Video and Podcast Resources On Alcuin of York's On Virtues and Vices

eleven lectures on an influential medieval work of ethics

A few years back, I finally had the opportunity to teach a Medieval Philosophy class. You might find that a bit strange, since I’ve been engaging in study and scholarship on an important medieval thinker, Anselm of Canterbury for roughly a quarter century. For a few decades, I have also incorporated a number of medieval thinkers into my classes, including Augustine of Hippo, Boethius, and Thomas Aquinas. I did occasionally get to teach a class that was supposed to cover Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, early on, but the bulk of that class ended up being devoted to Ancient.

While schools were still mainly teaching online as a result of the Covid pandemic, Carthage College asked me to teach a class that was titled “Medieval Thought”, which is a broader designation than Medieval Philosophy. As a philosopher, of course, I steered the class I was designing towards the medievals that are often considered both philosophers and theologians.

I made a deliberate decision not to try to cover the entire “medieval” period, which depending on how you understand it might encompass something close to a millenium of time and texts. Instead, I focused on the eras from the end of the ancient period through the development of monasticism, the monastery and cathedral schools. making our cutoff the works of Bernard de Clairvaux.

One of the thinkers who I particularly wanted to incorporate and do some work on was a prime mover in what gets called the Caroligininan Renaissance, one of the periods after the “dark ages” and the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. That’s Alcuin of York, who wrote a number of quite interesting works. I thought for my class the most useful text for them to engage with would be his treatise On Virtues and Vices, since that was already an important theme they were engaging with through earlier authors like Prudentius, Augustine, and John Cassian.

So I produced an entire set of core concept videos on that text, which later I converted to Sadler’s Lectures podcast episodes. Here they are:

• Virtues from Wisdom To Zeal Of Reading | watch video | listen to podcast

• Virtues from Peace To Patience | watch video | listen to podcast

• Confessions, Repentance, And Conversion | watch video | listen to podcast

• Fasting, Almsgiving, And Chastity | watch video | listen to podcast

• Humility, Compunction, And Fear Of God | watch video | listen to podcast

• Fraud, Judges, And False Witnesses | watch video | listen to podcast

• The Eight Capital Vices | watch video | listen to podcast

• Capital Vices of Gluttony, Lust, And Avarice | watch video | listen to podcast

• Capital Vices of Anger, Weariness, And Sorrow | watch video | listen to podcast

• Capital Vices of Envy, Vainglory, And Pride | watch video | listen to podcast

• The Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Courage, Temperance | watch video | listen to podcast

If you’d like to see the particular translation I referenced in this set of lectures, you can find them over at Heroic Age. You can also find the original latin text in the online Patrologia Latina.