GAVIN FORT

More specifically, my research is motivated by understanding how and why deep human emotions, like empathy and nostalgia, influence the creation of ideas and practices. Why would one person take on someone else’s punishment, for example? Or why would one believe that Eden could be (or should be) resurrected and transplanted into any contemporary context? These questions stem from a desire to explore the roots of the human psyche in the western world.

 

A central topic that drives much of my research is the medieval phenomenon of suffering for others, especially in the context of penitential acts. In acts of proxy penance, one person completed a penitential work for another, who received the spiritual benefit. From the third until the sixteenth century, the church and its members encouraged and practiced proxy penance, though the practice was also contested by church leaders and the laity. My book, “Penitents and Their Proxies in Medieval Europe, 200–1550,” explores both the belief that one person could “stand in” for another and the acts of these penitential representatives. Part of the context for this substitutionary work was a spiritual economy where debts were paid by others’ surpluses, often through suffering bodies. In fact, I show how religious women in the thirteenth century used their bodies as the medium of proxy suffering. Underlying all this was a religious culture of care for others, even as criticism and abuse of proxy penance existed alongside it. I have published two articles that describe how this balance operated throughout the medieval period. My first article, “Penitents and Their Proxies: Penance for Others in Early Medieval Europe,” won the Sidney E. Mead Prize from the American Society of Church History.

 

This book contributes to the growing field of the history of emotions, especially as practiced by scholars like Karl Morrison, who work on premodern empathy. I argue that medieval religion, and indeed medieval culture in general, developed expansive and elaborate principles of substitution and representation. This work also contributes to a long and deep history of why we do things for other people. Indeed, proxy penance in medieval Europe informs modern ideas about the corporate nature of social and civic life. In its revised state as a monograph, I show how the history of suffering for others resonates with contemporary attempts to cultivate empathy, and interacts with present debates about “effective altruism” and its ability to explain how we think about ourselves and others in an interconnected world.

 

The book uses a wide range of source material because it covers a large chronological frame and because proxy penance took on different forms in different periods. In the first chapter, I employ letters, sermons, penitential treatises, monastic rituals, confessional liturgies, and theological works to examine the first instances of proxy penance. Chapter two uses the newly created penitential texts and various conciliar sources to examine the growth of proxy fasting in early medieval Europe. Chapter three traces the shifting opinions about penance in the burgeoning intellectual culture of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with an emphasis on the forces that both defended and criticized proxy penance. Chapter four examines thirteenth-century theological works, both the more practically-focused manuals for confessors and the scholastic treatises, which detail how intellectuals thought proxy penance operated. Chapter five uses collections of religious stories—from the quotidian to the fantastic—to show how prevalent proxy penance had become in everyday life, as well as stories of religious women who endured incredible physical punishments for others (see attached writing sample). Last, chapter six uses late medieval English wills, royal and papal registers, and letter collections to narrate the phenomenon of proxy pilgrimage.