Visible humility in the middle of the thirteenth century: William Peraldus’s signa humilitatis

Abstract

In the middle of the thirteenth century in Lyon, the Dominican William Peraldus (ca. 1200-ca. 1271) compiled a list of signs of humility (signa humilitatis) as part of his treatment of the virtue in his highly successful “Summa de virtutibus”, which was preceded by a “Summa de vitiis”. In this paper, I examine the epistemic value of Peraldus’s list of signs of humility and the logic that underlies it. I situate Peraldus’s “aesthetics of humility”, which I analyze as a gender-sensitive “aesthetics of concealment”, within the broader context of instructing proper behavior and shaping character, a task Peraldus explicitly undertook, and I connect it to the wider theologico-soteriological framework he shared with his readership. Finally, I argue that the treatment of the signs of humility, alongside the indicators of pride in the “Summa de vitiis”, responds to widespread concerns about the aesthetics of morally ambiguous traits such as humility and pride.