Auricular Confession Research Articles

‘Riddling Shrift': Confession, Speech, and Power in Romeo and Juliet and ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore

This essay maps the complex intersubjective dynamics of confession as illuminated in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, plays in which the ritual of shrift has a pivotal narrative and thematic role. The essay focuses on the friar characters and the office of shrift with which they were associated, and argues that Shakespeare and Ford draw on the durable cultural currency of auricular confession in post-Reformation England to ultimately disruptive ends, as characters consistently and increasingly reconfigure the intersubjective scripts of confession, using its conventions to draft new architectures of performative power.

Politics as a Confession: Confronting the Enemy Within

ABSTRACT In this article, we claim, firstly, that the turn to an “ethical” politics focused on subjectivity and its transformation, announced by post-structuralist theorists in the 1970s, can be found today in forms of progressive politics, illustrated by struggles against racism and their articulation by consultants and educators. Secondly, this turn entails targeting the “enemy within,” whether it be the inner fascist (Guattari, Foucault) or white privilege (Di Angelo, Kendi). Rather than an extension of Lasch’s therapeutic “culture of narcissism,” it is a turn to practices reminiscent of public rituals of expiation of guilt and acts of purification (exomologesis) characterizing what Weber referred to as “sects.” Pace Foucault, the “main danger” lies not in the “subjectifying” practices of the human sciences descended from auricular confession and the Christian pastorate, but rather the displacement of formal politics and attendant “civil religion” (Bellah) by conflicts between charismatic sects claiming exemplary subjectivity and virtuosity.

Частная исповедь в Церкви Англии: исторические, литургические и канонические аспекты

Частная исповедь в Церкви Англии: исторические, литургические и канонические аспекты

Католическая практика «испытания совести»: теоретические и религиозно-культурные аспекты

The confessing one’s grave sins in form of a private or auricular confession, introduced as an obligation by the Catholic Church in the thirteenth century and involved as one of the main requirements a detailed recitation of all the circumstances of sinful acts, resulted in the course of time in wide-spreading of “examen conscientiae” procedure. “Examining of con­science” as a preparation procedure for the sacrament of penance becomes its completed form at the turn of the Early Modern Times, but its roots go back to monastic spiritual exer­cises, aimed at self-knowledge, self-evaluation, and moral improvement. Unlike the monas­tic practices, a preparation for the penance was focused primarily on cognition and limita­tion of one’s sinfulness manifestations in all areas of the life. The early Christians borrowed “examen conscientiae” as a regular self-evaluation from the Greek-Roman philosophical tra­dition. The given article analyses the roots of this practice and its reinterpretation by Origen (c.184–c.253); typical texts of “examining of conscience” and their modification under the influence of the theoretical understanding of the sacrament of penance in the works of the so-called “high” speculative theology; particularities of the Early Modern “examen con­scientiae” (a growing number of areas of life becomes gradually the object of moral evalua­tion, and typical texts of “examining of conscience” are supplemented by questions, related to professional activities, fulfillment of duties to God, neighbor, and oneself); influence of the rhetoric and mnemonic methods of memory training, as well as of the “Spiritual Exer­cises” of Ignatius of Loyola on the preparation procedure for the sacrament of penance.

Learning from the Confessional in the Later Thirteenth Century: Contributions to Human Sexuality, Daily Life, and a Science of Nature

Implementation of the canons of the Fourth Lateran Council dramatically expanded the practice of auricular confession among laypeople. Although the Council's canons also insist upon the seal of confession in order to keep the content of confessions secret, thirteenth-century authorities differ over the boundaries of the seal. As a result, the “secrets” of confession are often revealed in at least general terms in order to provide preachers with entertaining exempla for moral or doctrinal instruction. What is revealed from confession not only provides a window onto medieval private lives, but it also provided confessors with information about human activities—especially sexual practices—that might otherwise be unavailable to them. With such information, learned confessors not only encouraged moral reform but also defended claims of Aristotelian biology on human nature and sexuality.

‘Grant me Grace’: Alternative Visions for Vernacular Theology and Lay Devotion in Richard Caister and Nicholas Love

Richard Caister is an important but unstudied example of vernacular theology in England in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Himself a priest, Caister’s extant work indicates a figure who departed from the conservative instutionalism of Thomas Arundel’s regime on two very important points: the suitability of the vernacular for theological and spiritual discourse and the necessity of auricular confession. The distinctive position Caister takes on these points can be observed best by a comparative analysis to Nicholas Love’s theological work which provided a theological rationale for Arundel’s restrictive legislation, articulating a negative view of the vernacular and of the capacity of the laity which endorsed lay dependence upon their Latinate clergy. This article argues that Caister provides an important alternative vision for vernacular theology and the laity predicated upon a thorough Christocentrism.

