Manuals for Penitents in Medieval England: from Ancrene Wisse to the Parson's Tale 9781843846086, 9781800104327, 184384608X

Table of contents :
Manuals for Penitents in Medieval England
Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Note on the Translation and Treatment of Texts
A Chronological List of Key Manuals for Penitents and Associated Works
Introduction: Teaching Sin
Part I: Self-Examination Writing before 1250
Sin in the Cloister
‘A Woman in Whom Great Trust was Placed’: Differentiated Education and Ancrene Wisse
Part II: Manuals for Penitents, 1250-1300
Learning about Sin
‘De privetez n’i troverét rien’: The Compileison and ‘Anxieties of Outreach’
Part III: Manuals for Penitents, 1300-1350
A Reforming Curriculum
Teaching Virtue
‘To enden in som vertuous sentence’: Concluding with Chaucer’s Parson
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Manuals for Penitents in Medieval England

Manuals for Penitents in Medieval England From Ancrene Wisse to the Parson’s Tale

Krista A. Murchison

D. S. BREWER

© Krista A. Murchison 2021 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Krista A. Murchison to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2021 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN 978-1-84384-608-6 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-80010-432-7 (ePDF) D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mount Hope Ave, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate Cover image: Confession before the confessional booth: a fourteenth-century depiction of a woman confessing her sins before a priest. © The British Library Board, Royal MS 10 E IV, fol. 270v. Reproduced by permission.

Contents Acknowledgements vii Abbreviations ix Note on the Translation and Treatment of Texts xi A Chronological List of Key Manuals for Penitents and Associated Works xiii Introduction: Teaching Sin

1

Part I. Self-Examination Writing before 1250 1 Sin in the Cloister 29 2 ‘A Woman in Whom Great Trust was Placed’: Differentiated Education and Ancrene Wisse 42 Part II. Manuals for Penitents, 1250–1300 3 Learning about Sin 4 ‘De privetez n’i troverét rien’: The Compileison and ‘Anxieties of Outreach’

67 79

Part III. Manuals for Penitents, 1300–1350 5 A Reforming Curriculum 6 Teaching Virtue

101 116

‘To enden in som vertuous sentence’: Concluding with Chaucer’s Parson

144

Bibliography 151 Index 171

Acknowledgements

I

am endlessly grateful to the Dutch Research Council for two grants that provided generous financial support while I worked on this project, and for the organisation’s longstanding commitment to academic scholarship. I am also grateful to Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and to the Ontario Government, both of which provided funding that helped make this book possible. For research and travel funding that supported this project I am grateful to the University of Ottawa and to my research institute and faculty at Leiden University. Several libraries and archives provided support for the textual and codicological portions of this analysis through their online or physical collections; I am especially grateful to the librarians and staff at the British Library, the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the Trinity and St John’s College Libraries in Cambridge, and La Bibliothèque nationale de France. Sincere thanks are due to Caroline Palmer and the rest of the team at Boydell and Brewer, who have helped bring this book to light. Portions of chapter 2 appeared, in a different form, in ‘Is the Audience Dead Too? Textually Constructed Audiences and Differentiated Learning in Medieval England’, The Modern Language Review, 115 (2020), 497–518. I am grateful to the team at The Modern Language Review for their editorial work and for granting permission to reproduce this material here. Friends and colleagues have been an ongoing source of kindness and support while I worked on this book; these include Nadine Akkerman, Ben Barootes, Bram Caers, Ben Companjen, Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen, Lettie Dorst, Lotte Fikkers, Lauren Fonteyn, Emma Grootveld, Alisa van de Haar, Neal Hackler, Camilla Horslund, Jill Jeffries, Minke Jonk, Ylva Klaassen, Erik Kwakkel, Sybille Lammes, Thijs Porck, Jan Pronk, Arby Siraki, Sebastian Sobecki, Carlijn Tetteroo, and Peter Verhaar. Cate Gunn drew my attention to a key work, for which I am grateful. Catherine InnesParker offered kind guidance and advice, and I will always remember her fondly. I would like to thank my parents for their unending kindness and my sister and her family for their support at several key moments. I remain forever grateful to my former advisor, Andrew Taylor, for his wisdom and guidance; his comments on this and other material have been very helpful. I am also grateful to Bella Millett, Geoff Rector, Victoria Burke, and David Staines for their comments on earlier versions of this material, and to the anonymous reviewer of this book for the same. Sincere thanks are also due to Nick Milne, who read over this book in full and made many things better. Any failings that remain are my own. Like a good medieval penitent, I hope all may be forgiven.

Abbreviations ANTS

Anglo-Norman Text Society

Arnold I

‘The Pater noster’, Select English Works of John Wyclif, ed. by Thomas Arnold, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1871), III, pp. 93–97

Arnold II

‘Þe Pater noster’, Select English Works of John Wyclif, ed. by Thomas Arnold, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1871), III, pp. 98–110

Dean

Ruth J. Dean and Maureen B. M. Boulton, Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts (London: ANTS, 1999)

EETS

Early English Text Society

OS

Original Series

FRETS

The French of England Translation Series

Matthew

‘The Pater noster’, The English Works of Wyclif Hitherto Unprinted, ed. by F. D. Matthew, EETS OS 174 (London: Trübner, 1880), pp. 197–202

Myrour

A Myrour to Lewde Men and Wymmen

Note on the Translation and Treatment of Texts

T

ranslations, as this study shows, can be controversial. Nevertheless, in the interest of accessibility, all quotations from works written prior to the fifteenth century have been translated into present day English or supplied with a gloss. Existing translations are used where available. On a few occasions, all noted, these have been modified to make them more closely reflect original readings. Quotations from Ancrene Wisse are from Bella Millett’s EETS edition, which uses Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402 as its base text; translations are from her corresponding Guide for Anchoresses. All other translations are my own. Quotations from the Manuel des péchés are from D. Russell’s newly published edition. Since the third volume of this edition, including notes and introduction, is still in preparation at the moment, it is not used here. While Russell’s text was under development, I worked from Wilhelm G. Busse and Barbara Dohm’s transcription of the Manuel des péchés. I am very grateful to Prof. Busse for providing me with this transcription. In titles of works, I have retained medieval spellings, except in cases in which scholarship favours a modernized spelling. For titles in Latin and French, I have followed the capitalization rules for those languages. Patrologia Latina references are given as chapter [section], column. For works in Anglo-Norman, reference numbers to Ruth J. Dean and Maureen Boulton’s Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts are given in parentheses. In my own transcriptions, I have approximated original punctuation using modern marks. Abbreviations have been silently expanded in the interest of readability. My transcriptions from the Compileison were taken from Trinity College Cambridge, MS R.14.7, since this is the manuscript used as a base text in W. H. Trethewey’s partial edition of this work. I have adopted Trethewey’s system of transcription and foliation for these.

A Chronological List of Key Manuals for Penitents and Associated Works Vices and Virtues Peniteas cito peccator ‘Poème sur le mariage, les vices et les vertus, par Henri’ (Dean no. 623) Speculum religiosorum Summa confessorum Summa de casibus poenitentiae (Summa de paenitentia) Ancrene Wisse Perambulauit Iudas Notus in Iudea Deus Summa de vitiis Summa de virtutibus Quoniam Primo Omnis etas Miroir du monde Compileison (Dean no. 644) Manuel des péchés (Dean no. 635) Qui vult vere confiteri La Somme le roi Summula The Boke of Penance Handlyng Synne Ayenbite of Inwyt Speculum vitae Livre de seyntz medicines (Dean no. 696) A Myrour to Lewde Men and Wymmen The Parson’s Tale The Clensyng of Mannes Sowle

c. 1175–1200 before 1213 c. 13th C / unknown

William de Montibus Henry

c. 1213–1233 c. 1215 c. 1225

Edmund of Abingdon Thomas of Chobham Raymond de Pennaforte

c. 1220–1230 before 1235 c. 1235–1253 c. 1236 c. 1236 c. 1236–1241 c. 1236–1241 1240 c. 1248–1280 c. 1254–1274 c. 1260 c. 1260–1274 c. 1279 1287 14th C 1303–1317 1340 mid 14th C 1354

Robert Grosseteste Robert Grosseteste Guilelmus Peraldus Guilelmus Peraldus

Walter de Cantilupe

William of Waddington Robert de Sorbon Friar Laurent Bishop Quinel Robert Mannyng Michael of Northgate Henry, Duke of Lancaster

late 14th C c. 1400 Geoffrey Chaucer late 14th or early 15th C

Introduction: Teaching Sin

T

he author of the thirteenth-century religious guide Ancrene Wisse, echoing a sentiment shared among many of his contemporaries, insists that ‘Schrift ah to beon biþoht biuore longe’ (‘Confession ought to be thought out well beforehand’).1 Medieval penitents understood that before going to confess to a priest they had to prepare themselves through careful reflection on their sins. Doing so allowed them to make the kind of detailed, reflective, and personal confession that was considered essential for the salvation of the soul. Just as a single hole in a ship could drown a group of sailors, a single forgotten sin, according to the author of Ancrene Wisse, could sink a soul to the pits of hell.2 The importance of penitential self-examination in the late medieval Church was the direct result of a decision that took place at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Canon 21 of this council famously placed an unprecedented emphasis on confession by requiring those who had reached the age of majority to confess their sins to a priest at least once per year.3 This new Church-wide requirement created an urgent need for written works that could educate the public about the process of confession, and that could explain the abstract concept of sin through recognizable, real-world situations and desires. Among these works are some of the best-known literary creations from medieval England, including Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne (1303–1317) and Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale (c. 1400). Educational guides such as these traced the shape and topography of the human heart for medieval penitents by describing specific types of sins and how to recognize them; ‘Ȝyf þou yn yre a man hate’, one manual explains, ‘And þat wraþþe wylt nat late, / Greuusly þou art

1

Quotations from Ancrene Wisse are from Bella Millett’s EETS edition, Ancrene Wisse: A Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, with Variants from Other Manuscripts, ed. by Bella Millett, EETS OS 325–326, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), I (quoted here at p. 129). Translations are from Millett’s corresponding Ancrene Wisse: A Guide for Anchoresses: A Translation Based on Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, ed. by Bella Millett (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2009). Page numbers are identical between the two volumes. 2 Ancrene, p. 119. Strictly speaking, the process of confessing sins to a priest, performing penance, and receiving absolution is termed performing the ‘Sacrament of Penance’, but the phrase ‘going to confession’ is also used here, as in common parlance, to refer to the entire encounter between priest and penitent. 3 Thomas N. Tentler writes that there were competing views following the council on what age was intended by the age of discretion: ‘Estimates varied from seven to fourteen years of age, with a general agreement that the age could vary from person to person’; Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 70.

2

Manuals for Penitents in Medieval England

yn synne!’ (‘If you hate a man in a fit of anger, and refuse to let go of that wrath, you are sinning gravely!’).4 These guidebooks, now known as ‘manuals for penitents’, make no attempt to hide their educational aims.5 One guide, written by the French King Philip III’s confessor Friar Laurent, announces that anyone who uses it ‘i porroit mout profiter et aprendre, et counoistre toute maniere de pechié, et a soi bien confesser’ (‘could greatly profit and learn [from it], and identify all types of sin, and how to confess well’).6 A translator of this work, Michael of Northgate, uses the figurative notion of cleaning to advertise that his book can help with confessional preparation: ‘þis boc is ywrite . / uor englisse men, þet hi wyte / hou hi ssolle ham-zelue ssriue, / and maki ham klene ine þise liue’ (‘This book is written for English men, so that they know how they should shrive themselves, and make themselves clean in this life’).7 Cleaning the soul could not be done without first identifying the places where it was stained with sin. This required in-depth self-reflection, and it is therefore not surprising that some of these manuals describe themselves as mirrors unto the soul.8 Judging from the sheer number of these manuals that have survived, with at least forty-five vernacular examples from medieval England alone surviving in hundreds of copies, there was clearly an urgent need – felt at least on the part of the Church – for widescale public education about sin and confession.9 After the Fourth Lateran 4 Robert Mannyng, Robert Mannyng of Brunne: Handlyng Synne, ed. by Idelle Sullens

(Binghamton: Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1983), ll. 3729–3731.

5 For the term ‘manuals for penitents’, and a list of surviving examples, see Lee Patterson’s

6 7

8

9

‘The “Parson’s Tale” and the Quitting of the “Canterbury Tales”’, Traditio, 34 (1978), 331–380. It is important to note that contemporaries of these texts rarely, if ever, used the term ‘manuals for penitents’ to describe them. Medieval documents use a variety of labels for texts like the Somme le roi and the Manuel des péchés. So, for example, A. I. Doyle finds that, because of its Pater noster framework, the Speculum vitae is often described as a ‘Pater noster’ in its manuscript copies; see ‘A Survey of the Origins and Circulation of Theological Writings in English in the 14th, 15th, and early 16th centuries with Special Consideration of the Part of the Clergy Therein’, 2 vols (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Cambridge University, 1954), I, p. 87. Laurent d’Orléans, La Somme le roi, ed. by Édith Brayer and Anne-Françoise LeurquinLabie (Paris: Anciens Textes Français, 2008), p. 270. Michael of Northgate, Dan Michel’s ‘Ayenbite of Inwyt’: Or ‘Remorse of Conscience’, Richard Morris’s Transcription Now Newly Collated with the Unique Manuscript British Museum Ms, Arundel 57, ed. by Pamela Gradon, EETS OS 23, 2 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), I, 5. This metaphor appears in the Speculum vitae, and the Compileison, among other texts. The relevant passage in the Compileison and its translation are printed in Nicholas Watson and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne’s ‘The French of England: The Compileison, Ancrene Wisse, and the Idea of Anglo-Norman’, Journal of Romance Studies, 4.3 (2004), 35–59 (p. 45). Michael Cornett traces the use of mirror imagery in first-person penitential works in ‘The Form of Confession: A Later Medieval Genre for Examining Conscience’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of North Carolina, 2011), DAI A 73, ProQuest Dissertations & Theses [accessed 23 June 2017], pp. 41–61. Patterson (‘“Parson’s Tale”’) lists ‘three dozen or so’ examples (p. 338). To these can be added the nine different English translations of the Somme le roi discussed further below; see W. Nelson Francis’s ‘Introduction’, in The Book of Vices and Virtues: A Fourteenth



Introduction 3

Council, this new educational tool permeated every level of society. Even an exceptionally elite work like the Somme le roi, the manual written under the patronage of Philip III of France, circulated widely – so much so that it became one of the most popular religious texts of medieval Europe.10 In England, where the focus of this exploration falls, fashionable continental works were imported en masse.11 And some local compositions became runaway hits, including William of Waddington’s Anglo-Norman Manuel des péchés, which survives in a remarkable twenty-eight manuscripts and fragments and was translated into English, Latin, and Icelandic.12 As they proliferated throughout late medieval society, these manuals became deeply embedded into its literary culture, subject to poetic re-imaginings and parodies such as the often-excerpted confession of the sins in Passus 5 of Piers Plowman and John Gower’s well-known confessional dialogue, the Confessio Amantis. Given the remarkable medieval influence of manuals for penitents, it is valuable to explore how they developed and functioned within medieval society, and this exploration is one of the main goals of the present study. In the sense that they were widely popular and provided a framework for private devotion – that is, for supporting believers in their religious observances outside of their Church services – manuals for penitents functioned much like Books of Hours. Both types of writing gripped public attention in a wave of personal and lay devotion that swept thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe.13 But here the significant similarities end. Books of Hours contain prayers and psalms that could be used for daily devotions, while manuals for penitents contain material that could help a penitent prepare for confession: the deadly sins, the Ten Commandments (those well-known ‘Thou shalt not’ statements that continue to act as the key precepts for virtuous behaviour in many Christian denominations), and other frameworks that were used during the penitential interrogation.14 And where Books of Hours

10

11 12 13

14

Century English Translation of the ‘Somme le Roi’ of Lorens D’Orleans, ed. by W. Nelson Francis, EETS OS 217 (London: Oxford University Press, 1942), p. xxii. Édith Brayer and Anne-Françoise Leurquin-Labie call the Somme le roi ‘un des best-sellers de la littérature française au Moyen Âge’ (‘one of the best-sellers of French literature during the medieval period’) in ‘Introduction’, in La Somme le roi, ed. by Édith Brayer and Anne-Françoise Leurquin-Labie (Paris: Anciens textes français, 2008), pp. 1–98 (p. 23). And it appears on the list of Œuvres Pieuses Vernaculaires à Succès prepared under the direction of Géraldine Veysseyre et al.; see ‘Projet’, in Œuvres Pieuses Vernaculaires à Succès [accessed 12 March 2018]. The nine English translations of the Somme le roi undertaken in the fourteenth century survive in sixty-two different manuscripts (Veysseyre et al.). K. A. Murchison, ‘The Readers of the Manuel des péchés Revisited’, Philological Quarterly, 95.2 (2016), 161–199 (p. 161). For the proliferation of Books of Hours in the late medieval period, see Claire Donovan’s excellent monograph on the de Braile Hours, The de Brailes Book of Hours: Shaping the Book of Hours in Thirteenth-Century Oxford (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991). Roger S. Wieck describes the typical Book of Hours as a ‘prayer book’ including: ‘1) a Calendar; 2) the four Gospel Lessons; 3) the Hours of the Virgin; 4) the Hours of the Cross and the Hours of the Holy Spirit; 5) two prayers to the Virgin known as the “Obsecro te” and the “O intemerata”; 6) the Penitential Psalms and Litany; 7) the Office

4

Manuals for Penitents in Medieval England

were designed to be used multiple times a day – at the canonical hours – manuals for penitents could be used more or less often depending on one’s confessional requirements. Aside from these manuals there were, of course, many other works available for self-examination purposes in medieval England, including a robust tradition of short writings on the vices and virtues that has been explored in depth by Richard Newhauser. The treatises listed in Newhauser’s study are primarily descriptive and limited to the sins and their remedies, giving few instructions about self-examination or confession. These treatises could have been used in a variety of different contexts and by a variety of people, including priests preparing to interrogate penitents.15 But some of these treatises may have been used in the same contexts as manuals for penitents and indeed, several of the examples Newhauser identifies are found embedded within manuals for penitents, nestled between subjects like the Ten Commandments and the powers of confession. Given the wide-ranging educational program of manuals for penitents, which includes essentials of the faith such as the Ten Commandments and the Pater noster (or Lord’s Prayer), it may seem appropriate to refer to them in broad terms, as ‘catechisms’ or as ‘catechetical’ guides. But there are problems with using these terms in this context. Most significantly, the medieval Church did not use the term ‘catechism’ to describe any of its pastoral works, a point that has led Eric Leland Saak, in his overview of the concept, to claim ‘[t]here was no catechism in the later Middle Ages’. Medieval theologians did write what could be termed ‘catechetical works’, but these works are considerably different from manuals for penitents. The former works are concerned primarily with teaching the essentials of the faith, whereas manuals for penitents explicitly announce that they are useful for people examining their consciences, which means they put a powerful emphasis on an interactive form of self-reflection.16 Indeed, in manuals for penitents, essentials of the faith that of the Dead; and 8) numerous Suffrages’; Time Sanctified: The Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life (New York: G. Braziller, 1988), pp. 27–28. For the use of various frameworks during the penitential interrogation, see chapter 5 below. For the particularities of Books of Hours produced within England, see Kathleen E. Kennedy’s ‘Reintroducing the English Books of Hours, or “English Primers”’, Speculum, 89.3 (2014), 693–723. 15 Richard Newhauser describes the differences between the ‘treatise on vices and virtues’ and texts like Handlyng Synne as follows: ‘The exclusiveness of the genre’s [i.e. the treatise on vices and virtues’] concentration on vices and virtues also makes it apparent that it cannot be equated with the late-medieval catechetical and penitential manuals which developed, as it were, by accretion, putting together smaller forms into a conglomerate, and of which the discussion on vices and virtues normally formed only one part among many’; The Treatise on Vices and Virtues in Latin and the Vernacular (Turnhout: Brepols, 1993), pp. 83–84. 16 According to Eric Leland Saak, ‘catechetical works’ ‘had as their primary intent to instruct their audience on the proper understanding of the foundational doctrines of the Christian religion and how to put such teaching into practice’. The function of Catechisms when they emerged at the Reformation was similarly ‘to ensure that the faithful learned the fundamentals of the faith’; ‘Introduction’, in Catechesis in the Later Middle Ages I: The Exposition of the Lord’s Prayer of Jordan of Quendlinburg, OESA (d. 1380), ed. and trans. by Eric Leland Saak (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 1–72 (quoted at pp. xi; 22–23; 1).



Introduction 5

are traditionally understood as impersonal didactic tools are instead cast as tools for self-reformation. While manuals for penitents could certainly be used like catechetical works for teaching the essentials of the faith, their expressed purposes and overall programs extend beyond this purely pedantic function. To bring in-depth self-reflection to the largest possible cross section of medieval society, most manuals for penitents eschew Latin in favour of the more accessible Anglo-Norman or English. And their use did not even require literacy in the strictest sense. English layfolk who could not read with their own eyes, or could not afford such manuals, would nevertheless have experienced their devotional programmes by hearing selections read aloud at parish churches, or in their homes by chaplains or priests. Through both direct and indirect means, these manuals became the most important tools for bringing penitential theology outside of the cloister and into the home. As the first popular wave of religious material to be read in the home, these manuals represent a significant innovation in medieval education practices. While a lay penitent in the tenth century, no matter how well-positioned, would typically learn about the faith through face-to-face encounters with the clergy, a well-positioned penitent in the thirteenth century had more opportunities to learn about it at a remove from the clergy, by reading a manual or hearing it read aloud. In this sense, these manuals represent a significant and lasting shift in the ways in which medieval society acquired and processed information. The development and composition of these manuals happened firmly within the control of the Church, and the use of these manuals among layfolk was often supervised by the clergy, but these manuals nevertheless gave some penitents new structures for exploring their own consciences and their relationships with religion and society outside of the direct supervision of the established Church. This form of medieval distance education, much like its modern analogue, was met with mixed responses: celebrated for its efficiency and accessibility, derided for its potential for miscommunication. As this investigation makes clear, the concern that readers could misinterpret doctrine became pronounced. Worse, clerics worried that these manuals, with their extended and at times detailed descriptions of (prohibited) sexual behaviours, might accidentally teach people new sins, remind them of old ones, or become sites of prurient interest. Clerics worried, too, that penitents might try to use them as a substitute for face-to-face confession or that the radical inward turn encouraged by these manuals might lead to unexpected social or religious changes. These fears, and the Church’s attempts to quell them, both of which lie at the center of this book, cut to the heart of medieval England’s conflicts between the individual and society, between the learned and the unlearned, and between orthodoxy and its various challengers.

Self-Examination and Popular Literary Culture Aside from exploring the function and development of these manuals, this study explores them as literary creations; using the tools of literary analysis, it explores the multivalent ways in which meaning is produced in them. Approaching these manuals through a literary studies lens may seem odd, given that these works are often excluded from the category of literature on the supposition that they are dull and

6

Manuals for Penitents in Medieval England

purely didactic; the Manuel des péchés has been described as a ‘dry reformative text’ and the Parson’s Tale, though often anthologized, has nevertheless received less attention than many of Chaucer’s other tales.17 The recurring conviction that manuals for penitents are dull and uninspired certainly raises the question of whether these works can or should be considered literature. Of course, the term ‘literature’ was not used in the thirteenth century, when these manuals began to grip public attention. The closest medieval equivalent, litteratura, was not used for vernacular texts at all; Bella Millett has observed that in this period, litteratura was a category reserved for Latin works and carried with it connotations of learning and erudition.18 So, many of the works we might now consider literature, such as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – works that, in the words of the editors of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, ‘claim special attention because of their formal beauty and expressive power’ – would have been excluded from the medieval category of litteratura.19 Yet although medieval writers did not use the term ‘literature’ or its cognates in the same ways as we do now, evidence from prologues and book lists suggests that medieval writers did have something resembling our category of literature – a body of works designed for secular entertainment that was considered distinct from other bodies of writing. A tale of Robin Hood would be considered among, and listed alongside, other works of secular entertainment. Of course, as religious guides, manuals for penitents would not have been classified among works of secular entertainment, but it is nevertheless useful to consider the relationships between manuals for penitents and this category. Indeed, the evidence presented here suggests that the 17 See Matthew Sullivan, ‘The Original and Subsequent Audiences of the Manuel des Péchés

and its Middle English Descendants’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Oxford, 1990), ProQuest Dissertations & Theses: UK and Ireland [accessed 22 June 2019], p. 142. The Parson’s Tale, though often anthologized, has nevertheless received less attention than Chaucer’s other tales, and the consensus on the work among many might best be described by echoing Samuel Johnson’s famous words on Paradise Lost, that ‘[n]one ever wished it longer than it is’; quoted in John Leonard’s Faithful Labourers: A Reception History of Paradise Lost, 1667–1970, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), II, p. 70. 18 Bella Millett, ‘Women in No Man’s Land: English Recluses and the Development of Vernacular Literature in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries’, in Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–1500, ed. by Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 86–103 (p. 86). 19 M. H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt, eds, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 9th edn, 3 vols (New York: Norton, 2012), I, p. xxxi. Of course the modern day notion of ‘literature’ has also been challenged in various quarters. David Richter, for example, writes that, since the 70s, literary scholarship has become increasingly conscious of the way that the separation between ‘literary’ and ‘non-literary’ texts is culturally determined; ‘The University, the Humanities, and the Province of Literature’, in Falling into Theory, ed. by David Richter (Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s, 1999), pp. 1–30 (pp. 21–23). Seth Lerer has made a similar observation in the context of medieval literary studies: ‘We have been taught, of late, that literature is not an essentialist category, capable of definition according to set criteria. Instead, many have come to argue (or believe) that literature and literary canons are creations of distinctive times and places’; ‘Medieval English Literature and the Idea of the Anthology’, PMLA, 118.5 (2003), 1251–1267 (p. 1252).



