Cours Année : 2014

Satan's lawsuits and dialogues on salvation in the Late Middle Ages *

Résumé

This paper introduces the reader to a group of Latin works, the dialogues on salvation, in which biblical figures discuss human redemption. A peculiarity of these dialogues is that they usually have a narrative setting, situating them in place and time, and some dramatic action, although they were not written to be performed. One of them, the Processus Sathanae, presents the devil filing a lawsuit at the heavenly court to regain possession of humankind. This work is conserved in several versions, including some in vernacular languages, and presents central theological problems in an entertaining, often humorous manner, paying also attention to judicial procedure. Whereas there are no dialogues on salvation from the Early and High Middle Ages, the genre was widespread in the late medieval period, before their popularity faded during Reformation and Counter-Reformation. The Latin texts seem to have circulated above all in the environment of universities. This paper argues that their success resides in their combining discussion of doctrinal problems with an appeal to emotion and imagination that is characteristic of late medieval piety. This to the background that such appeal had disappeared from scholastic theology, which was highly technical and purely rational.

In the Middle Ages, many authors, particularly those writing in Latin, chose to present their subject matter through a conversational exchange among characters. 1 The numerous Latin dialogues have different degrees of complexity in the characterization of the figures and of their interaction. According to these aspects and to their contents, four main types can be defineddidactic, polemic, philosophical and introspective dialogues-which are not well-defined genres, but rather points of orientation in a continuum. Thus, a particular work can be related to two different types or to other, non-dialogic genres.

The simplest form of dialogue is the exposition of a subject matter in questions and answers, formulated by two figures representing types, such as 'teacher' and 'pupil' in didactic dialogues.

Many polemical dialogues simply contrapose types (for instance, 'Christian and 'Jew') declaring their position; in other cases, though, the characters engage in an exchange of arguments, lending the work some similarity to the philosophical dialogues. Some authors slightly individualize their * This paper was scheduled to be published in print in 2021. This could not be done, therefore it is published now (May 2025) in HAL. The text has not been changed, the bibliography goes therefore only until 2020.

1 In this introduction, I summarize the results of my research on medieval dialogues (Cardelle de Hartmann 2007). The repertory includes only dialogues written in the period 1200-1400, but the first part also considers early and high medieval works, as well as some later ones. For a summary of the characteristics of medieval prose dialogues, cf. 261-67, for the different denominations of dialogues, cf. 29-57, the four types are discussed 58-247.

Kommentiert [AQ1]: AU: Please check the sentence "This to the background…" for clarity, and correct if necessary.

Kommentiert [CC2R1]:

Since scholastic theology was highly technical and purely rational, such a combination had become rare but was still attractive for readers, especially those with an academic background.

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hal-05052860 , version 1 (30-04-2025)
hal-05052860 , version 2 (13-05-2025)

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Carmen Cardelle de Hartmann. Satan's lawsuits and dialogues on salvation in the Late Middle Ages *. Doctoral. Kings College, London, United Kingdom. 2014. ⟨hal-05052860v1⟩
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