in the very nature of the mens and actualising that memory. In other words, the individual transforms the memory of God from a ‘constitutive presence’ – ontologically given yet absent until acknowledged – into a ‘living recollection’. Assisted by the grace of illumination and by Christ the mediator, “the road paved with humanity” (De Trinitate 4:1), this living memory enables the individual to return to the divine likeness. Recordatio and commemoratio are therefore an agere memoriam: making the human-God relationship present and participatory now, even though it will be fulfilled only at the end of time. Active memory gives that relationship experiential form.

The nexus between memory and presence is a cornerstone of Christianity that can rightly be called a religion of memory precisely because the actualising remembrance of God’s act of salvation constitutes both the content of belief and the very object of worship. In his classic study of memory and commemoratio in the Middle Ages, Oexle (Reference Oexle1976) notes that the Latin memoria carries two semantic layers. The first, corresponding to Greek mneme, is the faculty of recalling – bringing latent knowledge and experience back into the present. The second, matching Greek anamnesis, goes beyond recollection: it is a process that makes the past operatively present. Contemporary theological reflection on anamnestic processes likewise distinguishes between subjective memory (mere recollection) and objective memory (the memorial), the latter alone being able to render the past salvific act present without duplicating or repeating it (Mazza Reference Mazza2007).

This distinction between mneme and anamnesis is characteristic of medieval Christian thought, which always understood representation as a memorative and dramatic process – never as an analogical, mimetic reproduction. The revelation of a God who makes himself present in the world – Mondzain’s apt “carnation iconique” (Reference Mondzain2003: 56) – undermines the Platonic-Aristotelian notion of representation, which here I take to mean a copy-like and defective reproduction (replica), as Palumbo (Reference Palumbo2008) details.Footnote ⁴ Notably, the sense of repraesentare as ‘replicate/copy’ is absent from patristic and medieval Latin lexica and does not occur in liturgical, exegetical, or homiletic sources until the early modern period (Bino Reference Bino and Cariboni2021b).

Instead, three principal semantic foci can be isolated. The first refers to an intensification of presence proper to epiphanic showing: it denotes both the physical act of presenting something to the senses, and the mental visualisation of an object, understood as speculative ‘apprehension’. The second refers to the iteration of presence: the ‘bringing back’ of something in space (‘returning it’) or in time (‘reliving it’). The third invokes the logic of vicariousness: it covers both systems of personal delegation (‘acting on someone’s behalf’) and figurative or symbolic modes of signification (Hofmann Reference Hofmann1974, Ginzburg Reference Ginzburg1999: 97–119, Lagerlund Reference Lagerlund2007).

Rather, the polysemy of repraesentare concerns the modes of presence (physical, intellectual, symbolic) and the ways of producing it (strengthening, iteration, and vicariousness). When a human being repraesentat salvation‑history, they are not reproducing an identical duplicate; instead, they enact its memory and ‘make it present’, presenting themselves on the stage where it unfolds. They make it present and make themselves present, both by meditating on Scripture in the theatre of the mind and by re‑actualising it within the rites.

How that presence is produced and played out is what I explore in the two texts analysed here.

1.4 Avatar: Production of Presence

In light of the dramatic dispositive of vision and the memorial sense of representation, it should now be apparent why I chose the term avatar to name the imaginal body the devotee fashions in order to be present within the memorial play. Even so, a few further clarifications are needed, chiefly of a semantic nature.

The contexts in which the term avatar is used are mostly two.

The first is its original setting. In Sanskrit, avatāra (Latin descensus) comes from the verb avatṛ, meaning “to descend into/from”. In Hindu tradition it denotes a deity – most often Viṣṇu – who descends among human beings in a visible form to restore cosmic order and guide humankind. Because Hindu cosmology is cyclical, avatars recur, and each one is a (frequently partial and non‑human) manifestation suited to a specific moment. When its task is complete, the avatāra dissolves or is re‑absorbed into the god (Kinsley Reference Kinsley, Eliade and Adams1987: 14–15). Comparative theologians who study the deity’s descent as avatar in the various Hindu traditions and set it beside the Christian Incarnation of the Word come to the same conclusion (Parrinder Reference Parrinder1997, Sheth Reference Sheth2002, Michael Reference Michael2016). To them, both phenomena are forms of presence – what Gumbrecht (Reference Gumbrecht2004) calls “productions of presence”: their outcome is the tangibility proper to what is material. The avatāra, however, is a theophany. It is neither the god in full ontological presence nor a mere appearance; rather, it is a descent – which entails a rupture – that is both ahistorical and recurrent, assuming a concrete, earthly form that makes the divine perceptible, albeit only for a time. Christ, by contrast, is God’s revelation: the personal union of divine and human natures; he is Verbum caro, and not simply Word in flesh. The Word (the Son) is consubstantial with the Father, the co‑essential image of God. His coming is God’s birth into human existence – within the mutable dimensions of space and time – and entails kenōsis, the self-emptying of the atemporal, immutable mode. The Incarnation is therefore a once-for-all historical event, permanent in its effect (through the Resurrection, human nature is configured to God’s and abides in that state – see Braumann Reference Braumann and Coenen1976).

In this first context, an avatar is a form of the subject’s presence; what varies is how that presence is produced and its very type – merely apparent or enduring.

The second context is contemporary immersive media within the wider field of audiovisual technologies, where avatar refers to “graphical representations functioning as digital proxies through which the users of the internet, of a cyber-community or a computer–based interface … interact with synthetic objects or other avatars in the virtual world” (Pinotti Reference Pinotti and Aldouby2020: 33). The avatar’s required link to the real subject, together with its wide formal range – “ranging from simple drawings or photographic (self–)portraits to elaborate figures produced by CGI” (Pinotti Reference Pinotti, Geil and Jirsa2023: 190) – means that an avatar is not merely a reproduction; it is also “a powerful identity‑operator that allows for an infinite number of negotiations of selfhood” (Pinotti Reference Pinotti and Aldouby2020: 33). The negotiation of a subject’s identity through avatars in immersive fictional environments has long been at the centre of interdisciplinary debate (mediological, philosophical, psychological, and neuroscientific) which has examined its mechanisms and emotive‑sensory effects using various methodological approaches. In this field, too, the category of presence plays a fundamental hermeneutic role and is interwoven with that of point of view. Particularly, scholars note that avatars correspond to different models of subject presence. They do this by manipulating two aspects of experience: the spatial dimension – the feeling of ‘being there’ – and the temporal dimension, which is tied to the perception of action and movement (Eugeni Reference Eugeni2018). The experience of inhabiting a virtual space–time that is nevertheless fully sensory and emotional varies with what Pinotti (Reference Pinotti and Aldouby2020: 39) calls the “avatarisation of the gaze” – that is, the extent to which the subject’s viewpoint overlaps with that of the avatar. In other words, it changes depending on how closely the user’s own point of view aligns with that of the avatar. It reaches its highest degree when the subject maintains “the visual and aural position” of the avatar, which Eugeni (Reference 62Eugeni2012: 25) has defined as the “first person shot”: “a figure which expresses in sensorial terms … the idea of subject and subjective identity. … It represents the sight of located, embodied, enworlded, active, dynamic, and hybrid agents …, and consequently, its perceptual, practical, emotional, living and ongoing experience”.

In this second context, an avatar is always a fictional stand‑in for its real–world user, bound to that user by an identity link. Yet the modes of representation shift, producing a semantic and functional short‑circuit between the duplicative reproduction of the subject (the avatar as double) and the complex, experiential production of a sensation of presence.

The way I use the term avatar borrows something from both earlier contexts: the first, concerned with forms of presence, and the second, with modes of representation. However, the differing semantics of representation, the Christian dramatic dispositive of vision, and the ‘immersive’ effects this dispositive exerts on medieval narrative and figurative forms – emphasised by Bleumer (Reference Bleumer2012) – together reshape the mechanisms of presence and participation inherent in imaginative experience.

Against this backdrop, I define the avatar as a ‘postural figure’ that enables the subject to re-locate their perceptual and emotional faculties and thus make themselves present inside the imaginal environment they construct. The avatar is not the subject’s double; rather, it is a reconfiguration of the subject’s psychosomatic unity (in Bynum’s sense of persona, Reference Bynum1995: 157–199). This reconfiguration allows the subject themself to perceive, in a fully personal way, a form of experience that is distinct from ordinary material reality. Four stages lead to this postural configuration of the avatar, which I outline next.

First, the discipline of the physical body: through a series of material operations (silence / closure / emotional and sensory isolation; the ordering of space and time and their qualities; specific postures and gestures, and so on), the physical body prepares the construction of the imaginal environment.

Second, the formation of an inner gaze (by gaze I mean perception) through intentio understood as the “creative tension” that embraces “concentration, ‘intensity’ of memory, intellect, and … emotional attitude” (Carruthers Reference Carruthers1998: 15). Intentio does not shift the viewpoint – it remains the subject’s own, in the first person – but it does change the orientation of the gaze (where one looks) and its affective colouring (how one looks). In other words, intentio names both the ‘direction’ of the eye and its ‘disposition’: a posture of the gaze that guides vision and gives it an emotional perspective.

Third, the introflected and affectively positioned gaze produces the presence of the imaginal environment and furnishes it with a diegetic framework, according to a ‘dramatic and perspectival schema’ that determines its form, movement, and emotional impact. It achieves this by using memory as a “compositional art” (Carruthers Reference Carruthers1998: 9) and by drawing on what Kiening (Reference Kiening2019: 59) calls “media forms”, meaning “all those things [texts, sermons, objects, images, liturgical‑ritual actions etc.] that can be brought into view for the senses or the imagination” and create the impression “that one is present to the events oneself”.

Fourth, the subject re‑locates themself inside the dramatic environment, producing their presence as a ‘character in the drama’; in theatrical terms, they step onstage and assume a specific role. Since the drama displays memorative characteristics, the subject’s re‑location follows the re‑presentational logic of memory rather than the duplicative logics that set the spatio‑temporal dimension of reality against that of fiction. In this process, the subject enters a ‘present’ and becomes the agent of their own being‑there in time and space, actively constructing and manipulating both spatial and temporal dimensions of representation. The role the subject enacts in the memorial play can vary. It may coincide with the role they have chosen in ordinary life, or it may merge with that of particular character in the drama. In the first case, the subject projects their personal identity into the play and adopts the postural figure that matches their own model or habitus of life. In the second, they quite literally step into another’s shoes, adopting that character’s viewpoint, actions, gestures, sensations, and emotions. In both scenarios the avatar generated reinforces the subject’s personal presence: it gives interior posture a concrete, physio‑sensory form and turns it into lived experience.

To sum up: the first two stages deal with the sensory‑emotional introversion that prepares the vision, while the third and fourth are re‑presentational processes, shaping the vision’s dramaturgy and the part the subject plays within it. Both instances are, in effect, productions of presence.

