Willing and Understanding: Late Medieval Debates on the Will, the Intellect, and Practical Knowledge explores the debate on the will in fourteenth-century philosophy and theology to capture its multifarious thematic and methodological facets. The primary aim of this volume is to acquaint a wider audience with the varied dimensions of the will-intellect problem that were under scrutiny in the late Middle Ages. Some of the issues examined by the contributors deserve the moniker of leitmotifs of the late medieval debate on the will, given their common popularity; others went against the grain, challenged the entrenched notions, and thus fostered original trends; and yet others proved merely ephemeral fads. By including this array of tendencies, concepts, and approaches, the volume illumines the development of late medieval theories of the will.
This collection evolved from the papers read at the conference The Will and Its Acts in Late Medieval Ethics and Theology, which was held at the Medical University of Łódź, Poland, on 17–18 June, 2021 to conclude the project The Will and Its Acts in Late Medieval Ethics and Theology: New Ideas and Methods (funded by the National Science Centre, Poland under grant agreement UMO-2017/27/B/HS1/00066). Also, the editorial work on this volume received financial support from the National Science Centre, Poland.
I extend my warmest gratitude to my co-editor, Riccardo Fedriga, for his support and work on this volume, and most importantly to the contributors to Willing and Understanding for their patience, determination, and dedication to our project.
I am deeply grateful to Patrycja Poniatowska and Amelia Popa-Rolando for their help with language revision; they read all the contributions with impressive accuracy, suggesting many improvements and making this book a smooth read.
While I am indebted to numerous people, my special, heartfelt thank-you goes to my husband, Wojtek, for his affection and invariable support.
I greatly appreciate the assistance and patience of the IMP editorial board, the outstanding group of editors and staff at Brill, and especially Marcella Mulder.
Monika Michałowska
Łódź, February 2023