David Aers
Biographic Data
| ID | 977725 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David Aers |
| GIVEN NAMES | David |
| FAMILY NAME | Aers |
| SIGNATURE | AERS D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Duke University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 5 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 20 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 9 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1977 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Imagining the Virtues
The tradition of the virtues was the model for moral practice from Aristotle to Luther. This tradition framed practices of living well in relation to visions of the good, and in its later Christian version, of God. One became good through practice, just as a harpist might play well through disciplined habits of exercise. In Alasdair MacIntyre's extraordinary excavations of philosophy and intellectual history, the Reformation is by and large negle…
Calvinist Versions of God
This essay argues that Calvinist versions of God and human redemption cannot be adequately grasped without studying the medieval traditions from which they emerged. Beginning with a close reading of Calvin's extremely violent understanding of the atonement, the essay moves through examinations of medieval versions of human redemption (literary, theological, and devotional) before turning to the political and ethical consequences of Calvin's refor…
An Old Materialism
This article takes a new approach to the conflicts represented in the thirteenth- century saints’ lives of the Katherine Group. Identifying saints and idols as contrasting poles in these conflicts, it argues that the category of sentience is a key distinguisher that is consistently employed to denigrate idols and idolators. Pagan antagonists are systematically identified as nonagential and material; by contrast, the saints communicate divine trut…
The Conditions of Mercy
This article examines John Bunyan’s relationship to traditions of representing labor reaching back before the Reformation, from Piers Plowman and its imitators through to a range of “plowman” satires, complaints, and reformist dialogues in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Bunyan’s provocative rejection of the virtues of labor in part one of The Pilgrim’s Progress brings together theological convictions about justification by faith with a …
Our Inner Custodian
Current approaches to understanding shame are rooted in controversial and even radically contrasting assumptions about shame and its relevance for social interaction and individual well-being. Classical and medieval sources themselves embrace surprisingly various notions about the workings of shame. While the Aristotelian tradition prevails in late antique and medieval philosophical psychology, it is also possible to discern a parallel tradition …
Competing Humanisms
Leonardo Bruni’s Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum Histrum has long been studied as a manifesto of the humanist divergence from medieval culture. This article reconsiders the role of Bruni’s Dialogi in the development of Italian humanism and especially in the development of the humanists’ awareness of their cultural identity as a group. The essay argues that Bruni’s principal aim was not to distance himself from previous traditions, but rather to mark a d…
A wife or friend at e’ery Port”
The “sailor ballads” of the early British Empire employ popular song not only to investigate sailors’ hardships and victories, but to explore the character attributes of seafaring men. This article argues that the range of attitudes and concerns present in these texts signals a larger cultural conversation about these men’s fitness as husbands to the nation’s women, fathers to its children, and members of its communities. Although protoimperialis…
Unbinding the Maternal Body in Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder
This article addresses Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder, an epic, twenty-canto retelling of Genesis. Scholars have often considered Hutchinson’s poem an inferior version of Paradise Lost insofar as it does not transgress biblical narrative. Attending to the poem’s portrayal of childbearing in relation to seventeenth-century birthing prayers and affect theory, this article demonstrates how Hutchinson’s figuration of the body belies any notion …
Survivors of Witch Trials and the Quest for Justice in Early Modern Germany
This article explores the trauma that early modern witchcraft trials inflicted on survivors and their communities. The point of departure is the case of Margareth Los, a widow accused of witchcraft in 1520s Württemberg. Subjected to brutal torture, Los was acquitted provisionally after three years in jail. Remarkably, she had the strength to produce an account of her ordeal and to bring her case before the highest court of justice in the Empire. …
The Severed Head as Public Sculpture in Late Medieval England
Chronicles of fifteenth-century England teem with severed heads. Frequently, these texts focus less on the event of decapitation than on its enduring result: namely, the modified and adorned head of the deceased, spiked and exhibited in a prominent public venue. This article concentrates on textual descriptions of such sights in order to propose that the head was not simply a byproduct of the premodern state’s judicial cruelty or merely evidence …
