Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval CompassionAffective meditation on the Passion was one of the most popular literary genres of the high and later Middle Ages. Proliferating in a rich variety of forms, these lyrical, impassioned, script like texts in Latin and the vernacular had a deceptively simple goal: to teach their readers how to feel. They were thus instrumental in shaping and sustaining the wide scale shift in medieval Christian sensibility from fear of God to compassion for the suffering