This volume makes available for the first time in English full translations of Book 1 of Peter Lombard's "Sentences," the work that would win the greatest teacher of the twelfth century a place in Dante's Paradise and would continue to excite generations of students well beyond the Middle Ages.

The principal signs and instruments of grace available to Christians as a result of Christ's redeeming work are the sacraments of the Church ? baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist, penance, extreme unction, holy orders, and marriage. These are the main subjects of Book 4 of the "Sentences," comprising forty-two of its fifty Distinctions. In particular, penance and marriage (with regard to which the Lombard's consensual theory was to prove extremely influential) receive extensive discussion. The last eight Distinctions are given over to a treatment of the last things: the bodily resurrection, purgation, hell, the last judgement, and eternity. The Book concludes with a reference to a text of Isaias that serves as an allegory of the function and purpose of the "Sentences" as a whole.