1.5 Dramaturgies of Presence

Viewed through the re‑presentational processes just outlined, the two texts I examine disclose two distinct dramaturgies of presence: one meditative and inward, the other ritual and outward. In each case the devotee engages in their dramatic relationship with God. What makes them especially valuable for the history of the senses and emotions is that, in both cases, this relationship unfolds within the drama of Christ’s life and reaches its climax in the Passion scene. Whatever happens to Christ, and whatever he feels, is seen and lived by the devotee according to different postures that are mutually bound to the way the scene itself is constructed, that is, its underlying dramaturgical schema.

Thanks largely to the work of Chazelle (Reference Chazelle2001) and Fulton Brown (Reference Fulton Brown2002), it is now well established that the ways in which the Passion was conceived, narrated, and ‘set in images’ changed over the centuries in step with the growing significance that Christ’s flesh acquired in contemporary Christological, soteriological and anthropological reflection. From the Carolingian era to the eleventh century, Christ’s true humanity was crucial to the three great debates on images, divine predestination, and Eucharistic realism. During that period, the representation of the Passion came to function as a ‘discipline of the gaze’: it taught the devotee to see the suffering body of Jesus on the cross as if present (quasi praesentialiter) and close at hand. Narrative, exegetical and euchological texts, together with rites and figurative art, offered a dramatic image of the Crucified’s wounded body, training the believer’s eyes to manage that powerful ‘sense of presence’, to form an engaged relationship with that body and to feel an appropriate emotional response. By contrast, between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, the radical transformation of Passion imagery must be read against a different backdrop: the growing importance of the senses and emotions for defining the individual, the rising prominence of the laity, the explosion of the mendicant orders and the flowering of Eucharistic devotion. Moreover, a strong ‘sense of history’ and what Hardison (Reference Hardison1965: 43) termed a “search for reality” led to an expansion of the Passion narrative, transforming it into a drama articulated in scenes, each composed of minutely rendered actions. The ‘in-presence’ relationship between believer and God shifted progressively onto the plane of concrete sensual perception and of active participation in the whole Passion event. The believer’s involvement unfolded in stages. At first, one merely learned to see Christ’s pain. Seeing grew into sharing that suffering. Sharing deepened into identifying with the one who felt it. Identification, in turn, led to conforming: the devotee became, in the first person, suffering flesh and grieving heart. In this way an inward sense of presence was transformed into bodily sensation and concrete action, a shift that ultimately generated dramatic re‑presentations of the Passion, public and community-related (Bino Reference Bino2008).

The texts I have chosen clearly illustrate this second shift, from seeing to acting, from sharing to conforming, because each one offers a different representational scheme that matches the posture the devotee adopts to build the scene, inhabit it, and perform a role within it. Three postures recur most often.

The first posture is affective participation. The devotee’s gaze is situated ‘inside’ a relationship that shapes how the scene is framed: what is represented is not what happens to Christ, nor his actions, but the sensations and emotions experienced by someone with whom one has an affective bond. This is not a generic ‘affective piety’. Rather, it refers to affectus as a “form of representation”, a notion – clarified by Lia (Reference Lia2007) – that is distinctive of Cistercian theology, and in particular of Bernard of Clairvaux’s theological aesthetics. Etymologically, affectus is the past participle of afficere. In the passive, affici means ‘to be touched’, ‘impressed’, and therefore ‘altered’ or ‘drawn’. Hence, affectus names both God’s action, imprinting His image on humanity at creation, and human longing for that image. It is, in short, the ‘loving relationship’ between God and humankind: the reciprocity that bound them before the Fall, and the bond re‑established by the Incarnation and Passion of Christ. In the latter case, affectus denotes God’s restorative love, whereby, by making Himself similar to humanity, He reaches the depths of its dissimilarity and offers the possibility of returning to the image. As a form of representation, affectus unfolds in fraternal and friendly bonds but, above all, in spousal love – centred on Mary Magdalene – and maternal love, which makes the Virgin’s affection the dramaturgical key to Christ’s life. Within the Passion narrative, the complementary meanings of Magdalene’s tears and Mary’s tears gave rise to traditions of the lamentation and compassion through which the interplay of affective roles enacted by those who took part in that event could be ‘staged’.

The second posture is mimetic identification. Here the devotee’s gaze moves from within an affective bond to standing with the figure to whom that bond is directed. The scene is now watched from inside the action: the devotee lives each event alongside the protagonist, copying their gestures and sharing their feelings and sensations in a psychagogic process of identification. The viewpoint is not fully first‑person; rather, the gap between observer and observed collapses into a single, aligned subjectivity. This change of perspective is decisive. It inserts an ‘as’ into the act of representation and activates a principle of ‘fiction’ that is not simulation but, in Bettetini’s (Reference Bettetini2004) terms, a “figure of truth”: the self is moulded by imitating the other until identification is achieved.

Franciscan spirituality adopted this posture and pushed it to the limit. As a concrete enactment of the Gospel in living flesh, the sequela Christi was not merely a ‘doing as’ Christ does but a ‘becoming like’ him, namely a reshaping of the self until full conformity is reached. This embodiment of the loving relationship with God leads to a third posture: complete identification. Here the devotee goes beyond projecting themself into the scene, seeing Christ’s presence in a sensual way, beyond forming an affective bond, beyond imitating Christ’s actions and sharing his emotions. They identify with him so completely that their natural body – and every sense – becomes a Christic body. This new perspective opens up two participatory levels of the Lord’s life, especially in relation to his Passion. On the social, chiefly lay level, devotional practices aimed to reshape human relationships through Passion piety, treating Christ’s suffering as the paradigm of concrete charity; from this impulse emerged the so‑called ‘theatre of mercy’, expressed above all in confraternal rites. On the personal and mystical level, devotees pursued an intimate imitation and a full physical‑mental‑ethical conformity to Christ. From this sphere arose what Bartolomei Romagnoli (Reference Romagnoli, Alessandra and Ricci2021) calls the “drama of sacrificial identification”: a continual interweaving of presence‑vision (contemplatio), affective participation (compartecipatio), and mimetic identification (conformatio).

The following sections investigate how these postures function within the two dramaturgies of presence and what re‑presentational and psychosomatic effects they produce.

2.1 The Regula: Economy of Presence

In the prologue, Aelred briefly states what his book is (Inst. Incl.: 1–16). It is not a schematic formulary of practices (formula certa) devised to direct the private manner of life his sister has embraced for Christ. Rather, it is a founded rule (certa regula) that will not guide her alone in bringing into harmony (ad componendum) the condition of the outward man with her vocation, but will also serve other women who choose a similar life (Inst. Incl.: 176–79).Footnote ⁸ As he had stressed in the Speculum Charitatis (3, 35), every rule has its own specific way of ‘ordering’ the life of those who voluntarily renounce the world and offer themselves to God. The rule not only gathers the exercises required of body and spirit; it ‘manages’ them, modifies how the practices are to be observed and distributed over time, how spaces are to be organised, and how interpersonal relations are to be conducted. This internal ‘economy’ forms the identity‑bearing armature of any rule: it must be known, weighed, and observed by anyone who undertakes it, for it will shape a determinate habitus vivendi and an equally determinate affective relation to God.

Both Aelred and his sister chose a life withdrawn from the world and dedicated to God. Yet, the two choices differ markedly. As L’Hermite‑Leclercq (Reference L’Hermite Leclercq1999) underscores, Aelred is fully aware of this difference and builds his treatise upon it. He knows himself to belong to a community‑body of which every monk is a member: the Cistercian rule he embraced orders the physical and spiritual practices that regulate spaces, times, actions, and speech within a single ‘relational unit’. Its aim is to shape a collective identity – a group conscious of sharing a pattern of behaviour (Bynum Reference Bynum1982: 102–106). He also knows that his is a horizontal community, grounded in the voluntary and unanimous adherence of many to charity (Cariboni Reference Cariboni2011), or – in Rosenwein’s terms (Reference Rosenwein2006) – an “emotional community”. Aelred translates the ideal of charity into a precise “communal affective model” (Boquet Reference Boquet2005: 275), namely spiritual friendship, which he crystallises in the image of the familial affection between Jesus and the disciple John with which he concludes the Speculum Charitatis (3:110).

The sister’s choice, by contrast, is an isolated, solitary life intra cellulam, an enclosed space with the exit barred (obstruso exitu). On entering it she performs three acts: she renounces the world; she hides herself from the world, desiring not to be seen (non videri); she dies to the world and is buried with Christ (Inst. Incl.: 439–442). This burial – as Jones (Reference Jones2012) shows in his study of the English rites of enclosure – is less a death than an initiation into a new life. The anchoress’s isolation is thus a spatio‑temporal shift of presence: she is absent from the world’s stage and no longer keeps the time of its performance. Her solitude is a ‘being with Christ alone’; all other relations are excluded. Therefore, the rule Aelred writes has to administer this form of presence according to the spatial and temporal order of the ‘interior’, disciplining a single psychosomatic identity and directing it to the one relationship with Christ. The sensory and affective dynamics it governs aim not at charity ‘tasted’ in the communal affect of the monastic familia, but at the exclusive love of two lovers. The model is spousal love, epitomised by the restful, delicious embrace of Magdalene at the feet of the risen Christ, the goal of the first of Aelred’s three concluding meditations (Inst. Incl.: 1235–1237).

If a spousal relationship is the rule’s telos, the rule must first discipline the cell, making it a space that ensures the outside’s absence. In doing so, it produces a double presence of her alive, yet dead to the world, and him, present and living “to the end of the world” (Matthew 28: 20).

2.2 The Cell as Body: The Discipline of Presence

Aelred begins the rule by constructing the cell. He does so in two stages: a pars destruens, explaining how the cell is not to be inhabited (Inst. Incl.: 16–122), and a pars construens, shaping the posture of the outward man through a strict discipline of silence and time, by which he orders all activities and all relations (Inst. Incl.: 128–438). In both instances, he assimilates the cell to a body and uses this rhetorical figure – typical of the monastic tradition – to describe how material reality is perceived and its psychosomatic effects on the individual. In the pars destruens, the cell is an ‘unprotected body’ that loses its unity with the soul, which is exposed to the world’s unruly sensuality. By contrast, in the pars construens, the cell is a ‘guarded body’ that keeps its oneness with the soul.

