Penitential texts Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Mémoire en Histoire, Université de Montréal, 2010

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- Histoire Médiévale, Penitential texts, Droit Canonique, Burchard of Worms

The thirteenth century in Europe witnessed both the birth of formal medical education in the West and the growth and spread of confession for all Christians. These two systems of social interaction are not unrelated, for both depend on professionals (physician and priest) trained in forms of diagnosis and treatment, whether of illness or of sin. While Christian authors had employed medical metaphors in religious contexts since the first descriptions of “Christ the Healer” in Antiquity, it was only in the decades around 1200 that the equivalency of priest as confessor and physician was made explicit and became a powerful image in the hands of later medieval preachers and theologians. Most historians of confession explain the popularity of such religious-medical metaphors with reference to Canon 21 of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, which required annual confession, and in which the confessor is advised to act like a learned physician, treating and curing the wounds of sin. Yet, as I will demonstrate through a study of theological treatises and confessional manuals from this era, the application of medical language to the confessional did not begin in 1215, but rather over the preceding half century in the schools of Paris, where a new and ambitious generation of clergy was trained in both theology and medical theory. These clerical authors, who includes Alan of Lille, Peter the Chanter, Peter of Blois, Robert of Flamborough, and others, encouraged priests to imagine themselves as learned physicians, trained in Galenic humoral theory, who carefully diagnose the nature of a penitent’s spiritual disease, and provide a correct and curative dose of penance that was neither too weak nor too strong. Medieval writings on confession thus provide evidence of how the medical knowledge of higher education may have spread to less learned priests and to the laity.

This dissertation summarizes the evidence for the use of canon law collections in England during the Christian Anglo-Saxon period, that is ca 600–1066. The method is text-historical, the focus being firstly on the scientific description of the primary evidence, and secondly on the evaluation of that evidence to determine which canon law collections were in circulation in Anglo-Saxon England, and exactly when, where and (in some cases) to whom they may have been available. An attempt is also made (in Chapter 2) to find a place for future discussion of canon law collections within the field of Anglo-Saxon Studies, a field traditionally resistant to this particular aspect of early medieval legal culture.
This dissertation has been envisioned as primarily descriptive. Here and there, however, attempts are made to venture beyond mere description of the evidence and explore the broader significance of canon law collections to Anglo-Saxon legal culture as a whole; however, given the still nascent state of the study of Anglo-Saxon canon law, such explorations are very often speculative and can only be considered preliminary to a more detailed investigation into the social, political and institutional significance of the evidence that is herein presented. This is simply to say that the goals of the present study are more humble than might be hoped. A solid foundation, rather than a consummate edifice of historical analysis, is sought after. Indeed, it bears advertising up front that not only has the definitive treatment of Anglo-Saxon canon law yet to be written; in all likelihood, it will still be many years before it is even prudent to attempt such a thing.
The appendices contain a number of transcriptions of canon law collections from Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, including the first ever transcriptions of the Collectio Sanblasiana and Collectio Turonensis, as well as transcriptions of Book 4 of the Collectio quadripartita and of the Collectio Wigorniensis (or ‘Excerptiones pseudo-Ecgberhti’) in four of its five redactions. The appendices also contain a review of the complex historiography surrounding the latter two collections, as well as case studies of three texts that appear to have been crucial to the development of canon law in the Anglo-Saxon church, namely the Libellus responsionum, the Constitutum Silvestri, and Ecgberht of York’s Dialogus. While the appendixed material is intended primarily as support for the broader arguments developed in the dissertation proper, it is also hoped that scholars will find some of that material useful in its own right, and that it will serve to promote further discussion of the importance of canon law collections―especially Continental canon law collections―within the context of Anglo-Saxon history.

- by Michael Elliot
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- Medieval History, Anglo-Saxon Studies, Medieval Studies, Textual Criticism

The book is devoted to the history of confession in Russia in 14-19th centuries. The main source for research are confessional questionnaires. These texts contain the questions from confessor to penitents about all details of his everyday life. The questionnaires show us relations between different members of the family, their relation to the superiors and to the beggars and a lot of other features of medieval everyday life.