Medieval Pilgrimage as Heterotopia
Saewulf’s Relatio de situ Jerusalem is one of the most significant yet understudied pilgrim texts of the twelfth century. Documenting the Jerusalem-bound traveler’s adventures through the medieval Mediterranean, the text is the first extant pilgrim document written immediately after Latin Christian armies seized control of the holy city. This article examines the text’s remarkable interest in autobiography and explores the resonance which crusadi…
Chaucer
Chaucer: A European Life, by Marion TurnerHistorians on Chaucer: The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, ed. Stephen H. Rigby with Alastair J. Minnis Chaucer: A European Life, by Marion Turner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U.P., 2019; pp. 624. $39.95);Historians on Chaucer: The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, ed. Stephen H. Rigby with Alastair J. Minnis (Oxford: Oxford U.P., hb. 2014, pb. 2018; pp. 528. Hb. £88, pb. £31.99). David Aer…
The Fortunes of Tragedy
“Go, litel bok, go, litel myn tragedye.” So wrote Chaucer at the end of Troilus and Criseyde. But how compatible are the forms and ideas of tragedy with Christian tradition, its theology and liturgy? What are the relations between medieval and early modern discourses of tragedy? In The Tragic Imagination (2016), the distinguished Anglican theologian Rowan Williams presents a grand narrative maintaining the compatibility of “the tragic imagination…
What Is Charity? William Langland's Answers with Some Diachronic Questions
Charity turns out to be the virtue which is both the root and the fruit of salvation in Langland's Piers Plowman, a late fourteenth-century poem, the greatest theological poem in English. It takes time, suffering and error upon error for Wille, the central protagonist in Piers Plowman, to grasp Charity. Wille is both a figure of the poet and a power of the soul, voluntas, the subject of charity. Langland's poem offers a profound and beautiful exp…
Conversions
In its most basic sense, the term conversion (Latin conversio) signifies a reversal, a change of direction. Yet the change or turnaround that is conversion has meant many different things in different cultures and across a wide range of discourses from logic to lyric poetry, theology to politics. Even within the long traditions of Christianity, understanding of conversion has included significantly different inflections. The study of conversion h…
Beyond Reformation? An Essay on William Langland’s Piers Plowman and the End of Constantinian Christianity
Aers, David. Beyond Reformation? An Essay on William Langland’s Piers Plowman and the End of Constantinian Christianity. An article from journal Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme (Volume 40, Number 2, Spring 2017, pp. 7-238), on Érudit
Unintended Reformations
Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation: How A Religious Revolution Secularized Society (2012) is a book whose aspirations dovetail with the aims of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. The journal fosters scholarship that crosses current disciplines and their periodization of western history, that is both committed to historical research and attentive to the theoretical models shaping such research. Gregory's The Unintended Reform…
Langland on the Church and the End of the Cardinal Virtues
This essay argues that William Langland’s great poem Piers Plowman poses serious questions both to the tradition of the virtues that Langland inherited and to the possibility of their authentic embodiment in the contemporary Church Langland knew. Moving from Thomas Aquinas to Thomas Hobbes and back again to Langland, the essay finds Langland imagining a troubling history in which the meaning of moral concepts is transformed and the powers of mora…
English Reformations
This special issue is devoted to the English Reformations and current historiography. The title intentionally pluralizes the traditionally singular noun Reformation to signify a scope that includes both the early Reformation (through to 1547) and continuing senses of reformation through to the later seventeenth century. But the plural also encourages investigation of what has seemed a mistaken homogenization of the religious and political process…
The Beauty of the Infinite
Reform and Cultural Revolution
Research Article| January 01 2005 Reform and Cultural Revolution: Introduction David Aers; David Aers Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Sarah Beckwith Sarah Beckwith Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (2005) 35 (1): 3–12. https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-35-1-3 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citat…
Introduction
New Historicism and the Eucharist
Research Article| May 01 2003 New Historicism and the Eucharist David Aers David Aers Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (2003) 33 (2): 241–259. https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-33-2-241 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search …
Visionary Eschatology
