Penitential Tradition Research Articles

Speaking of Failure: Modern Masculinity and Medieval Confession

Modern hegemonic masculinity often entails a focus on the past, a longing for an imagined time when men had more authority and power. I argue that this orientation toward the past stretches back to the Middle Ages. Specifically, the discourses surrounding medieval confession—the mandatory ritual of confessing one’s sins to a priest—continue to shape how white men assert their own power and domination in modern North America. In Europe’s Middle Ages, guides to confession encouraged men to assert their patriarchal authority by narrating their own past failures. Through an analysis of representative medieval penitential manuals, I show how confession became a discursive tool for men to imagine themselves in positions of social and moral superiority. This penitential tradition’s continuing influence is particularly evident in North America’s booming men’s self-improvement culture and the growing nostalgia for historical versions of masculinity. By narrating the sins of their own past and their collective flawed past as men, North American men enact a modern penitential masculinity that does not undermine patriarchy but rather justifies their place as powerful men within it. Western patriarchy has long relied on a penitential model of masculinity that deploys men’s past failures—both individual and collective—as a justification for future gendered domination.

Sol Miguel-Prendes. Narrating Desire: Moral Consolation and Sentimental Fiction in Fifteenth-Century Spain

Sol Miguel-Prendes. <i>Narrating Desire: Moral Consolation and Sentimental Fiction in Fifteenth-Century Spain</i>

From Covenantal Symbol to Institutional Sign: The C Revisions in Passus 16 of Piers Plowman

Juxtaposing a passage from Patience's sermon against the comparable passage from the C text, the essay contends that Langland's revisions to Patience's sermon both court and challenge the semiotics of late medieval penitential discourse. Patience's revised sermon centering on the “chartre” draws upon the theological and canonistic conception of penance as a semiotic process of mediation between the penitent's inner contrition and divine remission. At the same time, Patience's manner of expounding the “chartre” challenges such a conception by presenting the penitential process as more temporal than semiotic, as more processual than terminal. Undergirding both parts of the essay lies the contention that in the C revisions Langland converts the semiotic register of the canon law into a temporal one in order to present the “chartre” as holding out less certainty about salvation than does the “patente.” This essay refines our knowledge of both the penitential tradition that certain understudied C revisions to the B text of Piers Plowman foreground, and the allegorical language chosen to effect that engagement.