Introduction 7

authors of manuals for penitents saw their works as having close but uneasy relationships with more secular ones. This link between manuals for penitents and forms of secular entertainment is perhaps most evident in the manuals’ use of narrative examples – known by the Latin form exempla. Many of these manuals make ample use of exempla to illustrate aspects of their penitential programmes. So, the Manuel des péchés illustrates the sin of pride through a story, taken from St Gregory’s Dialogues, of a monk who falsely pretends to be obedient to his rule and subsequently is pursued by the devil.20 Narrative examples of this sort were essential for translating the abstract theology of sin into concrete, everyday terms. Medieval theologians understood the moral and didactic power of a good story. As Elizabeth Allen notes, Jacques de Vitry held that preachers should spice up their sermons with examples; aside from being didactically useful, these could keep audience members entertained and prevent them from becoming bored or falling asleep.21 The use of narrative exempla was especially important to the preaching orders, including the Franciscan and Dominicans, who discovered their didactic power early on.22 Writers of manuals for penitents drew heavily on these preachers’ established techniques, and William of Waddington, while introducing his text, makes it clear that he understands the power and draw of exempla: ‘Ke plus en lisaunt seit delitus, / Cuntes nus mettrum vus aucuns’ (‘To make the reading delightful / We will add for you some stories’).23 Authors of manuals for penitents knew that such stories would link their works to more secular ones. Robert Mannyng acknowledges this link indirectly in his Handlyng Synne, writing, ‘Talys shalt þou fynde þer ynne / And chauncys þat haue happyd for synne’ (‘You will find tales within, and happenings that occurred due to sin’). By using the term ‘talys’ – one that is used in works such as Ancrene Wisse to describe secular narratives – Mannyng gestures toward his work’s participation in narrative forms used for secular entertainment.24 20 William of Waddington, Le Manuel dé pechez, ed. by D. Russell, ANTS 75–77, 3 vols

21 22 23

24

(Oxford: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 2019–2021), I, ll. 3080–3118. Since the third volume of this edition, including notes and introduction, is still in preparation at the moment, it is not used here. See E. Allen, False Fables and Exemplary Truth: Poetics and Reception of Medieval Mode (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2015), p. 10. See Allen, False Fables, pp. 12–13. Waddington, Manuel, I, ll. 57–58; translated by Ulrike Schemmann in Confessional Literature and Lay Education: ‘The Manuel dé Pechez’ as a Book of Good Conduct and Guide to Personal Religion (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2000), p. 229; see the further discussion of this quotation in chapter 4. The fourteenth-century translation of the Manuel des péchés known as Of Shrifte and Penance similarly notes, ‘þat hyt be þe more delicious some talus we schul telle ȝow’ (‘so that it will be more delicious, we shall tell you some tales’); Of Shrifte and Penance: The ME Prose Translation of ‘Le Manuel des Péchés’, edited from St. John’s College, Cambridge, MS G.30, ed. by Klaus Bitterling (Heidelberg: Winter, 1998), p. 34. Mannyng, Handlyng, ll. 131–132. The author of Ancrene Wisse writes ‘Me seið upon ancren þet euch meast haueð an ald cwene to feden hire earen, a meaðeleð hire alle þe talen of þe

8

Manuals for Penitents in Medieval England

Manuals for penitents were also linked to more secular forms of storytelling through their use of the vernacular. The link becomes clear from early uses of the term ‘romaunce’. Prior to the thirteenth century, the term could be used to describe any vernacular – and especially French – work, so it was used not only for works of secular entertainment but also for devotional works written in the vernacular.25 A thirteenth-century rubric to the Life of St Alban, for example, describes the text as ‘li rumantz de l’estoire de Seint Auban’ (‘the rumantz of the history of St Alban’).26 Starting in the thirteenth century, the French word and its English cognates were used in increasingly limited contexts. ‘Romaunce’ and its cognates became increasingly associated with secular, adventure-based narratives, such as the fourteenth-century Arthur and Merlin and Kyng Alisaunder.27 Yet while ‘romaunce’ and its cognates were used in this increasingly limited sense in the late medieval period, they continued to be applied to devotional works – including manuals for penitents. Indeed, one fourteenth-century copy of the Manuel des péches is introduced as, ‘Le romaunz ky est apelle Manuel de pechez’ (‘The romaunz that is called Manuel de pechez’).28 There are enough examples from this later period of these terms being used to describe predominantly religious texts to suggest that this is not simply a case of misappropriation. Even in this later period, ‘romaunce’ and its cognates were associated with the vernacular itself. The use of the vernacular in manuals for penitents, then, tied them to the nebulous medieval category of the ‘romaunce’. In many cases, the choice of the vernacular in manuals for penitents worked in conjunction with versification to link these manuals to more secular writing; while most manuals for priests are in prose, most of the major manuals for penitents that circulated in England are in verse.29 Even the most notable exception, the Somme le

25 26 27

28

29

lond’ (‘They say about anchoresses that practically every one has an old woman to feed her ears, a female chatterbox who passes on every story in the country’) (p. 36). See Gail Ashton’s Medieval English Romance in Context (London: Continuum, 2010), p. 17. La Vie de Seint Auban, ed. by Arthur R. Harden, ANTS 19 (Oxford: ANTS, 1968), p. 51. These and other examples can be found in the entry for ‘romaunce’, in the Middle English Dictionary, ed. by Robert E. Lewis et al. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1952– 2001) [accessed 10 May 2021]. This is Cambridge University Library, MS Mm. 6.4. On this manuscript see Murchison, ‘Readers’, pp. 172–173. The devotional Peines de Purgatorie, typically ascribed to Robert Grosseteste, is similarly introduced with ‘Ci comence romaunz estret hors de divinite’ (‘Here begins a romaunz drawn from theology’) in the thirteenth-century London, British Library, Arundel MS 288, fol. 84r; quoted in T. Hunt, ‘Anecdota Anglo-Normannica’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 15 (1985), 1–17 (p.7). Works in verse include Peniteas cito peccator, Dean no. 623, the Manuel des péchés, The Boke of Penance, Handlyng Synne, and the Speculum vitae. Those in prose include the earliest examples of the tradition, such as the early Middle English Vices and Virtues, La Somme le roi, and some, but by no means all, of its associated texts (such as the Ayenbite of Inwyt, and the prose translation of the Speculum vitae, known as the Myrour to Lewde Men and Wymmen). Prose is also used in three later examples from England: The Clensyng



Introduction 9

roi, was usually transformed into verse when fourteenth-century writers reworked the text. And verse had accrued powerful and well-documented associations with forms of secular entertainment by the time most of these works were being written.30 Concerns began to be raised that verse was not appropriate for serious subjects and lacked truth.31 So, in the poem known as the ‘Dispute Between a Good Man and the Devil’ (c. 1390), the titular good man suggests that his words might fall under suspicion because they are versified: ‘Al is soþ þat I seye, þeiʒ I speke in Rym’ (‘all that I say is the truth, even though I speak in rhyme’).32 Verse, then, was associated with falsity, levity, and secular writing. The writers of manuals for penitents seemed to have known that their choices aligned their works with more secular forms of entertainment. Sometimes these writers draw comparisons between their works and more secular ones. So, the Speculum vitae adds to its source an extended comparison between its content and that of secular romances: I warne yhow first at þe bygynnynge, I wil make na vayne carpynge Of dedes of armes ne of amours, Als dose mynstraylles and iestours Þat mas carpynge in many place Of Octouyane and Isambrase And of many othir iestes, And namely whan þai cum to festes. Ne of þe lyf of Beuis of Hamptoun Þat was knyght of grete renoun, Ne of Sir Gye of Warwyke, Al-if it myght sum men lyke,

I warn you up front at the beginning, I will tell no foolish stories of deeds of arms nor of loves, as these minstrels and storytellers do – those who make noise in many a place of Octovian and Isumbras, and many other tales, and especially when they come to parties. I think my subject will not be of the life of Bevis of Hamtoun, who was a knight of great renown, nor of Sir Guy of Warwick,

of Mannes Sowle, Henry of Lancaster’s Livre de seynt medicines (Dean no. 696), and the Parson’s Tale. 30 See Rhiannon Purdie’s Anglicising Romance: Tail-Rhyme and Genre in Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), pp. 1–12. 31 See Edward Donald Kennedy’s ‘Romancing the Past: A Medieval English Perspective’, in The Medieval Chronicle. Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on the Medieval Chronicle, Driebergen-Utrecht, 13–16 July 1996, ed. by Erik Kooper (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), pp. 13–39 (p. 14) and the scholarship cited there; for a discussion of the same within the context of medieval France, see Adrian Armstrong and Sarah Kay’s ‘Introduction’, in Knowing Poetry: Verse in Medieval France from the ‘Rose’ to the ‘Rhétoriqueurs’, ed. by Adrian Armstrong and Sarah Kay (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), pp. 1–24 (pp. 1–3). See also Hope Emily Allen’s ‘The Speculum vitae: Addendum’, PMLA, 32.2 (1917), 133–162 (p. 139). Allen writes that ‘[t]he reasons urged against the use of verse are generally its use by minstrels, and its addition of extra words’ (p. 139). 32 ‘A Dispitison Bitwene a God Man and Þe Deuel’, in The Minor Poems of the Vernon MS, ed. by C. Horstmann, 2 vols (London: Trübner, 1892), I, p. 334, ll. 203–204.

10

Manuals for Penitents in Medieval England

I thynk my carpynge sal noght be, For I hald þat noght bot vanyte. Bot þis sal be my carpynge To carp of mast nedefull thynge Þat sykirest es for saul and lyf To man and womman, mayden and wyf33

even if some would like these subjects, because I hold these as nothing but vanity. But this shall be my subject: to tell of the most necessary thing, that which is the most beneficial for soul and life to man and woman, maiden and wife.

The author of the Speculum vitae sees his work as adjacent to forms of secular entertainment, but he nevertheless distances it from these forms, not only on the grounds of its content, but also of its utility. The author insists that his work is more valuable because it contains the ‘mast nedefull thynge / Þat sykirest es for saul and lyf’ (‘most necessary thing, / that which is the most beneficial for soul and life’). A similar comparison appears in a Lollard text known as the Dialogue between a Wise Man and a Fool (c. 1410): But summam seiþ, I prieie þee leeue þees spechis And telle me a mery tale of giy of warwyk, Beufiz of hamtoun, eiþer of Sire Lebews, Robyn hod, eiþer of summe wel farynge man of here condiciouns and maners. [But one will say, “I pray you, leave off these exhortations, and tell me a merry tale of Guy of Warwick, Bevis of Hamtoun, or of Sir Libeau, Robin Hood, or of some scoundrel – of their conditions and manners!”34]

As Hope Emily Allen, Laura Hibbard, and others have noted, such comparisons, which are commonplace in devotional guides, suggest that the writers of these guides felt that their works had to compete for the public’s attention against more secular forms of entertainment.35 Through such comparisons, writers could advertise the entertainment value of their works while also making a case for their guides’ didactic superiority. Some authors seem to revel in the overlap between devotional guides and more secular genres. One fourteenth-century author, apparently aware of the popular 33 Speculum Vitae, ed. by Ralph Hanna, EETS OS 331–332, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2008), I, p. 6, ll. 35–52.

34 The text is preserved in Cambridge University MS Ii vi. 26, fol. 131r and quoted in Allen,

‘Speculum vitae’, p. 140. A name missing from Allen’s transcription has been supplied from the transcription in Helen Phillips’s ‘Reformist Polemics, Reading Publics, and Unpopular Robin Hood’, in Robin Hood in Greenwood Stood: Alterity and Context in the English Outlaw Tradition, ed. by Stephen Knight (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), pp. 87–117 (p. 94). ‘Sire Lebews’ is likely a reference to the Arthurian Romance of Libeaus Desconus, in which Gingalain, a knight in Arthur’s court, is given the name ‘Sir Libeaus Desconus’. 35 Allen notes that these comparisons are very commonplace and she cites several examples of them being incorporated into devotional texts belatedly; see Allen, ‘Speculum vitae’, pp. 140–141 and Laura Hibbard, ‘The Sword Bridge of Chrétien de Troyes and its Celtic Original’, Romanic Review, 4 (1913), 166–190 (p. 183). The opening to the Cursor Mundi is one of many examples.

Introduction 11



appeal of the Guy of Warwick already alluded to, decided to employ this romance figure for didactic purposes. In the resulting Speculum Gy de Warewyke, the conventions of secular poetry are present from the very beginning of the text: Herkeneþ alle to my speche, And hele of soule i may ou teche. Þat i wole speke, it is no fable, Ac hit is swiþe profitable.36 [Everyone listen to my words And I will teach you of the soul’s health That which I want to say, it is no fable but it is very profitable.]

The poem opens with a call for attention that echoes that of many chansons de geste, then immediately advertises its veracity and didactic value. The narrative that follows is centered on the figure of Guy of Warwick, who contemporary audiences would have recognized from a rich romance tradition. While the romance tradition focuses on Guy’s exploits and ends with a brief episode in which Guy repents of his sins, the Speculum Gy de Warewyke dramatizes none of Guy’s exploits. It opens with Guy’s request for spiritual guidance from one ‘Alquin’ and uses this guidance as a framing device for the traditional educational programme of manuals for penitents, including the sins, virtues, Creed, and guidance on how to confess.37 Much like modern media that use beloved superheroes or cartoon characters to teach children moral lessons or to encourage them to eat their vegetables, the work promotes spiritual growth by exploiting the perceived overlap between penitential and romance writing.38 Yet these guides also express notable unease about their relationships with more secular forms of writing. Perhaps most famously, Chaucer’s Parson calls his manual 36 Speculum Gy de Warewyke: An English Poem, with Introduction, Notes and Glossary, ed. by

Georgiana Lea Morrill (London: Trübner, 1898), ll. 1–4. The translation is mine.

37 See the discussion of this poem in Homer G. Pfander’s ‘Some Medieval Manuals of

Religious Instruction in England and Observations on Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 35.2 (1936), 243–258 (p. 250). Despite the suggestive parallels, the poem bears no resemblance to Alcuin’s ‘Advice to Wido’ (also known as ‘De Virtutibus et vitiis’); see A. S. G. Edwards’s ‘The Speculum Guy de Warwick and Lydgate’s Guy of Warwick: The Non-Romance Middle English Tradition’, in Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor, ed. by Alison Wiggins and Rosalind Field (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007), pp. 81–93 (p. 82). 38 Across the channel, L’art d’amors by Guiart accomplished a similarly artful blend of secular and penitential. The text begins with an abridged version of Ovid’s Ars amatoria and Remedia amoris, but the author soon rejects ‘la vanité du monde et la desloiauté’ (‘the vanity and treachery of the world’) (l. 26). The rest of the poem is then dedicated to singing the praises of confession and exploring the seven deadly sins. For selections of the work and a discussion of it, see Alastair J. Minnis’s Magister Amoris: The Roman De La Rose and Vernacular Hermeneutics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), quoted at p. 43. For the use of cartoon characters to promote vegetable consumption see Andrew S. Hanks, David R. Just, and Adam Brumberg’s ‘Marketing Vegetables in Elementary School Cafeterias to Increase Uptake’, Pediatrics, 138.2 (2016), 1–11.

12

Manuals for Penitents in Medieval England

for penitents ‘a myrie tale in prose’, but refuses to tell a ‘fable’ – a word that was powerfully associated with false forms of storytelling.39 Some have wondered if there might be a Lollard undercurrent in his mistrust of fables, but the Parson’s mistrust here was shared with contemporary manuals for penitents that otherwise appear wholly orthodox.40 This unease was, of course, the culmination of a much longer tradition, which Elizabeth Allen traces back as far as Plato, of doubting the educational value of mimetic art.41 But the unease was also in part due to concerns over fictionality itself; authors of manuals for penitents were eager to show that their works were grounded in truth – a concern that can be felt in Robert Mannyng’s repeated insistence that his tales are of ‘autoryte’.42 An unease about the relationship between self-examination education and fiction lies at the heart of some of the most well-known literary creations of the time. Indeed, this tension is central to John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (c. 1389), according to Elizabeth Scala. Scala notes that the poem works by combining elements of a confessional dialogue with elements of a courtly romance – a union that underlines the emptiness and artificiality of the courtly love conventions that Amans embodies. In so doing, the poem ultimately works ‘to deny fiction throughout (even as it operates on its very principles)’.43 For writers like Gower, the overlap and tension between self-examination writing and more secular narrative forms provided fertile ground for creative energy. Writers of manuals for penitents, then, had a complex relationship with forms of secular entertainment. These writers knew that their use of exempla, and their decisions to write in the vernacular and in verse aligned their works with more secular ones, and they drew direct comparisons between their works and more secular forms of entertainment. The overlap between these two types of writing was obvious to the extent that it became a site of creative exploration. Since medieval writers considered manuals for penitents adjacent to, if not participating within, a category 39 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Larry D. Benson,

3rd edn (Boston: Houghton, 1987), pp. 3–328, (X.31; X.46). All subsequent references to Chaucer are from this edition. 40 Scholars who see a potentially Lollard undercurrent in the Parson’s rejection of fables include Peggy Knapp, who writes that ‘Wycliffite objections to including non-biblical stories in sermons are well known’, and argues that the use of the term fable, in particular, ‘does strike a Wycliffite chord’; ‘The Words of the Parson’s “Vertuous Sentence”’, in Closure in The Canterbury Tales: The Role of the Parson’s Tale, ed. by David Raybin and Linda Tarte Holley (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2000), pp. 95–113 (p. 98). For an overview of approaches to the Parson’s rejection of fables, see Arvind Thomas’s ‘What’s Myrie About the Prose of the Parson’s Tale?’, The Chaucer Review: A Journal of Medieval Studies and Literary Criticism, 46.4 (2012), 419–438 (p. 423). Thomas follows Knapp in suggesting that the Parson ‘may have wished to dissociate his tale from a genre that the Lollards held in contempt’ (p. 423). For other manuals that reject the fable as a false form of storytelling see, for example, Mannyng, Handlyng Synne, l. 16. 41 See Allen, False Fables, p. 12. 42 Mannyng, Handlyng Synne, ll. 3551; 12164. 43 Elizabeth Scala, Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Literary Structure in Late Medieval England (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 154–157, quoted at p. 157.



Introduction 13

of secular entertainment – one that is now considered literary – it is fitting to grant these works literary status, and to open them up to some of the methods of analysis traditionally associated with literary studies, including the analysis of structure, rhetoric, and audience functions.

Self-Examination and Popular Religion By focusing on a body of writing that represents – in terms of both its social position and its circulation history – popular religious instruction, this study participates in a broader movement of exploring medieval culture from a grassroots perspective. While historians once focused their attentions on the documentary evidence of the lay and clerical elite, the field has increasingly come to embrace documents that were produced by and for those outside of centers of power, and that are thought to offer a better representation of typical life in the medieval period. So, while the study of medieval religion was once done primarily through episcopal and Church-wide changes and the Latinate theological documents that instantiated them, scholarship of the past few decades has become increasingly interested in the everyday lived religious experience of medieval individuals and the works that shaped this experience. In the context of medieval England, this change was heralded by the publication of Nicholas Watson’s ‘Censorship and Cultural Change’. In this ground-breaking 1995 article, Watson drew attention to the constitutions introduced by Archbishop Arundel in 1409 aimed at combatting the growing Wycliffite heresy. Watson argued that they articulated, and contributed to, a feeling of suspicion about vernacular theological writing. Although the Constitutions were, at least in spirit, responding to Wycliffite translations of the Bible, these Constitutions cast scrutiny over not just vernacular biblical translations, but vernacular writing of all sorts. The victim of these Constitutions, according to Watson, was ‘vernacular theology’ – not simply theological writing in the vernacular but writing that effervesced with the multifaceted energies of heterodoxy and the undercurrents of religious dissent. According to Watson, a ‘golden age’ of vernacular theological writing preceded Arundel’s Constitutions – one that included the works of William Langland, Julian of Norwich, and Richard Rolle – but it was followed by ‘a sharp decline both in the quantity of large theological works written in the vernacular and in their scope and originality’.44 The Constitutions, then, in Watson’s model, changed not only the quantity and variety of available vernacular writing, but also – and perhaps most importantly – its quality. Watson’s article has had a powerful impact. Indeed, Ian Johnson writes that ‘[i] t is impossible to name an article that has, in the last three decades (or longer), had a greater agenda-changing impact on Middle English Literary Studies’.45 Most relevant to the exploration at hand is the way the article created and reflected new ways 44 Nicholas Watson, ‘Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England:

Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409’, Speculum, 70.4 (1995), 822–864, quoted at pp. 823, 826, 832. 45 Ian Johnson, ‘Vernacular Theology / Theological Vernacular: A Game of Two Halves?’, in After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth-Century England, ed. by Vincent Gillespie and Kantik Ghosh (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp. 73–88 (p. 75).

14

Manuals for Penitents in Medieval England

of thinking about the literary value of religious works in English – works that were, in many cases, directed at lay education.46 While once historians of religion had considered them of limited interest and literary scholars had considered them dry and of limited literary value, works like Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection and Julian of Norwich’s Showings were viewed as sites of complex, scintillating heretical thought. This change is reflected in the evolution of the Norton Anthology of English Literature – one of the most widely read literary anthologies and, therefore, a useful one for gauging a work’s canonical status. It is undoubtedly under Watson’s influence that the most significant changes made to the medieval section of this anthology over the past four decades have all involved the addition or expansion of texts with more overtly theological material, such as the addition of a selection from Ancrene Wisse and of a more religious-themed selection from Piers Plowman.47 While the overall claim of Watson’s article has been upheld in the two decades or so since its publication, some of its findings have been subject to revision.48 Two 46 Ellen K. Rentz notes that this change was a direct result of Watson’s ground-breaking

article in Imagining the Parish in Late Medieval England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2015), p. 2. 47 This process began in M. H. Abrams’s fifth edition (New York: Norton, 1986) of the anthology, which introduced The York Play of the Crucifixion (I, p. viii), selections from The Book of Margery Kempe (I, p. ix), and an expanded selection of Piers Plowman (I, p. viii). Abrams did not include The York Play of the Crucifixion in his sixth edition (New York: Norton, 1993), but he did add two other mystery plays (I, p. ix), and an even longer selection from Piers Plowman (I, p. viii), and he introduced selections from A Book of the Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich (I, p. ix). This new emphasis on more overtly religious material was pushed even further in the seventh edition of the text (New York: Norton, 2000), which added an even longer selection of Julian of Norwich’s work (I, pp. ix–x), and introduced a short selection from Ancrene Wisse (I, p. viii). The most substantial expansions to the three most recent editions were in the Anglo-Norman and medieval Irish selections, but the anthology’s more overtly religious offerings have also been expanded. The eighth (2006) reintroduced the ‘The York Play of the Crucifixion’ (p. xii), expanded the selection from Piers Plowman (p. xi), and reorganized some works from the previous edition into a section on ‘Christ’s Humanity’ (p. xi). The ninth (2012) introduced a newly expanded selection from Ancrene Wisse, on the pains of anchoritic enclosure (p. 1). The most recent edition (2018) maintains the religious additions from previous editions; it also introduces some more secular material, including a section on ‘Talking Animals’ (p. x), but its expansions are all relatively short. 48 Among the proponents of this new model is Michael G. Sargent, who underlines some of the problems with writing literary history more generally and questions the extent of the impact of the Constitutions on vernacular literature by arguing that, since Watson’s list of vernacular literature produced in the wake of the Constitutions excludes such key texts as sermons and saints’ lives, it overemphasizes the impact of the Constitutions; ‘Censorship or Cultural Change? Reformation and Renaissance in the Spirituality of Late Medieval England’, in After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth-Century England, ed. by Vincent Gillespie and Kantik Ghosh (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp. 55–72 (p. 65). Ian Johnson also believes that Watson’s model overstates their impact, noting that many of the texts that Watson takes as representative of the ‘Golden Age’ of vernacular theological writing before the Constitutions continued to be read and copied long after them; ‘Vernacular’, p. 83. Another who could be counted here is Katherine Kerby-Fulton, who, in her ground-breaking study of heterodox revelatory writing, urges caution in ascribing too much significance to the Constitutions, and stresses their limited applicability in Books



Introduction 15

particular modifications to Watson’s model are foregrounded in this study. First, scholars have expanded Watson’s model of vernacular theology to include works such as saints’ lives and sermons, which Watson had previously omitted.49 As Ellen K. Rentz notes, this movement has led to a new interest in the historical and literary value of what she terms ‘parish level’ texts, and the present study aims to support and participate in this broader movement by shedding light on a relatively grassroots body of penitential writing.50 The second shift in the terrain of vernacular theology that is crucial to the present study concerns the contours of medieval orthodoxy and heterodoxy. In his seminal article, Watson drew a distinction between the Constitutions’ approach to more dangerous ‘theological thinking and writing in the vernacular’ – including Biblical translation and non-Biblically derived theological texts – and the Constitutions’ approach to supposedly safer material – that which fell ‘within the pragmatic bounds set by earlier legislation’.51 This distinction led, in some quarters, toward a simple bipartite approach to medieval writing, in which works were either orthodox or heterodox, conformist or Wycliffite. According to Sargent and others, this approach was ultimately grounded in a presentist model, in which heterodoxy is privileged and celebrated as transgressive, Proto-Protestant and, therefore, fundamentally modern.52 Recent scholarship has stressed that the distinction between orthodoxy and heterodoxy in the medieval period was not so clear cut and that, much like music piracy today, whether an English version of the Bible was cause for persecution depended on, in the words of David Lawton, ‘the class, reliability and discretion of the user’.53 Moreover, scholars are increasingly recognizing that the orthodox/heterodox binary and the presentist thinking from which it stems belie the rich complexity of more conformist medieval religious practices and works. As this study shows, a medieval work did not need to be Wycliffite to be risky, transgressive, or individualistic, and texts that are none of these things nevertheless reward exploration. This study therefore aims to contribute to a growing recognition of the complexity of what Karen

49

50 51 52

53

Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), pp. 397–401. Michael G. Sargent argues that ‘“vernacular theology” is as equally anachronistic as “medieval English mystics”, and over-determines its content to an even greater extent: specifically, that the exclusion of sermons, saints’ lives, the drama, and Wycliffite writing from the survey of vernacular theological literature appended to “Censorship and Cultural Change” seriously distorts our view of the field’ in ‘Censorship’, p. 65. See Rentz, Imagining, p. 2. Watson, ‘Censorship’, p. 826. See Sargent, ‘Censorship’, p. 58. For an earlier suggestion that medieval orthodox religion has been sidelined in academic and popular circles due to an inherited Protestant academic framework, see, for example, Linda Georgianna’s ‘The Protestant Chaucer’, in Chaucer’s Religious Tales, ed. by C. D. Benson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), pp. 55–70. David Lawton, ‘Englishing the Bible, 1066–1549’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. by David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 454–482, quoted at p. 459.

16

Manuals for Penitents in Medieval England

Winstead, in her study of the Parson’s Tale, describes as ‘a traditional, more nuanced, flexible and intellectual orthodoxy’.54 At the same time, in exploring these more ‘parish level’ texts, this study is also participating in a broader movement of exploring medieval religious culture from a more local, rather than Church-wide perspective. While the grand narratives of medieval religion of the nineteenth century focused on conflicts and developments passed at the synodal or conciliar level and their associated documents, a general suspicion of master narratives and a greater wealth of available sources has lead to studies of medieval religion that emphasize local, regional, and temporal differences.55 With respect to the study of medieval confession, this has manifested itself in a tendency to focus on individual regions, canons, or time periods. So, the New History of Penance is presented as a collection of ‘fragments’, each focused on a different region and moment since, in in the words of editor Abigail Firey, the development of confession ‘cannot be neatly contained in a single narrative’. This fragmented structure, according to Firey, calls on the reader ‘to find material that might be inserted into the interstices of the partial pattern the authors have set forth’.56 This study, then, answers this call by offering insight into one specific cultural moment (late medieval England) and one specific body of writing (manuals for penitents) that have not been considered by the contributors to Firey’s collection and, in so doing, aims to cast one new fragment among the multivalent histories of confession. Embracing and extending a more grassroots approach to medieval literary culture, this book holds up as representative those manuals that were read by the largest number of medieval readers and that had the most influence in their day (rather than those that simply have the most entrenched literary status today). This approach, by establishing the normative aspects of this body of writing – or, to borrow Jauss’s famous construction, its ‘horizon of expectations’ – provides insight into the frameworks that medieval audiences would have used for understanding

54 Karen A. Winstead, ‘Chaucer’s Parson and the Contours of Orthodoxy’, The Chaucer

Review, 43.3 (2009), 239–259, quoted at p. 251.

