The Treatises of Vices and Virtues in Latin and the Vernacular

Newhauser's work on the genre of the treatise on vices and virtues is, in effect, an attempt to resolve a paradox of modern scholarship. We have witnessed, in the past thirty years in particular, a rapid growth in the number of studies on the vices and virtues in the Middle Ages and on individual vices or virtues or on works containing information about them - and nevertheless there is almost no scholarship on the tractatus de vitiis et virtutibus as the one medieval genre devoted exclusively to these moral constructs. Newhauser, thus, has taken on the task of establishing the genre, more or less for the first time, and this pioneering work has also essentially influenced the goals of his volume: if it is impossible at this stage to assess with finality the problems involved in the transmission of representatives of the genre due to their overwhelming number and the incompleteness of bibliographic aids to collections of medieval manuscripts, one can nevertheless begin to sketch the outlines of the genre, its historical development, and its importance within the corpus of medieval religious literature in sufficient detail and with enough attention to genre theory to serve as a guide for future research in this vast field of literature and to draw attention to some of the areas in which medievalists have much to gain by further investigations of representatives of the genre.