Communicating the Passion: The Socio-Religious Function of an Emotional Narrative (1250–1530) , ed. Pietro Delcorno and Holly Johnson

This volume considers late medieval devotion to Christ’s Passion as depicted in sermons, devotional and mystical texts, and images. The collection brings together twelve essays spanning a geographical range from Italy and the German-speaking lands to England, central Europe and the Nordic world. Pietro Delcorno’s introduction, which effectively frames the collection, presents the Passion as a master narrative through which medieval devotion, social life and collective identity were continually shaped. The first five contributions focus on Passion literature and associated images. Eliška Kubartová shows that fourteenth-century Bohemian Marian laments in the Hradecký Manuscript and the Passional of Abbess Kunigunde (d. 1321) articulate gendered devotion through competing expectations, presenting women as both honoured and constrained while also complicating male norms; the weeping Virgin thus becomes a powerful stimulus for compassion, a feminised yet widely shared devotional ideal. Katrin Janz-Wenig and Lenka Panušková likewise examine Kunigunde’s Passional codex, considering how text and images of the arma Christi shaped late medieval understandings of sin, repentance and devotional response. Its extended homiletic afterlife is attested by an eighteenth-century German translation (Prague, National Library of the Czech Republic, MS XIII.E14d), which preserves these affective strategies in verbal form.