Aelred sets in opposition disorder and perceptual–emotional order, a contrast to be read against the background of his anthropology of the affections, effectively studied by Boquet (Reference Boquet2005). In this case, however, he describes the process of perfect affective ordering that leads the individual to mystical union with God – a process he had already outlined in Sermon 32 for the Feast of the Purification of Mary (Boquet Reference Boquet and Dutton2017: 184–189). The person, he explains, is like a palace in which the mens rationalis is the sentry: it guards the body-as-building and keeps watch by day over voluptas and vanitas and by night over the vices. The bodily senses are the doors that open onto the exterior atrium (memoria), through which evil (cupiditas, articulated in the three desires for knowledge, wealth, and carnal pleasure) can enter, as well as good things (caritas). Through the door of thought (cogitatio), they pass into the interior atrium of the inner man (delight) and immediately enter the vestibule, where the will sits in judgment, choosing what to admit to the domus of consent. There the person feeds on its desires. Mystical union occurs when one keeps vigilant guard over the senses (the accesses to the palace’s exterior atrium) so that memory is wholly occupied by the Lord, who passes through the body-as-building and inhabits it. When consent is joined by the affect of love and the delight of the spirit, everything passes into the most precious part of the person (the nuptial chamber), where the most intimate embrace takes place.

In our context, Aelred seems to invert the similitude – no longer the body as a building, but the cell as a body – and he describes the process of affective disorder. The pars destruens begins with an image of a split between the recluse’s body and soul: her membra are shut within the cell’s walls, yet the mens fails to keep watch; instead, it wanders aimlessly, splinters into worldly interests and anxieties, and is stirred by impure desires.Footnote ⁹ This split generates a sensory and affective tension towards the world, contrary to the cell’s function. Aelred renders it through the image of the woman perpetually seated at the cell window, which has become almost her ear and mouth. The recluse listens and speaks: her sense‑windows open, letting in voluptas, which then spreads through the rest of her limbs. When she, alone again, reflects (cogitat) on what she has heard, everything returns in the form of an image before the eyes of the heart. The interior vision rebounds onto her senses and dulls them (the tongue stammers, sight grows dim, the body sways), preventing her from devoting herself to the memory of God. Aelred repeats the point several times: to sit at the window is to leave the cell and let the world in with its three lusts. The cell/body is transformed: from a place of closure and intactness, it becomes a market, a school, a hospice, and – its access flung wide (dilatato foramine) – even a brothel through which one goes in and out.

It is therefore necessary to guard the cell’s entrances and keep vigil over anyone who approaches. Guarding and protecting are the key words of the pars construens, which seeks to restore within the cell the shattered body-soul unity through a discipline of presence articulated in three actions: exclusion, perceptual‑emotional introflection, and temporal ordering. First, the senses/door-windows are kept under guard to ensure that the world remains shut outside. Yet because what is exterior can enter through interpersonal relations, these relations are regulated so that every affective motion ad extra is contained or eliminated. Hearing and active sight are moderated because they generate inner images that occupy memory; touch and passive sight (the way one shows oneself through posture and clothing) are sources of vice and are almost entirely eliminated. Second, silence becomes the body’s stable condition (sede et tace), required for the inner peace of the soul. Lest that peace be disturbed, exterior speech is disciplined, establishing when to speak, about what, with whom, and in what manner. Third, the strictest bodily needs (meals, sleep), work, and – above all – interior speech (reading, prayer, meditation) are distributed according to a detailed temporal order, daily and yearly. The daily order follows the liturgical rhythm of the canonical hours (nocturn, matins, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers, and compline). The yearly order overlays the cycle of the seasons onto ritual time and is divided into two blocks: from the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross to Lent, and from Easter to the Exaltation of the Cross. At the centre stands Lent, the privileged time of purification that prescribes a regime of total silence and of fasting of the senses and from activity, which facilitates delving into Scripture, a realignment of the inner movements of the heart, and the affective tension towards God (Dietz Reference Dietz2022). Lent is the emblematic symbol of the fast from the world: it becomes the exemplary time of the cell and, at the same time, the season in which the recluse desires her Lord even more. Lent is her “wedding day” (R.R.: 59).

The establishment of this precise temporal order marks a pivotal moment in Aelred’s discipline of the cell/body. Christian time is a ferial continuum punctuated by festal events – a state of perpetual mnemonic tension that allows the person to bridge the gap between the finite dimension of the human being and the infinite dimension of God, made accessible through the remembrance of Christ’s incarnation, passion, and resurrection (Alzati Reference Alzati, Benvenuti and Garzaniti2005). Commemoratio ‘brings back’ the mystery of salvation from past and future into the hodie of the present, allowing one to experience it: as for Augustine, so for Aelred representation is a mnemonic process understood as the strengthening and reiteration of presence.Footnote ¹⁰ Entering a ritual order of time is therefore a necessary condition for the mechanisms of production of presence.

In sum, the discipline of the cell recomposes the recluse’s psychosomatic unity within the body and, through solitude and silence, produces her presence in a different spatio‑temporal dimension. Yet, it shapes only the exterior posture of the one who chooses reclusion, limiting itself to producing a mere ‘being in the presence of Christ’: “she must sit alone … believing that when alone she is never alone, for then she is with Christ” (R.R. 50). For this presence to become active – “listening to Christ and speaking with him” (R.R.: 51) – the woman must assume an appropriate inner affective configuration. That is the task of the rule’s second section.

2.3 The Body as Vessel: Affective Posture

At the outset of the chapters devoted to ordering the inner man, Aelred urges the anchoress to redirect her gaze, to fix it on her soul, and to centre her attention there. Cogitare is the foundational act on which the rule’s second section is built: it is the work of the mens which, having gathered and introflected all the senses, thinks and re-thinks (revolvet) its own condition and how to give that condition a form suited to a relationship of love with God. The norms that follow are thus ‘spiritual exercises’ meant to discipline the anchoress’s psychosomatic unity within the soul, and to orient it towards the dilectio Dei. Body, senses, and desires are reread in this light. The body becomes a delicate container – a sensual earthen vessel that guards the woman’s virginity, the precious and fragrant treasure the Lord longs for like a lover. Silent solitude, by contrast, becomes the fast from the world of one who has freely pledged herself to God (Inst. Incl.: 443–470).

Aelred distributes the spiritual practices in a lengthy allegorical narrative, punctuated by exempla and built around two parallel figures corresponding to two actions: first, stripping the recluse’s soul of the pride of the old self, which keeps her far from God; second, clothing it fully with the humility of the new self, which draws her back to God. Both figures/actions are guided by, and oriented towards, charity – the driving force and goal of the whole process of discipline.Footnote ¹¹ The first figure gathers the exercises of penance and contrition through which the woman trains her introflected senses, freeing them from the feeling of the flesh.Footnote ¹² The instruments of this re‑educative purification are, on the one hand, continentia which – in Augustine too – holds together carnis afflictio and divine grace; on the other, the meditatio of Scripture, which, like a mirror, illumines the interior senses, exposes voluptas and curiositas, and removes them (Inst. Incl.: 504–696). Through this interior ‘training’ the anchoress assumes the humble posture of the penitent who, by tradition, keeps her face lowered and eyes downcast, lies prostrate at Christ’s feet, and ‘pierces her heart’, invoking his name and imploring forgiveness amid tears (Nagy Reference Nagy2000: 276–313, Bino Reference Bino and Ricci2021a). The second figure arranges the practices of virtue, which Aelred likens to the weft the soul weaves upon the warp of its humility, thereby fashioning the garment in which it will appear at the wedding with Christ. The exercise of virtue effects a change in the anchoress’s affective posture: from humble penitent she becomes lover and bride (Inst. Incl.: 697–715).

The two figures/actions find their fulfilment in the concrete practice of charity, articulated as love of neighbour and love of God – allegorically, the threads with which the woman trims the hem of her wedding garment. Aelred, however, explains to the recluse that, by dying to the world, she has withdrawn from the active duty of loving others so as to devote herself solely to the love of God (Inst. Incl.: 773–872). Indeed, she has chosen to play a specific role: “recognise the state in which you are …. There were two sisters, Martha and Mary. The one was busy, the other … simply sat at Jesus’ feet and listened to what he had to say. This is your role” (R.R.: 75).

As Aelred explains, the anchoress must play her part in two distinct ways, for “there are two elements in the love of God (dilectio Dei): interior dispositions (affectus mentis) and the performance of works (effectus operis). The latter lies in the practice of the virtues …, a matter of a rule of life … whereas the affections are nourished by wholesome meditation” (R.R.: 79). The rule therefore schools in dilectio Dei, which is at once the effectus of her practices and the emotional attitude – her affectus – to which she attains. Yet the discipline of the cell provides only the affective posture; it does not in itself effect the nuptial union of love. Only meditatio enables the soul to place itself actively in the presence of God: it is, as Boquet calls it (Reference Boquet2005: 184), an “ascetic and mystical itinerary” through which memory produces a lived presence of God that approaches the threshold of ‘real presence’ and sacramental efficacy (Nouzille Reference Nouzille2011). For Aelred, who repeatedly emphasises the tangible accessibility of Jesus’s “sacred humanity” (Dutton Reference Dutton and Sommerfeldt1992: 212), meditation generates the presence of an affective and psychosomatic relationship between the human person and God‑made‑flesh, allowing an experience of that relationship that is spiritual, but above all dynamic and sensory.

In sum, the rule has taught the recluse her part. First, it disciplined her exterior attitude, schooling her to ‘stand only in the presence’ of Christ. Then it ‘clothed’ her interior attitude, training her to be humble at his feet and attentive to his words. The accord between the two attitudes shaped by the cell (the fast of the senses and the desiring tension towards God) forms the affective posture of the bride who “yearns with all her ardour for Christ’s embrace” (R.R.: 59).Footnote ¹³ Through meditation, the woman opens the interior theatre and gives form to the memorial play.

2.4 Time, Place, and Posture of Meditation

The onset of meditation is shaped by temporal circumstances (when the anchoress meditates), environmental contingencies (where she meditates), and the physical setting (how she meditates).

We have already seen that the cell corresponds to a dimension of ritual time and to a state of physical‑sensorial closure that together produce a new form of subject’s presence, absent to the world and yet affectively positioned. The relation between meditation and ritual time turns on the memory’s representational power; the relation between meditation and the space of the cell is a further ‘entry into an interior’; finally, the relation between meditative posture and affective posture issues in the production of a ‘postural figure’, the avatar with which the subject renders herself present in the memorial play. Let us consider each point in turn.

Aelred states that meditatio Verbi Dei is a purifying, educative instrument that must occupy the anchoress’s thought at every canonical hour (Inst. Incl.: 609–612). During Lent – the fast of the senses that prepares for the divine vision – meditation is prescribed even between Nocturns and Lauds (Inst. Incl.: 381–382), a vigil that recalls the watch at Christ’s tomb while awaiting the rising of the lamb‑bridegroom (Alzati Reference Alzati, Benvenuti and Garzaniti2005: 20). Thus, on the one hand, meditation is woven into ritual time – the canonical hours – which structures daily life in the cell according to the memory of the mystery of salvation realised in Christ: it enables the recluse to remain in constant relation with the divine, thereby disciplining her psychosomatic identity. On the other hand, meditation is a mnemonic instrument that amplifies the representational dimension of Lenten time, allowing the recluse to celebrate her nuptials with the Lord. In both cases, meditation acts as a mnemonic medium that actualises the presence summoned by ritual time.

