‘My Cruel Conscience with Sharpned Knife’: Conscience as Vessel and Vivisector in Jacob’s Well and a Meditation of a Penitent Sinner

Abstract

In 1560, Anne Vaughan Lock, a member of John Calvin’s Genevan exile community, wrote the first sonnet sequence to be published in English. Lock’s Meditation of a Penitent Sinner may seem to have little in common with Jacob’s Well, a fifteenth-century sapience manual; however, this article examines surprising similarities in their respective discussions of the penitent self and its access to a cleansed conscience. Jacob’s Well attempts to emphasize the necessity and importance of the sacrament of penance in lay piety. This article traces the manual’s attempts to apply orthodox sacramental doctrine to a shifting theory of the conscience and its relation to the self. At first glance, Lock’s Meditation of a Penitent Sinner rejects this traditional theorizing of the conscience and its need for the sacrament of penance. This article proposes, however, that Meditation struggles with some of the same concerns Jacob’s Well raises as it attempts to integrate the need for a cleansed conscience with the providence-heavy Reformed approach to the sinner’s repentance and access to a cleansed conscience.