The Boys on the Beach:
Children's Games and Baptismal Grace in the Middle Ages.
October 9 2015
7:30pm
English Common Room 4406
CUNY Graduate Center
Children's Games and Baptismal Grace in the Middle Ages.
October 9 2015
7:30pm
English Common Room 4406
CUNY Graduate Center
Professor Emerita, Department of History, Oberlin College
While medieval Christians firmly agreed that baptism was a
sacrament of necessity, there was considerable disagreement on what
makes a baptism a valid sacrament. One such debate was triggered by
conflicting responses to a passage in Rufinus of Aquileia's
Ecclesiastical History in which Alexander, bishop of Alexandria,
validates the playful baptism of boys on the beach by the child
Athanasius, his own protégé and successor. Up through ca. 1300,
thinkers who cited Rufinus, often in selective and garbled form,
used him as a template for their appropriation of their other key
authority, Augustine's De baptismo, and framed their solutions in the
light of a range of arguments on different issues. They reached no
consensus on the question itself, reflecting a larger
medieval reality often lost sight of by proponents of the rise of a
persecuting society in the Middle Ages: the acceptability, within the
medieval orthodox Christian consensus, of more than one position on a
fundamental theological doctrine.
co-sponsored with Friends of the Saints