- by Maria Korogodina
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- History, Russian Studies, Russian Literature, Medieval Philosophy

As I argue, in the Middle Ages the prohibited degrees (the ban on kin marriage) were sometimes talked about in a language of purity and pollution, but sometimes in rather "cool" terms without any reference to such charged terms as incest, abomination etc., The paper attempts to show how both modes of speaking influenced the canon law collections of the eleventh and twelfth century. Looking at contemporary theology, I argue that theologians much earlier than compilers of canon law collections stressed that the prohibitd degrees were human legislation that had changed in the past and could be changed in the future.

- by Christof Rolker
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- Canon Law, Legal History, Gender and Sexuality, History of Sexuality

Building on an earlier paper on incest discourses mainly in the 11th c. (Two models of incest:, Carlsberg conference 2011), I argue that in the 12th and 13th centuries there were at least two distinct modes of speaking to discuss the prohibited degrees. Both modes of speaking co-existed for a long time, and one should be very careful to deduce "deeply rooted fears of pollution" from the use of a language of purity and pollution in certain sources.

- by Christof Rolker
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- History of Sexuality, Second Temple Judaism, Medieval Canon & Roman Law, Qumran

Che esista una tradizione controversistica ostile nei confronti del pellegrinaggio è cosa nota. Meno noto è quanto questa forma di critica trovasse sponda nella pratica – diffusa dalla tarda antichità a tutto il medioevo – del pellegrinaggio giudiziale. Nessuna aura positiva circondava tale vagatio e anche volendo credere alla buona fede dei penitenti ciò non cambia la realtà dei fatti: chi si metteva in quel genere di peregrinatio era colpevole di assassinio o gravi reati sessuali tanto che Cyrille Vogel non esitava a definire il fenomeno come «pellegrinaggio di chierici criminali»

- by Ilaria Sabbatini
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- History of Religion, Anthropology of Pilgrimage, Pilgrimage, Pilgrimage Routes

This paper (presented at the 22nd International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, 6–9 July, 2015) makes the case for Ecgberht, archbishop of York to 766, as the author the Paenitentiale Theodori, or more precisely the recension of that work that I call the Paenitentiale Umbrense (because it claims to have been composed by a certain Discipulus Umbrensium). It is argued that the Paenitentiale Umbrense was probably composed around the year 720 when Ecgberht was perhaps only 25 years old, and that it was addressed to certain of Ecgberht’s former schoolmates and masters at Canterbury. A probable context for the composition of the work is found in the dispute Boniface had on the Continent with the Irish heretic Clemens. The paper also considers Ecgberht’s authorship of the Paenitentiale Umbrense as a preparatory step for his eventual composition, much later, of the Paenitentiale Ecgberhti, a work which was also destined to be put to use by Anglo-Saxon reformers working on the Continent. The Paenitentiale Umbrense and Paenitentiale Ecgberhti are thus framed as two halves of the same project, one that involved the efforts of Ecgberht, Boniface, and many other Anglo-Saxon scholars working in both England and Francia. The repercussions of the project were several, but include the establishment of the genre of the paenitentiale as an indispensible tool in church administration, and the baptizing of penitential law as a respectable and useful supplement to more traditional forms of ecclesiastical legislation.

This new edition (currently in early draft) aims to replace that of P.W. Finserwalder, now nearly 100 years old. It is based on a fresh assessment of the manuscript evidence, and is the first edition to present together the texts of the Canones Basilienses, the Canones Cottoniani, the Capitula Dacheriana, the Canones Gregorii, and the Paenitentiale Umbrense, the latter also being presented for the first time in its original single-book form (rather than the later two-book form). The edition will include indices, commentary, translation (English), and exhaustive source information. Draft editions of all five versions (without sources) are available here for viewing or download as a PDF. More information, including a synoptic edition (wherein the chapters of all five versions are presented together in a single table) can be found at http://individual.utoronto.ca/michaelelliot/manuscripts/texts/iudicia_theodori.html.

