Pain and Suffering in Medieval Theology: Academic Debates at the University of Paris in the Thirteenth Century

Pain and Suffering in Medieval Theology: Academic Debates at the University of Paris in the Thirteenth Century

By Donald Mowbray
Boydell & Brewer, 2009
ISBN: 9781843834618

Questions of pain and suffering occur frequently in medieval theological debate. Here, Dr Mowbray examines the innovative views of Paris’s masters of theology in the thirteenth century, illuminating how they constructed notions of pain and suffering by building a standard terminology and conceptual framework. Such issues as the Passion of Christ, penitential suffering, suffering and gender, the fate of unbaptized children, and the pain and suffering of souls and resurrected bodies in hell are all considered, to demonstrate how the masters established a clear and precise consensus for their explanations of the human condition.

Contents

Introduction

1  Thirteenth-Century Theological Ideas about Human Pain and Suffering and the Passion of Christ

2  Gendering Pain: Theological Ideas about Female and Male Suffering

3  Pain as a Restorative Power: Voluntary Suffering and Satisfaction for Sin

4  The Intellectual Development of Limbo: Pain, Children and Original Sin

5  Anima Separata: Masters of Theology and the Controversy surrounding the Suffering of the Separated Soul

6  Defining the Corporeal: Suffering in Hell according to Masters of Theology at Paris, c.1230-c.1280

7  Conclusion

8  Bibliography

Click here to go to the Publisher’s Website