The Seven Deadly Sins: From Communities to Individuals collects twelve essays, most of which treat a single sin or the concept of the seven sins in social, institutional, or literary contexts. The essays grew out of the authors' participation in a 2004 NEH summer seminar on "The Seven Deadly Sins as Cultural Constructions in the Middle Ages," led by Richard Newhauser, editor of this collection. The authors represent the fields of literature, history, psychology, art history, and political science, offering a diversity of approaches to the topic of sin in medieval and early modern Europe.
In his introduction, Newhauser opens with a meditation on how precisely to construct a Begriffsgeschichte (conceptual history), and takes his cues from the social sciences. He argues for a "social constructionist" approach to the history of the vices, advising that we should not seek to understand what a particular sin is in any essential way, but how a particular sin might function or signify in a local environment. Like most concepts, the sins are sensitive to social, economic, and linguistic change. While this might seem to be an uncontroversial, though eminently reasonable, perspective, Newhauser demonstrates that scholarship on the vices has not always treated them as evolving concepts. He offers a narrative of the sins' emergence from "a narrowly theological inquiry" (6) into contemporary scholarship concerned with the history of emotions, psychology, anthropology, and gender studies. The essays in this volume, then, are oriented toward a confirmation and extension of these new directions in the study of the sins.
At their best, that is indeed what these essays accomplish; they demonstrate that the study of the sins need not confine itself to inflexible notions of medieval "dogma" and that changing definitions and contexts for inquiry into the sins can point us to larger cultural changes. For example, Bridget Balint's essay on envy shows us that attention to discourses of envy in the high Middle Ages reveals both the increasing valuation of intellectual prowess and increasing allegiance to the value of reading non-religious texts such as Ovid's erotic poetry. John Kitchen's essay on nocturnal emissions argues that the monastic penitential context strategically casts the body as a container of secrets--an image that affects reading, ascetic practices, and monastic hierarchies. Dallas Denery's essay on lying and V.S. Benfell's essay on vice and beatitude in the Purgatorio demonstrate that sin and even blessedness are flexible concepts, transformed in light of pressing social and political concerns. These essays are the most successful of the collection at illustrating what a conceptual history of the sins can show us about the ethical, political, and aesthetic lives of individuals and communities.
The essays are organized in three sections: "Communities," "The Institution of the Church," and "Individuals." The first essay, by Dwight Allman, offers an intriguing argument about the way that Carolingian theories of Christian kingship demanded a reorientation of ways of thinking about pride. He persuasively argues for the conflict between antique and Christian understandings of justice and just rule, though his reader would benefit from less time spent unpacking these fairly basic distinctions (classical emphasis on human excellence as a basis for politics in contrast with a Christian emphasis on human sinfulness), and more time spent discussing the specific context of Carolingian kingship, which occupies the final third of the essay. Alcuin's recuperation of a Christian vice such as pride as a classical kingly virtue is, as Allman notes, a tantalizing idea that points to "further investigation." A discussion of how this recuperation might figure in other aspects of Carolingian political theory or practice-- even a provisional discussion--would have helped the reader to assess precisely how fruitful this focus on the sin of pride might become.
Bridget Balint's essay, mentioned above, offers a convincing narrative of the rise of envy in intellectual discourse in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and asks the productive question of how "envy" came to be the term that academic writers associated with "misdirected moral criticism." Her argument for Ovid as a source text on envy, and thus envy's association with intellectual prestige and the prestige of classical, secular texts, is similarly persuasive. In the last essay on "Communities," Susan Hill offers a useful discussion of the way that medieval depictions of gluttony differ from modern understandings; most prominently, medieval gluttony was not associated with corpulence, but rather with inappropriate use of food. Her conclusion that these differences point toward a medieval focus on the glutton's influence on his or her community and a modern concern with the glutton as an outcast is, however, quickly determined and lacking evidence.
The section on "The Institution of the Church" begins with John Kitchen's essay on Cassian and the problem of nocturnal emissions in monastic communities. Kitchen takes issue with Siegfried Wenzel's contention that the scheme of the seven deadly sins was primarily practical in purpose and did not provide "theoretical insight" into human behavior. Kitchen shows that the concatenation of the sins was critical in Cassian's discussion of the question of nocturnal emissions, of Christ's typological conquering of sin (as the "second Adam"), and thus in monastic understandings of the roles of ascetism, abbatial authority, and ultimately the mystery of Christ's humanity and divinity. Rhonda McDaniel's essay examines Adhelm as an important figure in the transmission of Gregorian and Cassianic conceptions of the sins in Anglo-Saxon England. It is intriguing that the contexts for Adhelm's writings on the topic were a prose treatise and a metrical work, both on the subject of virginity and dedicated to a female religious audience. McDaniel discusses the way this audience inspired Adhelm to emphasize the dangers of pride in virginity. She also provides a useful chart (108) comparing Cassian's and Gregory's lists of sins, demonstrating in a nicely concrete form the way that (for example) Gregory's luxuria is not simply his term for Cassian's fornicatio, but rather that gula and fornicatio in Cassian are subsumed into gula for Gregory, while luxuria subsumes elements of acedia.