- by Dalia Marx דליה מרקס
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- Jewish Studies, Liturgy, Israel Studies, Prayer
- by Elaine Pereira Farrell
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- Penance, Penitential texts
- by Dalia Marx דליה מרקס
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- Jewish Studies, Liturgy, Jewish Mysticism, Magic

A symposium hosted by the UCD MÍCHEÁL Ó CLÉIRIGH INSTITUTE

- by Elaine Pereira Farrell
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- Canon Law, Pastoral Care, Penance, Penitential texts

This article is a first attempt at systematically considering the penance imposed by Bolesław the Brave on the assassins of the so-called Five Martyred Brethren, described in Vita Quinquae Fratrum Eremitarum by St. Bruno of Querfurt (BHL 1147). The killers of the hermits were condemned to life-long penance in an abbey founded by Duke Bolesław on the site of the desecrated hermitage soon after the crime (about 1003-1006). The posed research questions concern, predominantly, the reasons for this particular penance, its purpose and character, as well as sources and cultural context in the form of the tradition of monastic penance (Klosterbuße).
The conducted analysis leads to a conclusion claiming that putting murderers in monastery was the result of a carefully planned decision of the Polish ruler, taking into consideration a number of the factors, including legal requirements. Comparative survey made it possible to find many significant West European analogies to the penance imposed on murderers of Five Martyred Brethern both in normative sources (capitularies, penitentials, canon law colletions, synodal statutes) and those referring to the penitentiary practice of the early Middle Ages. Their confrontation with the account by Bruno of Querfurt demonstrates that the solution accepted by Bolesław the Brave took into consideration regulations known from penitential or canonical tradition condemning the killers of clergymen to life-long penance in a monastery known from the seventh century as servitium Dei. Following their contents, the duke resigned from his original intention to incarcerate the felons in ducal prison or to sentence them to death in favour of chastisement corresponding to standards that should be respected by a Christian ruler. The penalty did not deprive the perpetrators of the perspective of salvation.
The proposed analysis casts a new light not only on the issue of penitential practice during the Early Piast era but also on the wider problem of the application of regulations borrowed from Western culture in the domain ruled by Bolesław the Brave. The article expands heretofore knowledge about the part performed by Duke Bolesław in binding his state with the circle of post-Carolingian Latin civilisation through a conscious acculturation of Christian customs and norms.

- by Radosław Kotecki
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- Piast Dynasty, Penitential texts, Medieval Poland, Boleslaw Chrobry

The law in literature movement has long appreciated law and literature as
“parallel forms of discourse, each with its own conventions and traditions,”
although their interaction is understood as being chiefly unidirectional:
literature provides an opportunity to critique changes in law or present
a view of law in action.1 Thomas’s book, however, proposes a new dimension altogether to this relationship. He sees William Langland using (primarily) the C-text of his Piers Plowman as a vehicle to participate in contemporary debates about canon law and the practice of pastoral care. As Thomas explains in his introduction, Langland’s intervention should not be seen as remarkable. Canon law was never an accumulation of statutes, as we often imagine law to be. Rather, canon law was a constantly evolving system, reliant on the debates and treatises of great canonists and theologians that produced much conflicting work. As a result, it was never a “closed corpus” (12). Nor was it definitive: rather, the judge in an ecclesiastical court ruled in accordance with those works he found most compelling. Drawing in part on the fact that Piers Plowman was typically read alongside treatises of canon law, Thomas asks us to imagine Piers Plowman as part of this process.He provides a cogent and compelling case for the poem’s participation in the glossing and production of canon law.

Esse artigo tem como tema práticas mágicas e de que maneira elas se relacionam ao pecado da fornicatio no Corrector sive medicus, de Burcardo de Worms. O presente estudo foca nas relações entre as penitências prescritas sobre as práticas que Neyra (2010) denomina “magia erótica” ou “amatória”, e os motivos para a regulação de tais práticas no período que antecede a Reforma Papal. Para tanto, estudamos o Corrector sive medicus, um manual penitencial em formato de questionário, produzido entre o ano 1000 e o ano 1025 por Burcardo, bispo de Worms. Esta pesquisa se contextualiza o Império Otoniano e seus mecanismos de governança, bem como a sua relação com Burcardo. Por meio da análise do contexto político e religioso do Império Romano-Germânico durante o governo da dinastia otoniana visamos compreender o pensamento de Burcardo acerca das práticas consideradas como “magia erótica” presentes no Corrector. Deste modo, procuramos responder à pergunta: o que são as práticas de “magia erótica” e de que maneira elas eram vistas pela a Igreja durante a primeira metade do século XI.

