The Scholastic Project

The Scholastic Project locates medieval theology within its unsaid. It explains the implicit ideological commitments that underscored the making of elite Christian ideas in the Middle Ages. Looking at canonical works by Lombard, Aquinas, and Scotus, this novel study explicates the political inhering within the abstract doctrinal argumentation of their dialectical thought. Much changed between the Middle Ages and the time of enlightenment. What did not change, however, was that the reasonable white man was the thinking subject who was allowed access to the life of the mind, and defined what it was to be reasonable. This book is the story of how scholastic theology defined this universal subject, and a catalogue of the exclusions which ensued. These exclusions still obtain today. The categories of woman, Jew, and heretic were core others against which ideal Christian subjectivity was implicitly defined. Theologians used these categories as sites of investigation, how did they tell us about God's presence in the world? What epistemological and ontological purpose did these "others" serve? The Scholastic Project offers an account of this intellectual work done by categories of difference in medieval theology. In so doing, it shows just how constitutive the woman, the heretic, and the Jew were for the production of orthodoxy in the Middle Ages.