Virtue ethics in the medieval period

Abstract

The idea that virtue might be one of the central features of ethics is associated with Aristotle, who devotes half of the Nicomachean Ethics to it, and this work had great influence in the high Middle Ages, especially in the thirteenth century. Yet diverse notions of virtue and of particular virtues were in circulation much earlier via the writings of Cicero and Augustine. In the former’s De Inventione the medievals read.