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In Salvation and Sin, David Aers continues his study of Christian theology in the later Middle Ages. Working at the nexus of theology and literature, he combines formidable theological learning with finely detailed and insightful close readings to explore a cluster of central issues in Christianity as addressed by Saint Augustine and by four fourteenth-century writers of exceptional power.
Salvation and Sin explores various modes of displaying the mysterious relations between divine and human agency, together with different accounts of sin and its consequences. Theologies of grace and versions of Christian identity and community are its pervasive concerns. Augustine becomes a major interlocutor in this book: his vocabulary and grammar of divine and human agency are central to Aers' exploration of later writers and their works.
After the opening chapter on Augustine, Aers turns to the exploration of these concerns in the work of two major theologians of fourteenth-century England, William of Ockham and Thomas Bradwardine. From their work, Aers moves to his central text, William Langland's Piers Plowman, a long multigeneric poem contributing profoundly to late medieval conversations concerning theology and ecclesiology. In Langland's poem, Aers finds a theology and ethics shaped by Christology where the poem's modes of writing are intrinsic to its doctrine. His thesis will revise the way in which this canonical text is read. Salvation and Sin concludes with a reading of Julian of Norwich's profound, compassionate, and widely admired theology, a reading which brings her Showings into conversation both with Langland and Augustine.
“Aers offers an intensely focused study of the use of medieval theology in vernacular writing. He passionately approaches each of his subjects, particularly Augustine and Langland, through a nuanced and sophisticated analysis of a number of important theologians and vernacular literary texts and in the process suggests their ongoing relevance to medieval studies. Aers’s book is an important addition to both literary and theological study, and his call to take up primary sources with renewed interest is an invaluable one that highlights the importance of theological debates to the understanding of fourteenth-century vernacular culture.” —Journal of British Studies
David Aers is the James B. Duke Professor of English and Religious Studies at Duke University. Among his books is Sanctifying Signs: Making Christian Tradition in Late Medieval England (University of Notre Dame Press, 2004).