55 The important post-Enlightenment historians in the field all take their evidence from

conciliar records and manuals for confessors containing advice for interrogating others. Among these are self-taught Protestant scholar Henry Charles Lea (1825–1909), who is credited with starting the modern debate on whether confession is a form of social control; see Sarah Hamilton’s The Practice of Penance, 900–1050 (Woodbridge: Boydell/ The Royal Historical Society, 2001), p. 10 and Mary C. Mansfield’s The Humiliation of Sinners: Public Penance in Thirteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 6. More recent historians of confession, including Thomas Tentler, Leonard E. Boyle, and Pierre Michaud-Quantin, mention self-examination texts in their studies, but draw primarily on manuals for those interrogating others. While the past two decades have seen the emergence of two studies about the form of confession, there is currently no equivalent study about manuals for penitents. A study on the confessional interrogatory is also wanting, as Michael Cornett notes in ‘Form of Confession’, p. 5. 56 Abigail Firey, ‘Introduction’, in A New History of Penance, ed. by Abigail Firey (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 1–18, quoted at p. 1.

Introduction 17



works that, because of their canonical status, are often read out of context – works such as Ancrene Wisse, the Parson’s Tale, and the Confessio Amantis.57 This prioritization of medieval influence over modern status has called for a somewhat transregional approach. Although the focus here is on the tradition of manuals for penitents in England, and although it has been argued that England’s tradition of confessional writing was exceptionally rich – especially following King John’s excommunication in 1209 and his subsequent reconciliation with the Church – this study also considers the traditions of manuals for penitents on the continent.58 This transregional approach is necessary, since many influential works in this tradition travelled back and forth across national and regional boundaries. Of course, a study focused on the influential works of the medieval period must grapple with the well-documented challenges involved in establishing the influence of a medieval work. But some practical guesses about influence can be made based on a work’s adaptation and citation histories, and based on the number of surviving manuscripts that contain it. This latter source of evidence must be approached with particular caution due to the manifold religious, political, and social upheavals which have impacted manuscript survival rates in ways that are only beginning to be understood. It remains to be seen, for example, whether the early modern dissolution of the monasteries destroyed more works on confession than those more hospitable to Protestant thought. Yet recent work on manuscript survival rates suggests that they may be a useful source of evidence about medieval influence when approached with caution; Michael G. Sargent has shown that while these do not necessarily provide insight into the exact circulation numbers of a given text, patterns in manuscript survival can be a useful tool for predicting broader patterns in medieval production.59 Given Sargent’s findings about surviving manuscripts, and the absence of other reliable sources of evidence, most of the discussions of medieval influence presented here are based on quantitative data about surviving manuscripts.

57 Hans Robert Jauss, Toward and Aesthetic of Reception, trans. by Timothy Bahti (Brighton:

Harvester, 1982), p. 45.

58 Mary Flowers Braswell identifies a particularly strong confessional fervor in thirteenth-

century England and attributes this fervor to the nation’s turbulent confessional history; see The Medieval Sinner: Characterization and Confession in the Literature of the English Middle Ages (London: Associated University Press, 1983), p. 15. Similarly, Mary Dominica Legge writes that after the Fourth Lateran Council, ‘the need for reform may have been felt more strongly in England, as a result of the suspension of Archbishop Stephen Langton and the recent Interdict’; Anglo-Norman Literature and its Background (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), p. 206. E. J. Arnould argues that the English tradition of confessional writing was uniquely strong. He speaks of ‘[c]ette vogue des Sommes populaires à travers l’Europe des XIIIe et XIVe siècles, et plus particulièrement en Angleterre’ (‘this fashion for popular summae throughout Europe during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and especially in England’); Le Manuel des Péchés: Étude de littérature religieuse anglo-normande (XIIIme siècle) (Paris: Droz, 1940), p. 2. 59 Michael G. Sargent, ‘What Do the Numbers Mean? A Textual Critic’s Observations on some Patterns of Middle English Manuscript Transmission’, in Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England, ed. by Margaret Connolly and Linne R. Mooney (York: York Medieval Press, 2008), pp. 205–244.

18

Manuals for Penitents in Medieval England

In the sense that it takes into account this quantitative data about manuscript circulation when establishing the characteristics of a body of writing, the approach taken here both reflects, and contributes to, what Wendy Scase, writing of the contributions to Gillespie and Wakelin’s Production of Books in England: 1350–1500, calls ‘the new sense of the centrality of the history of the book as an endeavour in cultural and literary study’ and a ‘renewed confidence in empirical research’.60 Yet despite its claims to empiricism, book history, with its emphasis on the careful accumulation of reliable and objective bibliographical information, is nonetheless influenced by modern values and imbedded views of the past. Indeed, over the past two decades, medieval literary scholars have become increasingly sensitive to the ways in which any attempts to narrate the past are inevitably, and often problematically, shaped by the values and ideals of the present.61 Still, book history remains a valuable way of gaining insight into grassroots medieval literary culture, and Linda Georgianna is surely right when she claims that although literary history – and, we might add, book history – is in many ways a fiction shaped by the passions of the present, it is one we must keep writing.62

Self-Examination and the Medieval Subject Today, Catholics who want to prepare for confession can download an app that will walk them through the preparation process. It begins with an examination of conscience: a list of questions about transgressions against the Ten Commandments, starting with ‘Have I ever deliberately told a lie or withheld a mortal sin from the priest in confession?’ (a sin against the first commandment). It then asks about various examples of the seven deadly sins. Once the user has answered all its questions, the app creates a personalized confessional statement that can be read out in the confessional box to the listening priest.63 For modern Catholics, this platform is valuable because it ensures no sin will be forgotten during confession. But medieval penitents did not have an efficient way of getting confessional statements automatically generated for them in advance. Instead, they turned to manuals for penitents, reflecting on what they had done and what they had desired, and 60 Wendy Scase, ‘Afterword: The Book in Culture’, in The Production of Books in England

1350–1500, ed. by Alexandra Gillespie and Daniel Wakelin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 292–298 (p. 293). 61 Linda Georgianna writes, for example, that literary theory ‘has laid bare the tropes of narrative literary history as fictions that constitute the past rather than explaining it’ in ‘Coming to Terms with the Norman Conquest: Nationalism and English Literary History’, in Literature and the Nation, ed. by Brook Thomas (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1998), pp. 33–54 (p. 33). See also Nancy Partner on the role of history in literary interpretation in ‘Did Mystics have Sex?’, in Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West, ed. by Jacqueline Murray (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), pp. 296–311 (pp. 296–297). 62 ‘All literary history remains provisional, a retelling of the past, undoubtedly a fiction but useful nevertheless so long as it recognizes its own provisionality’ (‘Coming to Terms’, p. 34). 63 Little iApps, Confession: A Roman Catholic app (2011), Apple Store.



Introduction 19

searching for descriptions of behaviours and thoughts in books that could help them contextualize and understand their own. The process of preparing a confessional statement therefore required in-depth reflection on both oneself and on one’s similarities to the abstract other sinner described in these manuals. Some offer a few sample confessional statements in the first-person voice of the sinner, supplying the reader with brief ready-made confessions, but for the most part these manuals demand that the penitent formulate his confessional utterance himself. In this way, these manuals are distinct not only from modern confessional technology but also from the other important type of writing that was used by medieval penitents: the form of confession. Unlike manuals for penitents, which typically describe the sinner in general terms using constructions like ‘one who has taken delight in sinful thought’, the form of confession is written from the first-person point of view of the sinner and so contains constructions like ‘I have taken delight in sinful thought’. Many versions of the latter open with the characteristic penitential formula, ‘I sinful creature knowleche me gilty and sinful & schryue me’ (‘I, sinful creature, acknowledge myself as guilty and sinful, and shrive myself’).64 A penitent using the form of confession could select whichever penitential utterances applied to him and read or repeat them to the priest during confession; in the words of Michael Cornett, these statements ‘could be put on for this solemn occasion, like one’s best attire’. Since these guides offer statements from the point of view of the penitent, Cornett writes that ‘[t]here is no other kind of pastoral literature that came as close as the form of confession to representing what was to be said by the penitent in the practice of confession’.65 On the other hand, manuals for penitents required that the penitent formulate his own confessional statements, rather than choosing them – or trying them on – from a list. These works therefore encouraged unique and deeply personal confessional statements – ones that required engaged and sustained reflection on one’s behaviour. In this sense, they can be thought of as contributing to, and the product

64 This example is from item 36 in section C of P. S. Jolliffe’s Check-list of Middle English

Prose Writings of Spiritual Guidance (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1974), p. 73. 65 Cornett, ‘Form of Confession’, quoted at pp. 29; 5. The medieval ‘form of confession’ was first explored by Philip Durkin in ‘Examining One’s Conscience: A Survey of Late Middle English Prose Forms of Confession’, Leeds Studies in English, 28 (1997), 19–56. It was then subject to a more comprehensive study by Cornett in ‘Form of Confession’. Cornett writes that the form of confession ‘voices through a first-person speaker the manifold variety of sins that might be acknowledged by the penitent’ (p. 5). Unlike manuals for penitents, forms of confession do not generally declare their suitability for those examining their consciences and Cornett notes that these texts were not intended exclusively for selfexamination; ‘priests could use the form of confession to verse themselves in what they should be hearing from penitents’ (p. 29). Cornett speaks of the remarkable popularity of this genre throughout Europe; he finds that ‘the form of confession survives in prose and verse from ca. 1200 to ca. 1500 in over 440 copies of 198 different Latin, French and English texts’ (p. 4), and this does not count those in the European vernaculars that he does not consider in his study (p. 229).

20

Manuals for Penitents in Medieval England

of, a broader medieval interest in the self – one which is increasingly being acknowledged and explored as part of an ongoing ‘revolt of the medievalists’.66 This ‘revolt’ is against the Burckhardtian notion that the concept of a ‘free personality’ and a curiosity about the self did not emerge until the so-called Renaissance.67 Over the course of the twentieth century, this formulation, which is based on a reductive view of medieval religion, has been challenged repeatedly.68 But it persisted in certain fields of literary studies, reasserting itself most influentially in Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980).69 Greenblatt did not embrace Burckhardt’s ideas entirely in this pivotal book; he acknowledged the ‘well-documented limitations’ of Burckhardt’s work, and distanced himself somewhat from Burckhardt by focusing not on ‘free personality’ as Burckhardt had done, but on ‘self-fashioning’ – a change that reflects his greater emphasis on the role of oppression

66 See Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?’, The

Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 31.1 (1980), 1–17 (repr. in Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages [Berkeley: Columbia University Press, 1982], pp. 82–106). 67 Jacob Burckhardt famously suggested that a ‘free personality’ first emerged in the Renaissance, in contrast to the ‘common veil’, ‘woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession’ under which the medieval period slept; see The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. by S. G. C. Middlemore, 2 vols (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), I, 143. 68 Although he did not engage directly with Burckhardt’s periodization of individuality, Charles Homer Haskins, in his The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1927; repr. 1955), posed an indirect challenge to Burckhardt by identifying in the medieval era many of the ‘modern’ elements that were generally understood by his contemporaries as innovations of what was then termed the Renaissance. He argued, for example, that, ‘The twelfth century left its signature on higher education, on scholastic philosophy, on European systems of law, on architecture and sculpture, on the liturgical drama, on Latin and vernacular poetry’ (p. vi). Walter Ullmann posed a more direct challenge to Burckhardt by arguing that self-awareness increased gradually from the medieval period to the Renaissance in his The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins, 1966). In L’éveil de la conscience dans la civilisation médiévale (Montreal: Inst. d’études médiévales, 1969), Marie-Dominique Chenu situates the awakening of the conscience, described as the sum of a man’s moral and psychological forces (p. 11), in the medieval era, with Peter Abelard acting as ‘le premier homme moderne’ (‘the first modern man’) (p. 32). Following Chenu, Colin Morris refuted the notion that individuality emerged in the Renaissance; The Discovery of the Individual: 1050–1200 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972; repr. 1987). 69 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980; repr. 2005). David Aers shows that this reductive appraisal of medieval religious practices was bolstered by scholars such as D. W. Robertson, under whom ‘Centuries of Christian traditions, an extraordinarily diversified, complex and profoundly adaptive culture of discourses and practices’ was ‘turned into a homogeneous, static uncomplicated monolith’; ‘A Whisper in the Ear of the Early Modernists: Or, Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the “History of the Subject”’, in Culture and History, 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities, and Writing, ed. by David Aers (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), pp. 177–202 (pp. 178; 185–194).



Introduction 21

in the development of the self.70 Yet Greenblatt nevertheless echoed Burckhardt in insisting that a new relationship to the self emerged in the Renaissance, by claiming, for example, that ‘in the sixteenth century there appears to be an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process’.71 At the same time that Greenblatt was locating the origins of ‘increased self-consciousness’ in the Renaissance, Foucault was formulating a different model – one in which a kind of self-consciousness was, in fact, rather pronounced in the medieval period.72 Crucially, Foucault suggested that a kind of self-consciousness arose through the confessional interrogations that he suggests were an innovation of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215.73 The ‘interplay of truth and sex’ involved in these encounters, in which penitents were at once both reminded of the prohibition against sex and urged to speak of its every lurid detail, inculcated in penitents an intense awareness of the self and its relationship to the Church’s prohibitions – what Foucault calls a ‘knowledge of the subject’, and what is often now called ‘subjectivity’.74 This model, by locating a kind of self-knowledge firmly in the medieval period, can be considered a key step in the current ‘revolt of medievalists’ against those who would locate it in the Renaissance. More recently, the revolt has taken a turn, and those looking at self-knowledge in the medieval period have begun to eschew developmental models altogether. In many ways, what Abigail Firey writes about the contributors to her New History of Penance could be written about the current field as a whole: ‘Those writing about late antiquity and the early Middle Ages see all sorts of evidence for curiosity and 70 Renaissance, p. 161. Self-fashioning, as Greenblatt described it, emerged as a response to

71 72

73

74

authority and was virtually inextricable from it. Greenblatt speaks, for example, of the ‘self-presentation’ that emerged due to social alienation, ‘Theatricality, in the sense of both disguise and histrionic self-presentation, arose from conditions common to almost all Renaissance courts: a group of men and women alienated from the customary roles and revolving uneasily around a center of power, a constant struggle for recognition and attention, and a virtually fetishistic emphasis upon manner’ (p. 162). Greenblatt, Renaissance, p. 2. Foucault’s work would not become available in English (as the History of Sexuality, Volume 1) until 1978, so at the time that Greenblatt was writing, the impact of Foucault’s ideas had not yet been felt in English departments. While Greenblatt did cite Foucault’s History (Renaissance, p. 270; n. 26), he did not engage with the French philosopher’s ideas at any length, nor acknowledge that, for Foucault, medieval confession was a crucial step in the development of the modern ‘knowledge of the subject’. A well-developed discussion of Foucault’s views as they pertain to confession can be found in Chloë Taylor’s The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault: A Genealogy of the ‘Confessing Animal’ (New York: Routledge, 2009). Michel Foucault, La volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976); translations are from his History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (New York: Vintage, 1990), quoted at p. 57 and p. 70. Prohibitions around sex, in Foucault’s estimation, are central to self-knowledge; Foucault writes, for example, that as ‘sex gradually became an object of great suspicion’ it became ‘the general and disquieting meaning that pervades our conduct and our existence … We tell it its truth by deciphering what it tells us about that truth; it tells us our own by delivering up that part of it that escaped us’ (p. 69). For Foucault, this ‘interplay of truth and sex’ was most pronounced in confession: ‘The confession was, and still remains, the general standard governing the production of the true discourse on sex’ (p. 63).

22

Manuals for Penitents in Medieval England

solicitude about the inner life of the penitent, and those writing about the later Middle Ages and the early modern period are intrigued by the external postures and conformity to prescribed norms’.75 By treating the growth of penitential literature in England as a sign of interest in – rather than the discovery of – the self, this book participates in a broader movement of rejecting as both false and progressivist any attempt to produce a master narrative of subjectivity, favouring instead approaches that consider important moments for subjectivity in isolation.76 It is worth noting, though, that while few now accept Foucault’s developmental model for subjectivity, this model, in which the medieval Church imposed a powerful mechanism of social control through confession, continues to hold sway. The social control model can be found in Geraldine Heng’s argument that the guide for religious women Ancrene Wisse, with its extended section on confession, is part of a wider group of texts that ‘enforce “medieval techniques of control”’, and her related claim about the system of self-interrogation outlined in part 5 of Ancrene Wisse, that ‘the former Kremlin’s or current CIA’s interrogators would not be as surgically, relentlessly comprehensive’.77 A similarly Foucaultian approach to confession is favoured by Marjorie Curry Woods and Rita Copeland who, in their chapter for The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, write that Canon 21 of the Fourth Lateran Council ‘invests social power and profound spiritual authority in the individual priest’. And echoes of Foucault can be heard in their statement that ‘the actual practices of pedagogy and confession contained their own mechanisms for relief from – and perhaps even subversion of – the containing power of the systems’.78 On a broader scale, interest in the relationship between confession and the subject might lie behind the

75 Firey, ‘Introduction’, p. 7. 76 See, for example, chapter 3, ‘Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?’, in

Bynum’s Jesus as Mother, and Aers’s ‘Whisper’. More recently, William Ian Miller has interrogated other medievalists’ periodization of selfhood by considering depictions of it in Icelandic sagas, while also arguing that the search for an originary moment of selfhood is problematic insofar as it seeks to define modernity against a past ‘other’; ‘Deep Inner Lives, Individualism, and People of Honour’, History of Political Thought, 16 (1995), 190– 207 (p. 191). Barbara H. Rosenwein pushes this idea further by suggesting that a search for the origins of the individual may be a vain endeavour. She quotes from Alain Boureau, who suggests that the individual may be an ahistorical phenomenon; ‘Y avait-il un « moi » au haut Moyen Âge?’, Revue Historique, 1.633 (2005), 31–55 (p. 42). 77 Geraldine Heng, ‘Pleasure, Resistance, and a Feminist Aesthetics of Reading’, in The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory, ed. by Ellen Rooney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 53–72 (pp. 64–65). Heng here is drawing, in part, on the work of Thomas N. Tentler, who also describes confession as a type of social control. 78 Marjorie Curry Woods and Rita Copeland, ‘Classroom and Confession’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. by David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 376–406 (quoted at pp. 392 and 406). Woods and Copeland cite Foucault as the progenitor of this idea (p. 392; n. 74).



Introduction 23

proliferation of studies that explore how confessional literature contributed to a new emphasis on the psychology and inner states of literary characters.79 The focus here is not on determining whether confessional practices helped to create literary representations of interiority, nor whether the social control they represented came accompanied by what Woods and Copeland term a ‘mechanism of relief’. Before manuals for penitents can be used to answer these questions meaningfully, their history, rhetorical approaches, and roles in medieval society – including their positions as sites of controversy and as educational tools – must be better understood, and that is the goal at hand. Nevertheless, it is worth stating that the conclusions here generally support the view that medieval penitents possessed, in the words of Abigail Firey, a powerful ‘curiosity and solicitude about the inner life’.80 This curiosity was nothing new in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, but it was clearly becoming, judging from the remarkable number of manuals for penitents that survive, a major structuring force in medieval lives.

Self-Directed Reading and Manuals for Penitents The kinds of self-examination material that existed prior to the Fourth Lateran Council are explored in the first chapter. Here, confessional prayers and other short texts that were precursors to manuals for penitents provide evidence that self-examination practices, and the literature surrounding them, had a long history predating the Council. Crucially, most of these works written before the Council operated within the relatively safe confines of the Church. It was only after the Fourth Lateran Council that material for self-examination started to move into the hands of the laity on a large scale. As self-examination material started to reach a larger audience in the decades following the Fourth Lateran Council, authors grappled with the question of how to make such material applicable, on a personal level, to a broad variety of penitents. Increasingly aware of, and interested in, the unique social statuses of their audience members, these authors started to experiment with new educational strategies, many of which were borrowed from contemporary sermon writing guides. Most notably, authors of self-examination material started to draw on differentiated learning strategies – that is, they tried to reach their diverse audiences through highly specific moments of address to individual groups or members within that audience. Drawing on the audience models of Walter Ong and Ruth Evans, chapter 2 explores how these highly specific moments of address function in thirteenth-century self-examination writing, and how these were used for rhetorical effect by the author of the thirteenth-century Ancrene Wisse.81As this chapter shows, these rhetorical strategies reflect the creative energy and formal complexity of this body of writing. 79 Cornett provides a good overview of these studies (‘Form of Confession’, p. 23). To his

list could be added Jennifer Bryan’s Looking Inward: Devotional Reading and the Private Self in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). 80 Firey, ‘Introduction’, p. 7. 81 See Walter J. Ong, ‘The Author’s Audience is Always a Fiction’, PMLA, 90.1 (1975), 9–21 and Ruth Evans, ‘Readers/Audiences/Texts’, in The Idea of the Vernacular, ed. by Jocelyn

24

Manuals for Penitents in Medieval England

Self-examination material moved increasingly out of the cloister in the second half of the thirteenth century, and this period saw the emergence of the first true manuals for penitents – in the sense of longer works on sin and the essentials of the faith that explicitly announce their benefit to those preparing for confession. As these manuals began to proliferate, penitents were increasingly reading about sin and exploring their consciences on their own, and at a remove from their priests. While the Church was eager to promote these manuals, an atmosphere of concern arose around them as well. The authors of these manuals worried that their guides could introduce readers to new sins – especially those sins that could not be learned simply through social observation. They also worried that their works could become sites of illicit pleasure. These tensions, which lie at the heart of chapters 3 and 4, reflect considerable unease surrounding this new wave of distance education about sin. As self-examination was increasingly being supported by written guides, the Church started to worry that penitents might start to see writing as a replacement for in-person penitential encounters. But in spite of such concerns, the educational programs of manuals for penitents continued to expand as the thirteenth century drew to a close. Though it is rarely acknowledged, confessors of the time were experimenting with interrogating penitents about their sins based on a variety of frameworks, including the Ten Commandments and the five senses. These frameworks, some of which were based on biblical texts, feature prominently in late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century manuals for penitents, where they are more than purely didactic tools for memorization, but sites of transformative, personal, and complex reflection. Chapters 5 and 6 explore this aspect of manuals for penitents and argue that, while a suspicion of medieval theology and a pervasive sense that commentaries on these frameworks are not ‘real’ literature has led to their widespread neglect, these commentaries can offer much insight into the development of medieval psychology and self-awareness. This last point is worth further commentary. It is of course true that manuals for penitents circulated almost entirely within the control of the established Church. They supported and propagated a program of social control that was, in terms of its disciplinary force, previously unmatched in the western world. As the investigation here shows, they were, in terms of medieval circulation numbers, the Church’s most effective tool for bringing the foundations of medieval orthodoxy into the private spaces and thoughts of the medieval laity. But while manuals for penitents enacted this powerful program of social control, they also introduced their readers to new ideas and encouraged them to think in new ways about themselves and their relationships to their social and political roles. As sites of deeply personal and engaged reflection, they encouraged a complex form of self-knowledge. Their authors knew that manuals for penitents had the potential to give penitents new and potentially dangerous ideas. For many within the established Church, their rise in popularity came accompanied by considerable unease. This is not to suggest that manuals for penitents were considered dangerous or heterodox. As should by this point be evident, the investigation here is committed to Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), pp. 107–125. See further in chapter 2 below.



Introduction 25

a broader, ongoing movement aimed at shedding light on the nuances that existed in the late medieval period between orthodox and heterodox religious culture. As this investigation shows, a work did not need to be considered heterodox to promote self-knowledge or self-reflection – or to reward our attention. If we are to understand the complexity of late medieval life and psychology – and to use this complexity productively to explore our own – we need to attend to the uneasy but generative spaces between the orthodox and the heterodox, between the powerful and the disempowered, and between the sanctioned and the censored.

Part I Self-Examination Writing before 1250

Chapter 1 Sin in the Cloister

O

ne of the earliest works that prescribes penances, a short Welsh tract known as The Synod of North Britain (c. 545), stands as an important witness to early Christian confessional practices. Its penitential discipline is aimed primarily at the clergy, as is clear from the passage on illicit liaisons: Cum muliere uel cum uiro peccans quis expellatur ut alterius patriae cenubio uiuat, et peniteat confessus .iii. annis clausus, et postea frater illius altari subiectus anno uno diaconus, .iii. presbiter, .vii. episcopus et abbas suo quisque ordine priuatus doctoris iudico peniteat. [Anyone who sins with a woman or with a man shall be sent away to live in a monastery of another country and shall do penance, after he has confessed, for three years in confinement; and afterwards, as a brother subject to that altar he shall do penance at the discretion of his teacher; if he is a deacon, for one year; if a presbyter, for three years; if a bishop or abbot, for [seven] years each being deprived of his order.1]

The severity of a sinner’s punishment here depends on his clerical rank, and his penance – banishment to a monastery abroad and, possibly, exclusion from his order – is centered around monastic life. Insofar as the text outlines a programme of confession and penitential discipline aimed at the clergy, The Synod of North Britain is broadly representative of writing on confession prior to 1250. As we shall see, such writing tended to be directed toward the clergy and read under the careful watch of the Church. The Synod of North Britain may be one of the earliest works to prescribe penances, but it is not otherwise an outlier. There is nothing unusual about finding a work about confession written before the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Moreover, while it is true that manuals for penitents – in the sense of comprehensive guides expressly aimed at coaching an individual through confessional preparation – were an innovation of the thirteenth century, texts that could guide penitents through the process of identifying and reflecting on their sins were not. Nor were such texts new in the

1

Quoted in ‘Incipit nunc Sinodus Aquilonalis Britaniae’, in The Irish Penitentials, ed. by Ludwig Bieler (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1963), pp. 66–67 (pp. 66–67). Translated in John Thomas McNeill and Helena Margaret Gamer’s Medieval Handbooks of Penance: A Translation of the Principal ‘libri poenitentiales’ and Selections from Related Documents (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 170–171. The translation has been modified to better reflect the edition text.