Auricular Confession: the Celtic Gift to the Church

Abstract This article traces the evolution of auricular confession from its origins in the spiritual diakresis in the early desert tradition and argues that through the Celtic churches of Northern Europe the practice is introduced into the Western Church culminating in the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. By developing the desert tradition of diakresis it will be argued that the Celtic system triumphed because of its stronger psychological verisimilitude compared to the Southern Mediterranean traditions of public one-off penance.

A Wholesome Cure for the Wounded Soul: Confession, Emotions, and Self in Eighteenth‐ and Nineteenth‐Century Catholicism

This article explores how Catholic practices of auricular confession related to emotions and self in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, focusing on the situation in Belgium as a revealing case study. Relying on both prescriptive sources and depositions in criminal case records, it is argued that the sacrament of penance occupied a central place in everyday life, influencing modes of self‐reflection. Penitents were to examine their conscience, practise contrition, and overcome shame, so that they could be absolved of their sins and experience relief. An analysis of these practices reveals that, starting in the late eighteenth century, confession made a “turn inwards,” by putting a greater stress on depth, interiority, and relief.

"Eternal, Slithery Penance": Graham Swift's Waterland and the Secularization of Confession

"Eternal, Slithery Penance":Graham Swift's Waterland and the Secularization of Confession Ryan Siemers (bio) "Your history teacher wishes to give you the complete and final version," the narrator of Graham Swift's Waterland, Tom Crick, tells his high school students (7–8). Crick refers to his personal and family history, his account of which constitutes the novel. Crick's avowed aim echoes auricular confession, which requires the complete recounting of a penitent's sins before he or she receives absolution. Like a religious confessant, Crick seeks absolution for past sins: he feels guilty about the abortion of his would-be son, the death of his childhood friend Freddie Parr, and the suicide of his brother. Indeed, Crick reveals his guilt over these deaths to the police: "I confess my responsibility, jointly with my wife, for the death of three people" (314).1 However, because he speaks to his students, to the police, and (implicitly) to the reader rather than to a father confessor with the purpose and authority to offer him absolution, Crick's secular self-examination and self-narration threaten to be endless. In a desperate and improvisational response to that problem, Crick universalizes his condition over the course of his narrative to assuage his feelings of guilt and bring his secular confession to a close. Crick's narrative should be read in the context of—and as a response to the problems posed by—the secularization of confession. As I use the term here, "secularization" stands not for an inevitable decline of religious affiliation due to modernization (a once-prominent thesis that has undergone revision in sociology), but for an interminable historical [End Page 56] process by which religious concepts and practices are translated or transposed into the secular sphere and by which they continue to function in that sphere, often with unexpected consequences.2 Carl Schmitt and Karl Löwith provide examples of secularization understood as transposition: Schmitt claims that "all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts" (37), and Löwith argues that the modern notion of progress and the associated conception of linear history are due to the secularization of Christian eschatology. As I use it here, secularization encompasses the kind of transposition proposed by Schmitt and Löwith, along with the continuing and unpredictable dynamism of once-religious contents following that transposition. Max Weber's analysis may provide an example of the latter: for Weber, the transposition of rational acquisitiveness from Protestantism (wherein wealth provides evidence of election) to modern capitalism (wherein wealth is an end in itself) conditions the modern laborer and makes the current economic order possible—which, of course, is not at all what Martin Luther or John Calvin had in mind. Waterland's Tom Crick demonstrates the transposition of religious contents into the secular sphere, but his narrative also suggests that Weber's rationalization may reverse itself, that disenchantment may prompt re-enchantment. Crick transposes auricular confession into the relationship between himself and his students, but he then appeals to an enchanted circular history as a means to escape the psychological impasse produced by that transposition. Crick critiques progress and prefers cyclical history. Like Löwith, who opts for circular history because it comports with the notion of historical continuity (207), Crick desires historical continuity—especially regarding sexual generation, which in his case has been stymied. (His wife, Mary, is unable to bear children following an abortion.) More importantly, Crick prefers a re-enchanted form of that history—re-enchanted not by a return to ancient Greek paganism, as Löwith ultimately proposes, but through an idiosyncratic mythology of Crick's own making—because it assuages his sense of guilt by relating his individual experience to a universal pattern. Waterland thus illuminates a psychological dimension of Löwith's preferred alternative to linear history: for a subject suffering from a guilty conscience, circular history transforms personal guilt into a universal condition that is less psychologically burdensome due to its impersonality. [End Page 57] Before we examine Crick's narrative in more detail, however, we should address an important objection to the basic premise that secularization entails the transposition of religious concepts and practices...

