Marcia L. Colish offers the only book-length study of the patriarch treatises of Ambrose of Milan in which he develops, for the first time in the patristic period, an ethics for the laity.

In this welcome new book Marcia L. Colish offers the only monograph-length study of the patriarch treatises of Ambrose of Milan (c. 340-397), in which he develops, for the first time in the patristic period, an ethics for the laity. Ambrose the ethicist has been viewed primarily as the author of advice to those with special callings in the church, such as priests, widows, and consecrated virgins. His views have been characterized as advocating asceticism and promoting a Platonic view of human nature, in which the body is a moral problem. Ambrose's patriarch treatises, argues Colish, are...

This magisterial book is an analysis of the course of Western intellectual history between A.D. 400 and 1400. The book is arranged in two parts: the first surveys the comparative modes of thought and varying success of Byzantine, Latin-Christian, and Muslim cultures, and the second takes the reader from the eleventh-century revival of learning to the high Middle Ages and beyond, the period in which the vibrancy of Western intellectual culture enabled it to stamp its imprint well beyond the frontiers of Christendom.
Marcia Colish argues that the foundations of the Western intellectual...

What validated or invalidated baptism in the eyes of medieval Christians?

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...