| Paper 1825-a | Archbishop Richard FitzRalph and His Portrayal of the Friars in 14th-Century Ireland
(Language: English)
Rowena McCallum, School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy & Politics, Queen's University Belfast
Index terms: Ecclesiastical History, Literacy and Orality, Religious Life, Sermons and Preaching |
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| Paper 1825-c | Moral Agency, Corporeality, and Virtue: 13th-Century Theological Entanglements in the Summa Theologiae
(Language: English)
Jodie Miller, Department of Modern Foreign Languages & Literatures, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Index terms: Medicine, Mentalities, Philosophy, Theology |
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| Abstract | Paper -a:
This paper will examine Archbishop of Armagh, Richard FitzRalph's allegations towards Ireland's friars in his Proposicio (1350) and his famous Defensorium Curatorum (1357). In the early part of his career FitzRalph had genuine friendships with the mendicant orders, but he suddenly became their most bitter opponent and devoted the last years of his life to a systematic attempt to undermine their privileges and their way of life. In 1350, FitzRalph began to write influential tracts and deliver sermons attacking the mendicants for usurping privileges traditionally associated with the secular clergy, especially rights to burial and hearing confessions. By doing this we can evaluate their popularity and significance on medieval life.
Paper -b:
My proposal examines how Furness Abbey, one of the most influential Cistercian monasteries in Northern England, constructed an institutional memory of its cross-border interactions with Scotland, Ireland and the Isle of Man from a 15th-century perspective. My paper uses case studies of documents from the Furness Coucher Book (the abbey cartulary compiled c. 1407-c. 1412) from each of these three British entities to reveal how the abbey sought to give itself a more 'English' identity, contributing to growing late medieval discourse on articulating 'proto-national' identities. It is argued that the Coucher Book helped to create an institutional identity for Furness Abbey, particularly in de-emphasising or 'forgetting' its wider British interactions. The 'frontier' shall be used to describe the series of geographical, political, and cultural boundaries differentiating England, Scotland, Ireland and the Isle of Man up to c.1300, to be termed the 'Insular British frontier' for the purposes of this paper. Similarly, 'institutional memory' shall be defined here as a collective understanding, or set of understandings, as to how an institution such as a monastery perceived of its past and the meaning which it attached to the memory of that past.
Paper -c:
What is it to be virtuous? According to Aristotle's ethics, virtue comes from finding the mean between deficiency and excess, and then acting in moderation. This paper aims to consider the portrayal of virtue as a question of proportions and equilibrium in 13th-century Christian theology, specifically in the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas. His work provides a corporeal, even medical, view of virtue in the idea of purging immoral behaviors, balancing the four humors, and strengthening moral agency through habit. How might an exploration of this corporeal interpretation of virtue inform our understanding of the economy of salvation in Latin Christendom and the philosophical climate of the 13th century?
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