In its later versions Piers Plowman is a long, complex poem of extraordinary formal, theological, and political complexity. It is one of the greatest Christian poems. Written in a period of unprecedented conflict in English polities, including the Church, it was passionately involved in exploring many of these conflicts while seeking to imagine projects of Reformation. The poem includes fascinating reflections on diverse eschatological traditions…
The Powers of the Holy
Reform and Cultural Revolution
Research Article| January 01 2005 Reform and Cultural Revolution: Introduction David Aers; David Aers Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Sarah Beckwith Sarah Beckwith Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (2005) 35 (1): 3–12. https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-35-1-3 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citat…
Our Inner Custodian
Current approaches to understanding shame are rooted in controversial and even radically contrasting assumptions about shame and its relevance for social interaction and individual well-being. Classical and medieval sources themselves embrace surprisingly various notions about the workings of shame. While the Aristotelian tradition prevails in late antique and medieval philosophical psychology, it is also possible to discern a parallel tradition …
New Historicism and the Eucharist
Research Article| May 01 2003 New Historicism and the Eucharist David Aers David Aers Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (2003) 33 (2): 241–259. https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-33-2-241 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search …
The Self Mourning
William Blake and the Dialectics of Sex
Medieval Literature
The Self Mourning
The Romance of Origins
The Powers of the Holy
Visionary Eschatology
In its later versions Piers Plowman is a long, complex poem of extraordinary formal, theological, and political complexity. It is one of the greatest Christian poems. Written in a period of unprecedented conflict in English polities, including the Church, it was passionately involved in exploring many of these conflicts while seeking to imagine projects of Reformation. The poem includes fascinating reflections on diverse eschatological traditions…
Introduction
New Historicism and the Eucharist
Research Article| May 01 2003 New Historicism and the Eucharist David Aers David Aers Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (2003) 33 (2): 241–259. https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-33-2-241 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search …
Reform and Cultural Revolution
Research Article| January 01 2005 Reform and Cultural Revolution: Introduction David Aers; David Aers Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Sarah Beckwith Sarah Beckwith Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (2005) 35 (1): 3–12. https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-35-1-3 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citat…
The Beauty of the Infinite
English Reformations
This special issue is devoted to the English Reformations and current historiography. The title intentionally pluralizes the traditionally singular noun Reformation to signify a scope that includes both the early Reformation (through to 1547) and continuing senses of reformation through to the later seventeenth century. But the plural also encourages investigation of what has seemed a mistaken homogenization of the religious and political process…
Langland on the Church and the End of the Cardinal Virtues
This essay argues that William Langland’s great poem Piers Plowman poses serious questions both to the tradition of the virtues that Langland inherited and to the possibility of their authentic embodiment in the contemporary Church Langland knew. Moving from Thomas Aquinas to Thomas Hobbes and back again to Langland, the essay finds Langland imagining a troubling history in which the meaning of moral concepts is transformed and the powers of mora…
Unintended Reformations
Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation: How A Religious Revolution Secularized Society (2012) is a book whose aspirations dovetail with the aims of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. The journal fosters scholarship that crosses current disciplines and their periodization of western history, that is both committed to historical research and attentive to the theoretical models shaping such research. Gregory's The Unintended Reform…
Beyond Reformation? An Essay on William Langland’s Piers Plowman and the End of Constantinian Christianity
Aers, David. Beyond Reformation? An Essay on William Langland’s Piers Plowman and the End of Constantinian Christianity. An article from journal Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme (Volume 40, Number 2, Spring 2017, pp. 7-238), on Érudit
Conversions
In its most basic sense, the term conversion (Latin conversio) signifies a reversal, a change of direction. Yet the change or turnaround that is conversion has meant many different things in different cultures and across a wide range of discourses from logic to lyric poetry, theology to politics. Even within the long traditions of Christianity, understanding of conversion has included significantly different inflections. The study of conversion h…