The locus of meditation is the oratory, the only space described in the rule. A site of perpetual prayer, it stands as the condensed icon of the cell. It contains a single furnishing: an altar covered with a cloth of pure white linen. Upon the altar stands the lone crucifix, perhaps flanked by images of the Mother and of John. No other ornament is permitted. Aelred depicts the oratory solely by narrating the severe process by which the linen that swathes the altar is wrought; its final whiteness is a metaphor for the interior purity painfully won by the recluse (Inst. Incl.: 716–766). In a movement of progressive penetration into an interior, the cell is thus transformed into an oratory, and the oratory becomes the woman’s inner place.

The transformation of the oratory into an inner place presupposes concord between intus and foris, between the soul’s quiet and the cell’s silence, between a mind cleared of every vain spectacle and an environment stripped of ornament (Inst. Incl.: 746–752). The woman’s affective posture – humble lover at the Lord’s feet – accords with the bodily posture she adopts for prayer, kneeling at the foot of the crucifix. The crucifix, once an image contemplated with the eyes of the body, becomes a relational presence: when she prays, she speaks to him, when she reads, she listens to him, when she meditates, she meets him. The anchoress sets the mnemonic process in motion by literally turning her now–cleansed inner eyes towards the past (oculos defaecatos retorque ad posteriora; Inst. Incl.: 889–890). In so doing, she re‑locates her personal presence within the scene recalled and projects into it her postural figure (her avatar).

2.5 ‘Becoming Magdalene’ within the Memorial Play

Aelred parcels the remembrance of the past into a narrative of Jesus’s earthly life divided into episodes. He gives this narrative scheme a locative, temporal, and dramatic shape: he arranges the events along an itinerary from place to place and from moment to moment, re‑presenting them as they unfold. The result is a three‑act drama, each act comprising six scenes, plus an epilogue.Footnote ¹⁴

The anchoress is not a spectator outside the story but an actor within the drama, entrusted with the role of Christ’s lover. In mnemotechnical terms, Aelred is a “master builder” – to borrow Carruthers’s words (Reference Carruthers1993) – who stages a memory theatre designed as a spatio‑temporal map. The recluse is the invited subject (the text bristles with imperatives and exhortations) who must activate that map with a specific affective colouring, thereby producing and performing the memorial play.

This process involves two operations: first, the relocation of the recluse’s presence onto the (a)temporal plane of memory; second, the construction of the scenes from an affectively positioned point of view. This re-location of presence does not occur through a proxy or double that mediates between the woman’s psychosomatic identity and the mnemonic experience. Instead, the anchoress projects her postural figure – namely, the sensory and emotional capacities disciplined within the cell – into the past that memory brings into the present. Thus, her avatar is a first‑person presence in a re‑presented past. Aelred conveys the punctual, aoristic coexistence of temporal planes by alternating past and present verbs: the woman sees now what happened then and, through memory, hears, acts, and feels in the present of that past. Memory scenes are always built from this first‑person presence. Yet, as she moves within the spatio‑temporal map of memory, the point of view continually shifts, each time generating a fresh affective perspective that reframes the scene in different ways. In return, the scenographic frame fashioned by her gaze acts upon the avatar, eliciting a physico‑emotional response that determines how the scene is played. As an example, I present Aelred’s composition of the Last Supper, emblematic both for its use of tenses and for the (physical and affective) positioning of the viewpoint together with the avatar’s ensuing entry into action.

The ways in which the avatar plays a scene are four: contemplation, participation, co-participation, and identification. Each corresponds to different degree of affective and performative immersion in the scenes of the memorial play, but they operate independently of its narrative arc: they do not unfold in step with the story’s linear development; rather, they arise inside individual scenes. At times a scene is performed wholly in a single mode; at others the avatar plays through several, sometimes by steadily deepening immersion in the vision, sometimes by alternating immersion/emersion movements.

Contemplation is the first mode. Here the woman projects her first-person presence into the scene, yet her avatar remains inactive. The events are not narrated in detail; they are presented instead as strongly empathetic images, arranged paratactically. Scenes intended for cogitare – Christ’s baptism, the forgiveness of the adulterous woman, the healing of the paralytic, Peter’s betrayal, the ecce homo – are played in this way. Even so, the avatar’s viewpoint is no mere bystander’s: it stands in an affective relation to the people in the drama, seeing them close at hand, hearing them, watching them act, grasping their emotions, and sharing them. One example is the scene of Jesus before Pilate:

The second mode is participation. The woman projects her first‑person presence into the scene, and her avatar becomes a new character in the drama. The avatar inserts itself into the relationships already unfolding among the other figures, so that the episode departs from the Gospel narrative. Whenever a scene is played exclusively in this mode, the action always ends with the avatar ‘at the Lord’s feet’. Thus, when the Virgin visits Elizabeth, the avatar sees the two women embrace, joins them, then prostrates herself at their feet and venerates Jesus in Mary’s womb. At the Nativity the avatar first acts as midwife, then lays the Infant in the manger and tenderly kisses his feet. In Gethsemane the avatar watches Christ pray in anguish and then enters the garden, licking the drops of blood that have fallen to the ground and wiping the dust from his feet with its lips. On Golgotha it witnesses the crucifixion from afar, then approaches the cross, stands with the Mother at the feet of the Crucified, and speaks to him. During the deposition, the avatar first observes Nicodemus remove the nails, then joins the action, licking the blood spilled on the ground and caressing the dust of Christ’s feet. In every instance, the affective posture fashioned in the cell is now actively enacted.

Co-participation is the third mode in which the recluse projects her first–person presence into the scene. Yet, her avatar takes part by aligning its viewpoint with that of a character already on stage. What the avatar sees is subjective; what it feels is nonetheless first‑person, for through an exercise in relational psychagogy it experiences the character’s own sensations; and what it does are actions performed together with that character. Whenever a scene is played wholly in this co‑participatory mode, the character accompanied is the Virgin. Thus, in the annunciation scene, the avatar enters Mary’s room and reads the Scriptures with her, waits for the angel, sees him arrive and hears his greeting; it then imagines Mary’s rapture as, “full of grace”, she feels in heart and womb the presence of God while he takes flesh from her. In Jerusalem the avatar searches for the missing boy with the Mother, and, on finding him among the doctors in the Temple, weeps with her in relief. On Golgotha it approaches the cross with the Virgin, imagines her anguish, and together they shed tears of grief.

In three instances, however, co‑participation deepens into identification, the fourth and final mode of playing a scene. The woman projects her first‑person presence into the scene, her avatar accompanies the character and, by superimposing gaze upon gaze, it adopts that character’s viewpoint, performs that character’s actions, and feels that character’s emotions. The first‑person presence remains, but it is ‘clothed’ in another role and plays it in a personal way. Consequently, the recluse’s postural figure is further shaped by the experience of identifying with the character. The three scenes the avatar plays in this way centre on three women: the penitent sinner who anoints Christ’s feet in the Pharisee’s house; Mary of Bethany who pours ointment on his head; and Magdalene who sees him risen. All follow the same pattern, yet the process of identification differs, altering the final affective posture the avatar assumes. Let us examine these scenes in detail.

First scene (Inst. Incl.: 987–1002). The avatar enters the Pharisee’s house and conjures a vision of the Lord reclining at table (recumbentem ibi Dominum tuum attende). Its gaze aligns with that of the sinner as she approaches Jesus and kneels at his feet (accede cum illa beatissima peccatrice ad pedes eius). Immediately, the two viewpoints merge: the avatar is prompted to act in the first person, washing Christ’s feet with tears, drying them with hair, covering them with kisses, and anointing them with ointment (lava lacrymis, terge capillis, demulce osculis, et fove unguentis). The fusion must be so complete that the avatar senses the fragrance of the balm upon itself (nonne iam sacri illius liquoris odore perfunderis?). From this point on, the avatar plays the role in the first person and enters into a direct relationship with Christ, reliving (and varying) the Gospel episode (Luke 7: 36–38) as its own plea for forgiveness:

Second scene (Inst. Incl.: 1029–1060). The avatar enters the house of Lazarus, Martha, and Mary at Bethany, sees them at table with Jesus, and notes their roles: Martha serves, Lazarus is seated, and Mary takes a jar of ointment and pours it over Christ’s head. The avatar is invited to join the banquet with joy (gaude … huic interesse convivio) and, explicitly, to assume Mary’s role (ungit Maria. Hoc … tuum est). From that moment the action continues in the first person; however, because the avatar performs precisely Mary’s actions, Mary herself becomes the recluse’s avatar. She “breaks the jar of her heart” (frange alabastrum cordis tui) and pours its contents upon the Lord’s head; she hears him rebuke Judas and the Pharisee who protest the waste of ointment; she sits silent at his feet and kisses them, lifts her eyes to gaze on him, strains her ears and listens to the one who has now become the bridegroom for whom the cell has prepared her.

Third scene (Inst. Incl.: 1207–1233). The avatar prepares the spices and goes to the tomb with Magdalene. Once there, the memory of what the woman saw with the eyes of the body renders the scene present, so that the avatar can now see it, in the first person:

Then the avatar undertakes a psychagogic mnemonic exercise: it summons Magdalene’s affective movements and feels them first‑hand, bodily and in the first person:

Finally, when Christ forbids Mary to touch his feet, the avatar takes on Magdalene’s role and responds in the first person, engaging him in a personal dialogue that, once again, enters the Gospel narrative (John 20: 17) and reshapes it:

When Mary Magdalene – sent by Christ to announce his Resurrection to the disciples – returns to the tomb, Jesus now allows her to touch him. So, she comes forward and clasps his feet. In this final act, there is no longer any distinction between Magdalene, the recluse’s postural figure, and the recluse herself: “Linger here as long as you can, virgin,” Aelred urges, “let not these delights of yours be interrupted by sleep or disturbed by any tumult from without” (R.R.: 92). To see and to touch the risen Lord at close quarters is the culmination of the meditation on the past, but it is equally the goal of the cell’s discipline – Lent preparing for Easter, the vigil preparing for the nuptials of the Resurrection.

