Fasting

Just one conjecture is linked to this page, and it approaches fasting from an angle Aquinas himself never considered: whether medieval penance was actually administered like a price list. The underlying doctrine is Aquinas's own account: fasting belongs to the virtue of abstinence, practiced to rein in disordered desire, direct the mind toward higher things, and make amends for sin.

Penance comes in denominations approaches the practice from its documentary record rather than its theology, asking whether penitential practice was administered in something like graduated denominations, fixed units of fasting or penance assigned to fixed categories of sin, the way a currency or a tariff schedule would be, rather than as a single undifferentiated discipline.