IMC 2020: Sessions

Research into the medieval theology of marriage has traditionally focused on the 12th and 13th centuries (up to Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure), while subsequent - often not less fruitful and innovative - doctrinal developments and debates have received much less scholarly attention. The session hopes to help remedy this situation. It explores the hitherto unstudied contributions to the theology of marriage by three renowned theologians active at the university of Paris around 1300, setting them against the background of previous and contemporary doctrinal developments and debates. Paper-a (Nold) examines the doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage in the unpublished Sentences commentary of the Franciscan theologian Vital du Four, comparing his position to two other Franciscan theologians writing around the same time: Richard of Middleton and Duns Scotus. Paper-b (Reynolds) expounds and contextualizes the unusual enquiry into the ontology of the bond of marriage by Peter of La Palu. In his Sentences commentary, this Dominican theologian proposes that being married to someone is not a relation in the Aristotelian sense, as commonly supposed, but rather a quality inhering in the embodied soul. Paper-c (Blažek) discusses the critiques to the theology of marriage of Thomas Aquinas found in the various redactions of the Sentences commentary of Durandus of Saint-Pourçain.