Persuading the queen's majesty's subjects from their allegiance: treason, reconciliation and confessional identity in Elizabethan England

This article examines how political, theological and cultural factors formed confessional identity in Elizabethan England. It explores the rite of ‘reconciliation’ – usually the means by which Protestants converted to Catholicism – and its peculiar significance to English Catholics. The author argues that due to its illegal status in England, as well as the wider context of post-Reformation Catholicism, reconciliation became blurred with auricular confession and was adapted into a rite of passage for lifelong Catholics as well as converts. Reconciliation illustrates how political conflicts shaped the religious culture of English Catholics; it is also a striking example of how religious groups respond to minority status, modifying their traditions in order to create and preserve collective identity.

The Confessional and Ex-Catholic Priests in Nineteenth-Century Protestant America

Auricular confession became a major source of contention between U.S. Catholics and Protestants in the nineteenth century. The theological battle over the sacrament of penance stemmed from the Protestant Reformation and, to some extent, reflected the theological pluralism of the pre-Council of Trent era with regard to the necessity of auricular confession and the meaning and form of absolution. In the nineteenth century, however, much of the Protestant polemic against auricular confession focused on the practice’s allegedly evil moral and social consequences. By the 1830s the confessional itself came to be seen as a den of sexual exploitation and perversion and a threat to husbands, the family, and the stability of American society. Several former Catholic priests took advantage of this polemical situation and became exponents of the obscene charges, making confession itself the key to understanding the believed Catholic perversion of Christianity. Their popular public lectures across the country and their widely-distributed publications on the subject appeared credible because of their prior experiences in the Catholic Church and their inner knowledge of confessional practices. These ex-priests, turned Protestant, reinforced the anti-Catholic, Protestant crusade that emphasized the Catholic tradition’s supposedly salacious elements.

Collects of the Roman Missals: A Comparative Study of the Sundays in Proper Seasons before and after the Second Vatican Council by Lauren Pristas

BOOK REVIEWS 333 argument. “We have a primary duty to name the disorder within,” the Lutheran in Mattox opines, yet that nobly humble sentiment could shine forth more brightly on certain pages of this book (277). What would a better book look like? Apologias have a long history in the church, back at least to Augustine. They suffer when they come off as a string of noble achievements that others should envy. They soar when they offer the self as a sinner and so refract the glory of a God who could save someone so depraved as that one. A Protestant sentiment? Perhaps, though neither author would suggest that that means it is a false one. Would he? JASON BYASSEE Vancouver School of Theology Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada Collects of the Roman Missals: A Comparative Study of the Sundays in Proper Seasons before and after the Second Vatican Council. By LAUREN PRISTAS. New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013. Pp. 272. $50.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-567-03384-0. Well into the second decade of the twenty-first century, the sweeping changes in the Roman Catholic liturgy mandated by the Second Vatican Council have not ceased to provoke reaction. The strong response to the initial overhauling of the liturgy and subsequent revisions has not been restricted to liturgical experts, theologians, and the religious elite. A colleague who is also an avid fan of modern crime novels recently alerted me to a few lines from a 2013 novel by New York Times bestselling author James Patterson. In observing his suspicious neighbor at Sunday Mass, the detective hero notes that “he knelt when he was supposed to and knew all the prayers. He even knew all the annoying changes in the prayers that the church had just dropped on everyone out of the blue” (J. Patterson and Michael Ledwidge, Gone [Little, Brown & Company, 2013]). Lots of ordinary Catholics in the pews have definite opinions in matters liturgical. Whether or not the move to a completely vernacular liturgy was the express intention of the council fathers, clearly there was little awareness among them of the possible seismic shock to the Catholic culture of the time consequent upon a complete revision of the Roman Rite. But as Michael Gauvreau observes, “Changes to the liturgy and sacramental obligations following 1965, designed to make the church more welcoming and inclusive, had disoriented and troubled many faithful” (“Without Making a Noise,” in 334 BOOK REVIEWS The Sixties and Beyond, ed. Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau [University of Toronto, 2013]). While perhaps uninformed about the nuances of the conciliar ressourcement/aggiornamento dialectic, historians and social scientists have not unreasonably suggested that, whatever the theological premises, such a massive revision of forms of worship was culturally naïve. For these experts, the impact of a structural overhaul and of the move away from a liturgical language to the vernacular was predictable. The experience of the Mass, auricular confession, and a variety of sacramental rituals and devotions was the bedrock of personal faith and corporate identity for Catholics of North America. The radical reform of Vatican II challenged both faith and identity for many faithful Catholics at a time when a fascination with technology and shifting mores dominated the wider culture. Once the vernacular liturgy was in place, the evaluation of the Vatican II liturgy most often focused on the quality of the English translation. How faithful was the text to the Latin editio typica? The complexities of producing an English text conveying the full theological meaning and nuance of the Latin original were widely acknowledged, but until 2001, with the publication of Liturgiam Authenticam, no comprehensive body of principles and practical guidelines was provided for the translator or editor. The issue of translation, however, was but one aspect of the broader question, namely, the quality and integrity of the editio typica itself. A critique of the collection of Latin prayers in the Missal of Vatican II was notably missing from the ongoing conversation about liturgical texts in the period immediately following the council. The evolution of liturgical texts from the Missal of 1962 to that of 1970 remained largely unexplored. It is precisely here that Professor Lauren Pristas begins to...

