Feeling Minne: Embodied Emotion in Mechthild von Magdeburg’s Mystical Devotions

Résumé 0

Minne (MHD: love, f.) often appears in 13th century Germanic female mystical texts as an object of devotional affection. In Das Fliessende Licht der Gottheit, Mechthild von Magdeburg portrays this Minne as a person—explicitly describing Minne’s body in FLG VII, lxviii using courtly poetic conventions, and thus effectively making this one of many moments where she personifies, embodies, incarnates the concept of minne in her writing. Typically, studies consider minne to be a personification of God, or of God’s love for mankind; an emotional link which should always exist “between God and the Soul” (FLG II, xiii). However, it seems that we ought to consider minne as possessed of her own “personhood” precisely because of her poetic embodiment in this text. In this paper, I will explore the impact of this embodiment of “love” on Mechthild’s experience of minne to interrogate whether or not we should consider minne as an emotion (a culturally and linguistically dependent concept) in this text, as opposed to a feeling (thought- and body-related) following the oppositional model proposed by A. Wierzbicka in Emotions Across Languages and Cultures. Mechthild von Magdeburg draws on the concepts of minne (as emotion) expressed in different literary cultural spheres of the time (courtly and religious) to construct her own concept of minne – a concept she experiences as having a body (something tangible, that can be touched with her body). I will argue that it is precisely this combination of Minne’s poetic embodiment as well as the variety of “cultural” and “linguistic” concepts of minne which existed in this medieval context that we shouldn’t consider Minne as an emotion proper in Mechthild’s text, but rather an embodied feeling: something that can cause or inform an emotional reaction in the mystic as well as something with a body that can be felt.