In sum, the first meditation enacts the nuptial model of love – to which the rule aspires – within the re‑presented past. It follows a clearly mnemonic itinerary designed to awaken an intimate affective relationship with Christ. The recluse undertakes that itinerary always in the first person: at one moment co‑participating in the Virgin’s affectus, at another stepping into the scene with the humble posture of a handmaid at Christ’s feet. Yet, when she enters fully into memory, she assumes the role of three women (the converted sinner, Mary of Bethany, and Mary of Magdala) who, as Saxer (Reference Saxer1959) showed, had already been merged by Gregory the Great into the composite figure of Mary Magdalene. Within the Cistercian affective aesthetics – what Nagy (Reference Nagy2000: 276) calls a “flourishing of tears” – Magdalene became the emblem of the path of conversion, contemplation, and compassion by which humanity draws near to God. Bernard and later Nicholas of Clairvaux linked her tears to the ointments poured on Christ’s feet, head, and body – a circulation of fluids bound to the spiritual fecundity of the journey from sin to mystical union (Bino Reference Bino and Cariboni2021b). Depicted as both penitent and bride in the office the Order dedicated to her (Scarcez Reference Scarcez, Waugh and Loewen2014), Magdalene stood as an icon of repentance (weeping), humility (remaining at the feet), devotion (listening in silence), and familial intimacy (kissing and embracing). Aelred here reseparates the composite, redistributing the figure into three distinct women so as to map more precisely the movements of the affectus and to arrange them in a dramatic process of ‘becoming Magdalene’ that begins with vision, advances through desire, and culminates in delight.

In the end, the sensuous, affective image that concludes the meditation on the past bears the fragrance of ointments and the taste of kisses, tears, and blood – elements that render the two lovers mutually present and sensuously perceptible to one another (Olson Reference Olson and Kelley2017).

This felt presence makes Magdalene the anchoress’s avatar persisting beyond the meditation itself.

3.1 Dramatic Discipline

The second case on which I work shifts the production of the memorial play from a meditative, inner, and imaginative vision to a ritual, outward, dramatic action.

I examine here the Ordo ad faciendum disciplinam of the Confraternita dei Disciplinati di Santo Stefano in Assisi, a brotherhood closely linked to the Franciscan Order (1327–1329). This hitherto unpublished text – studied here for the first time – sets out in detail the emotional, verbal, and gestural ‘script’ by which the brethren carried out their collective penitential flagellation. Thanks to the unusually rich corpus of sources for this sodality – one of the oldest and best documented in Italy – we can reconstruct the timeframe and manner in which the rite was enacted on Good Friday, when the confraternity shut itself inside the oratory at Vespers to commemorate Christ’s passion and death.Footnote ¹⁵

Flagellation is not a practice in its own right, but rather the very heart of an office divided into three sections. The first comprises the recitation of prayers and psalms, and the donning of the confraternal habit: it involves the physical and spiritual operations by which the brethren bring homo interior and homo exterior into accord, preparing themselves for commemoratio. The central section is the enactment of memory in the strict sense (that is, the memorial play), articulated in two parts: first, meditative listening to the Passion narrative as declaimed aloud by one of the brethren; then, the singing of the laude paced by the strokes of the scourge. Finally, the third section consists of a sequence of prayers by which the brethren prepare to exit the rite and concludes with the removal of the confraternal habit.

Here, too, the same process recurs: the physical-sensory closure to the external world, the subject’s psychosomatic preparation for the production of the memorial play, and the adoption of the postural figure with which the subject plays it. The re-presentational dynamic, however, operates according to the rite’s ‘aesthetic dispositive’ (Ries Reference Ries1993, Weyer-Menkhoff Reference Weyer-Menkhoff2002, Bonaccorso Reference Bonaccorso2013): as a performance capable not only of expressing but also of creating shared values and shaping social relations, the rite does not eliminate the subject’s psychophysical sensitivity to material reality (the affective and bodily perception in relation to objects and other persons) but suspends its ordinary channels, re-activating it within an extraordinary, structured, and organised experience that gives perception a new form and effects its transformation.

Therefore, the analysis of the process must take into account four elements closely interwoven with one another.

First, the office is carried out by a group of laymen who constitute a ‘relational community’, grounded in the free and responsible sharing of the bond of brotherhood (con-fraternitas). The “confraternal choir” – to use Apollonio’s term (Reference Apollonio1956: 71) – differs from the community-as-body of religious conceived as an organic unity, set apart from the world and shaped by a manner of life. It is a we composed of individuals who adopt a shared pattern of Christian behaviour that shapes their lives within the world. That pattern of behaviour forms the subject’s identity within a continuous dialectical relation and exchange exterior–interior (life in the world-life in the choir) and individual-group.

Second, responding to the ritual dispositive, the exclusion of external reality takes the form of a regulated separation from the world’s space and an ordered suspension of its temporal dimension, allowing the choir to enter the dimension of sacred space and the time of memory, producing an actual and active relation in presence with the divine.

Third, the efficacy of this production of presence extends beyond sacred space and ritual time: it continually re-forms the choir’s shared pattern of behaviour and orients the actions the brethren undertake in social space and secular time.

Fourth, the memorial play is at once an exterior, collective experience and an interior, individual one. The whole choir ‘plays the memory’, following the same script of words, songs, emotions, gestures, and actions. Nevertheless, each brother produces his own mental vision of memory, into which he projects his psychosomatic presence; likewise, he performs the memory in the first person with his own body (he sings, prays, moves, and scourges himself), experiencing personal physical and emotional sensations. The theatre of the mind and the theatre of the body are interlinked in a performance that continually brings into play the dynamic of the outer-inner man and the individual-group dialectic, seeking their accord.

Thus, ritual practice sets in motion a re-presentational process that both presupposes and creates a dynamic of ‘circular reciprocity’ linking individual identity and belonging to the choir; historical and ritual time–space; individual and collective emotional posture; and the personal and the choral body, together with their respective perceptual experiences. This dynamic has affinities with Turner’s idea of “communitas” (Reference Turner1969), developed in relation to the ritual process, and with the “autopoietic feedback loop” central to Fischer-Lichte’s performance theory (Reference Fischer-Lichte2008): both are shared psychophysical experiences that entail a relational transformation (or continual re-negotiation) of personal identity. Yet the process I am analysing is distinctive, and the key to understanding it, I believe, lies in the Latin term disciplina.

Both in the text of the office and in other sources concerning the confraternity – especially the Statuti: 32 – disciplina denotes at once the confraternal manner of life (vivendi modus et forma) that the brethren have pledged to ‘follow’ (sectari disciplinam); the ritual devotion they are bound to celebrate (facere devotam disciplinam); and, finally, the practice of flagellation at the heart of the office (apprehendere disciplinam).

The polysemy of the term reflects a semantic layering built up over the centuries. The Middle Ages condensed two notions adopted from Greco-Hellenistic paideia into disciplina: first, ‘teaching-and-learning’ (with discere as teaching and discipulus as he who learns); and second, a manner of life (the individual’s formation according to behavioural and moral norms aligned with a shared model of the common good). Stroumsa (Reference Stroumsa2009) shows how, through by Jewish culture, ancient Christianity redefined paideia in relation to the new conception of the individual, founded on an idea of ontological likeness (the human person as a body–soul created by God in His image) which also entails an unbridgeable ontological distance (the image is like-and-not-equal to God). Said distance is further widened by sin (the human failure to recognise oneself as not-equal and therefore ‘other’ than God). The Incarnation placed the body at the centre of the definition of the person (the flesh is the axis of salvation) and made education a discipline of the self that entails praxis (doing) rather than theoria (seeing and thinking): it aims at the recovery of perfection through the complete transformation of the self in imitation of Christ, who is disciplina Dei in person. At the root of this discipline of the self lies the principle of conversion (metanoia) as awareness of dissimilarity from God resulting in repentance: “the turning toward God was foremost a return to oneself, an attempt to understand the nature of sins that has effaced (or at the very least obscured) the image of God that man was supposed to represent” (Stroumsa Reference Stroumsa2009: 16). Re-founded on the logic of conversion and ordered to the dramatic reorientation of the human being towards God – of which I have already spoken in the first part of this Element – disciplina acquired therapeutic values (the discipline of affections and actions as medicina animae et corporis) and came to be understood as a ‘care’ of the self within the wider context of mutual care among neighbours (charity or mercy).Footnote ¹⁶ In the monastic tradition, disciplina became the (virtually exclusive) instrument of common ascetic living, the perfect Christian life (Leclercq Reference Leclercq1957, Knox Reference Knox and Prodi1994, Guijarro Reference Guijarro2013). Through a centripetal process of semantic specification, the term came to designate, first, the rule (disciplina nostri ordinis); by extension, the specific economy of each rule (disciplina corporalis et spiritualis); and finally, the ensemble of ritual practices of penance and punitive correction. Among these, flagellation was regarded as perfect disciplina, because it imitates the Lord’s redemptive suffering: to practise it was to undergo an experience of pain that educates the individual, redeems them from sin, orients them towards God, and brings them back to salvation, fostering the spiritual growth both of the person and of the community to which they belong (Leclercq Reference Leclercq1962, Smith Reference Smith2009).

In our case the semantic process runs in the opposite direction: contemporaneous official documents – such as letters from bishops or papal legates – designate the brethren as disciplinati of the Crucified Christ precisely insofar as they are penitents who practise the devotion of the discipline in remembrance of the Passion.Footnote ¹⁷ In a centrifugal extension of meaning, disciplina denotes first and properly the penitential flagellation, then the office as a whole, and finally the confraternal manner of life. In all three cases it is a memory of the Passion.

The semantic reversal corresponds to an inversion of the re-presentational process. In the context of contemplative life (coenobitic or reclusive), the production of the memorial play is the culmination of a ‘regular discipline’ – what Asad (Reference Asad1993: 130) calls “the gradual reshaping of the self” – which orders the bodily operations and the interior exercises of virtue, directing them towards a precise relation with the divine that the devotee experiences in mnemonic meditation. By contrast, in the context of a lay, associational manner of life, the memorial play appears to be the starting point: it is the emotional, physical, active, sensual, and embodied experience of the Passion of Christ that enables the individual to bring his affective posture into accord with the gestures and actions he performs. By ‘entering’ the rite and playing the memory, he disciplines his psychosomatic unity through the collective, affective, and sensual experience of Christ’s suffering, and gives form both to his identity as a member of the choir and to his way of being in the world.

In other words, the rite is a dramatic discipline of memory, virtually a “spiritual exercise” (in Hadot’s sense, Reference Hadot1993) that embodies the choir’s devotio to the Crucified Christ and translates it into an existential form.Footnote ¹⁸ The physical, collective performance has a psychagogic power: it produces the postural figure – the avatar – which, in this case, is an emotional posture, the attitude with which the choir plays the memory of the Passion, and which then becomes a daily habitus, individual and social.

Whichever avatar is configured, then, depends on the circumstances and contingencies of the ritual performance – that is, on the time of the rite (when the office is celebrated), its form (how it is celebrated), and, finally, the memory the rite renders present (the dramaturgical schema of the recollection of the Passion).

