Lecture - 'Rethinking Lying in the Twelfth Century'

The Program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies will be honored in next term with the visit of the distinguished intellectual historian Marcia Colish, Professor Emerita of History, Oberlin College and 2004 holder of the Judge Guido Calabrese Fellowship in Religion and Law at the Yale University Law School.  She is the author of numerous books and shorter studies on the history of classical and medieval philosophy and religious thought, including Ambrose's Patriarchs: Ethics for the Common Man (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), The Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition ( Yale, 1997), Peter Lombard (Brill, 1994), The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages (Brill, 1985), and the influential study The Mirror of Language: A Study in the Medieval Theory of Knowledge (University of Nebraska Press, 1968; 2nd edition 1983). Professor Colish will be giving two papers:

1. a colloquium in the Pre-Modern Colloquium series on her current research on Catholic apologia in the De veritae fidei christianei of Juan Luis Vives (1540), which she describes as full of highly interesting matters such as the historiography of conversoand Morisco studies; what happened to the intellectual leadership of Muslim and Jewish communities in later medieval Spain; European attitudes toward and knowledge of the Turks in the sixteenth century. The colloquium thus touches on number of issues that remain highly pertinent in contemporary culture as well.
2. a lecture on "Rethinking Lying in the Twelfth Century," which, drawing on classical and especially Stoic thought will reconsider the ethical value of lying, and the circumstances in which it was considered acceptable or even laudable in twelfth-century philosophy and theology. Since lying never goes out of fashion as a practice, this too may have contemporary as well as historical resonance.