30

Manuals for Penitents in Medieval England

twelfth century – which is typically cast as having been particularly concerned with the individual and with the discovery of the self.2 Material encouraging self examination had been around in some form for centuries prior to the Fourth Lateran Council and the Church had, since its early years, stressed the value of in-depth self-reflection and the examination of conscience. What penitential self-examination practices looked like prior to the Fourth Lateran Council, though, is hard to pin down, and a scanty historical record has been further obfuscated by centuries of sectarian scholarship aimed, on one side, at establishing a continuous and unbroken lineage for contemporary Catholic confessional practices, and, on the other, at delegitimizing these contemporary practices by casting them as a medieval innovation. In the nineteenth century, Protestant historians, reeling from the doctrine of papal infallibility which they saw as an unparalleled power-grab by the Catholic Church, were eager to prove that private confession to a priest – a characteristically Catholic ritual – had no basis in the Bible nor precedent in the early Church. The only type of confession in the early Church, they claimed, was a public one, in which a penitent confessed his sins before a congregation and was subsequently turned away from, then reconciled with, the Church in a public ceremony that took place over the course of the Lenten season. In this model, public confession and public penance gave way, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, to a form of private (or solitary) confession – also known as auricular confession – in which a single penitent confesses alone to a priest and atones for his sins privately. This shift was thought to be accompanied by an increased interest in the emotional and psychological state of the sinner.3 This model, however, has been revealed in recent years to be both ideologically suspect and overly simplistic, part of a broader presentist tendency to cast the shift from the eleventh to twelfth centuries as representative of a shift from group to individual, from a shame culture to a guilt culture, and in W. P. Ker’s famous figuration, from ‘epic’ to ‘romance’.4 Instead, it is now widely recognized that public and pri2 As Rosenwein notes, Peter Dronke and Robert Hanning both suggest that a new interest

in the self appears in literature after the twelfth century, while R. W. Southern suggests that a new interest in the self appears in theological writings of the twelfth century (‘Y avait-il un « moi »’, p. 222). Others who locate a new interest in the self in the twelfth century include Morris (Discovery) and Chenu (L’éveil). Bynum (‘Did the Twelfth Century’) famously added nuance to this developmental narrative by arguing that if the twelfth century placed a new emphasis on the individual, it did so at the same time as it discovered new ways of articulating the individual’s relationship to the group. 3 For this model, see, for example, the three-volume history of confession by Henry Charles Lea (1825–1909), A History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church, 3 vols (New York: Greenwood, 1896; repr. 1968). 4 W. P. Ker famously argued that in the twelfth century epic writing was ‘succeeded and displaced’ by romance; Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval Literature (New York: Dover, 1908; repr. 1986), p. 3. R. W. Southern extended Ker’s model, arguing that the dawn of the twelfth century brought with it an ‘urge towards a greater measure of solitude, of introspection and self-knowledge’ – one that came accompanied by new types of writing, characterized through their ‘warmth and intimacy’ (The Making of the Middle Ages [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953], pp. 227–228). The rejection of this developmental



Sin in the Cloister 31

vate penitential practices co-existed for centuries both before and after the Fourth Lateran Council.5 It is not clear where or when private penance in particular originated; the evidence suggests that a form of it was in practice as early as the sixth century and perhaps even earlier. Its roots are often traced to the sixth-century Irish church, although recent work has suggested that a continental tradition of private penance developed simultaneous to – but independent of – the Irish one.6 Although the origin story of private penitential practices remains unclear and fundamentally entangled with sectarian conflicts, recent reassessments prove that by the twelfth century, these practices had been around, in some form, for at least six hundred years.7

Teaching Sin in the Cloister The earliest texts focused on the administration of the sacrament of penance are the so-called penitentials, such as The Synod of North Britain. These are straightforward lists of sins and penances that were used by priests to assign appropriate penitential discipline.8 The earliest penitentials tend to prescribe lengthy penances; in The Preface of Gildas, we find that, ‘Si casu neglegens quis sacrificum aliquod perdat, per .iii. xlmas, relinquens illus feris et altibus deuorandum’ (‘If someone by mishap through carelessness loses a host, leaving it for beasts and birds to devour, he shall

5

6 7 8

model was articulated perhaps most directly by Robert M. Stein in Reality Fictions: Romance, History, and Governmental Authority, 1025–1180 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), p. 9. But it is also present in the work of scholars, including Sarah Kay in The Chanson de Geste in the Age of Romance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), who stress the temporal and formal overlap between the categories of ‘epic’ and ‘romance’, and in that of the numerous scholars, including those described by Firey, who stress the importance of various types of introspection in early medieval thought; see ‘Introduction’, p. 7. The notion of a transition from a ‘shame’ culture to a ‘guilt’ culture in particular has been challenged in the domain of anthropology; see, for example, Adam Kuper’s The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion (London: Routledge, 1988). Central to this re-evaluation is the work of Mary C. Mansfield, who proves that public and solitary penance co-existed in France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Humiliation. Sarah Hamilton supports and advances Mansfield’s argument by noting that public and private penance co-existed and, at times, overlapped. She exemplifies this latter point using the penance imposed on members of William’s invading army after the Battle of Hastings, which had both public and private elements (Practice, p. 87). Rob Meens notes that both a ‘public’ and a more ‘informal’ form of penance existed in England in this period and finds that there was likely considerable ambiguity over how and when these forms were enacted; see his Penance in Medieval Europe, 600–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 163–164. For an overview of recent work on the topic, see Hamilton, Practice, p. 4. See Firey, ‘Introduction’, p. 9. Pierre J. Payer describes penitentials as ‘short works composed primarily of canons – brief, succinct statements that specify an offender, an offence, and an appropriate penance’ in Sex and the New Medieval Literature of Confession, 1150–1300 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2009), p. 12.

32

Manuals for Penitents in Medieval England

do penance for three forty-day periods’).9 Since each sin came with its own fixed penitential prescription to be performed by an individual, the system represented by these penitentials is generally called ‘tariff penance’. The earliest witnesses to tariff penance date to the sixth century and seem to have originated in Wales: the Decrees of the Synod of North Britain (c. 545), Grove of Victory (Synod c. 569), Excerpts from a Book of David, and Preface of Gildas on Penance.10 The first three have been ascribed to St David (d. c. 589–601), and the last to Gildas.11 Gildas is most concerned with sins pertaining to monks. Transgressions – most of the sort that could be made within a monastery – are listed briefly, along with their corresponding penances. So, for example, anyone who fails to sing the Psalms out of drunkenness should be denied dinner.12 Compared to the guides for priests of later centuries, these early penitentials can seem disordered and haphazard. They lack consistent structuring devices; it was, after all, not until the seventh century that the deadly sins began to be used as a framework for organizing penitential interrogations – as Morton Bloomfield notes in his magisterial overview of the seven deadly sins in medieval culture.13 It is hard to say if the type of confession described in these early penitentials was done in private or public. From Gildas we learn that brothers could encourage each other to confess, but not whether the described confession was a private one or not.14 Either way, it is clear that some form of confessional practices were being encouraged as part of the daily routine of monks; the most important guide for monastic communities in the medieval era, the sixth-century Rule of St Benedict, advises, ‘mala sua praeterita cum lacrimis vel gemitu cotidie in oratione Deo confiteri’ (‘Every day with tears and sighs confess your past sins to God in prayer’), and monks were often expected to confess transgressions against the Rule to their brothers.15 Records of such monastic confessions are rare, but we get an unusual peak into a kind of confession from a twelfth-century manuscript from across the channel. According to Michael Cornett, who has analysed the statement, it was written by the scribe of the manuscript. This scribe, Rainaldus, extols the merits of confession and then confesses that he has erred in ruling the manuscript.16 9 Gildas, Praefatio de poenitentia, in The Irish Penitentials, ed. and trans. by Ludwig Bieler

(Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1963), pp. 62–63.

10 See Kenan B. Osborne, Reconciliation and Justification: The Sacrament and its Theology

(New York: Paulist, 1990), p. 87.

11 Osborne, Reconciliation, p. 87. 12 Edited in Arthur West Haddan, and William Stubbs, Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents

Relating to Great Britain and Ireland, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1869), I, 113.

13 Morton Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins: An Introduction to the History of a Religious

Concept, with Special Reference to Medieval English Literature (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1952), p. 57. 14 Gildas, Praefatio de poenitentia, pp. 60–61. 15 Saint Benedict, The Rule of St Benedict in English, ed. and trans. by Timothy Fry (Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical, 1982), p. 28. 16 Cornett, who first noticed the passage in this context, suggests that it looks like a confessional utterance – not a private confession to a priest, but a public one to the



Sin in the Cloister 33

Confession was therefore inseparable from monastic discipline in this early period, and it is not surprising that the earliest penitentials, such as The Synod of North Britain, are concerned with primarily monastic sins. But there are exceptions. One of these early penitential guides for priests, The Book of David, digresses briefly into lay sins.17 And while The Grove of Victory gives the requirements for penance based on whether a sin happened before or after the penitent had taken vows (which suggests it was intended for use among the clergy), curiously, one penance it describes seems to have been intended for the laity; if a person has helped the barbaris – here probably the Germanic groups who had migrated from the continent – and if, in the process, a Christian was killed or imprisoned, the penitent must never again take up arms.18 It is of course true that monks were both directly and indirectly involved in combat at the time, but both the sin and the penance described are remarkably secular and may suggest that penitential discipline was starting to move out of the cloister. Nevertheless, secular sins such as these are rare and most of these early guidebooks are focused on monastic sins. Since these early guidebooks contain lists of penances to be assigned, they were clearly intended for priests and others administrating confession. It is hard to judge how often penitents themselves were using written documents at the time to prepare for confession. Sources aimed at penitents are rare; Allen Frantzen, in his study of Old English penitential writing, states that the ‘chief witness’ to confessional practices in this early period ‘remains the handbook of penance’ – which he defines as ‘the priest’s guide in counseling penitents’.19 There are, however, some surviving examples of self-examination works that seem to have been aimed at penitents instead of priests, including the English scholar Alcuin’s Advice to Wido (c. 800), also known as De virtutibus et vitiis.20 This short text, which lays out a devotional program for one of Charlemagne’s commanders in Brittany, includes instructions on confession and an enumeration of the vices and the virtues.21 But although Alcuin himself was from England, he wrote his treatise while serving at the Carolingian court, so the work might not reflect England’s penitential discipline, but rather that of the Carolingian empire – where self-examination material was apparently slightly more abundant.22 The surviving record suggests brothers in chapter (‘Form of Confession’, p. 25; n. 18).

17 Osborne, Reconciliation, p. 88. 18 Saint David, ‘Incipit altera Sinodus Luci Uictorie’, in The Irish Penitentials, trans. by

19 20 21

22

Ludwig Bieler (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1963), pp. 68–69. For the suggestion that barbaris here refers to the Germanic groups who arrived from the continent, see Osborne, Reconcilation, p. 88. Allen J. Frantzen, The Literature of Penance in Anglo-Saxon England (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983), pp. 13; 7. Alcuin, ‘De Virtutibus et vitiis’, ed. by Max Förster, Archiv, 122 (1909), 256–261. For a description of this text see Abigail Firey’s ‘Blushing Before the Judge and Physician: Moral Arbitration in the Carolingian Empire’, in A New History of Penance, ed. by Abigail Firey (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 173–200 (p. 177). See Kiril Petkov’s ‘The Cultural Career of a “Minor” Vice: Arrogance in the Medieval Treatise on Sin’, in Sin in Medieval and Early Modern Culture: The Tradition of the Seven

34

Manuals for Penitents in Medieval England

that in England, self-examination material was scarce; material about confession was typically aimed at priests rather than penitents.

Early Self-Examination Writing in England The roots of England’s tradition of self-examination writing are more likely to be found in early penitential prayers. These are typically lists of sins described through the first-person voice of the sinner. The speaker addresses his confession either to a confessor, or directly to a divine figure, such as Christ. The characteristic opening of these prayers can be illustrated from the confessional prayer in London, British Library, Royal MS 2.B.V: ‘Myn drihten god ælmihtig ic þe eom andetta minra synna þara þe ic in minre gemeleste wiþ þe geworhte’ (‘My Lord God almighty, I confess to you my sins, those that I, in my negligence, committed against you’).23 Cornett sees such prayers as important antecedents to the short first-person ‘form of confession’ – a form that rose in popularity around the same time as the larger, typically third-person manuals for penitents. As he notes of the form of confession more generally, penitential prayers would have been used both by penitents preparing for confession and by priests trying to learn what to expect during the confessional encounter.24 It is not clear how often these written prayers were used in medieval England. Only twenty-four have survived from before the Fourth Lateran Council, and only nine of these are in English.25 Of these nine, one – that preserved in British Library, Cotton Tiberius MS A. iii, an eleventh-century compendium that also contains Ælfric’s Colloquy – contains a kind of user’s guide, and this guide suggests its audience might not have been familiar with this type of writing: Man mot hine gebiddan, swaswa he mæg 7 cán, mid ælcum gereorde 7 on ælcere stowe. Nu is her on englisc andetnyss 7 gebed. Ac seðe þis singan wylle, ne secge he na mare on þære andetnysse, þonne he wyrcende wæs: for-þon-ðe ure Hælend nele, þæt man on hine sylfne leoge, ne eac ealle menn on áne wisan ne syngiað. [One must pray as he can and knows how to, with any language in any place. Now here is a confession and prayer in English. But whoever wants to sing this, may he say no more in that confession than he was doing, because our Lord does not want a man to lie about himself, nor do all men sin in one and the same way.26]

23 24 25 26

Deadly Sins, ed. by Richard G. Newhauser and Susan Janet Ridyard (York: York Medieval Press, 2012), pp. 43–64 (p. 47). Abigail Firey writes that, ‘Penitential literature framed around the seven capital sins flowed from Carolingian clerics to lay addressees; the quantity suggests a considerable expansion of a penitential and confessional ethos among the laity’ (‘Blushing’, p. 191). London, British Library, Royal MS 2.B.V (fol. 190v); printed in Cornett, ‘Form of Confession’, p. 360. The translation is mine. Cornett, ‘Form of Confession’, pp. 14; 5. Cornett, ‘Form of Confession’, pp. 321–368. Max Förster, ‘Zur Liturgik der angelsächsischen Kirche’, Anglia, 66 (1942), 1–51 (pp. 8–10); qtd. and trans. in Kate Thomas, ‘The Meaning, Practice and Context of Private Prayer in Late Anglo-Saxon England’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of York, 2011), White Rose eTheses Online [accessed 7 February 2018], pp. 235–236.



Sin in the Cloister 35

The instruction here, that a person using this prayer should limit his confession to those sins that he has actually committed, suggests that the audience was not expected to be familiar with this type of writing. The need to clarify how to use a prayer of this nature may suggest that such prayers were not yet widespread. Another penitential prayer, this one in Latin, gives a series of confessional statements that can be recited: ‘Peccaui per superbiam et inuidiam. Peccaui per detractionem et auaritiaim. Peccaui per superbiam et malitiam’ (‘I have sinned through pride and envy. I have sinned through detraction and avarice. I have sinned through pride and cunning’). Toward the end, the prayer teaches the sinner precisely how to personalize it: ‘Redemptor animarum, ne me derelinquas unum miserum indignumque famulum tuum N.’ (‘Redeemer of souls, do not forsake me, your lonely, wretched, unworthy servant N.’).27 The ‘N’ here, which stands for ‘nomen’, marks the precise place where the sinner’s own name should be added, making it theoretically possible for the prayer to be used as a kind of script. This cue, and the instruction incorporated into the aforementioned Old English prayer, both of which are aimed at clarifying how to use a piece of writing for confessional preparation, suggest that self-examination writing was unfamiliar – it was a new form of educational technology that required clear instructions. In the century leading up to the Fourth Lateran Council, the Church became increasingly concerned with educating its ranks about the nature of sin and about the importance of penitential self-examination. Scholars, many working in the cathedral schools of Paris that were emerging at the time, increasingly theorized about what was required for a good confession and how best to promote penitential rigor. Could a confession be valid if it was motivated by the wrong reasons? Could a confession be valid if a penitent was not with his usual priest? Answering such questions was becoming an increasingly pressing concern. The general tenor is felt from Guy, the prior of Southwick’s Tractatus de virtute confessionis (c. 1190–1198). Guy’s work is divided into two parts: a general section on the benefits of confession, and a second part on how to make a good confession. This second part is itself divided into eight sections covering topics such as how and why the penitent should confess.28 In a prologue affixed to his work, Guy describes having been inspired to write the text by one William, Bishop of Hereford – who has been identified as William de Vere (Bishop of Hereford between 1186–1198): ‘Cum enim apud Londonias, inter iocunda et salubria consuete dulcedinis uestre colloquia, super quibusdam articulis confessionis inuicem conferremus’ (‘For when we were in London, among the happy and beneficial things typical of the sweetness of your conversations, we would confer with each other in turn about certain

27 See the edition of ‘De conscientiae reatu ante altare’, in The Liturgy and Ritual of the Celtic

Church, ed. by Frederick Edward Warren (Oxford: Clarendon, 1881), pp. 185–187, quoted at pp. 186; 187. The same prayer is discussed under the title ‘Ego humiliter te adora’ in Thomas’s ‘The Meaning’, pp. 261, 269, and 271. 28 See D. A. Wilmart, ‘Un opuscule sur la confession, composé par Guy de Southwick’, Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale, 7 (1935), 337–352.

Manuals for Penitents in Medieval England

36

articles of confession’).29 This conversation, according to Guy, inspired him to write his work. By suggesting that he was pressed to write his work, Guy is clearly deploying a familiar humility topos, but the passage nevertheless stands out for showing the requirements of a good confession being actively discussed by the clergy in the period leading up to the Fourth Lateran Council. This period witnessed a slow growth of material aimed at teaching penitents about sin and encouraging them to probe their souls in search of it. By far the most popular work of this nature – not just in England but in Europe as a whole – was William de Montibus’s Peniteas cito peccator, or ‘Do penance quickly, sinner’. This short Latin verse exposition on penance, written in the decades before the Fourth Lateran Council, survives in over 150 manuscripts, and it was a central part of the school curriculum throughout the late medieval period.30 Its powerful first lines are addressed directly to a sinner: ‘Peniteas cito, peccator, cum sit miserator / Iudex’ (‘Repent in haste, sinner! The judge is merciful’).31 This is followed by advice about repentance and proper behaviour: ‘sunt hec quinque tenenda tibi: / Spes venie, cor contritum, confessio culpe, / Pena satisfaciens, et fuga nequitie’ (‘Observe these five commands: for pardon hope; / Have heart contrite; admit the sins you’ve done; / Make full amends, and flee from wickedness’).32 These lines show that, while Joseph Goering is certainly right that the work ‘became one of the most popular vehicles for conveying the essentials of penance to medieval confessors’, it was also – and importantly – intended for penitents – presumably those who could read Latin or find someone to translate it.33 Peniteas cito peccator is representative of three key characteristics of insular self-examination literature before the Fourth Lateran Council: most is, relative to the larger manuals for penitents that emerged after the Council, limited in scope, most is in Latin, and most is either addressed to, or was used by, penitents who were also members of the clergy – using the term loosely, as in modern parlance, to describe those whose professions fell primarily within the established Church.34 29 Quoted at p. 34. For the identification of William de Vere, see Wilmart, ‘Un opuscule’, pp.

337–338.

30 Joseph Goering, William de Montibus (c. 1140–1213), The Schools and Literature of Pastoral

Care (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1992), pp. 107; 111; 113.

31 Passages from William’s text in both the original Latin and its translation are from A. G.

Rigg’s A History of Anglo-Latin Literature, 1066–1422 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 116. The translation has been adapted slightly here to more closely reflect the original. 32 Rigg, History, p. 116. Goering, William de Montibus, p. 107. Nicholas Orme, in Medieval Schools: From Roman Britain to Renaissance England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), suggests that ‘[i]t calls on the reader to confess and explains why this is necessary, how to make your confession, and how to expiate your sins when confession is over’ (p. 101). 33 Goering, William de Montibus, p. 107. 34 When used within the context of the medieval Church, ‘clergy’ can carry different meanings. The Middle English clergie carried connotations both of a position within the established Church (i.e. that of being ordained) and of attributes related to that position (i.e. possessing clerical learning or training). There was, moreover, what Nicole Rice



Sin in the Cloister 37

With the aim of upholding monastic discipline at the fore, the Church promoted self-examination practices among its own ranks before directing its energy to those outside of them. This is not to suggest that penitential self-examination was the realm of the clergy exclusively in the lead-up to the Fourth Lateran Council. There is good evidence to suggest that self-examination was increasingly being encouraged among the laity as well. Indeed, once the dust had settled from the Battle of Hastings, Norman bishops, fretting about the sins that had been committed during the bloodshed and about the state of Norman soldiers’ souls more generally, issued a set of penitential ordinances for those who had participated in the Conquest. Anyone who had killed in the battle was assigned a year’s penance for each person killed, and archers, who could not know how many men they had killed, were to do penance for three Lents. If a man had not injured another but had nevertheless wanted to do so, he was to do penance for three days.35 This last stipulation is particularly striking because it shows that layfolk were being asked to perform a rather thorough self-examination, reflecting on not just their deeds but the thoughts and intentions behind them. Having set their weapons down, those who had fought in the battle were supposed to turn their energies inwards, hunting out a new kind of threat – one to their eternal souls. Self-examination practices, then, were not restricted to the clergy. And while most of the written guides in this pre-Lateran period were for the clergy, there are a few texts for the laity that stand out as notable exceptions. One of these is the AngloNorman poem on the ‘Estates of Man, the Vices and Virtues, by Henry’ (Dean no. 623), which has been dated by its editor on linguistic grounds to the first few years of the thirteenth century. The introductory section is remarkable for the pre-Lateran period. While it begins with a description of the relative goodness of chastity, marriage, and widowhood (ll. 24–60) that, in its prioritization of chastity, is wholly conventional for its time, it then offers a less conventional exaltation of the virtues of married life. It claims, for example, that ‘[m]ont est noble por verité / ki bien se tient en cest degre’ (‘in truth, the one who keeps himself well in this estate is very noble’) (ll. 46–47). So beneficial is virtuous married life that those who live in spousal harmony ‘coronnéz seront cum reyne et reys’ (‘will be crowned as queen and king’) (l. 50). This exaltation of virtuous married life, and Henry’s recommendations for how to achieve it, could of course assist a clerical reader in his pastoral duties. But given that the guide positions itself as a manual for personal spiritual development, this passage must be constructing an implied lay audience in addition to the work’s clerical one. This introductory section ends with a call that, in its address to ‘seignors’ (‘lords’), evokes the secular performance environments of the chansons de geste: ‘Ore, seignours, oï avéz / cum se tient ces treis degréz’ (‘Now, lords, you have heard / how these three estates are ordered’) (ll. 121–122). The poem then dramatizes the seven deadly sins at some length. They are described as the treacherous supporters of the describes as ‘slippage between these two categories’; see Lay Piety and Religious Discipline in Middle English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 14. 35 H. E. J. Cowdrey, ‘Bishop Ermenfrid of Sion and the Penitential Ordinance Following the Battle of Hastings’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 20.2 (1969), 225–242 (p. 234).

38

Manuals for Penitents in Medieval England

devil, who is cast as a military commander: ‘Li ennemi a set serjanz / ki partout porte ses coumanz’ (‘The enemy has seven supporters / who enact his commands everywhere’) (ll. 137–138). For each sin, the text provides both a warning about its effects on the individual and some of its recognizable characteristics. Pride, for example, ‘partout erre, / or et argent et beals dras querre / tost et tart, ce est sun ouvre’ (‘is everywhere, / looking for gold and money and fine clothing / early and late – this is how it works’) (ll. 141–144). After the description of each vice comes a very short description of its opposing virtue. In a martial conceit that echoes the battle between the vices and the virtues of Prudentius’s Psychomachia, the poem calls on the good Christian to ‘humblece mette a banere / encontre orguil qui tant est fiere’ (‘recruit humility to fight under your own banner / against pride that is so self-satisfied’) (ll. 153–154).36 The poem ends with an explanation of what is known as the saligia order (superbia, accidia, luxuria, ira, gula, invidia, and avaritia). This passage is remarkable for two reasons. First, the poem translates the list of sins generated by the mnemonic into French: Comment ces vices par ordre rent, S.A.L.I.G.I.A. si les conprent. Qui les voldra a dreit mettre prenge vice pour une leitre et faice interpretacïum: leitre doigne a vice nun. S. orguil, A. avarice, L. luxure le tierce vice, I. ire, G. glotonnie, A. a peresce, I. pour envie. [So that these vices rank in an orderly manner / saligia contains them. / Whoever wants to arrange them properly / takes a vice for each letter /and does some interpretation: / the letter gives to each vice its name. / S. pride, A. avarice, / L. lust the third vice, / I. ire, G. gluttony, / A. to sloth, I. for envy (ll. 291–300).]

Where the poem begins to explain the mnemonic in French, the last two letters get rearranged to suit the rhyme scheme. The poem ends with a Latin rhyme designed to help with the recollection of the sins: ‘Dic michi saligia que sunt peccata notanda’ (‘Tell me, Saligia, which are the noteworthy sins’) (l. 311).37 The poem navigates somewhat uneasily between the Latinate moral theology and the vernacular, perhaps anticipating an audience with little or poor Latin.

36 The poem has been edited by Jacques Monfrin under the title ‘Poème anglo-normand sur le mariage, les vices et les vertus, par Henri (XIIIe siècle)’, in Études de philologie romane,

ed. by Jacques Monfrin (Genève: Droz, 2001), pp. 427–449. For the dating of the text, see p. 430. 37 A similar rhyme is found in a poem from the turn of the thirteenth century: ‘Dic mihi SALIGIA, / que sunt peccata luenda’, printed in H. Walther, Initia carminum ac versuum medi aevi posterioris latinorum (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1959), no. 4371.