3.2 Dramaturgy of Time: The Choir’s Good Friday

By shutting themselves within the oratory’s ‘sacred precinct’ at Vespers on Good Friday, the choir creates the conditions to make the Passion of Christ present on the very day when memory brings it back into the present, thereby producing and enacting an actual presence of the event. However, the office of the discipline does not ‘open’ a ritual temporality but is ‘set’ within it: it is one scene in a dramaturgy of memory that the confraternity unfolds throughout the day.

The Statuti (60–62) set out the order of this dramaturgy, specify its places and devotions, and state its function: to conform both the individual and the choir to the Crucified Christ. Memory is articulated in temporal ‘stations’ corresponding to the canonical hours. At Matins the choir gathers in the oratory and, in secular dress, listens to “the Passion, the pains, and the sighs of Christ”. At Prime, the brethren don the sodality’s habit and go to the churches of San Francesco and Santa Maria degli Angeli (the Porziuncola), where they perform for the people (populo representent) “the lauds of weeping, the songs of sorrow, and the bitter laments of the Virgin Mother, widowed and deprived of her own Son”. During the day they take part in the Liturgy of the Passion and hear the sermon with the civic community.Footnote ¹⁹ Finally, at Vespers the choir regathers in the oratory for the rite of discipline.

The result is a mnemonic itinerary in circular movement: entry into the confraternity’s enclosed, private space (oratory), exit to the public civic celebration, then re-entry into the private sphere. This inside/outside/inside motion marks the exclusivity of the choir’s devotions while situating them within the city: it underscores the confraternity’s bond with the Franciscan community (the laude of weeping are sung at the Order’s two chief sites) and its belonging to the ecclesial community (with which it joins for the Liturgy of the Passion and the sermon).

Moreover, the itinerary apparently entails different ways in which the individual and the choir participate in memory, marked by whether or not the confraternal habit is worn – a point to which I shall return next. The subject who listens to the Passion in the oratory without the habit is not a disciplinato but a devotee who belongs to a group; by contrast, the habit identifies him as a member of the choir when he re-presents Mary’s weeping in public. When he takes part without the habit in the Church’s rites and hears the sermon, he is a member of the Christian community; vesting in the habit to perform the dramatic discipline makes him part of a collective, relational identity and assigns him a role within the ritual performance.

The modes of participation correspond to different degrees of activating the senses and emotions. Devout listening to the Passion appears as an interior, meditative exercise of affective preparation, both individual and choral. The public singing of the laude of the Mother’s sorrow engages the whole body (voice, gesture, movement) but is above all an emotional performance aimed at arousing compassion in its audience – the Statuti (62) are explicit here, urging the brethren to perform the laude with greater attention to the emotional side than to words or voice (magis ad lacrimas intendentes, quam ad verba vel voces). Participation in the Liturgy of the Passion follows the dynamics of the psychophysical engagement of the penitent, adoring assembly (La Salle Reference Salle and Donald1997), as does the communal hearing of the sermon, often designed to elicit mass emotional responses centred on penance and compassion – “the grammar of Good Friday” preaching (Johnson Reference Johnson2012). Finally, the performance of the dramatic discipline is a synaesthetic experience that activates the inner senses and the whole body.

The structuring of memory by the canonical hours makes them the ‘immediate’ conduit between past and present, turning the itinerary into an episodic re-presentation of the events of the Passion, at the intersection of the monastic tradition of prayer and the Franciscan dramaturgy of meditation (Falvay Reference Falvay, Delcorno and Johnson2025, and bibliography therein). Elsewhere I have shown – especially thanks to Bonaventure of Bagnoregio – that the Order’s writers divided the Passion narrative into: arrest, mockery, and imprisonment (Matins); encounter with the Mother, trial, scourging-crowning with thorns and condemnation to death (Prime); ascent to Calvary, crucifixion and death (Terce and None); deposition (Vespers); burial (Compline) (Bino Reference Bino, Guida and Solvi2024a).

The office of the discipline is the concluding station of this itinerary into the memory of the Passion of Christ, first meditated in private, then re-presented and lamented in public, and finally celebrated and heard with the community. It is the choir’s intimate liturgy with which the choir commemorate the hour of Vespers, making present the moment when Christ’s dead body was taken down from the cross and placed in his Mother’s arms as she, together with those who loved him, wept.

Thus, it is within the timeframe of these tears that the form of the rite and the mnemonic experience it produces are to be read.

3.3 Donning Compunction: Entering the Rite

As already noted, the office of the discipline is articulated in three moments: an entry, an exit, and – at the centre – the practice of penitential flagellation. The latter has its own complete structure, almost a ‘rite within the rite’ – copied independently both at the end of the two manuscripts that transmit the full Ordo and in the confraternity’s ‘community book’ alongside readings and laude (Illuminati: 25 v–26 v).Footnote ²⁰

In the briefest terms, the overall schema of the Good Friday office is as follows:

Beyond the rite’s form, the Ordo details how it is to be celebrated. It distinguishes the parts assigned to the officiant (minister), lesson-reader (lectionarius), cantor, and prayer-reader (porrector preces) from those for the choir; specifies the vocal delivery of antiphons, psalms, prayers, and songs (in silence, in a low voice, or aloud); and notes the brethren’s ‘regulated gestures’ – postures (kneeling, standing), proxemics (at one’s place, at the altar), and the cues marking each transition (the bell).

Above all, the Ordo (4 r) states that flagellation is always a fustigatio “in memoriam Passionis”, to be carried out “humiliter” and sung “lacrimanter et pie”.

The introit prepares the brethren towards this intention in three stages. First, all acknowledge unworthiness and sins by mutual confession – the Confiteor recited by the minister and then the choir – with the accompanying absolution: the Misereatur and indulgentiam absolutionem; this penitential act delivers their souls from evil and re-orients them to the good (Schembri Reference Schembri1969). Next, each brother dons the confraternal habit to the alternating minister–choir chant of Psalm 50 (Miserere), thus assuming the interior penitential posture with which he enters the rite as a member of the choir. Finally, the choir genuflects towards the altar and recites Psalm 126 (De profundis), prayers for the dead, and the Requiem, thus reconstituting the community of living and dead – bound by the imperishable bond of brotherhood – and physically adopting the penitential posture with which it takes part in the mnemonic re-presentation.

The three phases of the introit correspond to penance understood as conversio (a change of mind, heart, and life), entailing reorienting the desiring tension from exterior to interior, from the world to God.Footnote ²¹

The semantic pivot of this affective re-ordering is the ritual donning of the habit, quite different from the clerical liturgical vesting studied by Palazzo (Reference Palazzo2014). For the Assisi disciplinati, the sackcloth habit’s specific meaning comes from the rite that blesses and bestows it at entry into the sodality (Illuminati: 28 r–v). It has three prerogatives: it is the habitus that outwardly displays (sic induti exterius) their having inwardly stripped off sin so as to be clothed with Christ (interius induant Domini nostri Jesu Christi); it is a bulwark against adversity; above all, it is the instrument by which God makes them His servants (famuli) and fills them with the grace of compunction whenever they wear it. In short, the habit is the sign of a penitential state including both contrition and compunction – two stages of “sorrow according to God” (Nagy Reference Nagy2000: 19) born of awareness of one’s sins. If contrition is remorse for sin – an interior (spiritual, invisible) pain accompanied by the will to confess (Casagrande Reference Casagrande, Casagrande and Vecchio2015: 308–319) – compunction is ‘sensible repentance’, the perpetual pain at the memory of sin that also carries desire for the Lord (Williams and Steenbrugge Reference Williams and Steenbrugge2021). This ‘feeling-in-action’ – as Nagy shows (Reference Nagy2000: 421–430) – is a repeated prick that becomes habitus and issues in tears, God’s gift.

Thus, the introit is the spiritual and emotional process whereby the choir suspends their ordinary perceptual capacities and activates them within the extra-ordinary experience of ritual commemoration. In this process, wearing the habit marks the passage from contritio to compunctio: the adoption of the posture that enables the brethren to scourge themselves lacrimanter in remembrance of the Passion. At Vespers on Good Friday – the time of Mary’s weeping over her Son’s dead body – vesting reaches its fullest meaning and becomes a clothing in tears to lament. With this affective intention, the kneeling choir of penitents begins to play the memory.

3.4 Dramaturgy of Memory: Feeling Like the Mother

The memory of the Passion is re-presented in two timeframes, played on two planes: the interior vision produced by listening to the lectiones de planctu beatae Virginis, and the physical action of fustigatio, punctuating the vernacular performance of the laude de passione Salvatoris nostri Iesus et mestissima Matris eius with scourge-strokes. In both cases the dramaturgy of memory is a lament. The diegetic dispositive, however, differs: the text guiding the interior vision recalls pain; the laude punctuated by flagellation are the song of pain. These dispositives yield two modes of memorial presence. On the one hand, the subject is projected into the past recalled by the Mother and sees the pain she feels for her Son’s Passion, then and there; on the other, the subject re-enacts the memory in the present and weeps with the Mother, here and now. Although interdependent, the vision prepares the re-enactment. Let us see how.

The Latin readings, heard by the choir in silence, form a long verse narrative in which Mary recalls her Son’s sufferings in nine tableaux, from the Sanhedrin trial to the burial.Footnote ²² Her gaze gives the memory locative, temporal, and dramatic shape, which she re-lives from within, as a character – both witness and actor. Thus, the Gospel Passion is modified and expanded, drawing on Scripture and on exegetical, meditative, and sequence traditions.Footnote ²³ The scenes are constructed from the maternal viewpoint, largely in the first person, and follow a five-part sensory, emotional, and physical score. First, Mary’s gaze establishes the setting – where she is, what she does, what occurs around her. Second, her sensory perception registers what befalls her Son, chiefly through hearing and sight. Third, perception yields an image: she narrates what the Son suffers and at whose hands. Fourth, the image elicits an inner emotion in her, which she verbalises, naming her pain. Fifth, that inner pain produces tears (varying in intensity and hue) and a bodily response – articulated in voice/speech, gesture, posture. I present the composition of the Sanhedrin scene, where both the locative-temporal dynamics of the gaze and the score linking sensory perception, emotional response, and bodily reaction are clearly legible:

This score articulates the Passion’s dramaturgy on two mirroring narrative levels: the emotional script of the Virgin’s grief, and the account of Christ’s bodily pain. The first mediates the second – visually (it produces an image of Jesus’s wounded body) and expressively (it translates pain into gesture and bodily reaction) – rendering sensible and perceptible what is otherwise inaccessible: physical pain, as Scarry (Reference Scarry1985) notes, is perceivable only to the sufferer. Yet this is neither a mere mediation of Christ’s suffering humanity nor a generic maternal sorrow. The bond between Mary and Christ is unique: as his sole earthly parent she is the “source of his humanity”, and he is “bone of her bones and flesh of her flesh” (Fulton Brown Reference Fulton Brown2002: 452–453). Theologically grounded between the eleventh and twelfth centuries, this bond becomes central in Franciscanism (Santi Reference Santi and Mauro2020, De Dominicis Reference De Dominicis, Guida and Solvi2024), making Mary’s suffering the medium of a pain shared and co-felt in the same flesh, and impressing on the listener a model of perfect empathetic love.

