Preface
PREFACE This book has been in the making for several years, on and off, in between other projects, and I have received encouragement, constructive criticism, and support from a variety of groups and colleagues as the research has proceeded and as my ideas have taken shape.The Medieval Studies community at Yale University has been my primary lifeline. But many others have pointed me toward valuable references, answered my questions, and suggested fruitful lines of research. In some cases, they have graciously shared their work with me and permitted me to cite it before its appearance in print. I want to offer a special vote of thanks for the extremely prompt and detailed comments and suggestions for correction and revision provided by the two anonymous readers of the manuscript as it was first submitted to the CUA Press. The book’s final form owes much to their learning and to their eagle eyes. On a range of subjects on which they know more than I did before I received their help, I benefited richly from the advice of Mark Glen Bilby, George Hardin Brown, Mary Dzon, Cédric Giraud, Miriam Kartch Hughes, Ruth Mazo Karras, Timothy Le Croy, Ian Christopher Levy, Gary Macy, Constant Mews, Alastair Minnis, Joaquín Martínez Pizarro, Riccardo Quinto, Riccardo Saccenti, Bryan Spinks, Carol Symes, Denys Turner, and John Wei. All deserve my gratitude for their generous collegial assistance. In addition to sharing his expertise with me, in his work on his own chosen themes in the history of medieval Christian thought, Gary Macy has been an inspiring model. I respectfully dedicate this book to him. Riccardo Quinto and Willemien Otten also deserve thanks for inviting me to contribute papers drawn from parts of the research that went into this book. I am also grateful to the copyright holders for permission to reuse material in these papers which first appeared in their publications: ix x Preface “Fictive Baptism in the Early Middle Ages,”Archa Verbi 6 (2009): 9–25,published by Aschendorff; and “De obitu Valentiniani: Abelard, Bernard of Clairvaux, and the Canonization of Ambrose of Milan on Baptism by Desire,” in How the West Was Won: Essays on Literary Imagination, the Canon, and the Christian Middle Ages for Burcht Pranger, ed. Willemien Otten, Arjo Vanderjagt, and Hent De Vries, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History 188 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 329–47. A comment is in order about the coverage in this book. I have not attempted to treat every thinker who had something to say on the three debated baptismal questions across the time span which this book addresses. I have focused only on thinkers who add to these debates, omitting those who simply repeat what predecessors have said. Each section of the book begins at the historical point at which discussion of each topic began, and takes the account to the point at which medieval thinkers stopped considering it, or to the early fourteenth century. Research to date on some medieval thinkers who worked after, and in some cases within, my chosen time frame has not elicited their views, if any, on these baptismal issues. This topic is not what has drawn researchers to them. I have focused on figures whose works are available in print and acknowledge that this decision limits my findings. Yet, one has to make choices and to stop somewhere . While I mention some of the post-medieval fortunes of these baptismal questions in the afterword, the early fourteenth century is where my analysis ends. It will fall to other researchers to enlarge our fund of knowledge on this subject for the later medieval period and for figures whom I do not discuss. I would like, as well, to note a few technical matters in this preface. Texts quoted are given in translation, with the originals in the notes. I have given my own translations except in cases where I refer specifically to other translators . As medievalists know, the Latin texts we use are sometimes published with classicizing spelling and sometimes not. For the sake of consistency, I have rendered the letter u throughout as v, although I have retained the letter j for i where it occurs in the publications cited. Latin grammar respects the same rule as English grammar in using “he” or “him” as a pronoun denoting a generic singular person. I have retained this usage in order to make grammatical sense of the passages quoted in translation. Readers will not find the substitution of “she...
OR
