For over seventy years, since the publication of Richard Southern’s 1953 classic The Making of the Middle Ages, historians have identified the medieval era with a profound shift in the Christian devotional relationship to Jesus Christ. Starting in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as European Christians experimented with new forms of “affective piety,” they began to show an unprecedented interest in the spiritual and somatic implications of Jesus’s humanity, above all, regarding his Passion, his horrific suffering and death on the cross. In recent decades, as evident in the work of Michelle Karnes, Mary Dzon, Holly Flora, and Sarah McNamer, among others, research into affective piety and Christ’s humanity has shown no signs of slowing down, renewed and recharged by gender studies, performance studies, and the history of emotions among other interdisciplinary developments.

Building on this trajectory, Communicating the Passion features thirteenth erudite essays that investigate the “vivid and emotionally intense commemoration of the Passion of Christ as a pivotal element in late medieval religious culture and social life” (13). The Passion, as one of the volume’s editors Pietro Delcorno explains in the introduction, was “not only something to know” but “something to experience” (15). In their effort to recover a sense of the full range of those experiences, the contributions to Communicating the Passion explore a wide set of historical sources and contexts, performances, artifacts, “imagescapes,” and “soundscapes” that shaped the social history of the Passion. This quest for the affective Jesus ranges from fresh takes on well-known devotional texts and images, such as those found in the fourteenth-century Meditationes vitae Christi (Meditations on the Life of Christ), to more obscure – for this reviewer anyway – iterations of Christ-centered devotion, such as the “speaking crucifixes” employed by Franciscans in liturgical celebrations of Christ’s Passion.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the topic of preaching runs throughout the volume. As Delcorno also observes, “preaching performance was not isolated but deeply intertwined with a wide range of texts, images, and objects that help us to reconstruct the pervasive role of the Passion in late medieval culture and in the life of the people at the time” (29). Many of the contributors focus on sermons and sermon collections, drawing attention to lesser-known sources and preachers, such as the English Benedictine Robert Rypon (d. 1422), discussed by the volume’s other editor, Holly Johnson; the Bohemian popular preacher Milíč of Kroměříž (d. 1374), examined by Olga Kalashinkkova; and the Italian Franciscan Roberto Caracciola da Lecce (d. 1495), studied by Giacomo Mariani. In the final essay, “Examining Finnish Anti-Judaic Imagery through Sermons: The Passion Iconography of the Holy Cross Church of Hattula,” Jussi Hanska reminds us that medieval devotion to Jesus’s human side, above all to his suffering, possessed dire implications for Christian attitudes toward Jews, held as collectively responsible for killing Christ, even when – as was the case in late medieval Finland – there were no actual Jews present.

As evident from these examples, the essays cover a wide geographical ground, but many of them focus on cultural and social expressions of devotion to Christ’s Passion in regions of Europe – including Bohemia, Hungary, and Finland – that tend to fly under the radar of scholars who work on affective piety. The fact that the volume emerged from a 2019 international workshop at the Central European University in Budapest no doubt fostered this innovative attention paid to areas outside of the “usual suspects” in western Europe (e.g., Italy and England). The collection also demonstrates an unusual willingness to extend into the era of print in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and even eighteenth centuries, beyond the putative medieval-modern divide, another one of its strengths.

To be clear, this volume is not intended for the casual reader. Bringing impressive codicological skills to bear, several of the essays offer a close reading of particular manuscripts or sermon collections in manuscript and print editions. Appendices offer new critical Latin editions of previously unedited sermons. One senses that many of these studies began with finely grained archival investigations. Generally speaking, these essays are models of meticulous scholarship that undergraduate students would, I suspect, find impenetrable; graduate students might find them intimidating but could learn a great deal from their methodologies. Nevertheless, taken as a whole, Communicating the Passion greatly expands the usual gambit of scholarship on medieval affective piety and devotion to Christ’s suffering in the flesh. The editors and authors of the volume are to be commended.