The devotee enters the drama of memory through the Mother’s eyes, yet he does not adopt her gaze: he does not play it in co-participation (subjective viewpoint) or in identification (first-person shot). Instead, Mary’s emotional script elicits in him a pain response parallel to that expressed by her in words and bodily gestures. In other words, the devotee does not assume the Mother’s avatar ‘within the scene’; he is guided to respond, by degrees, to the Passion-pain she feels.

By degrees. Mary’s pain is of two kinds and elicits in the devotee two distinct emotional responses. On the one hand, compassion: co-participation in the visceral physical pain by which the Mother shares the Son’s torment. On the other, lamentation: sharing Mary’s mourning as she weeps over the Son’s broken flesh, taken down from the cross and prepared for burial – a universal mourning that no longer follows the ancient logic of exclusive kinship, of blood lineage (ghenos), as described by Loraux (Reference Loraux1990), but an inclusive kinship grounded in all’s participation in Christ’s blood and flesh.

These responses are mediated by two distinct re-presentational processes that divide the Passion narrative in two sections.

From the crowning with thorns to the crucifixion, Mary co-suffers Christ’s pains and describes pain entering her through the senses, generating amaritudo and angustia, both modalities of his Passion. Amaritudo recalls the taste of the gall he drank on the cross – the taste of human sin he cleanses with his blood (Ziolkowski Reference Ziolkowski, Jaeger and Kasten2003); it afflicts the Mother’s heart and draws tears that overflow to blindness. Angustia is the feeling of mortal peril with no escape (Haubrichs Reference Haubrichs, Jaeger and Kasten2003). It works on Mary’s body, twisting her entrails, wounding her heart, corroding her limbs, draining their strength to nothing. This twofold emotional effect is clear in the scene where Christ is mocked, crowned with thorns, robed in purple, and scourged before her eyes:

The psychosomatic dynamic of compassion is perfectly rendered in the scene of Christ’s condemnation to death, which first sets out the progression hearing → emotion → bodily reaction:

Then it describes the sequence seeing → emotion → bodily reaction that brings about the annihilation of the Mother’s body:

The sharing of the Passion reaches its apex at the crucifixion, where the sight of the Son upon the cross and the blood flowing from his wounds engenders in Mary an interior suffering that takes on the tones of the torment of the flesh, to the point that she feels her heart crucified with him and physically pierced by the sword:

From this point the re-presentational process shifts and – almost in a cross-fade – lamentation overlays compassion. Mary no longer mediates the Son’s pain by describing her own; rather, through tears she gives voice to his agonising body, addressing first the tormentors (exhorting them to penance), then the women who accompany her (inviting them to weep). When death ends Christ’s sufferings, compassion recedes, and lamentation takes its place. The narration shifts to the third person and proceeds on two planes: on the one hand, the relation between Christ’s lifeless flesh and Mary’s; on the other, the emotional reactions of those who see – or are called to see – their bond of love and share it in weeping. Three scenes follow. The first shows Mary, crucified in soul, lying dead before the cross from which her lifeless Son hangs:

The second depicts the intimacy between Mary’s flesh and Christ’s: first the Mother throws herself upon her Son’s corpse, taken down from the cross, covering his wounds with kisses and embraces; then she wrests his body from those wrapping it for burial, unbinding his limbs from the bands:

The final scene depicts the Mother’s parting from her Son’s body at the tomb. In an interplay of looks and weeping, Mary’s grief spreads to all and turns her very flesh into eyes, dissolved in tears.

The image of the Virgin becoming a weeping eye brings the listening to the lectiones to a close.

If the rite’s introit reorients the choir’s perceptual capacities and clothes it in tears of compunction, the first act of the memorial play is an affective path that shapes those tears first as compassion, then as lamentation. The latter becomes the posture with which the choir plays the second act of the memorial play. At the sound of the bell, flagellation begins.

3.5 Discipline of Compassion: Mercy

The Ordo (4r) states that the laude, paced by fustigatio, are meant to move the brethren’s hearts to weeping (movere corda fratrum ad planctum). Flagellation is thus an explicitly emotional and transformative practice: a physical act that stirs inner emotion and alters the psychosomatic state.

However, this is not distinctive. Such psychagogic–transformative power characterises medieval flagellation, whether imposed as corrective punishment or self-inflicted as expiatory, conformative penance. Historical–anthropological studies concur that it functions as a discipline of personal identity, seen either as a ritual of communal shaping (Smith Reference Smith2009); or as an educational instrument where the body serves as a semiophoric medium, that is, the flesh carries meaning (Vandermeersch Reference Vandermeersch2002, Mills Reference Mills2005); or a Maussian “technique of the body” (Mauss Reference Mauss1935). Notably, Largier (Reference Largier2007) stresses the tight soul-body relation and its shifting dynamics with changing practices and cultural contexts; Merback (Reference Merback and Strickland2007) and Nagy (Reference 66Nagy and Boquet2022) focus on sense-emotion in lay mass flagellations and their effects on spectators.

The distinctive feature of the Assisi disciplinati’s flagellation lies elsewhere – namely, in the dramaturgy that shapes the mnemonic process and steers its psychagogic–transformative dynamic. Scholarship shows that, between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries and from central–northern Italy, penitential flagellation became a Christo-mimetic mnemonic practice oriented to compassion.Footnote ²⁴ Imitating Christ’s scourging – the metonym of his suffering – the devotee enacts voluntary mortification of the flesh, reparative penance for sin, and a sharing in the Lord’s wounds, thereby gaining access to redemption. Despite differences of setting, both monastic ritual flagellation (paradigm: Peter Damian) and lay devotional flagellation (private and public) are governed by a dramaturgy of suffering flesh that collapses distance from the devotee: he re-lives the Lord’s pains in the first person, feeling them in his own body, in an identificatory mode Panofsky (Reference Panofsky1927) called “contemplative immersion”. Here discipline is understood as a psychosomatic experience of retributive conformity ordered to salvation.

In Assisi, the confraternal flagellation is a mnemonic practice shaped by a dramaturgy of tears. Its intention remains compassion, yet it urges the devotee to relive Christ’s pains by adopting Mary’s emotional posture, according to an empathetic mode that takes the Mother’s pain as the experiential model. It is therefore necessary to understand the diegetic economy of the laude – what they represent and how – as the ritual flagellation’s intention and its psychosomatic discipline depend on it.

We do not know which of the five de passione pieces in the community book accompanied the flagellation.Footnote ²⁵ However, they all share the same dramaturgic scheme: laments in which the Virgin, through tears, composes the image of Christ’s body ‘becoming’ wounded and dolorous. All also explicitly solicit sharing her weeping: sometimes the choir asks Mary to show the Son’s pain so they may weep with her; sometimes Mary asks the brethren to weep with her so that they may see his pains. Showing in order to lament, lamenting in order to see: the lament is no longer the response to the Mother’s pain (as in the lectiones) but the dispositive of empathetic perception that mediates the vision of the Passion. The laude do not present Mary’s suffering as such, but the image of the vir dolorum that she assembles and offers to the devout so that – looking through her sorrowing gaze – they may see and feel in the first person what he endured.

If we shift from purely textual dynamics to the ritual script in which the laude are performed, the lament becomes the intention with which the devotee performs the fustigatio: the empathetic dispositive is re-located into the action and shapes it. He scourges himself weeping with the Mother and, while feeling the pain of the lashes, aligns her point of view ‘in subjective shot’, he follows the line of her gaze, seeing in first person Christ bound, struck, scourged, crowned with thorns, mocked, humiliated, crucified – the whole deformation of the God-man’s body into the ‘man of sorrows’. In scourging himself, he does not perform an analogical–fictional mimetic action (he does not imitate the mother’s gestures) nor identifies with Christ; rather, he makes the body “an avenue to knowledge. Knowledge of the body, of the soul, of the truth, of reality, and of God” (Cohen Reference Cohen1995: 52–53). Perceiving Christ’s pain through Mary’s gaze – the medium of perfect empathy that fuses two into one and allows to say “I am you” (Fulton Brown Reference Fulton Brown2002: 461–470) – the devotee gains access to the affective God-human bond: likeness. At the same time, he recognises that Christ’s deformed body is the mirror – both consequence and reparation – of his own deformity as sinner, thereby grasping the nature of sins unlikeness from God. In sum, by becoming the dispositive for empathic perception of the Passion, maternal weeping reconfigures and transforms flagellation from a Christo-mimetic expiatory sharing into a dramatic discipline of knowledge and psychosomatic conformation.

Three aspects characterise it.

The first concerns the meaning and function of the vir dolorum image, fashioned by the laude and the end towards which the mnemonic process tends. That image must be read within Franciscan spirituality and within the Order’s catechetical–pastoral programme – the matrix of the values inspiring the confraternity and its devotions. Recent studies show that early Franciscanism (late thirteenth to early fourteenth centuries) did not construe it in doloristic terms, nor as an image of redemptive violence (Bartolomei Romagnoli et al. Reference Romagnoli, Alessandra and Di_Muro2024). Rather, it was understood as the image of God’s radical, complete self-revelation and of his love per Verbum crucifixum.Footnote ²⁶ Through the Passion and on the Cross God brings His kenosis to fulfilment and hands Himself over to humankind, fully sharing the flesh. From the word of the Cross that spoke to Francis, the human being begins to grasp the mystery of salvation and return ad Verbum. To set the vir dolorum before one’s inner and outer gaze does not prompt mortification of the flesh, but the full restoration of the image of God in the person – soul and body.Footnote ²⁷ If, as Coccia (Reference Coccia, Boquet and Nagy2009: 158) notes, the Passion is the meeting-place of God and the human – so, “to suffer means, for God, to become human; for the human, to imitate God” – then, discipline in memoriam Passionis is a process of conformatio, compassion a via transformationis, and Mary’s sorrow the gnoseological and affective dispositive mediating that encounter.