Witchcraft and Inquisition in Early Modern Venice by Jonathan Seitz (review)

Reviewed by: Witchcraft and Inquisition in Early Modern Venice by Jonathan Seitz David Lederer Jonathan Seitz. Witchcraft and Inquisition in Early Modern Venice. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. xi + 286 pp. Ill. $99.00 (978-1-107-01129-8). While the title of Seitz’s analysis of Venetian inquisitorial records adverts to an explication of witchcraft persecutions, the contents and results of his research are substantially germane to medical history. Theoretically, the author explores the boundaries between natural and supernatural phenomenon with particular reference to mentalities, the role of the material and demonic in magic, and, importantly, the delineation of competency over accusations of maleficium. The vast majority of the study is dedicated to the role of medical experts—the clergy as spiritual physicians and university-trained natural physicians—in the determination of the natural or supernatural etiology of illnesses popularly attributed to witchcraft. Therefore, while trial records and inquisitorial procedures frame his analysis, Seitz focuses on contemporary understandings of illnesses and treatments. The book itself is broken down into nine chapters, though these become progressively uneven depending upon the amount of material available to support individual points. The main body of evidence derives from 600 trials brought before the Venetian inquisition from 1550 to 1650 (housed in the Archivio di Stato, with almost all records missing from 1593 to 1610), of which 120 involved maleficia, that is, magic intended to inflict physical (and occasionally mental) harm. Seitz expands upon these through a laudable investigation of related materials made available to the public since the recent opening of the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the Vatican. In addition, he consults an array of contemporary printed sources on demonology, medicine and exorcism, organized under the rubric of “libraries.” The theoretical introduction lays out the central ideological problem: the delineation of natural from supernatural phenomenona and the gray areas in between, particularly della Porta’s realm of natural magic and the popular understanding of nature. Throughout, Seitz goes on to demonstrate how Venetians at all levels of society saw both natural and supernatural causes at work in accusations of witchcraft. Chapter 1 will be familiar territory to those familiar with Ruth Martin’s study of the mitigating influences of inquisitorial procedure on witch trials, usually arising from an illness purportedly caused by magic. Seitz hones in on inquisitorial skepticism, limited use of torture, and the rarity of executions. He outlines procedures, denunciations, testimony of eye witnesses, the interrogation of the accused (constitutus), the defensive phase, and sentencing when the accused was occasionally found guilty. Chapter 2 considers afflictions and material evidence presented as proof of maleficium: reminiscent of allegations from the anti-Cathar inquisition of Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou, these included feathers, wax statues, bits of bone, and other objects described as sporchezza (literally “filth”) hidden about the household or corruption vomited as poison. The remainder addresses Gentilcore’s tripartite concept of medical pluralism, examining the role of experts in healing and testimony. Evidence on wise women as popular healers is scant, and the inquisition viewed their activities [End Page 197] with skepticism. Spiritual physic by ecclesiastical exorcists and university-trained physicians takes center stage. Although the inquisition even harbored misgivings about clerical medical practitioners, lay people viewed them as integral to the diagnosis and treatment of disease. Over time, natural physicians gained prominence and their testimony was rarely questioned. However they operated within religious constraints (e.g., the requirement for patients’ auricular confession) and deferred to clergy in all matters supernatural with the laconic protestation, “not my profession.” Seitz lays out four chapters on spiritual and medical physicians, providing archival evidence and an overview of standard handbooks. Although the inquisition privileged medical healers, the population at large (including medical practitioners!) could not be disciplined into a similar set of beliefs. At the end of the day, professional experts, material evidence, and natural causes gained influence in Venice and Italy more generally, while jurisprudence continued to dominate cases for maleficia in the empire to the north. Overall, Seitz provides a detailed reconsideration of Venetian witch trials, focusing on medical understandings rooted in inquisitorial procedure and popular mentalities. More recent literature on witchcraft and exorcisms...

