A World Besieged: The Status of Politics in Augustine’s Sacramental Worldview
Augustine of how God acts in the world.
‘As If Augustine Had Said’: Textual Interpretation and Augustinian Ambiguity in a Medieval Debate on Predestination
This paper reevaluates a sample of Hincmar’s writings in the 840s and 850s to argue that he sought to make explicit what Augustine had left unclear regarding predestination by appealing to common standards of orthodoxy in the forms of additional patristic authors, conciliar judgments, and liturgical practices.
Post-Apocalyptic Fiction: A Return to the Medieval
A specific theme in post-apocalyptic science fiction is a return to a new medieval context.
Augustine of Hippo and the Art of Ruling in the Carolingian Imperial Period
This thesis investigates how the political thought of Augustine of Hippo was understood and modified by Carolingian-era writers to serve their own distinctive purposes.
MEDIEVAL BOOKS: Black Friday!
Here are a few recent releases for medievalists hunting for Black Friday books and early Christmas gifts!
The End of the Ancient Other World: Death and Afterlife between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages
Peter Brown gives lectures on ‘Gloriosus Obitus: Death and Afterlife 400-700 AD’ and ‘The Decline of the Empire of God: From Amnesty to Purgatory’
Defenders of the Faith: Augustine, Aquinas, and the Evolution of Medieval Just War Theory
Christianity has always had a difficult relationship with the concept of war. After all, it is impossible to follow Christ’s command to ‘love one’s neighbor’ on the battlefield.
Intersex in the Middle Ages
A brief look at how the medieval world viewed the Intersex individual.
An Apostolic Vocation: The Formation of the Religious Life for the Dominican Sisters in the Thirteenth Century
The Dominican vocation sprang from complex historical understandings of the vita apostolica, and the Dominican women’s religio should be approached as part of these same contexts and perceptions.
Bede’s Temple as History
Another IHR paper, this time, a talk given about Bede’s writing and his interest in the image of the Temple and its relation to Christianity. This paper also examined how Bede’s views shifted over time. How did Bede view Judaism? Was he truly ambivalent?
Avignon vs. Rome: Dante, Petrarch, Catherine of Siena
In the fourteenth century the image of ancient Rome as Babylon was transformed into the positive idea of Rome as both a Christian and a classical ideal.
Hobbes, Augustine, and the Christian nature of man in Leviathan
Scholars of Thomas Hobbes can be loosely divided into two camps: those who believe Hobbes retained strong medieval elements in his philosophy and those who argued that Hobbes’ philosophy marks a clear break from both Ancient philosophy and Christianity.
Medieval Thought and its Architectural Expression
This dissertation will study the correlation and influences between a series of underlying beliefs and how these find expression in the architecture and setting of place.
‘The Torrent of the Human Race:’ The Concept of Movement in the Works of Saint Augustine and Its Impact on the Medieval Imagination
For Augustine, movement was essential in four respects. First, it described the nature of the relationship between an eternal God and a finite, temporal, material world. Second, movement constituted the basic imperative of the Christian message: man’s soul is compelled to move toward God or perish eternally.
Criminal Behaviour by Pilgrims in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period
In the early and high Middle Ages, an introspective religiosity was predominant and supported by Benedictine and Cistercian monks; thus, pil- grimages to holy places were neither as popular nor practiced as they were in the period from the late Middle Ages onwards.
Two Augustines?
Beyond the decision to keep what Christians call the Old Testament, probably the only positive Christian contribution to Jewish-Christian relations from the patristic era was Augustine’s ‘witness doctrine.’
Reality and Truth in Thomas of York: Study and Text
The investigation is conducted through a study of opposites into which being is divided. These opposites are principally the one and the many, potency and act, truth and falsity.
The Light was retreating before Darkness: Tales of the Witch hunt and climate change
Little by little, out of the old conviction —pagan and Christian— of evil interference in atmospheric phenomena evolved the belief that some people may use malign sorcery to set off whirlwinds hail, frosts, floods and other destructive weather events.
The myth of Jewish male menses
Several scholars have asserted that medieval Christians believed that Jewish men menstruated. Their arguments, made in support of a grander claim that Jews as a collectivity were gendered feminine in Christian thought, rest on numerous misreadings.
Eriugena: The Medieval Irish Genius Between Augustine and Aquinas
Carolingian thinker Johannes Scottus Eriugena (810-877 CE) is the author of numerous philosophical and theological works.
The emotion of Shame in Medieval Philosophy
In his Summa theologiae, Thomas Aquinas presents a very detailed taxonomy of emotions which is influenced by some earlier medieval theories.
Thomas Bradwardine: Forgotten Medieval Augustinian
In spite of this dearth of scholarly publications on Bradwardine, he deserves serious consideration. From a church historical perspective, he represents a resurgence of a relatively pure Augustinianism in the late Middle Ages.
Consorting with the other: Re-constructing scholastic, rhetorical and literary attitudes to pagans and paganism in the Middle Ages
My thesis suggests that Christian culture in the late antique to medieval period consciously adapted pagan cultures for its own ends, with a particular view to the usefulness of pagan cultures.
The Conjugal Debt and Medieval Canon Law
The apostle Paul was the earliest influential spokesman for a Christian view of marriage and sexuality. Marital sex was, for Paul, a safeguard against human weakness (1 Cor. 7.1-2).
Theological Works of the Venerable Bede and their Literary and Manuscript Presentation, with Special Reference to the Gospel Homilies
Bede’s theology is complex and closely interwoven; as we can observe, the different themes are interleaved within the homilies. Though Bede was profoundly influenced by Gregory, Augustine and the other Church Fathers, he combined their theologies in a new way that has had a lasting influence.