The Fortunes of Tragedy
“Go, litel bok, go, litel myn tragedye.” So wrote Chaucer at the end of Troilus and Criseyde. But how compatible are the forms and ideas of tragedy with Christian tradition, its theology and liturgy? What are the relations between medieval and early modern discourses of tragedy? In The Tragic Imagination (2016), the distinguished Anglican theologian Rowan Williams presents a grand narrative maintaining the compatibility of “the tragic imagination…
What Is Charity? William Langland's Answers with Some Diachronic Questions
Charity turns out to be the virtue which is both the root and the fruit of salvation in Langland's Piers Plowman, a late fourteenth-century poem, the greatest theological poem in English. It takes time, suffering and error upon error for Wille, the central protagonist in Piers Plowman, to grasp Charity. Wille is both a figure of the poet and a power of the soul, voluntas, the subject of charity. Langland's poem offers a profound and beautiful exp…
An Old Materialism
This article takes a new approach to the conflicts represented in the thirteenth- century saints’ lives of the Katherine Group. Identifying saints and idols as contrasting poles in these conflicts, it argues that the category of sentience is a key distinguisher that is consistently employed to denigrate idols and idolators. Pagan antagonists are systematically identified as nonagential and material; by contrast, the saints communicate divine trut…
The Conditions of Mercy
This article examines John Bunyan’s relationship to traditions of representing labor reaching back before the Reformation, from Piers Plowman and its imitators through to a range of “plowman” satires, complaints, and reformist dialogues in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Bunyan’s provocative rejection of the virtues of labor in part one of The Pilgrim’s Progress brings together theological convictions about justification by faith with a …
Our Inner Custodian
Current approaches to understanding shame are rooted in controversial and even radically contrasting assumptions about shame and its relevance for social interaction and individual well-being. Classical and medieval sources themselves embrace surprisingly various notions about the workings of shame. While the Aristotelian tradition prevails in late antique and medieval philosophical psychology, it is also possible to discern a parallel tradition …
Competing Humanisms
Leonardo Bruni’s Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum Histrum has long been studied as a manifesto of the humanist divergence from medieval culture. This article reconsiders the role of Bruni’s Dialogi in the development of Italian humanism and especially in the development of the humanists’ awareness of their cultural identity as a group. The essay argues that Bruni’s principal aim was not to distance himself from previous traditions, but rather to mark a d…
A wife or friend at e’ery Port”
The “sailor ballads” of the early British Empire employ popular song not only to investigate sailors’ hardships and victories, but to explore the character attributes of seafaring men. This article argues that the range of attitudes and concerns present in these texts signals a larger cultural conversation about these men’s fitness as husbands to the nation’s women, fathers to its children, and members of its communities. Although protoimperialis…
Unbinding the Maternal Body in Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder
This article addresses Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder, an epic, twenty-canto retelling of Genesis. Scholars have often considered Hutchinson’s poem an inferior version of Paradise Lost insofar as it does not transgress biblical narrative. Attending to the poem’s portrayal of childbearing in relation to seventeenth-century birthing prayers and affect theory, this article demonstrates how Hutchinson’s figuration of the body belies any notion …
Survivors of Witch Trials and the Quest for Justice in Early Modern Germany
This article explores the trauma that early modern witchcraft trials inflicted on survivors and their communities. The point of departure is the case of Margareth Los, a widow accused of witchcraft in 1520s Württemberg. Subjected to brutal torture, Los was acquitted provisionally after three years in jail. Remarkably, she had the strength to produce an account of her ordeal and to bring her case before the highest court of justice in the Empire. …
The Severed Head as Public Sculpture in Late Medieval England
Chronicles of fifteenth-century England teem with severed heads. Frequently, these texts focus less on the event of decapitation than on its enduring result: namely, the modified and adorned head of the deceased, spiked and exhibited in a prominent public venue. This article concentrates on textual descriptions of such sights in order to propose that the head was not simply a byproduct of the premodern state’s judicial cruelty or merely evidence …
Art (24 works) · Philosophy (21 works) · History (20 works) · Literature (19 works) · History (18 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity (15 works) · Medieval Literature and History (14 works) · Law (13 works)