Sanctifying Signs

David Aers is one of the most experienced and accomplished scholars in Middle English studies. His consistently bracing and dynamic work has opened up many extremely fertile areas in the field." --James Simpson, Cambridge University Concentrating on the sacrament of the altar, poverty, and conflicting versions of sanctity, Sanctifying Signs presents a critical study of Christian literature, theology, and culture in late medieval England. In this notable book, David Aers considers the diverse ways in which certain late medieval Christians and their Church engaged the immense resources of the Christian tradition in their own historical moment. Using a wide range of texts, Aers explores the complex theological, institutional, and political processes that shape and preserve tradition during changing circumstances. He is particularly interested in why some texts were judged by the late medieval Church to be orthodox and others heretical, and the effect of these judgments on the conversations and debates of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Sanctifying Signs begins with accounts of the sacrament of the altar that were deemed orthodox in the late medieval Church. Aers then shifts his focus to the relationship between sanctification and the sign of poverty. Finally, he reflects on the relationship between some versions of domesticity and sanctification. Texts of William Langland, John Wyclif, Walter Brut, William Thorpe, and others are examined within the context of a broad range of earlier and contemporary writings and events. Through these modes of exploration Aers seeks to understand and reinvigorate a theological, ethical, ecclesiological, and political conversation that has been pursued through a variety of rhetorical forms since the late Middle Ages. Students and scholars of medieval literature and theology will find David Aers's trenchant new work to be an invaluable resource.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction, Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.