This paper seeks to offer a new perspective on how seventeenth-century devotional writings, both private (manuals of prayer and meditation) and public (sermons), may have been felt and understood by their audiences. It reads modern theories of mind, specifically motor resonance theory or kinesis, back into the rhetorical styles and techniques that characterized and governed these genres; kinesis, a term which describes the phenomenon of actions seen or read about being echoed in the involuntary muscular responses of viewers or readers, is shown to intersect in suggestive ways with accounts of the classical rhetorical figure of enargeia, a vivid picturing or animated ekphrasis. In the light of this conjunction, the paper examines accounts of Christ’s passion in the works of de la Puente, Bruno, Cranmer and Loyola, and then in sermons by Donne and Andrewes, with the aim of performing a kind of rhetorical archaeology that might yield traces of original affect. It seeks to contribute to the growing field of cognitive literary study by investigating important devotional genres that have been so far overlooked.