Continuing Carolingian Reform in the late Ninth Century:The Paenitentiale Trecense Rob Meens, Lenneke van Raaij, and Carine van Rhijn In the Carolingian kingdoms penance was an important aspect of life.1 Penitential principals and procedures were heavily debated in ecclesiastical councils and penitential rituals functioned as a focus for political discussions and actions on the highest level, as the two cases in which Louis the Pious did public penance clearly demonstrate. The importance of the theme of penance was such that historians refer to Louis's reign as 'the penitential state'.2 The Carolingian era also saw a bustling activity in the composition of penitential handbooks that were meant to instruct confessors on how to deal with sinners in a new way. These new Carolingian creations were far from homogeneous, but they all display a clear interest in the authorities providing legitimization for the rulings they offer to the confessor on how to deal with his confessing subjects. In the year 813 the council of Chalonsur-Saône ruled that: 'we should repudiate and eliminate totally those booklets they call penitentials, of which the errors are as certain as the authors are uncertain'.3 This canon can be seen as a token that the authority of penitential rulings was a matter of great concern, although the council of Chalon-sur-Saône represented only one voice in a choir of polyphone singers, and other councils adopted different positions on this matter.4 As a result of these concerns [End Page 17] influential scholars such as Halitgar of Cambrai and Hrabanus Maurus composed new penitential handbooks for the clergy, that should live up to the expectations as they were expressed in reforming circles. Canonical collections such as the Collectio Dacheriana (ca. 800) also provided a range of rulings that proved a valuable tool for judging penitents.5 At the council of Tours in 813 the bishops decided that to remedy the situation in which the great variety of penitential decisions hampered proper penitential judgments, an episcopal assembly should meet at the sacred palace to decide what would be the right penitential book to be used in the empire. This proposition did not come to fruition. No decision was ever pronounced on the proper penitential book to be prescribed throughout the empire. A number of penitentials were composed, however, that responded to the criticism of the Carolingian bishops. Yet, they all came up with different conclusions. Although grounded in a number of authoritative basic texts, variety was still the rule. One manuscript, now kept in Troyes, Médiathèque de Troyes Champagne Métropole 1979, contains no less than three penitential books that in their own way tried to respond to the episcopal criticism of penitential books. This codex contains book one of the penitential of Halitgar of Cambrai, which was composed at the behest of Archbishop Ebo of Reims. Ebo had invited the bishop of Cambrai to compose a text in order to remedy a situation 'in which the judgments of the penitents were confused, diverse and contradictory in the little works that our priests use and which are not founded on anyone's authority'.6 Ebo clearly subscribed to the criticisms formulated in Chalon-sur-Saône regarding penitential books and regarded the sayings of the fathers and the judgments of the canons as the proper foundation for penitential judgments. Furthermore, the Troyes manuscript contains the so-called penitential of Pseudo-Theodore. This text, composed in the north-eastern regions of the Frankish empire, possibly [End Page 18] somewhere in the area between Reims and Mainz in the second quarter of the ninth century, clearly dates from a region and a period in which the criticism of penitential books was well-known. It has therefore sometimes been included among the group penitential books inspired by new Carolingian thinking about penance, although this is not so evident from its text or the choices of source material.7 A third penitential book included in the Troyes manuscript was already observed by Raymund Kottje when he studied the manuscript tradition of Halitgar's penitential, but it has hitherto never been edited or analysed.8 In this contribution we will offer an analysis...