Faustus, Confession, and the Sins of Omission

This essay examines how the loss of auricular confession in sixteenth-century England registers on Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus --probably the most influential representative of a dramatic genre that, in its medieval form, had relied on the sacrament of penance as its sine qua non. When confession lost its sacramental status (and when the moralities that celebrated its virtues fell into decline), a lacuna appeared in English culture that Marlowe’s theater tried to restore: mainly by aiming to recover every inch of fetishistic hedonism that Protestants imagined, somewhat wishfully, the Catholic sacraments had once afforded: worship of money, sensuous stimulation from images, the magical transport beyond moral limitation through the mere power of words. In my argument, Faustus underscores how closely theater and the confessional had always been allied insofar as each provided a sanctuary for the discursive representation of radically deviant behavior. The play mourns the absence of--and celebrates its continued allegiance to--an ancient rite in which people had formerly enjoyed (according to Calvin) “exchanging narratives of their crimes as if they were merry tales.”

Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (review)

Reviewed by: Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness Claire Sponsler Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness. By Sarah Beckwith. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011; pp. 232. In the crowded field of Shakespeare studies, Sarah Beckwith has found an opening on two seldom-linked fronts. This study makes a new contribution both to studies of the enduring, universal, themes in Shakespeare’s works, and to studies of the specific cultural and historical contexts that shaped his writings. The theme in question is forgiveness, and the cultural and historical context is that of early modern views on repentance. In addition to its bold synthesizing of two approaches that are usually kept separate, what sets this book apart is Beckwith’s expertise as a scholar of medieval theatre and religious culture whose work has played a major role in breaking down the rigid periodization that has—with historical inaccuracy and critical unhelpfulness—long severed the medieval from the early modern. Any understanding of forgiveness in Shakespeare’s plays, as Beckwith convincingly shows, has to reckon with the continuities with, as well as the breaks from, older doctrines of penance that were fundamental to late medieval religion. Four plays are at the heart of this book: Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. That all four were written after the great tragedies, and are thus “post-tragic,” is crucial to Beckwith’s claims about them, since in her reading, all four hold out the possibility of a redemption unavailable to Shakespeare’s tragic figures. While figures like King Lear are locked into the irreversible consequences of their passions and behaviors, penitence and repentance become the means by which Shakespeare’s posttragic heroes and heroines find forgiveness and, through forgiveness, a return to the human community—or what Beckwith calls “acknowledgement.” As Beckwith notes, the sacrament of penance was the medieval location of the language of acknowledgment, especially through the act of confession. In the late romances, the language of acknowledgment develops in the absence of the auricular confession and priestly absolution that for some 300 years had shaped penance, but that by Shakespeare’s time had been rejected by reformers, who in its place offered up (although far from neatly) repentance understood not as an outward ceremony, but as a turning of the self toward God. Beckwith traces the controversies over the components of the sacrament of penance—contrition, confession, and absolution—in order to map the contours of forgiveness in Shakespeare’s late plays. Changes in the status of penance and repentance were bound up with changing forms and conventions of speaking, as a whole range of speech acts, such as confessing, absolving, blessing, and baptizing, among others, were transformed by the English Reformation. Shakespeare’s plays, Beckwith argues, chart this revolution in language, including instances in which the authority of the speech acts of the priesthood was undermined and replaced by the claims of everyone for authority over human relations. In Beckwith’s view, the result is a new forging of bonds of community, which lacking other foundation had to be continually remade through conversation. For Shakespeare, Beckwith claims, human speech is what makes or breaks the ties among people, hence the “grammar” of the book’s title, which points to the relations among words linked to the sacrament of penance and makes a connection between the practices of ordinary language philosophy and the theatre, both of which understand language as situation and as act. After a section charting transformations in the language of forgiveness following the abolition of the sacrament of penance, the book’s second section offers a reading of promises and marriage in Measure for Measure, before turning in the third section to an analysis of forgiveness as an act of community in the four late romances. While a discussion of promises might seem out of place in a study of forgiveness, it fits with the book’s reliance on speech-act theory as a methodology and looks forward to the later plays, in which marriage turns less on issues of future promises than on forgiveness of past actions. Beckwith’s aim, when she takes up the four late romances, is to explore how Shakespeare treats...

