Feeling dredeful: fear and therapy in The Scale of Perfection

Journal article

Fear, as understood by medieval medicine, is a dangerous and potentially lethal passion of the soul that ought to be avoided. Yet while both academic medical texts and vernacular regimens of health stress the dangers of fear, medieval theology holds a very different opinion. As popular devotional materials and complex theological treatises make clear, fear is uniquely suited to promote the ultimate health of the soul – its salus and union with God. This paper will explore how medieval theology reconfigures fear as a passion of the soul that edifies and promotes health. Focusing upon the connection between emotion, medicine and religious literature in late-medieval England, the paper will explore drede – or fear – and its therapeutic uses in Walter Hilton’s The Scale of Perfection. This text is remarkable not simply for its widespread dissemination, but also for its sophisticated comments regarding drede’s utility. It identifies drede as a means of altering the soul in specific and highly desirable ways, as an initial means of returning the soul to God by promoting the key virtue of kenosis or mekenesse within the very construction of the soul itself.

Authors: Mccann, D

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: SAUTE
• Journal: Emotion, Affect, Sentiment: The Language and Aesthetics of Feeling
• Volume: 30
• Pages: 89-107
• Publication date: 2014-01-01
• Acceptance date: 2013-11-25
• ISSN: 0940-0478
• Language: English