Sacramentum Magnum

Elaborating on the teaching of the Bible and the Church Fathers, and drawing fruitfully on Roman law and Aristotelian philosophy, the Latin Middle Ages developed a rich and versatile theology of marriage. The medieval contributions to the Christian theology of marriage include definitions of the process of marriage formation, reformulations and further developments of the biblical and patristic doctrine of the sacramentality, unicity and indissolubility of Christian matrimony, and new approaches to conjugal morality and to the pastoral care of marriage. This volume wants to be a contribution to the research on the still inadequately explored subject of marriage in medieval theology and pastoral care. In seventeen articles, ranging from late antiquity to the Council of Trent, hitherto unexplored aspects of the medieval theology of marriage are being presented. Apart from new interpretations of well-known theologians like St Thomas Aquinas or St Bonaventure, the focus is on a number of sources and authors hitherto entirely neglected.