Robert Southey: History, Politics, Religion. Stuart Andrews.British Romanticism and the Catholic Question: Religion, History and National Identity, 1778-1829. Michael Tomko.

Stuart Andrews, Robert Southey: History, Politics, Religion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) xvii + 250 $85.00 Michael Tomko, British Romanticism and Catholic Question: Religion, History and National Identity, 1778-1829 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) xii + 224 $84.00 Catholic was a persistent and usually passionate debate about relieving Roman Catholics of civil disabilities that had been imposed on them by Penal Laws of 17th century, a debate that intensified between anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780 and Catholic Emancipation act of 1829--the years of Romantic period in literature. The public policy issue was complicated by deep-rooted prejudice against Romish superstition with a history going back to Mary Tudor's persecution of Protestants and series of popish plots, real or imagined, that followed. A more serious complication was problem of Ireland. Following rebellions of 1798, an Act of Union dissolved Dublin parliament, raising question of how five million Irish Catholics could be admitted to full participation in political life of a united kingdom. The dispute thus involved a legal and cultural struggle over religious difference, historical grievances, and very definition of Britishness. Michael Tomko's British Romanticism and Catholic Question and Stuart Andrews' Robert Southey: History, Politics, Religion, two books under consideration, make case that Catholic Question played a more central role in culture of Romantic period than previous literary historians have noticed. Tomko addresses impact of controversy on imaginative literature while Andrews provides a vivid clarification of issues at heart of conflict and passions that drove one writer's lifelong obsession with threat he thought Roman Catholicism posed to Britain's survival as a Protestant nation. After he became Poet Laureate in 1813, Southey wrote little verse, devoting his creative energies to historical and argumentative prose. He was a conscientious and energetic historian, as his biographies of Wesley and Nelson still demonstrate, but prose that Andrews examines here mainly concerned dispute on Catholic Question, in which he was a committed partisan. In a series of books, articles, and reviews, debate became primary concern of his life as an author. He engaged in acrimonious public quarrels with two able and prominent defenders of Catholic rights, John Milner and Charles Butler. In his Book of (1824) Southey's admiration of of England necessitated invidious comparisons with the errors, corruptions and crimes of pernicious Romish Church (as he almost always called it). Milner's Strictures on Poet Laureate's Book of (1824), responded in kind to what he thought was a tissue of vituperation and fanaticism, whose author raves through history of many centuries, in abusing and calumniating common source of Christianity, in order to court heads of present Establishment, under pretence of vindicating it (121). Butler's Book of Roman Catholic (1825) similarly argued that Southey's book was calculated to revive past animosities, to inflame prejudice, to perpetuate discord (119). Southey responded to his critics in Vindiciae Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1826), with still more rancorous attacks on idolatrous and superstitious of Rome, and in a later publication wrote, Throughout papal Christendom there has been substituted for Christianity a mass of corruption which nauseates understanding (184). In various writings he ridiculed transubstantiation, indulgences, belief in purgatory, veneration of Mary and saints, and authority of Pope. He thought that auricular confession by absolving sin encouraged more of it; he found priestly celibacy repugnant; and he entertained gothic visions of innocent girls being shut up convents, forced to practice idolatry, denied meat on Fridays, and encouraged to indulge in self-flagellation. …

SARAH BECKWITH. Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness.