Sin in the Cloister 39

But perhaps even more remarkable is the use of the saligia mnemonic itself. This order became popular in the thirteenth century and some credit its popularity to Henry de Suso’s Summa (c. 1250–1253), but its origins are not fully understood.38 If the ‘Estates of Man’ poem does date to the early thirteenth century, as its editor suggests, it would be remarkable as our earliest surviving example of the saligia order. But while its editor dates the poem to the early thirteenth century on linguistic grounds, the potential precociousness of this poem that this dating implies may be called into question somewhat, since the only manuscript in which it appears was produced after the Fourth Lateran Council.39 The potential case of the ‘Estates’ poem aside, no surviving Anglo-Norman work on confession seems to date from before the Fourth Lateran Council. The ‘Effects of the Seven Sins’ (Dean no. 652), a diagrammatic Anglo-Norman list of vices and their species, was once thought to have been written in the twelfth century, but, as I have shown elsewhere, this suggestion is groundless.40 And while scholarship on AngloNorman penitential writing is still in its infancy and might therefore turn up another potential pre-Lateran example, it is suggestive that no Anglo-Norman confessional text appears in a manuscript from this early period.41 We might expect the Middle English tradition from this period would yield more penitential writing addressed to the laity, given that English was the language of a large cross section of the general public in the decades preceding the Fourth Lateran Council, but the Middle English tradition of self-examination material in this period, like the Anglo-Norman one, is sparse.42 One of the few surviving Middle English 38 See Richard Newhauser, ‘“These Seven Devils”: The Capital Vices on the Way to

Modernity’, in Sin in Medieval and Early Modern Culture: The Tradition of the Seven Deadly Sins, ed. by Richard G. Newhauser and Susan Janet Ridyard (York: York Medieval Press, 2012), pp. 157–190 (p. 158). Bloomfield writes that, ‘Since Henry of Susa or Ostia (de Segusia or Hostiensis), in whose works we first find saligia, refers to it as if it was already known, he was probably not the originator of either the order or the use of the word as a mnemonic device’ (Sins, p. 86). Bloomfield holds that ‘[t]he saligia list cannot be found before the thirteenth century and usually indicates a work later than that period’ (Sins, p. 105). 39 For the editor’s dating see Monfrin, ‘Poème’, p. 427. For the dating of the manuscript, see Ruth J. Dean and Maureen B. M. Boulton’s Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts (London: ANTS, 1999), no. 623. 40 K. A. Murchison, ‘The Effects of the Seven Sins: An Edition and Commentary’, The Journal of Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing, 38 (2017), [accessed 23 January 2018]. 41 See Dean and Boulton’s Anglo-Norman Literature. 42 None of the English penitential prayers that survive date from this period; see Cornett, ‘Form of Confession’, pp. 321–368. Nor do any of the texts dealing with the vices – and, therefore, potentially related to self-examination – on R. R. Raymo’s list of ‘Works of Religious and Philosophical Instruction’, in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500, ed. by Albert E. Hartung, 11 vols (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1967), VII, pp. 2255–2378. Some works, such as those grouped under ‘Miscellaneous Manuals’ (no. 24), have not been studied in depth and may prove to have been composed in this period, but, considering that none of these survives in a manuscript from before the middle of the thirteenth century, this seems somewhat

40

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examples is an anonymous work entitled Vices and Virtues, which has been provisionally dated to last quarter of the twelfth century.43 The work, like Gower’s later Confessio Amantis, takes the form of a dialogue, here between ‘Reason’ and a ‘Soul’. Medieval sinners seeking a window unto their sins could find it here. The ‘Soul’s’ supposed confession contains identifying details about each sin; so, for example, in the section on detraction, the ‘Soul’ says: ‘Ic habbe beswiken min emcristen mid faire wordes ðe ic to him habbe ȝespeken, and oðerlicor mid weorkes him ȝekydd, and uppe mine lahfulnesse ofte him behet, þat ic naeure eft him neȝelaeste’ (‘I have deceived my fellow-Christian with fair words which I have spoken unto him, and have shown him otherwise by my works, and have often promised him upon my word of honor, what I never afterwards accomplished for him’).44 The dialogue never explicitly declares its purpose, but Cate Gunn, who has studied it in detail, argues that it is not a guide for priests about hearing confessions.45 She holds that the author’s urging toward penance suggests, instead, that the text is intended for self-examination.46 And Gunn identifies some later additions, in Latin, that elucidate how readers understood the text. She finds that one reader wrote ‘mea culpa’ beside a profession of sin – ‘Swa ic happe ibien full of euele þohtes’ (‘So have I been full of evil thoughts’) – and she concludes from this and other annotations that ‘as the author was writing in a confessional mode, so was the text being read’. She finds, however, that the text does not call for self-examination in a straightforward way; rather, the reader is invited to reflect on his sin along with the ‘Soul’.47 The text is remarkable for its time in that it implies both clerical and lay audiences; Gunn finds in it some guidance that seems to be aimed at monks, but she also notes that, ‘References to worldly practices, such as fair market trading, that would not be out of place in Piers Plowman, suggest a need to communicate at a more

unlikely. The scarcity of material for penitents written in English in this period is noted by Bloomfield who, while speaking of works on the vices and virtues in England before the twelfth century, claims that ‘Ælfric’s sermons and the Vices and Virtues contain the only two outstanding examples of the employment of our concept in this early period in English’ (Sins, p. 121). 43 Stephen Pelle, ‘The Date and Intellectual Milieu of the Early Middle English Vices and Virtues’, Neophilologus, 99.1 (2015), 151–166 (p. 163). I am grateful to Cate Gunn for pointing me toward Pelle’s article. The work appears in Francis Lee Utley’s section ‘Dialogues, Debates, and Catechisms’, in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500, Albert E. Hartung, 11 vols (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1972), III, pp. 669–745 (no. 26). 44 The text and its translation are printed in Vices and Virtues, ed. by Ferdinand Holthausen, EETS OS 89, 159, 2 vols (London: Trübner, 1888–1921), I, pp. 10–11. 45 Cate Gunn, ‘Vices and Virtues: A Reassessment of Manuscript Stowe 34’, in Sin in Medieval and Early Modern Culture: The Tradition of the Seven Deadly Sins, ed. by Richard G. Newhauser and Susan Janet Ridyard (York: York Medieval Press, 2012), pp. 65–84 (p. 79). 46 Gunn, ‘Vices’, p. 82. 47 Gunn describes the ‘mode’ of the text as follows: ‘not, “these are the ways you must check your conscience for sin” but “these are the sins I have committed, and likely you, reader, as well”’ (‘Vices’, p. 83).

Sin in the Cloister 41



popular level’, and concludes that the text may have been ‘intended for a variety of readers’.48 Gunn’s caution here is sensible, since guessing the implied audience of a text from the sins that it describes is not a straightforward practice – an author could include ‘worldly practices’ for many reasons, and their presence does not necessarily suggest a lay audience is intended.49 Vices and Virtues shows that even before the Fourth Lateran Council, the Church felt the need to educate penitents in the architecture of sin; while manuals for penitents themselves were an innovation of the thirteenth century, the idea of using a text for sustained self-examination was not, and a handful of vernacular examples shows that later works like Ancrene Wisse and the Somme le roi are not, as has sometimes been claimed, entirely new in this respect.50 Nevertheless, it remains the case that self-examination writing before the Fourth Lateran Council was primarily for the clergy. While layfolk were clearly performing various forms of self-examination, and while some must have been instructed about the process through guides like William de Montibus’, these guides operated, for the most part, within the relatively safe confines of the cloister and the Church.

48 Gunn, ‘Vices’, pp. 78–82 (quoted at pp. 81 and 82). 49 The differences between the implied and actual audiences of a text are discussed at greater

length in chapter 2.

50 Some count the late thirteenth-century Somme le roi among the first vernacular texts

concerned with confession; see, for example, Leo M. Carruthers, ‘Lorens of Orléans and The Somme Le Roi or The Book of Vices and Virtues’, Vox Benedictina, 5.2/3 (1988), 190–200 (pp. 190–194) and W. A. Pantin, The English Church in the Fourteenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1955; repr. 1980), p. 220. In their introduction to The Mirroure of the Worlde, R. R. Raymo and Elaine E. Whitaker write that, ‘The Mirroure is derived from Le Mirroir du Monde and La Somme le Roi, the two earliest vernacular treatises on vices and virtues’; ‘Introduction’, in The Mirroure of the Worlde: A Middle English Translation of Le Miroir Du Monde, ed. by Robert R. Raymo, Elaine E. Whitaker, and Ruth E. Sternglant (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), pp. 3–42 (p. 7).

Chapter 2 ‘A Woman in Whom Great Trust was Placed’: Differentiated Education and Ancrene Wisse

I

t is generally accepted as a truism that the introduction of Canon 21 at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 represents the most important moment for the development of medieval pastoral education. The Canon, known by its famous opening words, Omnis utriusque sexus, called for annual confession for anyone who had reached the age of majority. According to the traditional narrative, the Canon’s requirement of annual confession was an innovation – one which, on one hand, extended the powers of the Church through an insidious form of mind control, while, on the other, promoted a sustained form of self-reflection.1 This striking confluence of social control and inward reflection has led many to take the Fourth Lateran Council as the starting point for a master narrative of modernity. This master narrative has been challenged and shown to be progressivist in various domains, and the premise on which it is based – the apparently innovative nature of the injunction to confession of Lateran IV – has been questioned.2 Most now recognize that the requirement of annual confession established at the Fourth Lateran Council was not a complete innovation. It is also amply clear from the self-examination material that preceded the Council that sustained self-reflection was in no way a novelty in the thirteenth century.3 The idea that the Fourth Lateran Council 1

For the view that the injunction to confession was a form of social control, see, for example, Tentler’s Sin. 2 For critiques of this narrative in the domains of literary studies and history, see the introduction to chapter 1. 3 It is not known how commonly the laity confessed prior to the Fourth Lateran Council. Leonard E. Boyle, surveying episcopal constitutions in the years leading up to the Fourth Lateran Council, stresses that, from an administrative standpoint, the canon was grounded in tradition and notes that the confessional summae of Robert Flamborough (c. 1210) and Thomas of Chobham (c. 1215) show that these practices predated the Fourth Lateran Council; see his ‘The Summa for Confessors as a Genre, and its Religious Intent’, in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion: Papers from the University of Michigan Conference, ed. by Charles Trinkaus and Heiko A. Oberman (Leiden: Brill, 1974), pp. 126–137 (pp. 126–128). It is generally accepted that, in the decades before the Council, confession was practiced among the clergy and lay religious, and several scholars find evidence of confessional practices among the laity. A. E. Redgate summarizes the current consensus, which is that, prior to the eleventh century, ‘penance was part of both religious and political culture, though exactly how often the laity generally confessed remains unknown’; Religion, Politics and Society in Britain 800–1066 (London: Routledge, 2014), p. 223.



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43

was a kind of gateway to self-reflection – and, concomitantly, to modernity – must therefore be firmly rejected. Nevertheless, as with many master narratives, this one contains a seed of truth. Even those who question the innovative nature of Canon 21 recognize that confessional legislation of this scale was unprecedented at the time, and that it brought with it a greater focus on pastoral education and a new need for tools for promoting self-examination among the laity and clergy alike.4 As the evidence here shows, the authors of self-examination material in this period, facing new pastoral needs, drew on cutting-edge educational strategies of the sort that were being described in contemporary sermon-writing guides. These include educating a diverse audience through material pitched at individual audience members – a strategy referred to here as ‘differentiated instruction’. The goal at hand is to explore how these educational techniques are used in self-examination works, and to highlight the creative ways in which differentiated instruction is deployed in one of the bestsellers of thirteenth-century pastoral writing, Ancrene Wisse.

Differentiated Instruction and Religious Education One effect of Lateran IV was to bring every penitent face to face with a priest at least once a year – a kind of annual performance review for the faithful. The sinner’s intention, state of mind, and social position were all crucial to the penitential investigation. Priests were expected to ask about the circumstances of sin – who committed the sin? With whom? What was the intention behind it? If a man had committed murder, according to one guide, a priest had to figure out if the crime had been done out of the desire to obtain goods or out of a desire for revenge.5 This circumstance-based approach to interrogation, in which the social position, marital status, and profession of the sinner were central, led, according to the renowned historian Jacques Le Goff, to ‘the formation of professional consciousness in medieval men

4 Cornett, drawing on the work of Alexander Murray, suggests that confession could not

have been common among the laity prior to the thirteenth century (‘Form of Confession’, p. 15). And even those who stress the continuity of confessional practices admit that a change took place around the twelfth century (Firey, ‘Introduction’, p. 9). In recent years, a number of regionally focused studies have begun to highlight some of the remarkable local variation in terms of the emphasis placed on confession, and we can therefore expect to find significant differences in confessional practices at national, episcopal, and even parochial levels, studies of which are still wanting. 5 See F. A. C. Mantello and J. Goering, ‘Robert Grosseteste’s Quoniam Cogitatio, A Treatise on Confession’, Traditio, 67 (2012), 341–384 (p. 374). Pierre Michaud-Quantin and others have noted that priests’ summae of the time stressed that the circumstances of sin should be used by a confessor to lead a particularly individual interrogation; Sommes de casuistique et manuels de confession au moyen âge (XII-XVI siècles) (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1962), p. 32. Biller writes that a priest was instructed to ‘enquire who the penitent is, what sort of job he has, and frame [his] question accordingly’; ‘Confession in the Middle Ages: Introduction’, in Handling Sin: Confession in the Middle Ages, ed. by Peter Biller and A. J. Minnis (York: York Medieval Press, 1998), pp. 1–42 (p. 13).

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from the thirteenth century on’, and it is often credited with giving rise to the estates satire tradition that features prominently in works such as the Canterbury Tales.6 It is worth stressing that this idea of the circumstances behind a sin – the sinner’s state of mind, intention, and status – was nothing new in the thirteenth century. A focus on the intention of the sinner can be found not only among the penitential ordinances that followed the Battle of Hastings, but, famously, in the intentionalist writings of Abelard (c. 1079–1142), that claim, for example, that one who desires to commit adultery has already consented to it – and that even committing the act itself could not increase one’s guilt any further.7 And although it has been claimed that the circumstances of sin were first introduced to the confessional encounter between priest and penitent in the aftermath of the Fourth Lateran Council, priests had, in fact, been taught for at least a century before the Council that they should inquire about these circumstances during the encounter itself.8 Nevertheless, the circumstances did grow in importance in the thirteenth century, becoming central to both priests’ guides about how to interrogate penitents, such as that of Raymond de Pennaforte, and to the manuals that began to be addressed to penitents about how to perform a proper confession, such as the Manuel des péchés. The general notion that doctrinal education must be approached differently depending on a person’s status was promoted in the century leading up to the Fourth Lateran Council through the ad status collections: anthologies of highly specific sermon material aimed at different types of people. In one of these, the Art of Preaching, Alan de Lille explains the logic behind matching material to audience: Minoribus autem decet in parabolis loqui, maioribus revelare mysteria regni Dei. Parvuli liquido cibo sunt nutriendi, adulti solido corroborandi; ne parvulus enecetur per solidum, et aduitus abominetur liquidum, ut sic singula quaeque locum teneant sortita decenter. [It is proper to speak to children in parables, and to show to adults the mysteries of the kingdom of God. The very young must be nourished on liquid food, adults invigorated with solid food, lest the child be stunted by solids, and the adult 6 Translated in Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work, & Culture in the Middle Ages (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 112. Peter Biller also argues that the social status of a penitent became more important in the thirteenth century; see ‘Confession’, pp. 14; 17. 7 For Abelard’s approach to sin see Cate Gunn’s Ancrene Wisse: From Pastoral Literature to Vernacular Spirituality (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008), p. 25; see also Morris, Discovery, p. 73 and Chenu, L’éveil, p. 17. For Abelard’s intentionalist ethics, see Peter Abelard, Ethical Writings, His Ethics or ‘Know Yourself’ and his Dialogue between a Philosopher, a Jew and a Christian, trans. by Paul Vincent Spade (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co. 1995), p. 7. 8 Bloomfield suggests that the notion of the circumstances of sin was introduced by Raymond de Pennaforte in the early thirteenth century (Sins, p. 124), but it can be seen in earlier guides about confession. The earliest treatment of the circumstances of sin may be the Pseudo-Augustinian De vera et falsa penitentia, which is generally dated to the eleventh century (Gunn, ‘Vices’, p. 74). The circumstances also appear in William de Montibus’s Peniteas cito peccator, which was written in the decades preceding the Fourth Lateran Council, and Johannes Gründel suggests that they were a new formulation at the time (p. 112). See also Boyle, ‘Summae’, p. 227.



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detest liquids. Thus they should each receive the kind of thing befitting their condition.9]

This passage, which draws on Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians (3:2), reflects a growing awareness that different audiences had different needs. Both approach and subject matter should meet the needs of one’s actual audience. Alan holds that if the audience is varied, so too should be the pronouncements. He gives a number of subjects that should be treated for individual members of a larger audience; so ‘Si virginibus, commendentur a munditia corporis, a puritate mentis, per quam homo sit supra hominem, superans carnem, et angelorum gerens similitudinem’ (‘If virgins are present, let them be commended for their cleanness of body and purity of character, through which one can surpass human nature, rise above the flesh, and carry oneself like the angels’).10 Material designed for the particular needs of specific audiences shows up in various preaching manuals and collections of sample sermons of the period; the most notable are those of Alan de Lille, Gilbert of Tournai, Humbert de Romans, Honorius Augustus, and Jacques de Vitry. This last writer explains the importance of matching one’s subjects to the nature of one’s audience, stating that everyone responds differently to different content; after all, ‘levis sibilus equos mitigat catulos instigat’ (‘light whistling soothes horses but stirs up little pups’).11 The ad status collections of these writers reflect a growing interest in the individual’s estate and reveal that Alan and his contemporaries saw an implicit connection between the actual audiences of a sermon and the audiences implied by a sermon through its content. The importance these writers place on matching content to audience might be taken to suggest that a section of an ad status collection addressed to one particular estate was meant to be extracted from the collection and delivered to that estate exclusively – that, for example, a preacher would extract the ad status material addressed to the elderly to preach to an audience composed of the elderly exclusively. But ad status material was designed to be used in far more complex ways. Medieval preachers rarely addressed audiences composed of one estate alone, and the highly specific content in the ad status collections was designed to allow a preacher to single out members of a single estate within a much more diverse

9 ‘Summa de arte praedicatoria’, in Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina, 210, ed.

by J. P. Migne (Paris: Migne, 1855), chp. 39 [sect. 107], col. 184C. Translation from Rita Copeland, Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages: Lollardy and Ideas of Learning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 99. Guillaume Durandus, writing in the late thirteenth century, also insists on the importance of pitching one’s sermon to a diverse audience; see Siegfried Wenzel, Latin Sermon Collections from Later Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 237. 10 210:107. The translation is mine. 11 Quoted and translated in Carolyn Muessig, Preacher, Sermon and Audience in the Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2002), p. 265. Jacques de Vitry here is drawing directly from Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care (c. 591), and indeed it is Gregory who provided the immediate inspiration for the ad status movement (although Gregory himself drew the idea from the fourth-century Archbishop Gregory the Theologian; see below).

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audience in the same way that, according to Alan de Lille, virgins should be singled out if they are present during a sermon to a broader audience. The idea of including highly specific targeted content within a sermon to a broad audience can be traced back to Pope Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care (c. 591) – although Gregory himself was inspired by the ideas of Gregory the Theologian (d. c. 390).12 Gregory the Great insists that a sermon should contain specific content and, through this content, appeal to the specific interests of each estate: one and the same exhortation is not suited for everyone because not everyone shares the same quality of character … Therefore, the discourse of the teacher should be adapted to the character of his audience so that it can address the specific needs of each individual and yet never shrink from the art of common edification.

Gregory then explains that each estate can be addressed in turn within a broader exhortation to a diverse audience: For, if I may say so, what are the minds of an attentive audience if not the taut strings of a harp, which a skillful musician plays with multiple techniques so as to produce a beautiful sound? … And so every teacher, in order to edify all by the single virtue of charity, ought to touch the hearts of his audience with the same common doctrine but by distinct exhortations.13

Like harp strings, the hearts of believers were to be touched variously, but not at variance with each other. Gregory’s image is of a preacher making highly specific, targeted exhortations in order to reach the disparate hearts of a diverse audience. This strategy of addressing a diverse audience by using a variety of specific exhortations is valuable for approaching an audience with diverse sins, according to Gregory: ibi quippe tanta arte uox temperanda est, ut cum diuersa sint auditorum uitia, et singulis inueniatur congrua, et tamen sibimetipsi non sit diuersa, ut inter passiones medias uno quidem ductu transeat, sed more bicipitis gladii tumores cogitationum carnalium ex diuerso latere incidat, quatenus sic superbis praedicetur

12 Gregory the Theologian recommends different instruction for different types of people

in his Apology for his flight to Pontus (2.30); see George E. Demacopoulos’s St Gregory the Great: ‘The Book of Pastoral Rule’ (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2007), p. 87. 13 The full quotation, with the attribution to Gregory the Theologian, runs as follows: ‘Vt enim longe ante nos reuerendae memoriae gregorius nazianzenus edocuit, non una eadem que cunctis exhortatio congruit, quia nec cunctos par morum qualitas astringit … Pro qualitate igitur audientium formari debet sermo doctorum, ut et ad sua singulis congruat, et tamen a communis aedificationis arte numquam recedat. Quid enim sunt intentae mentes auditorum, nisi ut ita dixerim, quaedam in cithara tensiones stratae chordarum? Quas tangendi artifex, ut non sibimetipsi dissimile canticum faciat, dissimiliter pulsat … Vnde et doctor quisque, ut in una cunctos uirtute caritatis aedificet, ex una doctrina, non una eadem que exhortatione tangere corda audientium debet’; Gregory the Great, Regula pastoralis, in Library of Latin Texts [accessed 23 December 2020], pars 3, prologue, ll. 5–13. Translation from Demacopoulos, Book, pp. 87–88.



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humilitas, ut tamen timidis non augeatur metus, sic timidis infundatur auctoritas, ut tamen superbis non crescat effrenatio. [Indeed, because of this, a sermon must be prepared with such skill that the audience, which suffers from diverse vices, can receive a single message that is without contradiction. In a single pass, it must cover each of the passions, but like a twoedged sword, it must remove the cancer of carnal thoughts on both sides. For example, humility must be preached to the proud in a way that does not increase the despair of the timid; the timid must be granted confidence in a way that does not increase the pride of the arrogant.14]

Gregory gives an extensive list of the different types of people who might need evocations shaped for them in particular. It includes addresses to ‘coniugiis obligati’ (‘those who are bound by wedlock’), ‘coniugii nexibus liberi’ (‘those who are free of the ties of marriage’), and ‘qui licet minima, crebro tamen illicita faciunt’ (‘those whose sins are minor but [who] commit them frequently’).15 Gregory then offers examples of how to address these various estates within one single sermon. The ideal for Gregory, then, is to achieve wide-ranging appeal through content aimed at those in very specific situations. Gregory’s advice resurfaces in various forms in twelfth-century sermon writing guides. The general principle appears in Guibert of Nogent’s Liber quo ordine sermo fieri debeat (Book About the Way a Sermon Ought to be Given); Guibert insists that a single sermon should include a mixture of simple material for the unlearned and complex for the learned.16 And Gregory’s advice had a direct and powerful influence on later writers, including Alexander of Ashby, who repeats it verbatim in his De modo praedicandi (On the Mode of Preaching) (c. 1205–1215).17 Inspired by Gregory’s methods, twelfth-century ad status collections encourage preachers to compile estate-based content into sermons addressed to diverse audiences. As Christoph T. Maier observes while analysing crusading propaganda in sermon literature, Jacques de Vitry and Gilbert of Tournai’s collections of sermon material are not designed to be used on exclusive, homogeneous audiences; rather, they act as open-ended models from which a preacher could draw based on the varied needs of those present.18 Hubert de Romans’s ad status work, known as De Eruditione Praedicatorum, opens with advice about how to preach ‘ad omnes homines’ (‘to all people’), and when it then gives advice about how to address people according to their estates, it envisions these estates as subdivisions of a larger, more 14 Gregory the Great, Regula pastoralis, pars 3, chp. 36, ll. 8–12. Translation from

Demacopoulos, Book, p. 202.

15 Gregory the Great, Regula pastoralis, pars 3, chp. 1, ll. 40; 50. Translation from

Demacopoulos, Book, p. 89.

16 James Jerome Murphy’s Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from

Saint Augustine to the Renaissance (London: University of California Press, 1974), p. 302. For Gregory’s influence on later writers, see Murphy, Rhetoric, p. 293. 17 Murphy, Rhetoric, p. 313. 18 Christoph T. Maier, Crusade Propaganda and Ideology: Model Sermons for the Preaching of the Cross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 30.

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diverse listening audience; so, if pilgrims are present, the preacher is instructed to ‘add some salutary words for them for their instruction’.19 Likewise, Honorius Augustodunensis’s collection of ad status material, with exhortations to eight specific groups – including members of the clergy, soldiers, poor folk, rich folk, and others – is nested within a Sermo generalis – the implication being that the preacher was to address these specific groups in turn as parts of a larger, diverse audience.20 Another contemporary sermon-writing guide gives a list of virtues that should be expounded for commoners (vulgarium), and then states that ‘if lords (domini) are present, you could treat of their estate, and commend justice and right judgment and disparage pride, avarice, plunder, and lion-like tyranny’.21 The effective preacher matched his stratified audience to stratified content in order to draw the greatest number of souls to virtue. This idea, of educating a group by delivering content that is aimed at specific subsections of that group, has a powerful analogue in present day pedagogical approaches. Educational theory of the past two decades, challenging the traditional twentieth-century classroom model that is structured around presenting all learners with the same content and didactic approaches, has highlighted the significant differences between learners in term of abilities, backgrounds, and educational needs, and, in response to these differences, has stressed the importance of presenting learners with highly individualized content. Modern educational theorists refer to this approach as differentiated instruction.22 According to Carol Ann Tomlinson, whose work has been foundational for the modern theorization of this approach, differentiated education means offering ‘specific alternatives for individuals to learn

19 The full quotation runs: ‘Quando Peregrini, qui quandoque uadunt insimul, in multitudine

inueniuntur in uia, uel in Ecclesiis, uel alibi, pium est apponere eis uerbum salutare aliquod ad eorum instructionem, et consolationem’. The Latin is from Tommaso Martino’s revised edition of Humbert de Romans’s De eruditione religiosorum predicatorum, in Bibliotheca maxima veterum patrum, ed. by Margarinus de la Bigne, 27 vols (Lyon: Anisson, 1677), xxv [accessed 5 August 2018]. The translation is mine. 20 For Honorius Augustodunensis’s collection of ad status material, see Muessig, p. 260. The idea that ad status collections were not intended for exclusive recitation to isolated estates is suggested by Fiona Somerset, who writes that ‘[t]ypically an ad status address invokes the public good and advises representative groups at all levels of society about how they should behave in order to maintain it, whether by discussing members of the three estates in turn or by anatomizing society’; Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 113. 21 Edited and translated by Siegfried Wenzel, in Latin Sermon Collections, p. 105. 22 See, for example, Carol A. Tomlinson and Marcia B. Imbeau, Leading and Managing a Differentiated Classroom (Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2010); Carol A. Tomlinson et al., The Parallel Curriculum: A Design to Develop High Potential and Challenge High-Ability Learners (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, 2002); Carol A. Tomlinson, How to Differentiate Instruction in Mixed-Ability Classrooms (Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2001); D. Heacox, Differentiating Instruction in the Regular Classroom (Minneapolis, MN: Free Spirit Publishing, 2002).



