A Pastoral or Academic approach to wrath in Thomas of Ireland’s dictionary of quotations, the Manipulus florum (1306)?

I attended the annual meeting of the Canadian Society of Medievalists during Congress 2013. The group of about 50 scholars listened as their colleagues presented papers based on their recent research. I presented a paper that summarized medieval Christian teachings on the morality of anger, focusing on the Manipulus florum of Thomas of Ireland, a 14th-century dictionary of famous quotations. Anger could be a sin, but it could also be virtuous, when correcting sin. I argued that the dictionary’s message about anger was best suited to clerical university students. This runs counter to the dominant view that the book was intended for and reflects the needs of popular preaching. May paper was part of two panels I organized about medieval emotions, like anger. Each culture has its own rules for how to feel, and these change in response to other historical circumstances. My colleagues, from across Canada and Australia, and I explored evidence for how medieval people thought about emotions, with the implication that emotions change over time. Looking back at a distant, though well-documented, historical culture helps us to realize what is changeable in our culture—that’s the lesson of history. Several of us are considering polishing our papers and submitting them for publication by an academic journal. I also participated in a round-table discussion of a recent translation of letters by the 13th-century Bishop of Lincoln, Robert Grosseteste. He was a famous scientists, theologian, and churchman, so this translation helps make his life known to a broader audience. I suggested ways that the collection would be useful for university teachers and researchers.This paper compares the discussion of anger in Thomas of Ireland’s Manipulus florum (1306) with that found in important reference works for preachers from about the same period. Richard and Mary Rouse’s major study of the text argued that Thomas’ “best-selling” and alphabetically arranged Latin dictionary of classical and Christian quotations was intended as an aid to preachers during the late medieval bourgeoning of popular preaching. The Rouses associated the MF with other genres developed during the thirteenth century to digest the Christian intellectual tradition. Through such tools, it is often assumed, the achievements of scholastics trickled down to pulpits and reached the masses of less educated clergy and lay people. Although the text remained a standard reference work for centuries, Chris Nighman has recently argued that the MF was not originally intended for popular preaching, but as an edifying anthology for university students preparing for ecclesiastical careers. In supporting Nighman’s contention, this paper highlights the gap between scholastic teaching and more popular moral instruction relating to emotional restraint. The MF reflects the nuanced patristic approaches to emotions taken by thirteenth-century scholastics, a period in which the moral valance of emotions were subjected to academic scrutiny. Anger was frequently a paradigm for discussing human responsibility for passions. The MF’s lemma for ira contains the sorts of classical and patristic sententiae from which students built their arguments and which also provided them with guidance in both moderating vicious wrath and in cultivating virtuous zeal through reason—skills needed by aspiring ecclesiastics. Aids used by preachers, however, such as collections of distinctiones by Nicholas de Byard, or William Peraldus’ Summae de vitiis et virtutibus, were most concerned with showing the sinfulness and dangers of wrath, which was one of the seven deadly sins. Treatment of zealous anger was usually perfunctory or downplayed. This pastoral approach to wrath had a venerable tradition, since its emphasis on rhetorical force, rather than intellectual argument, was practical for popular moral instruction. Preachers drawing on such tools sought to counter sinful wrath among their listeners by eliciting feelings of disgust, shame, and fear of the dangers and punishments caused by anger. Although the MF has features useful for preachers, and overlaps with the message conveyed by other tools, it does not appear to be an artifact of popular preaching. The differences highlight the variations in religious teachings about anger in the thirteenth century