- by Larissa de Freitas Lyth
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- Magic, Witchcraft, Religion and Magic, Middle Ages, Penitential texts
- by Richard Bautch
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- Theology, Biblical Studies, Prayer, Second Temple Judaism

Bragança Júnior, Álvaro Alfredo & Birro, Renan M. (2016). O Corrector sive Medicus (ou Corrector Burchardi, ou ainda De Poenitentia, c.100-1025) de Burcardo de Worms (c.965-1025): apresentação e tradução dos capítulos 1-4, além das... more

- by Leituras da Escandinávia Medieval LEM and +1
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- Medieval Latin Literature, Penitential texts, Burchard of Worms, History of the Church
- by Eleni Leontidou
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- Manuscript Studies, Carolingian Studies, Moral Education, Penitential texts

This paper examines the connections between the penitential works attributed to Gildas and David and those of the anonymous author of the Poenitentiale Ambrosianum and Cummian. It argues that the penitential attributed to Gildas should be regarded as a genuine work by Gildas and that the Ambrosianum be considered as ‘the book of David’, from which excerpts were made. Attempts by Cummian to combine these two authorial traditions in seventh-century Ireland point to the continuing strength of a British Church, against the image presented by Bede.

- by Stephen Joyce and +1
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- Early Christianity, Early Medieval History, Early Medieval Ireland, Penitential texts

A number of Anglo-Saxon law codes begin with headnotes explaining the function of the laws that follow, many of which frame the codes in the context of developing better ways to keep the “public peace.” In contrast, Anglo-Saxon penitentials, which are often seen as the best religious equivalent to secular law codes, do not open with invocations of the public good or even the good of the religious community. Instead, the introductory material of penitentials usually very briefly explains the purpose of the following text, which is to guide confession and penitence. The emphasis is on the individual sinner and the effect of confession. Such brief introductory statements illustrate one of the essential differences between secular law codes and penitentials: the way in which they frame trangressions and reparations in terms of the production and maintenance of communities or individual relationships with God, and the motivation behind the regulation of such communities or relationships.
For the scope of this paper, I focus on relationships or interactions between men and women in the secular law codes of Anglo-Saxon kings from Æthelberht to Cnut, which are collected and translated in F. L. Attenborough’s Laws of the Earliest English Kings and A. J. Robertson’s The Laws of the Kings of England from Edmund to Henry I, and in five penitentials used in Anglo-Saxon England, collected and translated on Allen Frantzen’s online database, “Anglo-Saxon Penitentials: A Cultural Database.” While the treatment of relationships and interactions between men and women in Anglo-Saxon secular laws displays a desire to maintain and regulate the bonds of communities, such as kin groups, neighborhoods, or even kingdoms, the Anglo-Saxon penitentials are far more concerned with how these relationships affect the status of individual souls and the relationship between an individual and God. In an effort to analyze how concerns and anxieties in texts traditionally regarded as “non-literary” are reflected in Old English literature, I also argue that the conceptions of communities and individuals found in secular law codes and penitentials are reflected in literary texts that closely align with the nature and context of these texts: epic poetry and Old English Saints’ Lives.

- by Torsten Jantsch
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- Soteriology, Luke-Acts, Gospel of Luke, Jewish Prayer

In this article I examine a Mesopotamian therapeutic ritual and its prayer, " My god, I did not know. " It is clear that although the prayer is quite general, its purpose is to reconcile a sick person to his personal deity so that the patient is healed. I will then examine structural and content similarities with Pss 38 and 51. Thus, the paper's methodology is comparative and form critical. I conclude that Pss 38 and 51, like the Mesopotamian penitential prayers and rituals, were ritual prayers through which the faithful Israelite was reconciled to God so that wholeness could be re-established in his or her life. This has implications for wholeness and health today as believers pursue right relationship with their creator. It also has implications for the critical contextualization of the psalms into different cultural contexts.