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as deeply as possible and as quickly as possible, without assuming one student’s road map for learning is identical to anyone else’s’.23 There are different strategies for classroom differentiation. A primary school teacher seeking to develop students’ reading skills might break up a class into groups based on students’ reading levels or learning approaches and assign each group a different task targeted at students’ specific needs. Or, in a different context, the same teacher might choose to create learning groups that pair less advanced learners with more advanced ones. According to educational theorists, such strategies can promote student motivation by ensuring that each student is challenged at an appropriate level and, therefore, motivated to learn. While this basic idea of differentiated education has been fundamental to pedagogical theory for decades, recent developments in educational technology have both underlined the value of this approach and made new types of differentiation possible by enabling new types of assessment and by expanding the possibilities of individualized content.24 Interest in differentiated education has also been stimulated, in recent years, by emerging research in related fields of inquiry, including neuroscience and the psychology of student motivation.25 This research suggests that differentiation works, in part, because the human brain is designed to retain information that it identifies as ‘personally meaningful’ – and therefore responds well to individualized learning content.26 Educational theory also suggests that differentiated learning works because it creates an effective learning community. Within a differentiated classroom or other educational setting, groups of learners can act as models for each other and, in so doing, reinforce the educational experience of the entire community. Tomlinson gives the example of reading groups comprising some advanced and some less advanced learners. The advanced learners deepen their literacy and management skills by taking on leadership roles within these groups, while the less advanced learners learn new literacy skills by listening to the advanced learners.27 In this way, differentiated instruction is not just a stopgap solution to the problems posed by learners’ divergent needs. Rather, this educational strategy deepens learning by encouraging members of the community to support and reinforce each others’ 23 Carol A. Tomlinson, The Differentiated Classroom: Responding to the Needs of All Learners

(Columbus, OH: Pearson Education, 2005), p. 4.

24 See, for example, the types of assessment and approaches to individualization in Eric M.

Carbaugh and Kristina J. Doubet’s The Differentiated Flipped Classroom: A Practical Guide to Digital Learning (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, 2015). 25 For research into student motivation see, for example, Monique Boekaerts’s ‘The Critical Role of Motivation and Education in Classroom Learning’, in The Nature of Learning: Using Research to Inspire Practice, ed. by Hanna Dumont et al. (Tübingen: Centre for Education Research and Innovation, 2010), pp. 91–112; see also Tomlinson, Differentiated Classroom, p. 31. For the ways in which differentiated education is supported by neuroscience, see David A. Sousa and Carol Ann Tomlinson’s Differentiation and the Brain: How Neuroscience Supports the Learner, 2nd edn (Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press, 2011). 26 Sousa and Tomlinson, Differentiation and the Brain, pp. 14–15. 27 Tomlinson, How to Differentiate, p. 28.

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education. This contemporary research about how people learn demonstrates the efficacy of the kinds of educational strategies promoted by Gregory the Great and the ad status writers. And, more important for the present purposes, it provides a valuable framework and useful vocabulary for exploring the educational strategies at play in medieval didactic works.

Differentiated Instruction and Self-Examination Writing In the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council, self-examination material, which drew heavily on contemporary sermon conventions, began to use the same methods of audience differentiation that contemporary sermon guides were promoting. Selfexamination material from this period tends to single out highly specific, and at times apparently mutually contradictory audiences. This strategy seems to have interested Robert Grosseteste, the accomplished and influential Bishop of Lincoln. In the prologue to his Perambulauit Iudas (written before 1235), he claims that he has written the self-examination guide that follows at the request of a religious advisor to a group of ‘simpler brothers’ (simpliciores fratres), for use in their religious community.28 The guidebook that follows is aimed at explaining to the brothers how they should confess to a priest. But in this guidebook, which is purportedly aimed at religious novices, Grosseteste stresses the importance of confessing to a priest any failings in instructing a wife, a son, or a daughter.29 It is hard to imagine such advice being immediately useful to the ‘simpler brothers’, even if we account for the editors’ suggestion that Grosseteste was aiming to cover ‘all the sins committed both in the cloister and in the world’.30 The brothers may have eventually found this information useful for interrogating others, but it would not have been beneficial to their own confessional preparations. At first glance, and taken out of the context of thirteenth-century pastoral rhetoric, there seems to be a rift in the text’s constructed audiences. The audience addressed directly by the work – the one which, using Ruth Evans’s model of audience function, can be termed the ‘intended audience’ – is apparently at odds with the one suggested by the content of the work – which Evans terms the ‘implied audience’.31

28 For the date and intended audience of the text, see Joseph Goering and F. A. C. Mantello,

‘“The Perambulauit Iudas …” (Speculum Confessionis) Attributed to Robert Grosseteste’, Revue Bénédictine, 96 (1986), 125–168 (pp. 125, 132). 29 ‘Maritus uxorem tuam non sufficienter exibuisti nec pro posse tuo instruxisti. Prolem debito affectu non educasti’ (p. 162, ll. 463–464). 30 Goering and Mantello, ‘“The Perambulauit Iudas”’, p. 125. 31 Evans, ‘Readers/Audiences/Texts’, pp. 115–116. Evans provides a model, based on that of Paul Strohm, that distinguishes between four different audience functions: 1) ‘the actual audience’, which may or may not be named explicitly in the text, 2) the ‘inscribed’ audience, which comprises any listeners described within a text, such as Chaucer’s pilgrims, 3) the ‘intended audience’, which Evans describes as those ‘sometimes identified by dedications and addresses to patrons’, and 4) the ‘implied audience’, which Evans describes as ‘the text’s “ideal reader”, anticipated or constructed by statements in the text with which he or she is encouraged to agree’ (pp. 115–116). See also Paul Strohm’s



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From a contemporary perspective, in which rhetorical control in written English tends to be marked by matching tone, content, and diction to one single audience – real or imagined – shifts in a text’s constructed audiences are generally understood as failings or as suggestive of shifts in actual ones. But such shifts in textually constructed audiences are the rule in self-examination writing of the thirteenth century, rather than the exception.32 A remarkable later example of a religious guide with diverse implied audiences is Robert de Sorbon’s Qui vult vere confiteri (c. 1260–1274), which, despite having been written in France, had currency in England through its adaptation into the Somme le roi and its English translations. Robert’s guide, originally written in Latin, can be counted among manuals for penitents; it is effectively a long list of sins that a penitent may have committed, aimed at helping the penitent perform a full and complete confession. It is addressed to ‘[q]ui vult vere confiteri peccata sua ad salutem anime sue’ (‘[h]e who truly wishes to confess his sins for the salvation of his eternal soul’), but in contrast to the seemingly broad intended audience of this opening address, Robert repeatedly creates highly specific implied audiences. The specificity of these audiences is most obvious here, as in other guides, when they are mutually exclusive. So, at times Robert is troubled by the kinds of abuses committed by the laity; in the section on avarice, for example, he includes a model confessional statement that, in its emphasis on paying tithes, was clearly intended for recitation by members of the laity, for whom this would have been an expectation. Elsewhere, he departs from this implied lay audience by fixating on exclusively clerical sins; ‘avarice’, he insists, is also the buying and selling of clerical benefices – a sin which he says is particular to the clergy and other religious.33 Like the sermons anticipated by the ad status collections, the work thus has diverse and, at times, mutually exclusive textually constructed audiences.

‘Chaucer’s Audience(s): Fictional, Implied, Intended, Actual’, Chaucer Review, 18 (1983), 137–164. 32 See, for example, items 23 and 42 in Durkin’s ‘Examining’. The late thirteenth-century Manuel des péchés has diverse and apparently conflicting constructed audiences; see Murchison, ‘Readers’, p. 162. Pierre D’Abernon of Fetchem’s Lumere as lais (1267) offers a curious example in that its intended audience initially excludes children but then, in the conclusion, includes them; see Alexandra Barratt’s ‘Spiritual Writings and Religious Instruction’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, ed. by N. J. Morgan and R. M. Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 340–366 (p. 352). 33 The Latin text on abuses gives: ‘Unde sic debet dicere penitens: Domine, in omnibus istis peccatis peccavi, et male solvi decimas’ (‘And the penitent should say thus: “Lord, I have sinned in all of these sins, and badly paid tithes”’). Regarding the clergy, Robert writes ‘Septimus ramus avaricie est symonia, quando venduntur vel emuntur sacramenta vel prebende [vel aliquid] ecclesiasticum vel religionis. Sed tale peccatum pertinet ad clericos et religiosos’ (‘The seventh branch of avarice is simony, when sacraments, or prebends, or anything ecclesiastical or religious, is sold or bought. This particular sin pertains to clerics and other religious’). Edited in F. N. M. Diekstra, ‘Robert de Sorbon’s Qui Vult Vere Confiteri (ca.1260–74) and its French Versions’, Recherches de théologie et philosophie médiévales, 60 (1993), 215–272 (pp. 216, 250–251). Translations mine.

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Other manuals for penitents exhibit a similar flexibility with constructed audiences.34 The late fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century Clensyng of Mannes Sowle often addresses a penitent; among other topics, it ‘tellith to whom þou schalt make thy confessioun’ (‘explains to whom you should make your confession’), and its motivation is purportedly to educate the ‘many men & women þere ben, not lettred and of simple knowynge’ (‘many men and women that there are, who are not educated [lit. lettered] and are of simple understanding’).35 Yet Lee Patterson, while examining the work, noticed ‘material relevant not to the penitent but to the confessor, such as Clensyng’s discussion of various canonical issues’.36 Taken together, these apparently mutually exclusive constructed audiences – one ‘of simple knowynge’ and one equipped for high theology – suggest that the work, like Robert’s, adopts the kinds of audience differentiation methods that were considered ideal for sermons. The use of these methods merits attention, especially since both the Clensyng and Robert’s guide contain material for use in confessional preparation, and such preparation would typically involve a less diverse actual audience than a sermon. The evidence suggests that these manuals drew on the same differentiated instructional strategies that were being promoted in sermon writing guides at the time, bringing these strategies into new and innovative educational contexts. Diverse and even mutually conflicting audiences in manuals for penitents appear to have been used as a means of reaching the hearts of as many potential audiences as possible. These guides, with their powerful strategies of audience differentiation, reflect a Church grappling with an increasingly large and diverse audience of penitents as self-examination moved increasingly out of the cloister and into the homes – and hearts – of the laity.

The Implied Audiences of Ancrene Wisse and their Implications As the confessional requirements for layfolk were extended and solidified in the thirteenth century, material explaining the shape and contours of sin was moving outside of the Church and into the hands of landholders, merchants, and craftsmen – and self-examination material increasingly included these groups among its diverse and yet specific implied and intended audiences. These new audiences for self-examination material, and the differentiated strategies for reaching them, are crucial to understanding the penitential material in Ancrene Wisse (c. 1220–1230), which was one of the earliest vernacular texts written in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council and was, based on surviving copies and influence, the most popular English guidebook of the thirteenth century. As a guide for women known as anchorites, who lived solitary and enclosed religious lives, the text was not written for the clergy in the strictest sense – although the anchoritic vocation itself did have some clerical associations, since some entered it 34 For further examples, see chapter 2, n. 32. 35 Mark H. Liddell, ‘A New Source of the Parson’s Tale’, in An English Miscellany Presented

to Dr. Furnivall, ed. by W. P. Ker et al. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1901), pp. 255–278 (p. 260).

36 Patterson, ‘“Parson’s Tale”’, p. 340.



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directly from a clerical life.37 In this sense, the manual is firmly situated on the crest of a thirteenth-century wave of lay penitential education. It is also deeply indebted to the rhetoric and ideas of contemporary pastoralia – a category that includes, in Leonard Boyle’s broad definition of the term, any text or technique that helped penitents or priests ‘to deepen their faith and practice’.38 Self-examination is at the heart of this guidance text, both literally and figuratively. In his preface, the author states that he has divided his work into eight ‘dalen’ (‘parts’) (p. 5). The first and last form the ‘outer rule’ which ‘riwleð þe licome ant licomliche deden’ (‘regulates the body and physical acts’), and the six between them the ‘inner rule’, which ‘riwleð þe heorte, ant makeð efne ant smeðe wiðute cnost ant dolc of woh inwit ant of wreiȝende þe segge “Her þu sunegest”’ (‘rules the heart, and makes it even and smooth without the bumps and hollows of a crooked and troubled conscience that says “you are committing a sin here”’) (p. 1). The dualism behind this structure is not maintained; as Christopher Cannon points out, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ are inseparable at both a textual and a structural level.39 It is nevertheless notable that this model, which maps the structure of the text onto the body and heart, places in the most ‘inner’ position the three parts that form a ‘miniature treatise on penance’: part 4 on temptations and their remedies, part 5 on the conditions of confession and the sins of anchorites, and part 6 on penance.40 The audiences described and implied by the work have traditionally posed something of a mystery – one which has been central to scholarship on the work.41 The 37 In modern parlance, ‘clergy’ is often used to describe those whose professions fall

primarily within the established Church. This works well enough for describing groups like monks, who were necessarily ordained and therefore meet both of the Middle English connotations of clergie, but it does not work as well for groups like anchorites. As Bella Millett notes, anchorites occupied a complex position within the Church – one which highlights the limitations of the broader modern use of the term clergy; ‘Ancrene Wisse and the Life of Perfection’, Leeds Studies in English, 33 (2002), 53–76 (p. 65). As enclosed religious, anchorites would seem to fall under the category of ‘clergy’, and indeed, those who entered the anchorhold from monastic enclosure would count as clergy using the traditional definition of ‘one who is ordained’. But those who entered it from lay life, which was the case with the three well-born sisters addressed by the original author of Ancrene Wisse, would not count under this traditional definition. For the Middle English connotations of clergie, see chapter 1, n. 34 above. 38 See Gunn’s Ancrene Wisse. For the definition of pastoralia, see Leonard E. Boyle, ‘The Inter-Conciliar Period 1179–1215 and the Beginnings of Pastoral Manuals’, in Miscellanea Rolando Bandinelli Papa Alessandro III, ed. by Filippo Liotta (Siena: Accademia senese degli intronati, 1986), pp. 45–56 (p. 46). 39 Christopher Cannon, ‘Enclosure’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing, ed. by Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 109–123 (pp. 112–113). 40 Robert Hasenfratz, ‘Introduction’, in Ancrene Wisse, ed. by Robert Hasenfratz (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2000), quoted at p. 443. 41 So, for example, Jennifer Anne Oguma notes that ‘Wisse scholars have shown a consistent interest over the years in questions of authority and audience’ in ‘Justifying a Calling: Audience and Authority in Ancrene Wisse’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Southern California, 2004), DAI A 65:07 (2004): item DA 3140526, ProQuest Dissertations & Theses [accessed 18 June 2018], pp. 9–10. The construction of audience

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author usually addresses his audience directly as ‘mine leoue sustren’ (‘my dear sisters’) – the phrase occurs over fifty times in Bella Millett’s estimation – and most discussions of the work’s audience circle around this intended audience.42 What appears to be additional information about the ‘dear sisters’ can be found in one version of the work alone – that preserved in British Library, MS Cotton Nero A. xiv. This version addresses a more specific group of anchorites at one point – three well-born sisters, descended from the same parents:43 Ȝe, mine leoue sustren, beoð þe ancren þet Ich iknowe þet habbeð lest neode to uroure aȝen þeos temptaciuns, bute one of sicnesse, vor mid more eise ne mid more men[s]ke not Ich none ancre þet habbe al þet hire neod is þene ȝe þreo habbeð, ure Louerd beo hit iþoncked … God hit wot, moni oþer wot lutel of þisse eise, auh beoð ful ofte iderued mid wone and mid scheome, and mid teone. In hire hond ȝif þis cumeð, hit mei beon ham uroure. [You, my dear sisters, are the anchoresses that I know who have the least need of support against these temptations, except only for illness; because I do not know any anchoress who has all she needs with more ease or more respect than you three have, our Lord be thanked for it … God knows, many others have little experience of this ease, but very often suffer from need and humiliation and trouble. If this comes into their hands, it may be a comfort to them. (p. 73)]

It is usually understood that this passage is the work of the original author of the manual, and that the three biological sisters here are the same as the ‘dear sisters’ addressed in the rest of the manual.44 A larger audience of twenty or more anchorites is addressed directly in the copy in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, but it is generally accepted that these are not the ‘dear sisters’ that the author of Ancrene Wisse addressed initially, and that the intended audience of twenty or more was a later addition.45 is an important point of investigation since, as Diane Watt notes, ‘Ancrene Wisse, for example, vividly illustrates the importance audience plays in the composition and revision of a text’; Medieval Women’s Writing: Works by and for Women in England, 1100–1500 (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), p. 7. Since the 80s a great deal of scholarship on the work has been driven by an interest in the way that it constructs and engages its primary audience of women readers. 42 See Bella Millett, ‘“He speaks to me as if I was a public meeting”: Rhetoric and Audience in the Works of the Ancrene Wisse Group’, in Rhetoric of the Anchorhold: Space, Place and Body within Discourses of Enclosure, ed. by Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008), pp. 50–65 (pp. 51; 57). 43 Millett, Guide, p. xliv. 44 Although the Nero copy is not the earliest, it is generally accepted that it preserves here an earlier textual tradition. Yoko Wada, however, expresses some skepticism: ‘One should treat this passage with caution because there is no evidence that all the references to these sisters in the Nero text were inherited from the original text which no longer exists’; ‘What is Ancrene Wisse?’, in A Companion to the Ancrene Wisse, ed. by Yoko Wada (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), pp. 1–28 (p. 4). 45 See Bella Millett’s ‘Introduction’, in Ancrene Wisse: A Guide for Anchoresses: A Translation Based on Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2009), pp. ix–l (p. xliv).



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Did either of these intended audiences (the three sisters or the twenty) correspond to real people – to what Evans, in her model of audience function, terms an ‘actual audience’?46 The question may seem pointless in light of Walter Ong’s wellknown dictum that ‘the writer’s audience is always a fiction’ – that, compared with orators, authors are more removed from their actual audiences, so the audiences they address are always partly invented.47 But if the audience is always a fiction, it is not only a fiction; a textually constructed audience is often based on an actual one, and this was particularly true of medieval religious guides.48 And, as Ong acknowledges, even if a textually constructed audience has no grounding in reality, it can impact a work’s real audience by shaping how one experiences a text.49 Still, according to Millett, some have wondered whether the intended audience of ‘dear sisters’ in Ancrene Wisse might serve an exclusively rhetorical function – in other words, that the sisters might not correspond to actual readers at all. She notes that ‘[t]here are certainly good reasons for not taking medieval addresses to the audience too readily at face value’. But Millett nevertheless finds grounds for considering the three sisters the real recipients of the original text: ‘the circumstantial detail of the two extended addresses to the audience in Ancrene Wisse, first to the three sisters and later to the larger group of anchoresses, is … difficult to explain as fiction, and their textual history suggests that it was understood as fact’.50 Yet evocations and descriptions of other audiences, such as the Nero passage that compares the three original sisters to those who have more need than them, indicate that even in its earliest form the manual reaches out to others beyond the three ‘dear sisters’. These include both a wider group of anchorites, and an unspecified group of

46 Evans, ‘Readers/Audiences/Texts’, pp. 115–116. 47 Ong, ‘Author’s’, p. 17. The author’s audience, in Ong’s model, is not a record of actual

readers in any straightforward sense, but an authorial projection (p. 10). Ong offers the example of Hemingway, who, he claims, uses phrases that suggest a familiarity with his audience: ‘A feature more distinctive of Hemingway … is the way he fictionalizes the reader, and this fictionalizing is often signaled largely by his use of the definite article as a special kind of qualifier or of the demonstrative pronoun “that”, of which the definite article is simply an attenuation’ (p. 13). According to Ong, when Hemingway uses a phrase like ‘To the mountains’, the definite article (‘the’) creates the implication that ‘[t]he reader – every reader – is being cast in the role of a close companion to the author’ (p. 13). Derek Pearsall has adapted Ong’s views to the context of medieval romance, writing that: ‘The content of a romance and its manner of address’ are ‘fallible as indicators of its actual audience’; ‘Middle English Romance and its Audiences’, in Historical and Editorial Studies in Medieval and Early Modern English for Johan Gerritsen, ed. by Mary-Jo Arn, Hanneke Wirtjies, and Hans Jansen (Groningen: WoltersNoordhoff, 1985), pp. 37–47 (p. 44). 48 Evans, drawing on studies by Richard Firth Green and Paul Zumthor, remarks on the interconnectedness of textually constructed and actual audiences: ‘historically real and implied audiences are not easily distinguished’. She also observes that implied audiences were often modified in response to the needs of actual ones (‘Readers’, pp. 110–111). 49 Ong, ‘Author’s’, p. 19. 50 Millett, ‘“He speaks”’, quoted at p. 52.

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non-anchoritic readers.51 These other intended and implied audiences are particularly pronounced in part 5 of the manual. This part, which describes the conditions of a good confession and falls at the center of the so-called ‘miniature treatise on penance’, includes warnings about seemingly worldly sins – those that would be hard for an anchorite to commit, such as ‘longe beon unbischpet’ (‘delaying being confirmed’) (p. 80). It also contains confessional statements from the point of view of a wife and a nun – statements that would seem to be inappropriate for anchoritic women, whose position excluded them from being either: ‘Ich am an ancre; a nunne; a wif iweddet’ (‘I am an anchoress; a nun; a married woman’) (p. 120). These passages cannot be explained away as references to an anchoritic reader’s previous life, since the utterances are made for the audience to voice during confession and are written in the present tense.52 These multiple implied and intended audiences appear in the first and longest section of part 5 – described here as the ‘general conditions’. This more general part is broken up into two ‘limen’ (‘branches’): the power of confession, and the qualities of a good confession (p. 114). The second of these is by far the longest, and it subdivides further into the sixteen conditions of a good confession, beginning with ‘Schrift schal beo wreiful. Mon schal wreien him i schrift, nawt werien him ne seggen, “Ich hit dude þurh oþre”, “Ich wes ined þerto”, “Þe feond hit makede me don”’ (‘Confession must be accusatory. You must accuse yourself in confession, not excuse yourself and say, “It was someone else’s fault”, “I was forced to”, “The devil made me do it”’) (pp. 115–116). At the end of the ‘general conditions’, the author writes that he has created the sixteen subdivisions for the benefit of his ‘dear sisters’: ‘Nu ȝe habbeð alle ihaued, as Ich understonde, þe sixtene stucchen þe Ich bihet to dealen; ant alle Ich habbe tobroken ham ow, mine leoue sustren, as me deð to children þe mahten wið unbroke bread deien on hunger’ (‘Now you have had all the sixteen sections that I promised to divide for you, and I have broken them all up for you, my dear sisters, as people do for children who might die of hunger with unbroken bread’) (p. 129). But he then explains that the preceding material was written with an eye to a wider audience: ‘Mine leoue sustren, þis fifte dale, þe is of schrift, limpeð to alle men iliche; for-þi ne wundri ȝe ow nawt þet Ich toward ow nomeliche nabbe nawt ispeken i þis dale’ (‘My dear sisters, this fifth part, which is about confession, is relevant to everybody alike; so do not be surprised that I have not spoken to you in particular in this part’) (p. 129). It is curious that the author waits until the end of the ‘general conditions’ to explicitly describe the audience of this part; someone encountering the text for the first time will read through all of the ‘general conditions’ – a whole twelve leaves in the Corpus manuscript (fols 81r–93r) – before being told that it is suitable for an audience that is larger than just the ‘dear sisters’.

51 Millett, ‘“He speaks”’, pp. 51–52. Gunn has recently drawn attention to this group of non-

anchoritic readers, remarking from it and from the text’s emphasis on pastoral education that the work is ‘always open to a wider – and not necessarily female – readership’ (Ancrene Wisse, p. 8). 52 See the further discussion of this passage below.



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Following the ‘general conditions’ is a second, shorter section, described here as the ‘anchoritic confession’. The author introduces this section by writing, ‘Habbeð þah to ower bihoue þis lutle leaste ende’ (‘But here is a short final section for your use’) (p. 129). Some of the sins in this section are more particular to anchoritic life: ‘of silences ibrokene, of sitten longe ed þurl, of vres mis iseide, wiðute ȝeme of heorte oðer in untime’ (‘breaking times of silence, sitting too long at the window, saying the Hours incorrectly, without concentrating, or at the wrong time’) (p. 129). Part 5 therefore ends with a return to the manual’s usual intended and implied audience. Writing in 1981, Georgianna observed that, with a few exceptions, ‘critics simply ignore the author’s extensive discussion of sin and confession’, and the situation has changed only marginally in the intervening years.53 This is, in part, because the multiple and at times mutually contradictory audiences addressed and implied in part 5 have traditionally led scholars to dismiss it as disjointed or as the regrettable product of the author’s laziness.54 While it is now generally accepted that part 5 is integral to Ancrene Wisse, reflective of contemporary pastoral interests in confession, the multiple constructed audiences of this part continue to present a mystery.55 Scholars have suggested that the ‘general conditions’ part, which has multiple, mutually exclusive constructed audiences, may have been deliberately aimed at a different actual audience than the rest of the manual. Potential candidates include

53 Linda Georgianna, The Solitary Self: Individuality in the ‘Ancrene Wisse’ (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 121. Only one study has been devoted exclusively to part 5 – Bella Millett’s ‘Ancrene Wisse and the Conditions of Confession’, English Studies, 80 (1999), 193–215. 54 John Hubert Gray argued that part 5 is distinct from the others in its relatively broad applicability, and in its almost complete lack of address to an anchoritic audience. He concluded that the author wrote this part for some other purpose, and included it in his anchoritic guide as an afterthought; ‘The Influence of Confessional Literature on the Composition of the Ancrene Riwle’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of London, King’s College, 1961), pp. 83; 91. Related to this argument was the view that the part’s focus on confession would make it unsuitable for anchorites, who were expected to be morally upstanding. So, in the introduction to M. B. Salu’s influential 1955 edition, Gerard Sitwell argued that ‘In so far as the seven deadly sins represent tendencies which are in all men, these sections do, of course, apply to the anchoress’, but held that ‘they are in no way necessary, and it might be fairly argued that they are unsuitable’; ‘Introduction’, in The Ancrene Riwle: The Corpus MS., ed. by M. B. Salu (London: Burns & Oates, 1955), pp. vii–xxii (p. xix). In her own introduction, Salu echoed Sitwell by stating that these parts ‘may themselves be an insertion by the author of his own previously written work’ and, like Gray, drew on the different audiences as evidence; ‘Translator’s Note’, in The Ancrene Riwle: The Corpus MS, ed. by M. B. Salu (London: Burns & Oates, 1955), pp. xxiii–xxvi (p. xxv). 55 The hypothesized independent origin of the confessional material was firmly rejected by Georgianna in her 1981 monograph (Solitary, pp. 120–121). Georgianna demonstrated that the focus of part 5 on what she terms ‘moral theology’ – ‘the branch of theology that helps the ordinary Christian distinguish right from wrong’ – is not, as Sitwell and Salu had suggested, out of place in the manual. Indeed, she argues that questions of moral theology arise throughout the manual (p. 121). See further Gunn, Ancrene Wisse, p. 147.

