The Virtues and Vices in the Arts: A Sourcebook

Endorsements and Reviews

Tucker puts excerpts from philosophical treatises into conversation with religious and literary compositions. Even more interesting, he draws on key artistic works, paintings, and sculpture, allowing the reader to imagine other ways to think about ethical problems. With a useful and accessible introduction, not to mention shorter introductions for each reading, Tucker has constructed an excellent sourcebook for any undergraduate class touching on the history of ethics in the Western tradition.
Dallas G. Denery II, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine

Shawn Tucker demonstrates how the concepts of virtue and vice are not only very relevant to contemporary Western culture but have a comprehensive, fluid, and contested history in art and literature. This interdisciplinary study of these core cultural concepts, and a serious inquiry into what behaviour we sanction and what behaviour we condemn, is a welcome addition to the study of humanities. Tucker’s lively introductions are especially effective at linking ancient texts and artistic works to modern ones, with generous nods to contemporary music, television, and cultural phenomenon such as fad diets and Christian rock.
Lee Ann Elliott Westman, University of Texas at El Paso

Shawn R. Tucker’s well-conceived sourcebook on The Virtues and the Vices in the Arts fills an important niche, and will be especially helpful for students just embarking on their study of the art and literature of European civilization. It represents a very useful compilation of key texts and illustrative artworks that document the historical conversation and debate about the moral life that has shaped the different cultures springing from Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian antiquity.
Dwight D. Allman, Baylor University

Shawn Tucker has done a great service bringing together a variety of texts and images from the rich tradition surrounding the vices and virtues, texts as different as Plato’s Republic and Hildegard of Bingen’s Ordo Virtutum, and images as varied as Brueghel’s engravings of lust and anger and Paul Cadmus’s paintings of envy and pride. This anthology will be a welcome resource for students of history, philosophy, literature, and art.
Holly Johnson, Mississippi State University

In The Virtues and the Vices in the Arts, Shawn Tucker has brought together important works on the vices and virtues that outline the trajectories of the development, diversification, and sometimes reversal, of these lively concepts over more than two thousand years of human thinking about morals and ethics. … The sources gathered here present both nonspecialists and specialists with enough material to appreciate the diversity and vitality of the long-lasting debate on the nature of vice and virtue in Western culture.
Rhonda L. McDaniel, Middle Tennessee State University

Shawn Tucker’s anthology offers a delightful journey through classic works of philosophy, theology, art, and literature with a heavy dose of wit. The structure of the book is crucial to its success. … With its well-chosen selections, insightful argument, and memorable imagery, Tucker’s anthology is a useful collection for those interested in a wide variety of fields. Students of history or philosophy, art or literature, and theology or ethics will find value in the pages of this book, as it promises to serve as a resource to which they return again and again.
Derek R. Davenport, in Reviews in Religion and Theology, Vol 24, Issue 3