ABSTRACT
A study in affect, temporality, and devotional reading, this essay addresses a scene in which the senses are compromised: Mary Magdalen’s mourning before the empty tomb of Christ in John 20. Primarily addressing the English Jesuit Robert Southwell’s 1591 meditation on Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Teares, it also brings contemporary queer theory together with patristic and early modern theology in order to propose Southwell’sMagdalen as a model for a queer poetics of sorrow, refusal, and recalcitrance. For Southwell, feeling, both sensory and emotional, is not an obstacle to but an instrument of interpretation, and negative affect and sensory compromise are not disorders in need of a cure but the necessary ground of devotion and reading alike, producing a productive intimacy between text and reader. What consequences, this essay asks, does such an intimacy have for our critical practice?