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lay people, confessors, or the anchorites’ maids.56 But context is valuable here. As I have argued above, multiple, and even mutually conflicting, textually constructed audiences were common in self-examination writing at the time. Including material for highly specific audiences was an established technique for making a work appeal to a broad and diverse public with broad and diverse needs. Understood within this context, the multiple, highly specific constructed audiences in Ancrene Wisse’s ‘general conditions’ do not appear to suggest a mistake. Nor do they necessarily reflect an actual audience of anchorites’ maids or confessors.57 Rather, by evoking these highly specific constructed audiences, Ancrene Wisse was drawing on an established technique for making a text accessible to a broad and diverse actual audience. But why does the author wait so long – until the absolute end of the ‘general conditions’ – to explicitly acknowledge that the ‘general conditions’ section contains other constructed audiences beyond the ‘dear sisters’? The delay cannot be simply a mistake. Given how often the author calls out to his ‘dear sisters’ throughout the rest of the text, he would surely remember to make this change of constructed audience explicit when, at the beginning of the ‘general conditions’, he stops addressing them explicitly. And if it is true, as current consensus holds, that the author partially revised Ancrene Wisse – the results of which appear to be preserved in the Corpus manuscript – it seems likely that he would have caught an omission as glaring as an unannounced move toward a new, at times apparently contradictory, constructed audience.58 The oddity merits further attention. To understand how the audience is constructed in part 5, it is useful to turn back to the start of this part. No address to the ‘dear sisters’ can be found at the start of part 5, even though the conclusion to part 4 addresses a ‘leoue suster’ (‘dear sister’) (p. 112). The first hint of an implied audience in part 5 is ‘us’: ‘Schrift wesheð us of alle ure fulðen, ȝelt us alle ure luren, makeð us Godes children’ (‘Confession washes away all our filth, gives us back all that we have lost, and makes us God’s children’) (p. 114). ‘Us’ here is somewhat vague. It indicates that the author counts himself within his implied audience, but we do not learn much else about this audience. At this stage there is nothing to suggest that he is still addressing the ‘dear sisters’ of the previous parts, but there is nothing to contradict this either. Next, in the first ‘branch’ of the ‘general conditions’ – the powers of confession – the author continues to use pronouns like ‘us’, ‘we’, and ‘ure’ to construct his audience. He also addresses the audience directly, ‘Lokið nu ful ȝeorne hwet tis beo to seggen’ (‘Now pay careful attention to what this means’) (p. 114). And he introduces into this discussion what Millett terms a ‘paradigmatic sinner’.59 He writes, for

56 For the suggestion that it may have been intended for a more general lay audience,

see Ancrene Wisse, ed. by Robert Hasenfratz (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2000), p. 460, n. 486; for confessors, see Ancrene Wisse and see Oguma, ‘Justifying’, pp. 39–65; for the anchorites’ maids, see Anne Savage and Nicholas Watson, Anchoritic Spirituality: ‘Ancrene Wisse’ and Associated Works (New York: Paulist, 1991), p. 392, n. 58. 57 See above in this chapter. 58 For the author’s revisions, see Millett, Guide, p. xxxviii. 59 Millett, Ancrene Wisse, II, p. 233, n. 5.564.



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example, ‘Þe sunfule seolf is þe unwihtes lond, þe is ure deadliche fa’ (‘The sinner himself is the land of the devil, who is our mortal enemy’) (p. 115). The author speaks again of a paradigmatic sinner while offering an exposition on a biblical passage: ‘Erunt sicut fuerant antequam proieceram eos; þet is, scrift schal makie þe mon al swuch as he wes biuore þet he sunegede’ (‘They will be as they had been before I had rejected them: that is, confession will make a man just as he was before he sinned’) (p. 115). Millett observes that the author often uses sum mon, and its associated masculine singular pronouns to illustrate a point that applies to sinners in general.60 Through this general sinner, the author expands the implied audience beyond the ‘dear sisters’ addressed elsewhere, but there is of course nothing to exclude the ‘dear sisters’ from identification with the paradigmatic sinner evoked through sum mon. The paradigmatic sinner reoccurs throughout the ‘general conditions’, but this part also has many more specific implied audiences. The fourth condition of confession constructs an audience of women alone. It states that confession should be ‘naked’, and explains what this means using a sample confession voiced by a woman – which implies a female audience: ‘“Sire”, ha seið, þe wummon, “Ich habbe ihaued leofmon”, oðer “Ich habbe ibeon”, ha seið, “fol of me seoluen”. Þis nis nawt naket schrift. Biclute þu hit nawt. Do awei þe totagges! Vnwrih þe ant sei, “Sire, Godes are! Ich am a ful stod-meare, a stinkinde hore!”’ (‘“Father”, a woman will say, “I have had a lover”, or “I have made a fool of myself”. This is not naked confession. Don’t wrap it up. Get rid of the trimmings! Lay yourself bare and say, “Father, God have mercy! I am a filthy stud-mare, a stinking whore!”’) (p. 120).61 Then, still in this fourth condition, the work has an even more specific implied audience. It provides some more sample statements that could be used during confession which resemble, in their first-person mode of address, the ‘forms of confession’ described by Cornett. The first, illustrating the circumstance of person, begins ‘Sire, Ich am an ancre; a nunne; a wif iweddet; a meiden; a wummon þet me lefde se wel’ (‘Father, I am an anchoress; a nun; a married woman; an unmarried girl; a woman in whom great trust was placed’) (pp. 120–121). With ‘an ancre’, the author seems to evoke his ‘dear sisters’ – the first explicit nod to them in part 5. Indeed, Mary Flowers Braswell, in her discussion of how confessional literature led to the development of individualistic fictional characters, assumes that monologues such as this one are in the voice of ‘the fictional persona of the anchoress created by the author of the Wisse’.62 But the statements that follow the anchoritic one are clearly not voiced by an anchorite, but by other implied audiences; some of these (the nuns and wives) exclude the anchoritic reader and reach out to the kinds of layfolk that were increasingly becoming the audience of this kind of self-examination writing. 60 Millett, Ancrene Wisse, II, p. 233, n. 5.564; Millett, ‘“He speaks”’, p. 63, n. 11. 61 In her study of the reading practices expected in Ancrene Wisse, Elizabeth Robertson

argues that monologues such as this one create a new ‘reader function’; while the reader is usually depicted as the addressee of the text, here, the reader becomes a speaker within it; ‘“This Living Hand”: Thirteenth-Century Female Literacy, Materialist Immanence, and the Reader of the Ancrene Wisse’, Speculum, 78.1 (2003), 1–36 (p. 27). 62 Braswell, Medieval Sinner, p. 50.

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The passage, then, borrows from the differentiated educational strategies of contemporary sermon guides, stirring the hearts of a variety of highly specific audience members. Yet at the very moment it demarcates the implied anchoritic audience from other implied audiences, the monologue depicts the former as equal to the latter in terms of its propensity to sin; none of the speakers – no matter her vocation – is more sinful here than any other. And these different implied audiences share not only a general propensity to sin but one single confessional utterance; a single ‘Ich am’ / ‘I am’ serves for all of the speakers (p. 120), which suggests that the confessional statement that follows is common to all. The ‘ancre’ here, while separate from the other audiences, is guilty of the same sin, and the monologue enacts a kind of moral levelling. This is, of course, in keeping with the pastoral teaching of the day, which stressed that sin is universal, and with the author’s constant reminders to his anchoritic audience to stay vigilant. Few of the other monologues illustrating the circumstances of sin imply a highly specific audience, although the monologue for the circumstance of place hints at anchorites through the sins that it describes: ‘Sire, þus Ich pleide oðer spec i chirche; e[o]de o ring i chirchȝard; biheold hit oþer wreastlunge, ant oðre fol gomenes; spec þus oðer pleide biuoren worltliche men, biuoren [religiuse], in ancre-hus, ed oþer þurl þen Ich schulde, neh hali þing’ (‘Father I joked or talked in this way in church; joined in round dances in the churchyard; watched the dances or the wrestling, and other frivolous amusements; talked in such a way or joked in the presence of people living in the world, or of religious, in the anchor-house, at another window than I should have, near sacred things’) (p. 121). The implied audience here is complex. ‘Ancre-hus’ and ‘þurl’ (‘window’) imply anchorites, but ‘þus Ich pleide oðer spec i chirche’ (‘I joked or talked in this way in church’) apparently does not, since elsewhere in the guide the author suggests that he does not expect anchorites to sit in church, but rather to watch the service through a special window. Like the monologue for place, then, this monologue contains a number of different implied audiences. And, like the other, it does not emphasize the differences between these groups, but, by placing their statements alongside each other, implies equality between them. Indeed, the difficulty in separating the various speakers from each other creates a levelling effect. It is worth considering how these implied audiences would have worked for a lay reader of the text – especially since the text was owned by several. These include the wealthy landowner Matilda de Clare in the second half of the thirteenth century and one John Purcel, around 1300.63 On one hand, the moments that address the anchoress – the paradigmatic sinner in Ancrene Wisse – must have served as an example to the lay reader, inviting comparisons that uphold the anchorite as morally superior.64 On the other hand, as the text’s distinctive constructed audiences bleed into 63 See Catherine Innes-Parker ‘The Legacy of Ancrene Wisse: Translations, Adaptations,

Influences and Audience, with Special Attention to Women Readers’, in A Companion to the Ancrene Wisse, pp. 145–173 (p. 148). 64 It is worth noting that this text is remarkable insofar as the paradigmatic sinner is a woman; as Jacqueline Murray notes, in most confessional texts the paradigmatic sinner is a man. See Jacqueline Murray, ‘Gendered Souls in Sexed Bodies: The Male Construction



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each other in this section to create a levelling effect, the lay reader is invited to see herself as equal to the anchorite, and both are subsumed into a broader community of sinners. While much of the manual works to demarcate the anchoritic audience from others, the levelling effect in part 5 pulls in the opposite direction, blurring the boundaries between the laity and the religious, the community and the solitary, and between the most sinful and the least. The author extends the levelling effect in the next part of the ‘general conditions’ by using more pronouns like ‘us’ to describe sinners in general, showing that he sees himself among the sinners he addresses. Such levelling language stands in stark contrast to the ways he constructs audiences in other parts of the text. As Millett argues, in these other parts, the author generally creates the impression of a close relationship with the ‘leoue sustren’ and demarcates them as role models for others, writing for example: ‘Ich write muchel for oþre þet nawiht ne rineð ow, mine leoue sustren, for nabbe ȝe nawt te nome – ne ne schulen habben, þurh þe grace of Godd – of totilde ancres’ (‘I write a great deal for others which doesn’t apply to you at all, my dear sisters, because you don’t have the reputation – and never will, through the grace of God – of peeping anchoresses’).65 The author’s contemporaries picked up on the distinctive audiences in the ‘general conditions’.66 In one case, a reviser seems to have been bothered by the apparent switch from an address to an undefined sinner (using ‘sum mon’) (p. 128), to a statement that is apparently voiced by an individual woman sinner. The reviser added female pronouns to the beginning of the passage to try to resolve the tension he perceived between these two audiences.67 But there is nothing to suggest that this response was typical, especially since most copies are left unaltered, and since such audience differentiation was clearly a standard educational strategy at the time. As we have seen, after the ‘general conditions’, the author returns to addressing the audience of anchorites explicitly with the ‘anchoritic confession’. Yet he does not immediately return to his tendency of stressing the anchorites’ superior virtue. Of of Female Sexuality in Some Medieval Confessors’ Manuals’, in Handling Sin: Confession in the Middle Ages, ed. by Peter Biller and A. J. Minnis (York: York Medieval Press, 1998), pp. 79–94 (pp. 80–83; 93). 65 Millett, ‘“He speaks”’, p. 58. Millett writes of this passage, ‘While making it clear that his work is not just composed for his immediate audience, [the author] nevertheless distinguishes them flatteringly from other possible anchoritic readers’ (p. 58). Millett argues that, while the author clearly did expect his text to reach real non-anchoritic readers, his addresses to these also served a distinct rhetorical function for the anchoritic audience, namely, to emphasize its superior virtue (‘“He speaks”’, p. 56). In light of Thomas of Chobham’s suggestion in the Summa de artes praedicandi that flattery can make an audience more open to teaching, Millett suggests that Ancrene Wisse might praise the ‘dear sisters’ in order to spur them to virtue (p. 61). 66 See Millett, Ancrene Wisse, II, p. 233, n. 5.564. 67 Millett, Ancrene Wisse, II, p. 233, n. 5.564. Millett describes the apparent motivation behind the revisions: ‘The problem seems to be … that the author begins by making a point which applies to penitents in general, using (as often) the hypothetical sum mon with the masculine singular personal pronoun to cover both sexes, but then illustrates it by an example which applies only to his immediate female audience’ (Ancrene Wisse, p. 233, n. 5.564).

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the ‘cuðe sunnen’ (‘manifest sins’) (p. 129) that he claims anchorites must confess, many are relatively minor – the kind to which a contemporary priest’s summa would assign light penance: ‘leote … claðes unseowet, bireinet, unwesschen, breoke nep oðer disch’ (‘leaving clothes undarned, damp with rain, or unwashed, breaking cups or plates’) (p. 130). Yet we must not take this to suggest that he thought anchorites incapable of more serious offenses; his list of ‘manifest sins’ also includes some of the ‘mother’ sins: ‘prude’ (‘pride’), ‘onde’ (‘envy’), ‘wraððe’ (‘anger’), ‘slawðe’ (‘sloth’) and ‘of mete, of drunch to muchel oðer to lutel’ (‘eating or drinking too much or too little’) (p. 129). After this list of sins particular to anchorites, he states that, ‘To euch preost mei ancre schriuen hire of swucche utterliche sunne þe to alle bifalleð; ah ful trusti ha schal beon o þe preostes godlec þet ha allunge schaweð to hu hire stonde abute flesches temptatiuns, ȝef ha is swa ifondet, bute i deaðes dute’ (‘An anchoress can confess those external sins that are common to anyone to any priest; but if she is subject to sexual temptations, she must be very confident of the virtue of the priest to whom she reveals this fully unless she is in danger of death’) (p. 130). The description of sins ‘þe to alle bifalleð’ (‘that are common to anyone’) implies that the anchorite shares certain sins with others. The author does recognize that some anchorites are above such sins, but even here he is cautious: ‘Ȝef ei ancre nat nawt of þulliche þinges, þonki ȝeorne Iesu Crist, ant halde hire i drede; þe deouel nis nawt dead, þet wite ha, þah he slepe’ (‘If any anchoress knows nothing about such things, she should give earnest thanks to Jesus Christ, and live in fear; the devil is not dead, she can be sure of that, even if he is asleep’) (p. 130). The tone is markedly changed from that of other parts of the manual, such as the insistence that the anchoritic audience will never have a reputation of being ‘totilde ancres’ (‘peeping anchoresses’). Yet although the anchorite is not significantly different in terms of her propensity to sin, we learn, at the end of part 5, that she does have different requirements in terms of penance: ‘Þe preost ne þearf for na gult, bute hit beo þe greattre, leggen oþer schrift on ow þen ȝe leadeð efter þeos riwle’ (‘Unless a sin is fairly serious, the priest need not impose any other penance on you for it than the life that you are leading according to this rule’) (p. 130). The implication of the anchorite’s distinctiveness here acts as a bridge to the opening of part 6, in which the author resumes his tendency to stress the anchorites’ high level of spiritual attainment: ‘Al is penitence, ant strong penitence, þet ȝe eauer deheð, mine leoue sustren’ (‘Everything that you have to bear, my dear sisters, is penance, and hard penance’) (p. 132).68 It is in part 5 alone, then, that the anchoritic audience is, in a sustained way, cast as equal to others, not just in its propensity to sin, but in some of the specific sins this audience commits. The significance of this unique aspect of part 5 becomes evident when one considers that it lies at the center of the text – in the inner part of the manual which is, according to the author, most removed from the external world. Rather than leading the anchorite away from others, as we might expect of a journey away from the external, this journey inwards casts her as equal – at least in 68 As Georgianna notes, this opening passage represents ‘[a] marked change in the Ancrene

Wisse author’s attitude toward the anchoress’ (Solitary, p. 120).



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her propensity to sin – to various other audiences, including the layfolk who were becoming an increasingly important audience for self-examination material. In other words, the movement inward effects a movement toward the wider community, encompassing nuns, laywomen, and others. That the journey inward ultimately dissolves some of the distinctions between the anchorite and others might seem like a paradox, but it is, of course, one that characterizes devotional practices of the period more generally.69 Moreover, the seeming paradox here – that a movement away from the external world highlights the anchorite’s position within a wider community – is one that finds a parallel in anchoritic life itself. According to Cannon, the central ‘doctrinal problem’ of anchoritic enclosure is that the anchorite is at once expected to be both removed from the community and an agent of its improvement; the injunction that ‘the reader “gather in [her] heart all the sick and sorrowful who endure misery” is in deep conflict with the very logic of enclosure’.70 The guidebook then, by evoking the widening audiences of self-examination material following the Fourth Lateran Council and positioning the anchorites it addresses firmly among them, stands as a powerful metaphor for the significant tensions at the heart of anchoritic enclosure. The multiple and at times mutually conflicting audiences of Ancrene Wisse, then, serve a powerful educational function. They enact a form of differentiated instruction, making the text speak, on an individual level, to members of a diverse audience, at a moment when confessional material was increasingly moving out of the cloister and into the home. At the same time, the text creatively explores the collectivist aims that for Gregory and other medieval thinkers underlie a differentiated instructional approach by, at the heart of part 5, blurring the distinctions between these audiences, and casting them as equals within a broader community of sinners. Situating Ancrene Wisse within the tradition of self-examination writing in which it participates shows that the text’s complex construction of audience is not, as was once thought, a mistake, but a powerful rhetorical and educational tool – one that reflects the multifaceted creative energies that accompanied the first major wave of self-examination writing in medieval England.

69 This model is perhaps best summed up by Bynum who, in her seminal study of medieval

individuality, writes that, ‘In the twelfth century, turning inward to explore motivation went hand in hand with a sense of belonging to a group that not only defined its own life by means of a model but also was itself – as group and as pattern – a means of salvation and of evangelism’ (‘Did the Twelfth Century’, p. 106). 70 Cannon, ‘Enclosure’, p. 114.

Part II Manuals for Penitents, 1250–1300

Chapter 3 Learning about Sin

T

he middle of the thirteenth century saw the rise of the first true manuals for penitents – in the sense of long guidebooks about sin that explicitly advertise their benefit to penitents, rather than priests. It was in the same period that self-examination practices, which had since the early days of the Church been the particular – but by no means exclusive – realm of the clergy, started to move decisively out of the cloister and into the home. This shift was heralded by Ancrene Wisse, which celebrates, describes, and dwells on self-examination practices, despite being addressed to a non-clerical audience.1 While a few other earlier works, like the twelfth-century Vices and Virtues, also anticipate non-clerical audiences, it is only in the second half of the thirteenth century that authors began to address members of the laity – as in those whose vocations fell primarily outside of the institutional church – in a significant way, and that manuals for penitents truly emerged. As the evidence here shows, these manuals reached lay audiences, who were expected to read them in their own homes, alone or in groups. The movement of self-examintion material out of the cloister and into the home brought learning that had largely been controlled by the clergy into the hands of the laity and it can therefore be thought of as reflecting, and contributing to, the laity’s growing interest in imitating clerical lives. Pastoral texts promoted a form of imitatio clerici among the laity, and encouraged the laity to engage in the lectio divina – a kind of meditative reading that had traditionally been the near-exclusive realm of the clergy.2 Claire Waters notes that religious works in this period addressed to the laity invite their readers to experience a clerical mode of reading: ‘Rather than shaping their audiences primarily as readers, these texts imagine and address them as students, as discipuli, in a model sometimes explicitly and more often implicitly tied to the monastic and scholastic modes in which their teachers had been trained’. Waters notes that this mode of reading ‘became available, as these texts were copied, recopied, and retranslated, to an ever-wider audience’.3 At the same time as clerical 1

See chapter 2 above.

2 On the promotion of imitatio clerici in late medieval vernacular theology, see Nicole R.

Rice’s ‘Devotional Literature and Lay Spiritual Authority: Imitatio clerici in Book to a Mother’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 35.2 (2005), 187–216 (pp. 188–193). On the laity’s increasing participation in lectio divina, see Jennifer Bryan’s Looking Inward, pp. 13–15; Nicole Rice’s Lay Piety, pp. 47–59; and Claire Waters’s Translating Clergie: Status, Education, and Salvation in Thirteenth-Century Vernacular Texts (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 3 Waters, Translating Clergie, p. 5.

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life was becoming increasingly inaccessible to the laity due to restrictions on new religious orders, clerical modes of reading were being increasingly embraced.4

Translating Sin in the Manuel des péchés The Manuel des péchés (c. 1260) was on the vanguard of these fashionable new books that circulated among the laity and, as the most popular manual for penitents written in England at the time, stands as a good representative of the change. It is aimed at providing guidance to penitents about sin and the process of confession, and the author states as much in his book, ‘[k]y s’alme vodra amender … trovera divers peché’ (‘Who would wish to cure his soul … will find different sins’).5 It is divided into five ‘books’, each dedicated to a key tool of behavioural reform: the articles of the faith, Commandments, sins, sacrilege, and the sacraments. In its emphasis on these elements of the faith, the Manuel resembles various priests’ guides that were circulating at the time. It was once held that Guilelmus Peraldus’s Summa de vitiis and his Summa de virtutibus (both c. 1236) were the ultimate sources for the Manuel’s treatment of these elements of the faith, although Fritz Kemmler has suggested that a different priests’ guide, Richard of Wetheringsette’s Summa (c. 1230–1240) may supply closer parallels to the Manuel.6 Yet despite these similarities to contemporary priests’ guides, the Manuel is not, on the whole, aimed at guiding a priest through the confessional interrogation, but at guiding an individual through confessional preparation.7 In the Manuel, the elements of the faith serve as frameworks for identifying moral failings. So, the second book, on the Commandments, describes the 4 Canon 13 of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 has traditionally been interpreted as

a ban on the founding of new religious orders. Recent scholars have questioned both the traditional interpretation of Canon 13 and the effectiveness of this canon; see the discussion of the traditional approach and its re-evaluation in Elizabeth Freeman’s ‘The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, the Prohibition against New Religious Orders, and Religious Women’, Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures, 44. 1 (2018), 1–23. Regardless of the impact of Canon 13, however, other barriers to convent life presented themselves in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England; see the discussion in Elizabeth Robertson’s Early English Devotional Prose and the Female Audience (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), pp. 22–24. 5 Waddington, Manuel, I, ll. 54–55. Translated in Schemmann, Confessional, p. 307. This passage is discussed at greater length below. 6 Fritz Kemmler claims that the similarities between the Manuel and Peraldus’s Summae have been overstated; see ‘Exempla’ in Context: A Historical and Critical Study of Robert Mannyng of Brunne’s ‘Handlyng Synne’ (Tübingen: G. Narr, 1984), p. 25. Parallels between Wetheringsette’s Summa and the Manuel are discussed in Kemmler, ‘Exempla’, pp. 48 and 59. I discuss the Manuel’s sources at greater length in ‘“Desturné en us de secularité”?: Authority and Narrative Framing in the Cursed Dancers Episode of the Manuel des péchés’, in The Cursed Carolers in Context, ed. by Lynneth Miller Renberg and Bradley Phillis (New York: Routledge, 2021), pp. 74–77. 7 For an overview of approaches to the work’s audiences, see Claire M. Waters’s ‘The Voice of the Sluggard: Humanizing Sloth in the Manuel des pechiez’, The Yearbook of Langland Studies, 33 (2019), 185–204 (pp. 185–186). I explore the question in ‘Readers’.

Learning about Sin 69



fourth commandment through different kinds of sins against it: ‘Cuntre ce funt premereme[n]t / Ceus ke ne sunt obedient / A fere ke unt comaundé / Pere e mere sons peché’ (‘Firstly, against this [commandment] are those who are not obedient in doing that which is commanded by a father or mother, without sin’).8 Rather than simply explaining the Commandments or asking the reader to memorize them, the text gives examples of sins against them so that the Commandments can be used for self-examination purposes. The poem grounds the abstract theology of sin in accessible, everyday examples. Avarice is explained in concrete terms, using the example of a man who hoards wheat in order to sell it at a profit later: ‘Humme ke custumablement / Retient chose trop lungement, Cum est veu blé pur plus gayner, / Pur duner suriz a manger, / De meint humme iert maudiez! / Ce dist Salemun le senez’ (‘The man who, by custom, retains something too long, such as old grain, in order to gain more – to leave it for the mice to eat – is badmouthed by many a man; so says Solomon the wise!’).9 Pride is exemplified through a reference to the well-known Song of Roland: ‘Ky un poy d’ure est escoler, / Lors quide tut le mund saver / Meint un quide Roland valer / Ke ne vaut pigace d’Olyver’ (‘Whoever studies for a minute instantly believes he knows everything! Many a man appraises himself as Roland who isn’t worth even a bit of Oliver’).10 The descriptions of sin are illustrated through stories drawn from sources such as Bede, Gregory the Great, and the Vitae patrum and ranging from the traditional to the outlandish. Some of the latter tales are clearly intended to be shocking or entertaining as well as didactic. The section on envy recounts a story that is taken from, and attributed to, Gregory the Great, of two men who had lived together in a hermitage. When one is left alone, he prays to God for comfort. Suddenly, a bear appears at his door. The hermit asks the bear to guard his five or six sheep. The poem dwells on this anthropomorphic bear in charming detail: ‘Semblaunt fist l’urs de otrayer. / Assét fu pastur merveilus, / Kar berbis soleit manger l’urs’ (‘the bear seems to agree – quite an unusual shepherd, since bears are accustomed to eat sheep!’).11 Monks envious of the hermit’s miraculous shepherd bear kill it, and, almost as an afterthought, the story offers a warning against envy: God punishes the monks for their sin by giving them leprosy. The tale’s moralization against envy here is a departure from Waddington’s source – one that is representative of Waddington’s broader 8 Waddington, Manuel, I, ll. 1493–1496. The translation here and throughout this section is

mine.

9 Waddington, Manuel, I, ll. 4461–4466; since there is probably a faulty manuscript reading

in the copy of the Manuel that serves as a base text for Russell’s edition (Cambridge, University Library, MS Mm. 6.4), ‘veu’ here has been supplied from Frederick J. Furnivall’s edition; Roberd of Brunne’s ‘Handlyng Synne’ with the French Treatise on which it is Founded, ed. by Frederick J. Furnivall (London: J. B. Nichols, 1862), l. 4639. 10 Waddington, Manuel, I, ll. 2999–3002. Generally speaking, ‘saver’ in Anglo-Norman can mean ‘to know’ or ‘to save’, but in this case the former meaning is clearly intended since the orthography of this copy of the text consistently makes a distinction between ‘saver’ (‘to know’) and ‘sauver’ (‘to save’). 11 Waddington, Manuel, I, ll. 3746–3748.