Although Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness refuses to make any outright claim to ‘Shakespeare’s religious identity’ (p. 11), and while it politely avoids arguments that have focused on this issue in recent years, the case put forward here nevertheless aligns Shakespeare uncompromisingly with the practices and beliefs of medieval Catholicism, at least when it comes to confession and penance. Given that the English Reformation instituted a ‘revolution’ in confessional practices, Sarah Beckwith asserts, then ‘Shakespeare's late, post-tragic plays’ (Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest) can be seen as exploring ‘the vulnerabilities, exposures, and commitments of forgiving and being forgiven in new forms of theater charged with finding pathways and possibilities of forgiveness in the absence of auricular confession and priestly absolution’ (pp. 1–2). The personal and communal force of medieval confession and penance, dismantled by the Reformation with untold cultural losses, Beckwith argues, finds continuity in Shakespeare's drama precisely because it has the power to reconstitute ‘community’ through its recognition ‘of both the depth and the fragility of human bonds’ (p. 5). Reading the plays of Shakespeare through a Catholic language of forgiveness and the kind of ‘speech acts so transformed in the English Reformation’ is Beckwith's purpose. A Shakespearean ‘sacramental theater’ that ‘evolves new ways of making manifest the presence and possibility of grace and forgiveness’ (p. 132) is what this study seeks to champion.

"Foryet it thou, and so wol I": Absolving Memory in Confessio Amantis

"Foryet it thou, and so wol I":Absolving Memory in Confessio Amantis Paul D. Stegner John Gower structures Confessio Amantis on the sacrament of confession and, more particularly, on medieval penitential handbooks in order to treat the problem that "love is falle into discord."1 Confession is doubly inscribed in the Confessio—externally to repair "divisioun" and internally to lead Amans toward self-awareness (pro. 992). Just as Gower's style of "the middel weie" between "lust" and "lore" (pro. 17-19) is grounded in his intent to repair the external division caused by religious, political, and social discord, the poem's penitential structure is designed to remedy the lover's internal division and to function as an "[e]nsample" for readers (pro. 196). Amans identifies his confessional exchanges with Genius as capable of restoring his debilitated senses and providing a means to confess satisfactorily. Indeed, Amans expresses anxiety that his sinfulness has so afflicted his senses that he might fail to deliver a complete confession to Genius. He fears that he might "mistime / Mi schrifte" because he is "destourbed / In al myn herte" and "schal I moche thing foryete" but suggests that he can confess satisfactorily if Genius "my schrifte oppose / Fro point to point . . . / Ther schal nothing be left behinde" (1.220-27). Central to Genius's confessional program, then, is the rehabilitation of Amans's memory. The final events of the Confessio point to the effectiveness of Genius's penitential method in restoring Amans's memory. Amans may continue to be a reluctant penitent after the end of "The Tale of Apollonius," but once Cupid pulls out the arrow from his heart and Venus gives him a [End Page 488] wondrous mirror that reveals his age, he experiences a conversion and asks for and receives absolution from Genius, who explains, "Thou hast ful pardoun and foryifte" (8.2897). He then withdraws "Homward a softe pas y wente" (8.2967). Critics have variously interpreted Amans's memorial state at the conclusion of the Confessio as demonstrating a "regained . . . sense of personal kingdom," because "he now prays, as poet, for common profit, and right use of memory, and good governance" and a reintegrated Augustinian "spiritual memory."2 In such interpretations, the successful restoration of memory at the end of the poem reflects Gower's literary project. Yet for all of Genius's care to revitalize the lover's memory and to reconcile his interior spiritual condition, his absolution of Amans appears to undo this project: "Sone, as of thi schrifte / Thou hast ful pardoun and foryifte; / Foryet it thou, and so wol I" (8.2895-97). Whereas Genius typically associates forgetting with sinful behavior, as in the case of Nebuchadnezzar's Dream, it here becomes a positive, essential mechanism for Gower's reintegration into the Christian economy.3 Genius's command to forget demonstrates the limits of memory: spiritual transformation cannot occur without the appropriate remembering of sin, but the process can only be completed through the productive forgetting of the desire to sin. In this essay, I argue that Gower represents a recuperative form of forgetting in order to signal the difficulty of reconciling auricular confession with narratives of desire, and I reveal the deep pressure between the penitent's memory of past transgressions and his reformation through confession. Forgetting amatory desire functions as a necessary conclusion to Amans's memorial rehabilitation because of Gower's treatment of the complex relationship between confession, amatory desire, and reason. From the prologue to the Confessio, Gower establishes an oppositional relationship between love and reason: "love . . . doth many a wonder / And many a wys man hath put under" (pro. 75-76).4 He figures this [End Page 489] conflict in terms of the tensions between the "lawe of kinde" (natural law), which he associates with Venus and venereal love, and the exercise of right reason (1.31). Gower represents the limitations of kindely love separated from reason by associating it with blind, irrational lust and by defining it as fundamentally implicated in incestuous desire. Incest functions, as C. David Benson observes in his discussion of the brother-sister incest in the "Tale of Canace and Machaire," "not [as] a wild aberration...