Piers Plowman and the Problem of Belief by Britton J. Harwood

REVIEWS for the circular and parallel patternings which vie with the line of the text in Divine History. The poem opens with Edward's impenitent return from a crusade and ends with the repentant Bruce asking for his heart to be carried on crusade; it opens with Edward viciously convening a parliament where power and infidelity are directed to worldly ends and concludes with Bruce in a state of penance convening a parliament in which justice min­ gles with mercy. That God as First Cause wills Bruce's victory and signs it to all through the design of history is structurally reflected in the early references to that king's (known) triumph through grace and the frequent supportive prophecies from Thomas of Erceldoune on. Thus, when Goldstein sets up a contrast in evaluative preference for the directness, personal focus, and modal complexity of The Wallace, I do not see matters as clearly. This is partly because of my contention that we should add Epic and Divine History to his modal definition of The Bruce, partly because there is evidence to suggest that the earlier poem may have had a different sort of directness-that of being read aloud (e.g., "doubill plesance in heryng. The first plesance is the carpyng"; l.4ff.). I should prefer the safer ground of likening the focus of The Bruce to that of the Miracle Cycles and that of The Wallace to the Moralities. Such matters can be debated. What I am certain about is the overall value of The Matter ofScotland in providing three things: the best book­ length account of the two poems to date, the necessary background for understanding the different traditions from which they emerged, and an argument which helps us see how medieval imaginative literature coped­ in retranslation-with the nice distinctions and overlaps between national history and national ideology. Those who read it will return to The Bruce and The Wallace with clearer guidelines and reinforced enthusiasm. R. D.S. )ACK University of Edinburgh BRITTON J. HARWOOD. Piers Plowman and the Problem ofBelief. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 1992. Pp. xii, 237. $60.00. In keeping with its claim to be a "formalist-historical" study of the poem, this is a rather old-fashioned book. Its point of departure is that Langland 205 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER "wrote Piers not in order to teach, but to find out ...how he might come to believe in Christ" (referring to B.1.81).Its method is to set Langland's religious arguments in the context of what Harwood takes to be orthodox Roman Catholic dogma, using authoritative Latin sources (which he does not translate), but without very much regard to what might have been Langland's likeliest sources in Latin or vernacular writing. Broadly speaking, then, the book explores Will's development through the poem.Many other authors, of course, have made the same attempt and, for my money, done so less personally but more illuminatingly.Harwood is unafraid of asserting, almost blandly, that at one point "the conative con­ science is contrition, signified by 'pacience' " (p.94), or, at another, that "Pacience ...dowel, Christ, and love are all ...materially the same" (p.96). His definitions of such terms are complex and supported largely by liberal line references, but I was not convinced by them.They seem to float in a vacuum, untested by reference to contrasting meanings in the poem itself or to parallel meanings in Middle English literature as a whole.His discussion of Patience, for example, makes no reference to all the work that has been done on this topic in Chaucer, or to the penitential tradition, where he could have found parallels to the "kind of spiritual bookkeeping" which he quite rightly identifies as one of Patience's activities in Piers. Of course, the finding of such parallels is not his purpose, which is to trace Will and Langland's spiritual journey as it appears to him to develop.But what then are to be the checks and balances which validate his reading? His reading of the poem as a dynamic expression of Langland/Will's development seems pretry original, though very...

Milton's Land-Ships and John Wilkins

Summa confessorum, 3.3.2; 4.1; 7.2.3, 11 [Broomfield, ed., pp. 62-63, 82, 340, 366]).30 A final example may be found in the tag with which Anima concludes his invective against lollards, hermits, and anchorites in B passus 15: Fy on faitours and infautores suos! (B 15.215); a similar phrase frequently appears in the penitential tradition, extending sentences of anathema to all accessories and accomplices in acts which ipso facto incur excommunication. Robert of Flamborough provides the paradigm: Et cum dico 'Excommunico Petrum et omnes fautores ejus,' omnes fautores Petri sunt nominatim excommunicati (Liber poenitentialis, 3.3 [Firth, p. 154]). The evidence discussed above does not make it possible to claim any one specific penitential text as Langland's source, but it makes a strong prima facie case for his having known some text or texts of the kind here examined. Langland's immediate source or sources may never come to light; but this is the less important because the penitential tradition was every bit as derivative and repetitive in matters of content and doctrine as we have seen it to have been in matters of terminology and the use of maxims.

Langland's Quotations from the Penitential Tradition

Langland's Quotations from the Penitential Tradition

The Humanism of the Penitentials and the Continuity of the Penitential Tradition

The Humanism of the Penitentials and the Continuity of the Penitential Tradition

The tradition of penitentials in Anglo-Saxon England

Anglo-Saxonists have often referred to a ‘penitential tradition’ in Old English literature, the poetry in particular, without establishing a connection between that tradition and the administrative sources on which it rested. Especially in the later Anglo-Saxon period, the time of Ælfric and Wulfstan, the literature pertaining to penance was extensive. It included handbooks of penance or ‘penitentials’, homilies about penitential practice and liturgical texts of various kinds, among them instructions for confessors, prayers for penitents and rites of public penance. Whether this material should be called ‘literature’ is an open question, but certainly its relevance to penitential themes in Old English poetry needs to be examined. Before we can grasp the significance of the ‘penitential tradition’ for either the literary or the social history of Anglo-Saxon England, it would seem necessary to understand better than we now do the sources and affiliations of the legislative texts, the penitentials in particular, which governed the practice of penance.

John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer

John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer