Sin in Medieval and Early Modern Culture: The Tradition of the Seven Deadly Sins, ed. Richard G. Newhauser and Susan J. Ridyard

Abstract

This book presents scholarship from both a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar and the Sewanee Medieval Colloquium. It begins with Richard Newhauser’s superb overview of recent scholarship on the seven deadly sins, in which he contextualises the essays in this volume and points to areas in need of additional research. Seven essays follow, grouped together for their focus on religious, intellectual, and pastoral themes. According to James Williams, Carolingians understood acedia not in its original sense of spiritual burn-out but as failing to do manual work, which makes sense of Benedict of Aniane’s monastic reforms. Kiril Petkov explores the changing meanings of arrogance, a branch of pride. For the Carolingians, it was a political vice which obstructed the desire for centralisation, but by the 1200s, it was a sin reflective of growing anxiety about social mobility. Cate Gunn’s close reading of the manuscript treatise Vices and Virtues demonstrates that interest in pastoral guidance and preparation for confession in England predated the Fourth Lateran Council. In her marvellous contribution, Eileen Sweeney lays out Thomas Aquinas’ distinctive approach to the sins in the Summa theologiae. Aquinas rejected the monastic vision out of which the concept of the seven deadly sins emerged. Vice was a matter of disordered affections, not of struggle with a supernatural evil force; moderation, not asceticism, was its remedy. For Jean Gerson, according to Nancy McLoughlin, the seven deadly sins were used in court sermons to make political as well as pastoral arguments. A different approach to preaching is evident in the Good Friday sermon from the 1430s discussed by Holly Johnson. In it, the preacher parallels the sins with seven torments that Jesus experienced and seven diseases which Jesus cures, while also making the Passion immediate for his auditors so that they would appreciate its relevance for their lives. Newhauser wraps up this section with a critique of Morton Bloomfield’s and John Bossy’s influential arguments that the seven deadly sins tradition essentially ended in the middle ages. Looking at some English evidence, Newhauser shows the sins being used in religious polemic and social criticism even in the 1600s, and argues that their appearance on stage suggests that a taste for morality plays continued in the age of Shakespeare.