Hispanic Casuistry Studies: Room to Grow

Hispanic Casuistry Studies:Room to Grow William Childers Keywords William Childers, Hilaire Kallendorf, Elena del Río Parra, casuistry, Martín de Azpilcueta, Baltasar Gracián, moral reasoning in the comedia Kallendorf, Hilaire . Conscience on Stage: The Comedia as Casuistry in Early Modern Spain. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2007. 299 pp. del Río Parra, Elena . Cartografías de la conciencia española en la Edad de Oro. México, DF: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2008. 310 pp. The term "casuistry" (<L casus, case) refers to the practical application of moral principles to specific cases. In the Catholic tradition, casuistry is linked to auricular confession, since the confessor must take the circumstances surrounding an action into account in deciding the gravity of particular sins and assigning penance. The first great stimulus to writing casuistical treatises was thus the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), which made annual confession obligatory for all Catholics. The second was the Council of Trent (1545-1563), which, encouraging more frequent communion, strengthened the institutions of confession and penance against Protestant [End Page 317] rejection.1 The typical casuist text was a summa of problematic cases of conscience, to which the author/compiler, citing numerous authorities as antecedents, offered solutions. Through the accumulation of cases and opinions, these collections tended to become ever more voluminous. During the Counter-Reformation, a typical summa was usually organized into the following sections: a survey of the sacraments and the conditions for their efficacy (with emphasis on confession itself); a catalogue of venial and mortal sins, with a chapter for each of the Ten Commandments; and a discussion of penance and excommunication. Meant primarily as a ready reference for confessors, they came equipped with handy indexes to aid in quick consultation. The ascendency of casuistry began in earnest with Martín de Azpilcueta Navarro's influential Manual para confesores y penitentes (Salamanca, 1556), and lasted one hundred years, until Blaise Pascal ridiculed casuists' excesses in his initially anonymous Lettres provinciales (1656). Largely as a result of this brilliant satire, the term retains to this day a connotation of moral chicanery and laxity. But Pascal's mockery failed to acknowledge casuistry's function as an instrument for extending the Church's active guidance of individual consciences. Early modern Catholicism urgently needed to adjust medieval morality for a broader set of situations arising in a changing world. Greater flexibility was introduced through the doctrine of Probabilism, according to which, given doubts about the best among a range of moral choices, it was permitted to adopt a "less probable" course of action, provided there was at least some basis for thinking it justified. Not all casuists were probabilists, a point to which I will return below; but a probabilistic casuistry was the most adaptable to different professions, social classes, and political circumstances. Spanish Neo-Scholasticism played a dominant role in the development of casuistry in general and Probabilism in particular. Among the leading casuists after Trent were Dominicans who taught at Salamanca, like Azpilcueta, Domingo Soto, and Bartolomé Medina, who was the first to openly espouse Probabilism. But crucial justifications of that doctrine came from the pens of two Jesuit theologians, Gabriel Vásquez and the great jurist Francisco Suárez. Suárez argued for Probabilism on the grounds that in doubtful cases a confessor must respect penitents' unalienable possession of free will (liberum arbitrium). In this regard, he clearly drew on Molinism, the defense of free will developed by another Neo-Scholastic Jesuit theologian, Luis de Molina. [End Page 318] Indeed, casuistry was a Jesuit specialty. From its inception, this order sought to extend the influence of the Church in worldly affairs, including matters of state. Of particular importance for that mission was the Papal license to hear confession anywhere and to absolve sins normally reserved to bishops. Expertise in hearing confession thus became a fundamental part of the Jesuit curriculum, and several leading casuistical treatises of the Baroque period are essentially Jesuit textbooks.2 As confessors to the wealthy and powerful, they employed probabilistic arguments to render Machiavellian "reason of state" compatible with Catholic morality. This led to a tendency toward laxism that provoked the outrage of Jansenists like Pascal, and...

La confesión auricular. Origen y desarrollo histórico

Historical knowledge of the invention of “auricular confession”, its extension and its iron will in the Medieval life of the Roman Catholic Church is a highly instructive aspect in order to understand the evolutionary processes of religious phenomena and their intertwining with political power, at the same time as the distancing from evangelical sources is confirmed together with the dissimilar traditions and the undeniable intrinsic relativism in these types of processes.