Chapter 2 offers a discussion of the ways religious scholars, government administrators and litterateurs transmitted communal knowledge. The chapter focuses in particular on ideas about oral and written transmission of knowledge, the production of books and understandings of authorship in the early Islamic world. The chapter ends with a discussion of some of the complicated ways in which some surviving early Islamic local histories were transmitted to their extant versions.

Personhood, for Aquinas, functions on the paradoxical structure of the soul’s incompleteness and completeness. The soul is an incomplete part absent the specific human body and yet if the soul were only an incomplete part, it could not function as the substantial form of the body and thus as its guiding principle as consciousness. It appears that Aquinas is placing us in a dialogic tension, a metaphysical gray area. This chapter addresses how this Thomistic ontological tension at the heart of the human person is more receptive of, and in more decisive confrontation with, postmodern views of personhood that fail to achieve coherence and consistency, often due to rejections of manufactured unity and then because of the epistemological crisis rooted in long-discarded and devastated metaphysical foundations. The dignity of the human person necessitates an open nature understood in Aquinas, and sensed in postmodern weak theological and poetic thought, but one metaphysically decisive and real, that does not fall into a taxonomy of cultural and social conventions.

The current practice of disability studies largely groups itself according to various “models” of disability, such as the “medical,” “social,” “identity,” and “minority.” While insightful, each is incomplete: some focus on the medical component of disability, others on its social implications, and yet others on its personal significance. The present chapter proposes an account of disability grounded in Thomistic anthropology. In this system, an individual is a human being insofar as he or she possesses a particular kind of essence or nature. Given this nature, a person has certain natural abilities that, if certain other requisite conditions are met, allow the person to perform typical operations. Disability – and the closely related term “impairment” – concerns inabilities to perform given activities and various consequent inequities that may arise. The “Thomistic model” proposed aims to incorporate insights from prevailing models of disability and, thus, to enrich contemporary disability studies through the application of Thomistic philosophy.

Chapter 5 introduces the main ways in which local history was written in the early Islamic centuries. As wide as possible a snapshot is offered, based on extant works and what we know about many now-lost works, of early Islamic local history-writing, with the works divided for the most part into four different models: conquest histories; biographical (or prosopographical) histories; chronologically organised histories of events; and histories that focus on topography or on the particular distinctions (faḍāʾil) of a town or region. The aim is not to provide a comprehensive list of known works, but rather to draw attention to the main ways local history was written/compiled and what kinds of topics local historians were interested in.

Drawing from both the medieval Scholastic philosophical-theological tradition and Aristotelian virtue ethics, Thomas Aquinas offers a comprehensive and nuanced account of the virtuous life – one that suggests fruitful relationships not only with contemporary philosophical and theological discussions but also with recent empirical work. In this short chapter, I sketch the big picture using an Aristotelian, four-causes approach. Section 1 mainly addresses the final cause or telos of virtue: ultimately, perfect happiness in eternal life – although a good earthly life affords “a certain participation” in happiness. Section 2 considers virtue’s quasi-material causes: reason and the appetites, including the intellectual appetite or will. Section 3 focuses on the formal causes (modes) of virtue in general and of the cardinal and theological virtues in particular, as well as the relationships between various virtues in the larger structure of Thomistic virtue ethics – including the possibility of a unity of the virtues. And Section 4 discusses proposed efficient causes of such virtues, drawing on the various ways in which virtues are developed and related to each other in the Thomistic picture. Throughout, I consider connections between Aquinas’s account of the virtuous life and contemporary work in ethics, psychology, and education.

This chapter uses text from throughout Aquinas’s corpus to reconstruct the main elements of his views on causation. Causation for Aquinas is a type of ontological dependence. Following Aristotle, Aquinas recognizes four species of causes. The chapter focuses in particular on efficient causation since this is the type of cause that most closely corresponds to what contemporary philosophers mean by a “cause.” Aquinas thinks that efficient causes act through active casual powers to bring about their effects. To highlight the philosophical significance of Aquinas’s views, the chapter compares Aquinas’s views on efficient causation with two prominent contemporary theories of causation, Humeanism and Nomicism.

Chapter 6 moves the discussion on from the overview of local history-writing in Chapter 5 and takes a different perspective by considering whether pre-modern Muslims conceptualised local history-writing as something distinct from other ways of writing history. It deals with the ways history was (relatively rarely) fitted into ideas about the classification of knowledge, with works dedicated to explaining and justifying history’s importance as a discipline, with the evidence for whether local historians saw themselves as working within a larger tradition, and with what evidence there is for readers’ appreciations of local history as a distinct type of history-writing. The chapter ends by identifying some works of local history as having been particularly influential, including al-Ḥākim al-Naysābūrī’s history of Nishapur and al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī’s history of Baghdad.

Chapter 3 identifies the prominence of Mater Ecclesia (Mother Church) as a theological person and the Trinity’s first creation in John Wyclif’s Tractatus de Ecclesia (De Ecclesia). This chapter demonstrates that maternal imagery was integral to Wyclif’s presentation of the doctrine of Church antiquity and challenges perceptions of Wyclif as anti-institutionally and anti-materially predestinarian.

At first glance, Thomism and feminism seem like unlikely bedfellows. In spite of the apparent incongruity, I argue that a fruitful dialogue can exist between Aquinas and feminism, particularly regarding the relationship between the body and reason. To this end, I make three points. First, I argue that Aquinas’s anthropology provides a fertile ground for a discussion of women’s nature and flourishing. Second, I argue that there is surprising degree of similarity between the attitude of Thomas toward the female body and the attitude of certain contemporary feminists, such as Simone de Beauvoir and Shulamith Firestone. All three of these authors recognized that women are more affected by their bodies than men are, and all three saw this as a source of inequality between men and women. Third, I argue that, while Aquinas is wrong to conclude that women are less rational than men, it may nonetheless be true that women experience more frequent interruptions to their ability to exercise fully their highest powers because they experience more pain and fatigue related to their biology. Finally, I consider how the nature of the female body may dispose women to exercising their reason slightly differently than men do.

Identifying the principles of ecclesiological interpretation that John Wyclif applies to all biblical feminine imagery in his Tractatus de Ecclesia (De Ecclesia), Chapter 4 shows how Wyclif uses biblical materials to provide Lady Church with a narrative arc and a speaking part in the drama of salvation history.

The book ends with a review of the long and complex history of feminine imagery for the Church and presents major conclusions from the book’s case studies, such as the remarkable and previously unrecognized continuities and changes across the periodization divide established by the English Reformation. The Conclusion also reviews the analytical method used in the book’s case studies – which is adaptable to feminine imagery for the Church in sources outside the book’s scope – and evaluates the aptitude of the term “goddess” for Lady Church in the context of comparative religious studies.