The second aspect is the esoteric character of this dramatic discipline and its refusal of a mimetic–spectacular dispositive. Unlike Umbrian flagellant processions and other contemporary confraternal practices, the brethren of Santo Stefano do not assimilate their bodies “to the pathetic vision of the suffering Christ”, becoming “living images of piety” in a public spectacle of pain (Merback Reference Merback and Strickland2007: 143). For them, flagellation is a memory played within the choir and behind the oratory’s closed doors: it may elicit a mutual “intervisual experience” of pain, not to be intended as a “real-time staging of Passion imagery” (166), but a real-time experience of compassion. The Virgin’s weeping is the performative dispositive of Assisi’s disciplinati. It is so, too, on Good Friday morning, when they don the habit of compunction and re-present Mary’s laments to the people by singing laude of her sorrow without scourging. Nerbano (Reference Nerbano and Pacchiarotti2015: 263) sees this Marian-lament centrality as the hallmark of Assisi’s ‘theatre of devotion’, and traces it to the influence of Franciscan spirituality, where praise is the chief instrument of devotion and preaching. By making Mary’s weeping the emotional script of Christ’s pains, the Assisi brethren turn Good Friday memory into a shared weeping of the Passion, in private and in public.

Lastly, the third aspect is the outcome of this dramatic discipline: mercy. The Assisi rite stands within the Umbrian–Marchigian tradition of self-inflicted penitential flagellation, yet renews it. It preserves both Peter Damian’s understanding of verberatio as configurative imitation, and the pacifying aim of the 1260 flagellant processions. The Statuti (33–36) make conformity to the Crucified Christ and the building of peace, respectively, the personal end of each brother and the choir’s principal charge. Yet both aims are reinvented through Mary’s ‘perfect compassion’, which has no penitential or retributive stamp (Mary is ‘perfect humanity’, without sin), but sharing and co-participatory ones. The nature of maternal compassion is most clearly understood through the Christian notion of misericordia (mercy). Beyond Greek – and modern – notions of pity (eleos, emotional sharing among kin/allies) or lament (oiktirmos, the sharing of tears), Christian misericordia is pain that is both empathic and generative. It recalls splangchnizomai, namely the pangs of childbirth: in the Synoptic Gospels it is used solely to describe Christ’s compassionate response to human suffering (Köster Reference Köster, Kittel and Friedrich1979: 919). The pain Mary mediates to the devout is Christ’s ‘divine’ and generative pain – the angustia passionis that brings forth the new self and Anthony of Padua compares it to the angustia parturientis.Footnote ²⁸ Therefore, misericordia denotes the spasm of the womb and the breaking heart of one who lives another’s pain in his own flesh and aids the neighbour (as Augustine states plainly, Sermo 358/A). To adopt Mary’s empathic gaze and make it the experiential dispositive of flagellation is to turn it into an embodied experience that disciplines both individual and choir to mercy, felt in interpersonal relations and practiced in communal and civic works.

Thus, mercy is the key term for grasping the ultimate sense of the Assisi brethren’s dramatic discipline as a spiritual exercise that shapes the choir for the mutual care of neighbours.

The Ordo lays out this disciplining process: on entering the rite, the penitents ask God for mercy (Misereatur nobis) and invoke it by vesting in compunction (Miserere); they then interiorise it as an empathic response to the Mother’s shared pain; finally, they experience it by seeing and feeling ‘like the Mother’ the life-giving pain of the Passion. By virtue of this psychosomatic co-feeling, in the final part of the rite they petition for peace, charity, justice, wisdom, and, at last, grace and salvation. They then leave the rite with a gesture that mirrors, and reverses, their entry: while reciting a hymn to the Passion – bitter and sweet, sorrowful and glorious – they remove the habit of compunction.

Disciplined to mercy, the brethren put their habitus into play in Francis’s city. There, from the late thirteenth to the early fourteenth centuries, the pastoral and politico-institutional action of the Franciscan bishop Teobaldo Pontano (1296–1329) appears to reshape the city according to a penitential and associative model aimed at peace and mercy (D’Acunto Reference D’Acunto2010).Footnote ²⁹

The empathetic performance of flagellation as a discipline of compassion is best – and perhaps only – understood within that Assisi context, and it can also cast new light on the meaning of the confraternal modus vivendi, which is not a flight from the world but the lay, social construction of community. Of this care for the common good, Mary, Mother of Mercy, is the avatar: emotional posture and forma formans.

4.1 Embodying Vision

One might object that the performative gaze’s efficacy is somewhat compromised by excluding material reality. If that exclusion is the condition for producing what I have called the medieval avatar, perhaps what results is not a fully real presence but only a mere ‘feeling of being there’ and acting.

The crux, however, lies in the dramatic strategy of re-presentation, tied to two paradigms of Christian “participatory mediality” identified by Christian Kiening (Reference Kiening2019): the universal mediation whereby creation makes God present to the world as Creator; and the absolute mediation whereby Christ makes God present to humankind through the communicatio of the divine and human substance in his person (the unconfused unity). In both cases the mediation is paradoxical: it entails the presence, visibility, and tangibility of what is absent, invisible, and intangible.

Above all, it entails the human capacity to apprehend the presence of absence and, in turn, to render oneself present within mediation by reconfiguring one’s psychosomatic faculties. I use reconfiguration in the etymological sense of figura derived not from Greek typos but from schema: it denotes the ‘manner’ in which something manifests its form in accord with ‘what it is’ and thus presupposes a gnoseological dispositive able to participate in the manifestation of being. Consequently, one who changes the figura-schema is trans-formed; one who loses it is de-formed (aschematos corresponds to Latin turpis) (Bino Reference 59Bino2020).

Within this process, the exterior-interior, closure-openness dynamic with which I began becomes decisive. I clarify this with reference to modern media to which the notion of the avatar – at least in part – points (see Section 1, §4).

That dynamic follows Francesco Casetti’s projection/protection complex: a mechanism “of disconnection and reconnection with reality that emerges thanks to enclosures and screens” (Casetti Reference Casetti2023: 34). It aims “at creating a ‘protected’ confrontation with the world and at the same time at ‘projecting’ individuals beyond the safe space in which they are located” (Casetti Reference Casetti2023: 14). Christian imaginative experience realises this complex insofar as it presupposes an intentional severance from the world which enables the subject to re-appropriate the world itself through a different configuration of vision. On the one hand, closure ‘protects’ the individual from simulacral exposure to the world (the illusion of appearances); on the other, re-presentation repairs the oppositional fracture between seeming and being (duplicitas), enabling the grasp of their unity (simplicitas).Footnote ³⁰ In short, excluding external reality conditions a participatory mediation that projects the individual into a synaesthetic experience of the transcendent made present and trains the gaze to look beyond the screen of the merely visible.

The medieval avatar is the outcome not of a simulacral process but of re-configuration, whereby the subject enters – and is immersed in – a participatory relation to the experience of God. In the two cases examined, the avatar engages the subject’s physical body in two distinct ways. In the first, the affective projection of presence intro-flexes the body (bends it inward) and moulds it (disciplines it); in the second, the body itself produces a somatic presence of the affectus, disciplining itself through action. The body’s affective introflexion and the emotions’ bodily extroflexion are complementary processes in a production of presence of oneself – to oneself, and to God – that is at once a form of knowing and a manner of life.

This complementarity is especially clear in (direct and indirect) accounts of mystical dramatic vision, where vision is embodied as transformative action.

An exemplary case is the hagiographic account of Catherine of Siena. If we read Raymond of Capua’s Legenda maior (1395) as a dramatic, psychosomatic script, it is governed by two patterns: that of mind/spirit and that of the body. On the one hand, Catherine’s interior experience intensifies as she is ever more absorbed in inner images and emotions; on the other, her body undergoes a gradual diminutio as she loses awareness of the exterior world. This cross-fade between perceptual introversion and the embodiment of inner vision is cast in two acts.

In the first act, Catherine leaves the familial and social logic that would form her as a virgin for marriage and withdraws into the ‘inner cell’ she herself builds as the intimate space for union with Christ, the bridegroom par excellence. Her withdrawal is more than removing the body from the world’s order to be reborn into a spiritual order: it is denegatio of self – abandoning a self-consciousness conceived ‘from and for itself’ to assume a consciousness ‘of the self in relation to God’. Fittingly, the itinerary towards union begins with a vision of Christ in Majesty whose effect is self-forgetting; proceeds through rites of passage (the vow of virginity, prayer and penitential action, reception of the penitents’ veil); culminates in a sapiential revelation (in which Christ himself discloses the principles of self-knowledge and union); and ends with Catherine’s mystical nuptials with Christ.

The second act concerns the experience of spousal life: she cleaves to the bridegroom with her whole self – mind, body, affections, and deeds. The visionary experience felt in the flesh overlaps with a desensitised bodily state, brought on by total fasting, sleeplessness, and dulled physical perception. This is not a negation of the body but its transformation through concrete care for the neighbour. Catherine learns to love as Christ and, in a conformative itinerary, ascends the Crucified as ladder and assimilates him as food: from him, she receives the crown of thorns, is clothed in his blood, feeds at his side, welcomes his heart into her breast, is pierced in the hand by the nail of the Passion; finally, she receives the stigmata. That final, public scene seals the unitive process. The embrace of the cross is almost a Eucharistic con-corporation (a co-bodily union): the bride receives the impress of the bridegroom’s sacrificial body, which transforms her once and for all. Washed by the rain of his blood and immersed in it – a rhetorical posture she declares in the Letters (“I Catherine, servant and slave of the servants of Jesus Christ, write to you in His precious Blood”) – she begins to speak in his name, becoming Christ’s avatar in the religious sense: the embodiment of divine consciousness and will.

Thus, the first act is a gnoseological discipline: it reconfigures self-perception towards knowledge of God and culminates in unitive love. The second is a conformative action: it literally embodies the vision of love and gives birth to love of neighbour. Catherine herself explains this dynamic: “The soul” – she says – “begins by exercising herself … in the ordinary virtues, remaining in the cell of self-knowledge, in order to know better the goodness of God towards her”. Once she has recognised it, “she loves it … without the medium of herself … and with the medium of virtue, which she has conceived through love of [God]” (Catherine of Siena 1907: 17, 27). Once the soul “has conceived by the affection of love, she immediately is delivered of fruit for her neighbor, because, in no other way, can she act out the truth she has conceived in herself, but, loving [God] in truth, in the same truth she serves her neighbor” (Catherine of Siena 1907: 27).

Catherine’s case is an extreme instance of avatar production: a radically transformative experience that reconfigures the senses, ‘immersing’ them in God, so that everything is remembered, known, seen, touched, and felt only in God:

The embodiment of vision shows that the specificity of the medieval avatar lies in presupposing an anti-fictional, immersive production of presence that couples the discipline of senses and emotions with the concrete practice of action.

Granted, the psychagogic, psychosomatic, and performative dimensions of this process make full sense within the theological anthropology of medieval Christianity. Nevertheless, they offer a trans-historical lens for understanding the complex, individual-and-collective negotiation of perception at work in modern and contemporary representation