Medieval Avatars: Projecting Presence, Performing Emotions

This Element explores how medieval devotional and disciplinary practices acted as 'immersive technologies' for producing presence and configuring emotions. Through the comparative analysis of Aelred of Rievaulx's De Institutione Inclusarum and the Ordo ad Faciendum Disciplinam of the lay confraternity of Santo Stefano in Assisi, it investigates how the devout subject projected themselves into an imaginal, affective space, where memory, posture, and sensory experience converged to enable a p...