Penance and the Market Place: a Reformation Dialogue with the Medieval Church (c. 1250–c. 1600)

Abstract

During the later Middle Ages the ecclesiastical jurisdiction generally abandoned ritual humiliation in the market place as an integral part of penance imposed by sentence in its courts, although intermittently this punishment continued into the early sixteenth century. In the early decades of the ecclesia anglicana of Elizabeth, however, several jurisdictions reintroduced shaming in the market place as a consistent part of a disciplinary regime. Although constituting no more than an episode, as public penance had again declined by the 1580s, the reintroduction of penance in the public forum reveals much about the character of the Anglican Church in the first decades after the settlement of 1558, but also reflects back on the pre-Reformation Church.