Dallas Denery offers a fascinating discussion of the sin of lying, exploring the way that Augustine's contention that "every lie is a sin" nevertheless left space for later theologians to reinterpret what constitutes a lie. The thirteenth-century scholastics placed greater emphasis on the intention of the liar, and while every lie still remained a sin, they allowed greater space for need or merit to attach to such actions. Denery convincingly contextualizes these reinterpretations in the renewed scrutiny of Augustine's writings in the university, as well as in the focus on the mendicant orders' obligation to "live the life of witness in both word and deed" (127), and thus the problem of hypocrisy. Holly Johnson's essay on Good Friday sermons and the sins is informative on the tradition of associating each torture of Christ with a particular deadly sin. Yet Johnson argues for this tradition as a reflection of "a changing conception of sin from external act to internal disposition" (129); as she does not discuss any association of Good Friday with the seven deadly sins prior to the thirteenth century, it is difficult to assess this shift, or the part played by Good Friday preaching. Johnson seems more interested in the general meditative aspect of the sermons, which ask the hearer to identify with the suffering Christ, than in the function of the sins in these sermons.
In the final essay of the section, Hilaire Kallendorf discusses seventeenth-century Spanish drama, the Autos Sacramentales, as a genre that helps us to think about the role of fashion in social and religious signification. She generously produces tables for each vice that chart the costume descriptions in a multitude of plays by Calderón de Barca, Lope de Vega, Mira de Amescua, Tirso de Molina, and José de Valdivielso. Kallendorf helpfully shows us the complexity of drawing conclusions from such descriptions, as Sloth and Gluttony may be described as "peasants," but costume inventories demonstrate these peasant costumes to have been particularly luxurious, thus disrupting any easy association of these sins with the lower classes. Yet the lack of specificity on the whole in regard to the descriptions of the costumes is troubling, as character description (innkeeper, whore, Roman) is conflated with clothing. There is also a strange conflation of seventeenth-century Spain and Elizabethan England, as much of the scholarship cited by Kallendorf is by scholars in the latter field, speaking about the English stage.
The final section, "Individuals," begins with V.S. Benfell's fine essay on Dante's Purgatorio. Benfell offers a history of the exegesis of the Beatitudes in the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:3-10) and moves us toward late-medieval concern with reconciling the notions of virtue and blessedness in the Beatitudes with Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Benfell reveals that Dante's treatment of justice in relation to the vices of gluttony and avarice reconciles the necessity of grace with a desire to emphasize justice as an earthly virtue, a corrective to the pressing problem of avarice in society. Derrick Pitard's essay, "Greed and Anti- fraternalism in Chaucer's 'Summoner's Tale,'" focuses not so much on greed as on the "rebelliousness" of Chaucer's use of the vernacular, though Pitard's comparison of Chaucer's anti-fraternal discourse with that of William of St. Amour does not quite prove that Chaucer's vernacularization of such critique has anything specific to say about "vernacularity" itself. While his reading of the "Summoner's Tale" as a poem that gives a linguistic answer (the fart) to the sin of greed is promising, the author's conflation of categories such as "romance" and "academic commentary" as part of the same "fossilized discourse" (227) illustrates the too-broad application of terms that drains his argument of much of its potential force.
Laura Gelfand provides an interesting close-reading of Hieronymus Bosch's painting The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things, linking specific sins with social class and gender. She includes nine photographs that show us the painting in full and the details of the genre scenes for each sin (and two photographs of other related works). Gelfand's reading posits the painting's engagement in the discourse of penitential treatises, and she concludes with an invitation to further work on the possible uses of the painting for the original owner. Finally, Thomas Parisi compares Freudian psychoanalysis with Dante's Commedia, in an essay that appears to be directed toward biological scientists who have dismissed Freud as unempirical by his own definitions, and therefore a useless fraud. Parisi's aim to use Freud's anthropology as a guide to ethical issues in the biological sciences is intriguing, and potentially salutary, but the comparison of Freud with Dante does not seem to reveal anything more than one would expect of a comparison of psychoanalysis generally with Christianity generally (e.g. Dante figures renunciation as wholly just and good while Freud sees necessity in renunciation, but also injustice and loss).
The volume includes a useful global bibliography and index, but suffers from occasional sloppiness: a long quotation from Rowan Williams is given in a footnote (29) and again in the text (32); there are occasional misspellings: "Carolyn" Walker Bynum and "Nichomachean" Ethics; Figure 10 in Gelfand's essay is mislabeled "Invidia."
Overall, this volume provides several useful literary, historical, and religious narratives; I would recommend it to scholars beginning work on the topic of the vices seeking to comprehend the range of their cultural contexts, and to medievalists working across the fields of ethics, politics, and intellectual history. In many of the essays, the sins come into focus as a particularly fruitful avenue for understanding the intersections of individual ethics and communities within locations from the monastic to the scholastic to the lay and literary. If some of the essays reach tentative conclusions, this open-endedness may help to spur further work in what is an increasingly productive interdisciplinary field.