Böcker av Marcia L. Colish

The answer to this question is neither simple nor straightforward. As this fascinating contribution to medieval intellectual history shows, medieval ideas on baptism, though seen as necessary for salvation, were far from unanimous. Marcia Colish demonstrates persuasively that, from the patristic period through the early fourteenth century, there was vigorous debate surrounding baptism by desire, fictive baptism, and forced baptism. Drawing on a wide and interdisciplinary range of sources that goes well beyond the writings of theologians and canonists to include liturgical texts and practices, the rulings of popes and church councils, saints lives, chronicles, imaginative literature, and poetry, Faith, Fiction and Force in Medieval Baptismal Debates illuminates the emergence and fortunes of these three controversies and the historical con- texts that situate their development. Each debate has its own story line, its own turning points, and its own seminal figures whose positions informed its course. The thinkers involved in each case were, and regarded one another as being, members of the orthodox western Christian communion. Thus, another finding of this book is that Christian orthodoxy in the Middle Ages was able to encompass and accept dis- agreements both wide and deep on a sacrament seen as fundamental to Christian identity, faith and practice.

An analysis of the course of Western intellectual history between AD 400 and 1400. It surveys the comparative modes of thought and varying success of Byzantine, Latin-Christian and Muslim cultures, and then proceeds from the 12th-century revival of learning to the high Middle Ages and beyond.

A study by Marcia L. Colish of the patriarch treatises of Ambrose of Milan (c. 340-397), in which he develops an ethics for the laity and a corpus of works aimed at the conversion of pagan Roman adults to Christianity, Christian ethics for the common man emerges.

Spanning thirty years, this volume contains papers that reflect three of Professor Colish's interests as a historian of medieval scholastic thought. The first group of studies represent investigations that flowed into, and out of, the research on Peter Lombard (d 1161) and his contemporaries that culminated in her book "Peter Lombard" (1994).

Early Christianity faced the problem of the human word versus Christ the Word. Could language accurately describe spiritual reality? The Mirror of Language brilliantly traces the development of one prominent theory of signs from Augustine through Anselm of Canterbury, Thomas Aquinas, and Dante. Their shared epistemology validated human language as an authentic but limited index of preexistent reality, both material and spiritual. This sign theory could thereby account for the ways men receive, know, and transmit religious knowledge, always mediated through faith.Marcia L. Colish demonstrates how the three theologians used different branches of the medieval trivium to express a common sign theory: Augustine stressed rhetoric, Anselm shifted to grammar (including grammatical proofs of God's existence), and Thomas Aquinas stressed dialectic. Dante, the one poet included in this study, used the Augustinian sign theory to develop a Christian poetics that culminates in the Divine Comedy. The author points out not only the commonality but also the sharp contrasts between these writers and shows the relation between their sign theories and the intellectual ferment of the times.When first published in 1968, The Mirror of Language was recognized as a pathfinding study. This completely revised edition incorporates the scholarship of the intervening years and reflects the refinements of the author's thought. Greater prominence is given to the role of Stoicism, and sharper attention is paid to some of the thinkers and movements surrounding the major thinkers treated. Concerns of semiotics, philosophy, and literary criticism are elucidated further. The original thesis, still controversial, is now even wider ranging and more salient to current intellectual debate.