Books by Sarah McNamer

The Meditations on the Life of Christ was the most popular and influential devotional work of the later Middle Ages. This volume is a critical edition, with English translation and commentary, of a hitherto-unpublished Italian text that McNamer argues is likely to be the original version of this influential masterpiece.

This book offers a new history of a major medieval genre, affective meditations on the Passion. It argues that women were instrumental in the creation of this genre, and it illuminates how these scripts for the performance of prayer served to construct compassion itself as an intimate and feminine emotion.