Faith, Fiction & Force in Medieval Baptismal Debates

by Marcia Colish

Overview

The answer to this question is neither simple nor straightforward. As this fascinating contribution to medieval intellectual history shows, medieval ideas on baptism, though seen as necessary for salvation, were far from unanimous. Marcia Colish demonstrates persuasively that, from the patristic period through the early fourteenth century, there was vigorous debate surrounding baptism by desire, fictive baptism, and forced baptism. Drawing on a wide and interdisciplinary range of sources that goes well beyond the writings of theologians and canonists to include liturgical texts and practices, the rulings of popes and church councils, saints' lives, chronicles, imaginative literature, and poetry, Faith, Fiction and Force in Medieval Baptismal Debates illuminates the emergence and fortunes of these three controversies and the historical con- texts that situate their development. Each debate has its own story line, its own turning points, and its own seminal figures whose positions informed its course. The thinkers involved in each case were, and regarded one another as being, members of the orthodox western Christian communion. Thus, another finding of this book is that Christian orthodoxy in the Middle Ages was able to encompass and accept dis- agreements both wide and deep on a sacrament seen as fundamental to Christian identity, faith and practice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813226118
Publisher:	The Catholic University of America Press
Publication date:	06/28/2014
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

MARCIA L. COLISH is lecturer in history, Yale University, and Frederick B. Artz Professor of History emerita, Oberlin College.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Abbreviations xi

Introduction 1

1 Baptism By Desire 11

The Age of the Church Fathers 11

After the Fathers, before the Scholastics 25

The Twelfth Century: Canonists and Theologians to Mid-Century 27

The Twelfth Century: Peter Lombard and the Post-Lombardians 55

The Thirteenth Century 71

Conclusion 87

2 Fictive Baptism 91

The Taufmime 93

The Boys on the Beach 97

The Age of the Church Fathers 103

Anglo-Saxon and Carolingian Exegetes 119

The Norman Ruse 126

Publicists and Canonists 130

Reenter the Taufmime 146

The Twelfth Century: Theology to Mid-Century 152

The Later Twelfth Century: Peter Lombard and the Post-Lombardians 165

The Thirteenth Century: Theology to Mid-Century 180

The Mid-Thirteenth to the Early Fourteenth Century 188

Conclusion 217

3 Forced Baptism 227

Late Antiquity 230

Medieval Jews 232

Preaching with an Iron Tongue: The Carolingians 250

Only the Saxons? 261

Preaching with an Iron Tongue: The Baltic Crusades 264

The View from the Ivory Tower: Canonists in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries 279

The View from the Ivory Tower: Scholastic Theologians to the Early Fourteenth Century 292

Conclusion 311

Afterword 319

Bibliography 327

Index 357