- by Joel Hamme
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- Assyriology, Penitential texts, Psalms, Critical Contextualization
- by Max Schiendorfer
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- Medieval History, Medieval Studies, Black Death, Medieval Chronicles

Rob Meens clearly presents the ambition of his work. It aims to challenge 'too-easy generalizations of the complex nature and histoiy of penance and confession' such as those based on the
master narrative of the so-called discoveiy of the individual in the twelfth century. Furthermore, it aims to provide 'a reliable
guide [... ] through the thick forest of penitential literature of the period between 600 and 1200'. The author deals with both tasks successfully in a book that will represent a touchstone on this subject for scholars and students alike.

- by Bart Jaski
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- Early Medieval Ireland, Penitential texts

Though strangely ignored until the mid-twentieth-century, Henry of Grosmont constituted the late medieval Great Man par excellence: descendant and ancestor of kings; England’s second duke and richest nobleman; a major military and diplomatic presence during the early Hundred Years War. Moreover, since his Livre de Seyntz Medicines’ re-emergence in the 1930s, his authorial and spiritual persona has been available to scholars: it represents the only extant penitential treatise by a fourteenth-century English aristocrat. As high status late medieval men go, he is accessible from an unusual range of angles.
This paper explores Grosmont’s attitude towards Christ’s lordship. Grosmont’s relationship with Christ, his Livre makes clear, reproduced the age’s social structure: he was his Lord’s vassal. His religious and knightly ideologies, however, were in tension. Grosmont’s ostentatious conformity to pious and chivalric norms impressed contemporaries. Some of Christ’s behaviour, though, as outlined in religious tradition, would have seemed weak or shameful in a secular nobleman. How did Grosmont handle this? His efforts to reconcile his secular idea of lordship and the notion of Christ-as-Lord are examined.
Grosmont’s aristocratic sense of the deference owed to himself, it will be argued, led Christ’s approachability to unsettle him even as he praised it. His Livre has been compared with the works of the English mystics. However, whereas mystics such as Rolle revelled in Christ’s unorthodox lordship, which collapsed the social distance between them, for Grosmont it undermined his relationship as it threatened the underpinnings of his own temporal pre-eminence.

Public weeping during Holy Week processions in late medieval Spain were emotional performances that could be learned and rehearsed. A variety of textual, visual, and doctrinal materials were available to lay penitents to assist them in achieving more profound—and more ritually efficacious—feelings of contrition and sadness. By comparing the compelling similarities between late medieval devotional practices and Constantin Stanislavsky’s methodological tools for achieving emotional and spiritual truth on stage, we may better understand the corporal and cognitive processes of social actors in ritual and theatrical arenas.

- by Christopher Swift
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- Theatre Studies, Performance Studies, Medieval Spain, Ritual Procession
- by José Andrade
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- Medieval History, Galician Studies, Medieval Studies, Medieval Church History
- by James Siemens
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- Czech History, Patristics, New Testament, Medieval Studies

Anche se gli studi sull'argomento sono per lo più relativi all'area francese non mancano pellegrinaggi penitenziali italiani. Esiste un documento fiammingo del tardo Cinquecento contenente una lista dei luoghi in cui si era soliti mandare i condannati al pellegrinaggio giudiziale. Tra gli altri ve ne sono indicati alcuni italiani: quelli che tra i molti santuari venivano ritenuti più importanti per la penitenza.

- by Ilaria Sabbatini
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- History of Religion, Anthropology of Pilgrimage, Pilgrimage, Pilgrimage Routes

Il saggio cerca di costruire il rapporto esistente tra la tradizione penitenziale altomedievale, esemplificata dai libri penitenziali, e l'istituzione del diritto penale in età carolingia, con particolare riferimento al legame tra giustizia ecclesiastica e secolare nei capitolari. Partendo da una prospettiva generale, che introduce la tradizione penitenziale, si vuole mettere in luce il ruolo che tale tradizione riveste nella cultura giuridica in epoca carolingia, attraverso l'esame del contenuto e del linguaggio di specifici capitolari, con particolare attenzione a quelli ratificati in ambiente lombardo nel IX secolo.

Revue de Qumran 32/1 (2020): 151-153.

- by Elisa Uusimäki
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- New Testament, Prayer, Second Temple Judaism, New Testament and Christian Origins
- by Stephen Morris
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- Canon Law, Gender Studies, Gender and Sexuality, Byzantine Studies