Virtues and Vices In Early Texts on Pastoral Care
The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 can undoubtedly be counted among the formative events in medieval history.1 Pope Innocent III successfully reinforced the pastoral responsibility of the clergy towards all the faithful and fundamentally redefined the relation between the Church and the Christian individual. All Christians were required to make a full confession of all their sins and to take part in Holy Communion at least once a year.2 Priests had to be qualified to fulfill their duties by preaching, hearing confession, imposing penance and by educating their flock both morally and theologically in the confessional interrogation. An important side effect of this new rule was the rise of a great number of different new genres of pastoral texts, leading to a true discursive explosion with deep impact on the literate culture of the later Middle Ages. These new genres include confessionals, catechetical handbooks, preaching aids, collections of exempla , mirrors of princes and laymen and many others.3 The mendicant orders who received their
Habitus Revisited: A Reply to Cary Nederman
In a recent Traditio article, Cary J. Nederman has added another valuable study to the series of papers he has been publishing over the past few years. This body of work has the laudable goal of showing that, across the twelfth century, thinkers were taking an increasingly Aristotelian line in the fields of ethics and political theory, on the basis of ideas transmitted indirectly via works available in Latin well before the appearance of the integral Latin translations of the texts of the Stagirite deemed to have launched the “Aristotelian revolution” of the thirteenth century in these fields. Throughout this burgeoning oeuvre, Nederman has been quite successful in supporting his case for a more gradual and less cataclysmic reception of Aristotle in the Latin West than the standard accounts acknowledge. It is not the purpose of this paper to challenge that larger argument. Nonetheless, with respect to the Aristotelian doctrine of habitus on which Nederman focuses in his Traditio article, we would like to suggest that his analysis needs to be reconsidered. We offer the following pages as an amplificatio of his thesis, with the aim of adding nuance to it by bringing forward material that he omits. Our intention here is not so much to criticize Nederman's reading of the texts on habitus in the twelfth century that he does adduce, and certainly not to object to his larger project, but rather to indicate that there is more to the story, and so to refine his analysis in the hope of strengthening it.
PLEASURE, POWER, AND THE PURSUIT OF COMMUNISM: SOVIET YOUTH AND STATE-SPONSORED POPULAR CULTURE DURING THE EARLY COLD WAR, 1945-1968
art, with certain students accused of “showing political immaturity, failing to understand the Party’s positions on art.” This episode constituted part of a broader crackdown on abstract art by the Khrushchev administration from late 1962, precipitated the the Soviet leader’s derision of such art forms in December 1962 at the Manege exhibit. Such instances demonstrate the limitations of the top-level promotion of youth grassroots initiative, as the Khrushchev leadership reigned in youth autonomy when it threatened to go beyond the boundaries of the permissible. The dates cited above have particular resonance, since both 1957-58 and 1962-63 represent two periods when those at the top of the Party hierarchy moved away from pursuing a more pluralistic, tolerant policy course, due to anxiety inspired by both sharpening Cold War hostilities and domestic developments. In these periods, official rhetoric censured what it labeled as 639 TsAOPIM, f. 635, op. 13, d. 546, ll. 56-57. This is likely related to criticism of the Party associated with the fallout from the Secret Speech and the Hungary invasion. For more, see Polly Jones, “From the Secret Speech to the Burial of Stalin: Real and Ideal Responses to De-Stalinization,” in Jones ed., The Dilemmas, 41-63. 640 TsAOPIM, f. 6083, op. 1, d. 52, ll. 166-67. 641 Susan E. Reid, “In the Name of the People: The Manege Affair Revisited,” Kritika 6.4 (Fall 2005): 673716. 642 On these anxieties, see Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer, 156-88.