A fresh consideration of the enduring tradition of the Seven Deadly Sins, showing its continuing post-medieval influence. The tradition of the seven deadly sins played a considerable role in western culture, even after the supposed turning-point of the Protestant Reformation, as the essays collected here demonstrate. The first part of the book addresses such topics as the problem of acedia in Carolingian monasticism; the development of medieval thought on arrogance; the blending of tradition and innovation in Aquinas's conceptualization of the sins; the treatment of sin in the pastoral contexts of the early Middle English Vices and Virtues and a fifteenth-century sermon from England; the political uses of the deadly sins in the court sermons of Jean Gerson; and the continuing usefulnessof the tradition in early modern England. In the second part, the role of the tradition in literature and the arts is considered. Essays look at representations of the sins in French music of the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries; in Dante's Purgatorio; in a work by Michel Beheim in pre-Reformation Germany; and in a 1533 play by the German Lutheran writer Hans Sachs. New interpretations are offered of Gower's "Tale of Constance" and Bosch's Tabletop of the Seven Deadly Sins. As a whole, the book significantly enhances our understanding of the multiple uses and meanings of the sins tradition, not only in medieval culture but also in the transition from the medievalto the early modern period. RICHARD G. NEWHAUSER is Professor of English and Medieval Studies, Arizona State University, Tempe; SUSAN J. RIDYARD is Professor of History and Director of the Sewanee Medieval Colloquium,The University of the South, Sewanee. Contributors: Richard G. Newhauser, James B. Williams, Kiril Petkov, Cate Gunn, Eileen C. Sweeney, Holly Johnson, Nancy McLoughlin, Anne Walters Robertson, Peter S. Hawkins, CarolJamison, Henry Luttikhuizen, William C. McDonald, Kathleen Crowther.

Anselm of Canterbury is an important and early source of two key themes in Western thought and religion that are hard to reconcile. In his arguments based only on reason, Anselm develops a model of pure and neutral rationality. In his intensely personal and passionate prayers, meditations, and letters of spiritual direction, Anselm is the forerunner of later experiential and emotional spirituality. Scholars have been largely content to compartmentalize these different elements in Anselm, but his most famous works, the Monologion and Proslogion, are both prayerful meditations and argumentative assays of ""reason alone."" Any account of Anselm as a thinker or of his place in Western intellectual and religious history must make sense of this enigma. In Anselm of Canterbury and the Desire for the Word, Eileen C. Sweeney addresses these tensions, offering a new cumulative and comparative interpretation of Anselm's writings. She finds common concerns and patterns across his prayers, logical analysis, and Christological and Trinitarian speculation. Sweeney argues that seeing the common structure and goal in the many topics and genres in the Anselmian corpus yields a new way of considering much-discussed questions in Anselm scholarship--the relationship of faith and reason, the search for ""necessary reasons,"" the concurrence of freedom and grace. It also sheds further light on Anselm's engagement with non-Christian objectors and on the emotional content of Anselm's prayers and letters. Sweeney's study offers a comprehensive picture of Anselm's thought and its development, from the early, intimate, monastically based meditations to the later, public, proto-scholastic disputations. She reveals Anselm as a thinker as relentless in his exposure of ambiguity, paradox, and separation as in his pursuit of certainty, necessity, and unity.