The Origins of the Seven Deadly Sins

Early Theatre, 2004

Among the Henslowe-Alleyn papers at Dulwich College is a document long prized by theatre historians: the handwritten 'plot' of a play called The Second Part of the Seven Deadly Sins (Dulwich College MS XIX), apparently designed to be hung on a peg backstage at a playhouse. The text of this play does not survive, but it is usually thought to be identical with Richard Tarlton's 'famous play of the seauen Deadly sinnes', referred to in 1592 by Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe. 1 The plot is extremely valuable for its scene-by-scene description of the play's action, which lists the characters and (most of) the players who played those characters in each scene. There are twenty players' names in all

The causes of sinful actions in Medieval philosophy are based around the intentions of wanting to perform a sinful action by an agent and the theistic underpinning of the fall of man (Macdonald, 2003: 393-395) (Bosley & Tweedale, 2006: 461-462). I will argue that the problem of sin is the problem of intentionality in an action. Intentionality will be viewed as central to answering the question of the cause of sinning; i.e. whether sinning is an intentionally evil action by an agent, through Augustine, Abelard and Aquinas.

2019

In the following article I engage with the main circle of the panel The Seven Deadly Sins by Hieronimus Bosch (1450-1516). Many articles have been written on this panel, but they deal mainly with its authorship and iconography. The present article, as a modest contribution to the discourse on Bosch's work, seeks to uncover the possible artistic precedents that might have influenced Bosch in his design of the circle and the figures that represent each sin.

Text and Performance Quarterly, 2006

Every sin is the result of a collaboration,'' claimed Seneca, observing that sin is both a cultural and an intersubjective process. Seneca's pointed formula implies both cultural performances that maintain normative order and a collusive, furtive will to resist that order. Sin is, to be sure, a rhetorical construct*/but it is also a resource. It is simultaneously social and surreptitious. Above all others, the seven deadly sins have become emblematic for understanding many of the practices of everyday life (sometimes vaunted, sometimes reviled). Some have gone so far as to claim that the seven deadly sins illustrate the excesses and abuses of Western society as a whole (Lyman). With this in mind, we take as a starting point in this special issue that sin has long held a firm grasp on our cultural imagination. Internal battles between good and evil are at the very heart of most of our storytelling; external battles between good and evil comprise the bulk of our tales of history. The discourse and imagination surrounding the seven deadly sins is particularly dramatic because the stakes are drawn so high. As a product of Christian guides to proper living, the seven deadly sins are constructed as offenses against God's will that lead to certain damnation and the death of the soul. They are literally deadly. These are the sins of anger, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, pride, and sloth. 1 The seven deadly sins are tied to personal behavior and decorum, articulating prohibitions concerning human desire. In his Inferno, Dante explains that the seven deadly sins are all failed relationships to love, articulated within the three relational categories of perversion, insufficiency, or excess. Whether understood as emotions or actions, as directed at self or other, or as spiritual or social matters, the seven deadly sins routinely enact relationships that cut to the heart of the onto-epistemic labors of performance. The contributors to this issue all engage Dante's typology in one way or another to perform sin through perversion, insufficiency, and/or excess (of style, of topic, of method).

There is scant evidence of the seven deadly sins in medieval music, compared with the manifold treatment of this theme in theology and art. Early sacred texts set to melody were based almost exclusively on the Bible, sources of which predate the first Western teaching against the sins. Even when composers began to use their own texts, the sins only rarely commanded their attention. This article deals with the small but fascinating repertory of music on the seven deadly sins from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: several conductus and motets from works of Philip the Chancellor, Guillaume de Machaut and the Roman de Fauvel. These unique pieces, straddling the divide between liturgical and pedagogical music, are shown to have unusually dramatic texts that often addressed the sins directly. In the fifteenth century, these works disappeared, replaced by music that expressed the idea of defeating the sins through the use of musical symbols rather than by singing their names aloud.

Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality

Pastoral Psychology, 2011

The results of a survey conducted in 1988 on the traditional deadly sins and the schedule of virtues formulated by Erik H. Erikson were previously reported by Capps (Pastoral Psychology 37:229-253, 1989). The results of a second survey conducted in 1998 were reported by Capps and Cole (Pastoral Psychology 48:359-376, 2000). This article reports on a third survey conducted in 2008-2009. All three surveys employed a research instrument constructed by Capps titled Life Attitudes Inventory. Major findings of the third survey are that lust and melancholy are considered the deadliest of the deadly sins, with anger rounding out the top three. Envy is thought to be the least deadly sin. The sins most personally struggled with are pride, envy, and apathy, with both genders accounting for the high ranking of pride, women for envy, and men for apathy. Men's and women's views whether individual sins are more characteristic of men or of women were also reported, with greed especially ascribed to men and envy to women. Similarities and differences between young, middle and mature adults' views on and experiences of the deadly sins are reported, as are comparisons between the members of two Christian denominations (Presbyterians and Methodists).

Comparative Drama, 1991

2014