Between liturgy and canon law: A study of books of confession and penance in eleventh- and twelfth-century Italy

Abstract

The origins of confessional handbooks or penitentials can be traced back to the seventh century, when Irish and Anglo-Saxon authors composed lists of sins and their corresponding penances. These texts were to be used by priests in order to enjoin a suitable penance on confessants. The penitential genre spread to the Frankish regions, where new texts were composed in the eighth and ninth centuries. While penitentials gradually passed into disuse in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the penitential genre experienced a short renaissance in the southern and central parts of Italy. This comparatively late production of new penitentials is more remarkable, because few new texts were compiled in the rest of Europe during this period. This study focuses upon five penitentials from South and Central Italy to examine in greater detail the flowering of penitential literature in this region. An analysis of the sources of these texts revealed both their indebtness to Frankish traditions as well as their originality. This book has shown that thematic uniformity in the penitentials was achieved by their focus upon upon criminal sins, such as sexual and marital sins and violence. This study also provides an analysis of the rites of confession of penance which were often included in the Italian penitentials. Furthermore, this study explored the manuscripts in which the penitentials were copied in order to establish which role these texts fulfilled in ecclesiastical life. By taking into account this codicological evidence, it is possible to answer the question as to whether these texts really functioned in daily pastoral care or whether they were theoretical texts with a largely educational purpose. After examining such features as the size, the decoration, and the contents of the manuscripts that contain penitentials, it can be shown that these texts could function within both an educational and a pastoral context. The influence of penitentials upon the canon law of that region was particularly strong, which can be discerned in two major, South Italian canon law collections of this age, the Collection in Nine Books and the Collection in Five Books. The compilers of these collections not only included many rulings of penitentials, but also changed existing rulings and created new ones themselves. In turn, many regulations of these documents entered some of the penitentials of liturgical manuscripts. The Italian penitentials, in other words, display a lively interaction between liturgical and legal genres.