Search results for ""Author Albert the Great""

Albert the Great wrote On the Body of the Lord in the 1270s, making it his final work of sacramental theology. A companion volume to his commentary on the Mass, On the Body of the Lord is a comprehensive discussion of Eucharistic theology. The treatise is structured around six names for the Eucharist taken from the Mass: grace, gift, food, communion, sacrifice, and sacrament. It emerges from the liturgy and is intended to draw the reader back to worship. The overall movement of the treatise follows the order of God’s wisdom. Albert begins by discussing the Eucharist as a gift flowing from the goodness of the Trinity. He touches on its relation to redemption and the Church, including a rigorous Aristotelian analysis of Eucharistic change and presence before ending with a discussion of Mass rubrics. The most significant theological emphasis is on the Eucharist as food given to feed the people of God. The style varies to suit the content: certain sections are terse; others are devotional, allowing the reader to enter the saint’s own prayer. Perhaps most characteristically Albertine is an extended meditation that compares the process of digestion to the incorporation of the Christian into the Body of Christ. The mixed style allows this work to integrate rigorous aspects of scholastic thought with a fervent love for God, making On the Body of the Lord one of Albert’s most human as well as one of his most beautiful works. On the Body of the Lord was well received, particularly in areas that came to be influenced by the devotio moderna. By 1484, three separate Latin editions had been printed, two of which were the inaugural works on new presses. In the following century the Protestant Reformation brought an end to its popularity. On the Body of the Lord is here translated into English for the first time.

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After the Latin translation of Aristotelian works outside the logica vetus began in earnest in twelfth-century Spain, it remained to Scholastic philosophers to assimilate the new materials. Although many individuals commented on the logica nova and on some of Aristotle's books on natural philosophy, Albert the Great is one of only a very few Scholastics to comment on the entire collection of Aristotle's biological works.This text, the "Questions concerning Aristotle's On Animals" ["Quaestiones super de animalibus"], recovered only at the beginning of the twentieth century and never before translated in its entirety, represents Conrad of Austria's report on a series of disputed questions that Albert the Great addressed in Cologne ca. 1258. "The Questions", in nineteen books, mixes two distinct genres: the scholastic quaestio, with arguments pro et contra, a determination, and answers to the objections; and the straightforward question-and-response found, for example, in "The Prose Salernitan Questions".Here, even more clearly perhaps than in his slightly later and much larger paraphrastic commentary "On Animals" ["De animalibus"], Albert adduces his own views - often criticizing other medieval physicians and natural philosophers - on comparative anatomy, human physiology, sexuality, procreation, and embryology. This translation, based on the critical edition that appeared in the "Cologne" edition of Albert's work, helps to explain the title "patron saint of scientists" bestowed upon Albert by Pope Pius XII.This work should find its audience among medievalists and historians of science and culture. More so than the massive "On Animals", it should prove useful in the classroom as an encyclopedia or handbook of medieval life.

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