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tendency to reshape and reimagine his source material into shocking narratives about the wages of sin. Aside from making the idea of sin accessible through concrete examples and surprising narratives, the poem also operates as a kind of self-help guide; it gives actionable advice about how to prevent sin, and – where prevention has failed – how to reflect upon it and confess it. In the section on lechery, for example, it urges, ‘Entendre me poét, si vus plest, / La manere tut devét cunter / Kant vus volét dreit confesser’ (‘Pay attention to me, please! When you go to confess, you must tell everything about the manner [i.e. in which the sin was committed]’).12 Waddington, then, is concerned not only with educating about the fundamentals of moral doctrine but also with inspiring self-reflection and specific behavioural changes in his audience. The poem seems to have been particularly open to adaptation and reworking, and the five books already noted are often found extracted or accompanied by some or all of an additional four books, numbered consecutively by Matthew Sullivan in his work on the Manuel.13 The sixth book provides a lengthy warning against sin and then stresses the importance of loving God. The seventh provides an applied approach to the theology of sin offered in the other books, offering guidance about the powers of confession and how to perform a proper confession; scorn, for example, has no place in confession according to William: ‘C’est a saver, kant hum n’ad quer / Retrere se[i] memes de pecher. / A ke[i] fere au prestre alez, / Si lesser vos pechez ne volez?’ (‘Take note: when a man doesn’t have it in his heart to hold himself back from sin, what use is going to the priest – if you don’t even want to leave your sins?’).14 The pragmatic approach of this seventh book is also found in the eighth book, which covers how to pray. Finally, the ninth book gives examples of prayers to the Virgin and to Christ. The work, in its various forms, proved remarkably popular. It survives in twenty-eight medieval copies and fragments, and medieval documents, such as wills and book lists, attest to at least eight additional copies that are now lost.15 It seems to have achieved relatively rapid success; almost all of the surviving copies were produced within the first 75 years of its composition, and it was translated into Latin, Icelandic, and English.16 In English it survives in three independent adaptations and one of these, Handlyng Synne, itself survives in a remarkable nine copies. This particular translation, produced within fifty years of the original, gives the impression 12 Waddington, Manuel, I, ll. 5802–5804. 13 Sullivan, ‘Original’, p. 18.

14 Waddington, Manuel, II, ll. 9089–9092. 15 For the lost copies of the Manuel, see Murchison, ‘Readers’, pp. 184–185. A copy

mentioned on the 1369 booklist of Richard of Normanton, the vicar of Southwell Minster is a possible ninth lost copy, but it may instead be the same manuscript as Cambridge, St John’s College, F.30 (167). 16 Jonathan Hughes, ‘The Administration of Confession in the Diocese of York in the Fourteenth Century’, in Studies in Clergy and Ministry in Medieval England: Purvis Seminar Studies, ed. by David Michael Smith (York: University of York, 1991), pp. 87–165 (p. 92). On the translations of the work, see Murchison, ‘Readers’, p. 161.



Learning about Sin 71

that the original had become something of a sensation, claiming that ‘Yn frenshe þer a clerk hyt sees / He clepyþ hyt manuel de pecchees’ (‘When a cleric sees it in French, he calls it the ‘Manuel des péchés’).17 While the manual was especially popular in its native Yorkshire region, it reached nearly all corners of medieval England and at least one copy was made on the continent.18 Predating the Somme le roi by at least a decade, it could be considered one of the earliest bestsellers of vernacular religion in medieval Europe.19 No single factor can account for why a given work achieves such a level of success, but the Manuel des péchés’s audiences are telling. The work seems to be pitched, in part, at the laity, although unambiguous details about its intended and implied audiences (i.e. the audiences addressed by and constructed by the work) are unfortunately scarce. The only direct address appears in the prologue, and it has become something of a textual crux: Pur la laye gent iert fet; Deu le parface, si ly plest, K’eus ver pussent apertement Kaunt eus trespassent, e kaunt nient! Si aukun de l’oyr seit amendé, Deu de cyel en seit gracié. [It is done for lay people; may God bring it to an end, if it please him, so that they can see clearly when they sin and when not. If anyone, from listening [to it], may be improved, may God in heaven be thanked for it.20]

These lines seem to point unambiguously to a lay audience, but because they are missing from five copies of the text, it has been suggested that these lines are later additions, and that the manual, which features some trepidation surrounding the description of clerical sins, was instead written for an exclusively clerical audience whom the author did not want to offend.21 But the absence of these lines from five 17 Mannyng, Handlyng, ll. 81–82; this passage is discussed further below. 18 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français MS 14959; on this manuscript see

Murchison, ‘Readers’, pp. 173–174.

19 The Manuel des péchés is earlier than all of the works composed in the vernacular that were

included on the list of popular vernacular religious works of medieval Europe compiled by Veysseyre et al. in ‘Projet’. This list is limited to works that survive in more than 80 extant copies so it is not comprehensive, and until more quantitative analyses of popular medieval literature emerge, the relative popularity of the Manuel des péchés must remain conjectural. Certainly within the context of medieval England, the number of surviving copies of the work – around 40 if all of its translations are counted – makes it stand out among vernacular works composed before the fourteenth century. 20 Waddington, Manuel, I, ll. 91–96; translated in Schemmann, Confessional, p. 229. 21 See Sullivan, ‘Original’, pp. 26–28. Sullivan also deems these lines spurious because they describe the audience’s engagement with the text with the term ‘oyr’ – one that Sullivan believes William does not generally use to describe the reader’s engagement with the text (p. 26). But recently Ulrike Schemmann has challenged this view by noting that the author does use ‘oyr’ elsewhere (Confessional, p. 324), and that William does, in fact, use both lire and oier to describe his audience’s engagement with the text (p.

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manuscripts could not tell us much about William’s original unless we could establish that these five were the closest to it, and there is no evidence to suggest this.22 And even if William never wrote these prologue lines himself, the same lines appear in some of the earliest copies of the Manuel, so it can certainly be said that early in its history layfolk were already an important intended audience for this manual – their confessional needs were becoming a growing concern for the Church.23 But the clergy remained an important audience for penitential material even as it passed out of the cloister, and it is no surprise that the Manuel des péchés contains many passages that are addressed to an exclusively clerical audience.24 Did the Manuel des péchés actually travel outside of the cloister? Alexandra Barratt speaks of the work’s ‘wide appeal among male religious’ and lists several copies that were owned by religious houses.25 But surviving manuscript evidence suggests that from the moment of its initial composition it was appreciated by lay audiences as much as clerical ones. Monks, scholars, wealthy laymen, parish priests, and a fair number of lay women are all found among its owners.26 Indeed, one of the earliest surviving copies was commissioned by a wealthy Lincolnshire landholder, Joan Tateshal, for her own use. And Joan wanted her involvement in the production of this manuscript recorded; the Manuel text begins with a drawing of her and the scribe she employed.27

22

23

24

25 26 27

319). Schemmann surveys all instances of the term ‘laye’ in the text, and arrives at the conclusion that ‘laye gent’, in the Manuel des péchés, ‘are treated as a separate group and distinguished from the clers (the secular clergy) and the religius (the regular clergy)’ (p. 331). On the lack of a reliable stemma for the Manuel, see Wilhelm G. Busse, ‘On Some Manuscripts and Versions of the Anglo-Norman Manuel des Pechez’, in Bücher für die Wissenschaft: Bibliotheken zwischen Tradition und Fortschritt, ed. by Gert Kaiser, Heinz Finger, and Elisabeth Niggemann (Müchen: K. G. Saur, 1994), pp. 3–20 (pp. 6–13). A lay audience also makes sense given the kinds of reading that William expects. Schemmann notes that the text calls for ‘slow and repeated study’ and from this she concludes that, ‘One point … can be stated with surety and that is that the Manuel dé Pechez would not suit the priest or friar who has to speak to changing audiences whom he faces for a limited period of time’, and ‘a lay household is the most probable environment in which the Manuel dé Pechez was received’ (Confessional, p. 319). It is also important to keep in mind that, in the words of Schemmann, William ‘seemingly did not rule out a clerical audience’ (Confessional, p. 331). Schemmann finds a number of passages which single out members of a clerical audience – here defined in the broadest sense, to include members of both the secular and regular clergy (Confessional, pp. 272–275). Barratt, ‘Spiritual Writings’, p. 354. Murchison, ‘Readers’, pp. 161–199. This copy is Princeton University Library, MS Taylor Medieval 1. On this commission, see Adelaide Bennett, ‘A Book Designed for a Noblewoman: An Illustrated Manuel des Péchés of the Thirteenth Century’, in Medieval Book Production: Assessing the Evidence, Proceedings of the Second Conference of the Seminar in the History of the Book to 1500, Oxford July 1988, ed. by Linda L. Brownrigg (Palo Alto: Anderson-Lovelace, 1990), pp. 163–181. The discussion of the patron illustration is on p. 173.



Learning about Sin 73

Copies of the Manuel des péchés passed rapidly from the Church and cloister to the home. In the late fourteenth century, William Creyke, Vicar of Barling, left a copy of the ‘Manuel de Pecches’ to one of his parishioners, named John Milton. There is reason to suspect that this gift was a generous one, since Creyke’s will indicates that this vicar held Milton in high regard; the vicar appointed Milton as an executer of his estate and insisted that Milton have first pick between two of his cloaks.28 Of course, not all of the owners of the poem would have actually read it; one copy, according to its inscription, lay in a chest as a surety for a loan, and some fragments of the Manuel were recycled as binding material.29 For those who did read it, part of the poem’s appeal must have been its charming narrative exempla, since these were sometimes extracted from the rest of the text. They seem to have been particularly appealing to the clergy, who undoubtedly saw them as ripe material for their preaching activities.30 The remarkably wide appeal of this kind of text can be gleaned from the Manuel’s Middle English translation, which is addressed directly to a lay audience and was, in the words of Matthew Sullivan, who has studied its circulation, ‘owned by unremarkable people, for example a country rector (who may have also owned a copy of Mannyng’s metrical chronicle) and a backwater mayor from Norfolk, a Leicestershire family man, and a rural Buckinghamshire house of the obscure Bonshommes canons’.31 One might quibble with the suggestion that a man like William Trewe, the mayor of King’s Lynn, was ‘unremarkable’, but the mixed readership of Handlyng Synne is a fact and suggests, most importantly, that prominent layfolk were now bringing home the teachings of the Church to read at their leisure.

Manuals for Penitents and the Laity A new need to teach lay audiences about the vocabulary, hierarchy, and severity of sin, and to put this material directly in their hands, was also felt across the channel. Friar Laurent sensed that the laity was severely lacking in this type of instruction: ‘Ce livre est fait pour les lais et non pour les clercs, qui ont des livres’ (‘This book is made for layfolk and not for clerks, who have books [already]’), and the remarkable popularity of his text suggests that others felt the same.32 Like the Manuel des péchés, which was its insular predecessor, Laurent’s guide was popular among lay and clerical owners from diverse backgrounds – Jean Gerson even included it among rec-

28 ‘Also I leave to John Milton my blue cloak or my red cloak at the choice of the aforesaid

29 30 31

32

John … Also I leave to the same John one book called “Manuel de Pecches”’; see ‘The Will of William Creyke’, ed. by H. W. King, Transactions of the Essex Archaeological Society, 3 (1889), 230–232 (p. 232). Murchison, ‘Readers’, p. 5. I explore the circulation of the Manuel at greater length in ‘Readers’, pp. 186–188. Sullivan, ‘Original’, p. 12. For the address to a lay audience see Jennifer Garrison, ‘Mediated Piety: Eucharistic Theology and Lay Devotion in Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne’, Speculum, 85.4 (2010), 894–922 (p. 897). d’Orléans, Somme, p. 48.

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ommended reading for both Charles VII and for the ‘simple woman’ for whom he wrote his Mendicité spirituelle.33 What motivated this new wave of lay and popular interest in manuals for penitents? The evidence is not easy to interpret, since medieval book ownership in the thirteenth century could be motivated by many different factors, and since the rise in interest in manuals for penitents happened at the same time as a broader popularization of literary culture.34 Books, at the time – increasingly becoming mass-produced commodity items through the rise of the commercial production house – were not just reference guides but also display pieces. Indeed, a guide for priests known as the Summa de virtutum de remediis anime (c. 1236) rails against those ‘who take such great pains to produce superfluous deluxe books, with gold letters and covers of silk or satin, made more for showiness and elegance than for edification and usefulness’.35 And books could be heavily laden social symbols; it is often remarked that Books of Hours signalled their patrons’ power and status, suggesting leisure time with meditative prayers, and wealth with elaborate foliate borders, lavish covers, and patron illustrations.36 It is therefore tempting to read populist interest in manuals for penitents as reflecting nothing more than a vogue for public performances of piety. But the evidence suggests that ownership of these manuals was motivated by more than a desire for public display. These were not lavish volumes – they were designed with functionality in mind, operating more like a present-day user’s manual or self-help book than a coffee table book. The most popular insular manuals are almost always found in homely manuscripts, with few illustrations, decorations, or expensive bindings. What adornment they do contain is predominantly pragmatic: rubrication, titles, or underlining that would have helped a reader locate a specific section on the page. Their consistency in this respect is remarkable; only one of the twenty-eight surviving copies of the Manuel des péchés contains any significant illustrations – the 33 Brayer and Leurquin-Labie find that even in the first few decades after it was composed

it circulated in both courtly circles and clerical ones (‘Introduction’, pp. 25–26). For Gerson’s recommendation, see Geneviève Hasenohr, ‘Religious Reading Amongst the Laity in France’, in Heresy and Literacy, 1000–1530, ed. by Peter Biller and Anne Hudson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 205–221 (p. 208). 34 Michael Clanchy, drawing on the work of Neil Ker, writes that ‘The century after the Norman Conquest … is the greatest in the history of English book production’; From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307 (London: Edward Arnold, 1979), p. 27. 35 Summa virtutum de remediis anime, ed. by Siegfried Wenzel (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), p. 254. 36 Eamon Duffy, for example, observes that, ‘The presence and importance of pictures, textual illumination and marginal decoration made Books of Hours especially costly, and to begin with they certainly were the preserve of royalty and aristocracy, or the wealthiest members of the urban elite … Indeed, the cost was often not so much a drawback of such books, as part of their point, and their decorative schemes were often designed to draw attention to wealth and dynastic alliances as much as religious preferences’; Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers: 1240–1570 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 18–19. Duffy does, however, note that, ‘by the early fifteenth century Books of Hours had become much more widely accessible’ (p. 21), and he describes their mass production (p. 25).



Learning about Sin 75

one commissioned by the wealthy Joan Tateshal for her own use.37 These manuals were, on the whole, practical volumes designed to be used and to be read carefully and selectively. Their material features, like their contents, suggest a prioritization of inward reflection over outward performance. A penitent would consult one of these manuals at home, or in the cloister, considering carefully any deeds done and impure desires that had arisen since the most recent confession. The penitent was then supposed to contextualize any impure behaviour using the descriptions in the manual, and to come to confession with any previously unconfessed sins memorized. Such memorization is at least a putative goal of the Clensyng of Mannes Sowle, which states that it has subdivided each of the seven sins into those of thought, word, and deed, so that ‘ȝe schal haue ȝour synnes bettir in mynde when ȝe come to confessioun’ (‘you shall have your sins better in mind when you come to confession’).38 The process of self-reflection had to be extremely thorough for it to be effective according to the author of the Ayenbite of Inwyt: Efterþan huo þet him wisliche wyle ssriue he ssel mid wylle þenche ane his zennes auore þet he come to ssrifte and al his herte zeche and his inwyt hou he heþ god and his yblyssede moder and his halȝen ywreþed. and mid greate drede al his lyf beþenche.39 [Afterwards, he who would wisely shrive himself must voluntarily think on his sins before he comes to confession, and search his whole heart and his conscience for how he has angered God, and His blessed mother, and His saints, and with great fear reflect on all his life.]

Using a manual for this kind of confessional preparation involved reading that was frequent and engaged – in the sense that it required reflection on oneself. Exactly what this reading was supposed to look like is not clear; when people consulted these texts at home, did they have the help of another, such as a private chaplain, or were they alone, performing a kind of private devotional activity? These questions intersect with broader, unsettled questions surrounding thirteenth-century privacy and literacy. While it has been suggested that the period saw the first wide-scale movement toward silent – and with it, private – reading practices, it has also been argued that reading in groups continued to be the norm and that even solitary reading in the period was oral and fundamentally linked to vocalization.40 37 A. W. Taubman, ‘Clergy and Commoners: Interactions Between Medieval Clergy and

Laity in a Regional Context’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of York, 2009), DAI C 71/07 (2010): item U513726, ProQuest Dissertations & Theses [accessed 4 August 2017], pp. 48–49. 38 Sarah Wood supplies this extract from her examination of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 923, fols 73v–74r; Conscience and the Composition of Piers Plowman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 63. 39 Michael of Northgate, Ayenbite, p. 172. 40 For the former view, see Paul Saenger’s Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); for the latter see D. H. Green’s Women Readers in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 58–60.

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A rare glimpse into how manuals for penitents were used can be gleaned from William of Waddington who, in his Manuel des péchés, explains how his book should be read:41 Pur ce nul trop hastivement Cet escrit lise nomeement! Deu fez le deit rehercer Ky s’alme vodra amender, La ou il trovera divers peché, Sicum il iert perograffé. [Therefore no one too hastily should read this book in particular; he must go through it twice, [he] who would wish to cure his soul, there where he will find different sins, as it is divided in paragraphs.42]

Reading for proper self-examination had to be slow and careful. It was also supposed to be frequent. The manual should be read at least two times (‘deu fez’). In nine witnesses of the Manuel des péchés a rather remarkable ten times (‘dis fez’) is recommended – undoubtedly a scribal error, but one that went uncorrected often enough to suggest that some copyists did not find the recommendation entirely impractical or excessive.43 In the English translation, Handlyng Synne, Mannyng adds a sense of urgency to this suggestion, claiming that repeated reading is absolutely essential for understanding the text: ‘Wyþ ofte redyng, mayst þou lere. / Þou mayst nouȝt wyþ onys redyng / knowe þe soþe of euery þyng. / Handyl, hyt behouyþ þe, ofte syþys: / To many maner synnys hyt wryþys’ (‘You can learn by reading it often. You may not, through only one reading, know the truth of every thing. Handling it many times is a benefit to you, for the many manners of sin which it touches on’).44 Reading these guidebooks was to be slow and frequent – a process not unlike the lectio divina expected of monks. By calling for this kind of engagement, then, authors of manuals for penitents invited their readers to participate in an in-depth form of reading that had been traditionally associated with the clergy. ‘Handyl’ here points to a tactile – and, therefore, almost necessarily individual – experience of the book. The term comes up again in Mannyng’s explanation of his 41 For the most comprehensive and recent examination of the question of the authorship of

the Manuel des péchés, see Schemmann, Confessional, pp. 228–263.

42 Waddington, Manuel, I, ll. 51–56; translated in Schemmann, Confessional, p. 307. 43 The scribal error of ‘dis’ for ‘deu’ was noticed by Sullivan (‘Origins’, p. 22). William repeats

his call for frequent reading again at lines 903–916 (quoted in Schemmann, Confessional, p. 325). 44 Mannyng, Handlyng, ll. 126–130. A different call appears in the Compileison where, after listing the remedies for wrath, the author explains that these should be considered often: ‘I cestes remedies e cestes medicines en contre ire isci deuant tuches souent en u[ostr]e memorie remenbrez e pensez’ (‘And these remedies and these medicines against wrath, touched upon here above, often in your memory call them to mind and think of them’) (Trinity College Cambridge, MS R.14.7, fol. 13c). The author here does not, however, imply that re-reading is needed for this kind of reflection.

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title, which is a curious rendering of the title of the Manuel des péchés: ‘Men clepyn þe boke handlyng synne. / Yn frenshe þer a clerk hyt sees, / He clepyþ hyt manuel de pecchees. / Manuel ys handlyng wyþ honde’ (‘Men call the book ‘Handlyng Synne’. When a cleric sees it in French, he calls it the ‘Manuel des péchés’. ‘Manuel’ means ‘handling’ with a hand’).45 Mannyng here describes the reader physically handling his work – a wholly embodied reading experience. The statement might not seem remarkable given the usual ways that books are used today, but it is rather remarkable within a medieval context, in which books were often read aloud to small groups of people who would not be touching the page. The striking focus on physical engagement with the page found in this passage originated in the Manuel des péchés, which engages in different but related wordplay on its own title: ‘“Le Manuel” serra apellé / Kar en meyn deit estre porté’ (‘It will be called the Manuel/handbook because it ought to be carried in hand’).46 Even the format of this book was designed to support this kind of reading: L’escrit est petit fet de gré K’en lisaunt nul ne seit grevé, E pur ce sons ennuy seit lu E en memoyre bien retenu! [The book is done in a small format purposely, so that none would be distressed while reading; and therefore it can be read without vexation, and well kept in memory.47]

William also stresses that his work is in ‘perograffes’ (‘paragraphs’ or ‘stanzas’), and these, as a predominantly visual structuring device, also imply that his audience will have direct visual experience of work on the page.48 Rather remarkably, the reader envisioned by both prologues (that of Handlyng Synne and its source, the Manuel des péchés) is holding the manuscript in hand and, apparently, solitary – the reader is looking at stanzas, feeling the weight of the manuscript in hand, and rereading passages as needed. Of course, as with any information about audience within a work, descriptions of how a work should be read might not be a record of how it was read, or even of how its author expected it to be read. An author might describe his audience performing a solitary devotional act as a way of flattering a patron with pretensions of piety, or for any number of other ideological, social, or financial reasons. Characterizations of audiences within a work will always be, to some extent, a fiction, and we cannot use them to make claims about actual audiences or actual reading practices in any straightforward way. But even the most fictional characterizations helped to shape the way actual audiences engaged with a text, and they are therefore worth

45 Mannyng, Handlyng, ll. 80–83. 46 Waddington, Manuel, I, ll. 41–42.

47 Waddington, Manuel, II, ll. 11521–11524; trans. in Schemmann, Confessional, p. 230. 48 Waddington, Manuel, I, l. 49; see Sullivan’s commentary on this passage in ‘Original’, p.

22.

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considering, while keeping in mind that they are embedded in, and inextricable from, contemporary social codes and expectations.49 In the case of the widely popular Manuel, the reading practices that the text describes – which we might, extending Evans’s audience model, call the ‘intended’ reading practices – find support in the material copies of the text. Most feature an elaborate system of running titles, and such titles, still a distinctive feature at the time, worked as finding aids, designed primarily to support the eye scanning the page – and the one sitting closest to the book.50 They suggest that the scribes who produced these copies had in mind the author’s dictum that the text be broken up into easily digestible segments and, in this way, made easily accessible to the person holding it.51 The emphasis here on an intimate experience of the book, with the reader looking at, handling, and rereading the page, may seem to be at odds with William’s occasional description of reading as a form of oier – listening – which tends to suggest to the modern mind a text being read aloud by another individual. But William uses lire just as often as oier to describe his audience’s engagement with his text.52 And even solitary reading in this period was still fundamentally linked to vocalization, so oier does not contradict William’s insistence that the text be held in the hand. Both Handlyng Synne and its source suggest that readers will engage with them in a solitary manner, as opposed to through a lector or with a group.53 In this respect, manuals for penitents were the ideal reading material for the private spaces that became increasingly common in the late medieval period in the homes of the wealthy and in religious houses, due to new architectural developments.54 While many penitents undoubtedly continued to learn about sin exclusively from their priests, a growing number were learning about it on their own, through handbooks read in the intimacy of their own homes; in other words, the Church was building an ever-widening set of resources for providing distance education about sin.

49 For a discussion of the relationship between textually constructed audiences and actual

ones, see above, chapter 2.

50 See Evans, ‘Readers/Audiences/Texts’, and the discussion above. 51 Of course, it is important to recognize, as Ulrike Schemmann does in her extensive study

of the Manuel des péchés, that this layout would have been just as useful to one reciting the text to others, and, within the text, William does seem to allow for this possibility (Confessional, p. 323). Schemmann even identifies one passage that, she claims, is a ‘direct address to a potential mediator’ (p. 312), although her interpretation of this passage is brief, and it is not clear why she interprets it as an address to a mediator, since the passage, which speaks of the Eucharist, would make just as much sense without a mediator. 52 This is noted by Schemmann. Schemmann argues that since William switches between describing the audience’s engagement through oier and through lire, ‘one cannot, from a study into the frequency of the verbs lire and oier, draw a conclusion as to the mode preferred by the author’ (Confessional, p. 319). 53 A similar call for individual reading appears in one form of confession (Durkin, ‘Examining’, p. 37; item 40). For the differences between manuals for penitents and the form of confession, see the introduction above. 54 See Bryan, Looking Inward, p. 12.

Chapter 4 ‘De privetez n’i troverét rien’: The Compileison and ‘Anxieties of Outreach’

S

cholars of medieval history and literature have long recognized that the manuals that were designed to guide confessors through the confessional interrogation express significant unease around sexual activity – and with good cause. Medieval confessors were, as Pierre Payer relates in his study focused on manuals for priests, deeply concerned with the question of how to probe a penitent’s conscience without inadvertently introducing new sins, or reminding penitents of old ones.1 The Summa de casibus poenitentiae (c. 1225), Raymond de Pennaforte’s remarkably influential guide for priests, warns confessors about this specific danger: ‘I advise [the confessor] that in his questions he not descend to special circumstances and special sins; for many fall severely after such an interrogation who otherwise would never have dreamt of it’.2 Since sexual sins could be committed in private, knowledge of them could be guarded – in theory, at least. While many sins, such as theft, could be learned through social observation, sexual sins were thought to be less easily learned in such a manner, and priests were therefore concerned with keeping them hidden. So significant were concerns over teaching new sexual sins that, according to Payer, written trepidations surrounding confessional interrogations ‘are virtually always about sexual offenses’.3 Among all sexual offenses, same-sex acts were thought to merit extra secrecy, according to Karma Lochrie.4 The unease surrounding sexual sin in general and same-sex acts in particular reflects a broader climate of tension surrounding confessional education in the thirteenth century and it is therefore worthy of further examination. While much has been written about how anxieties surrounding sexual sin are manifested in manuals for confessors, there has been relatively little about how these 1

Pierre Payer, Sex and the New Medieval Literature of Confession, 1150–1300 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2009), p. 59. 2 Translated in Tentler, Sin, p. 115. 3 Payer, Sex, p. 60. Similarly, Tentler suggests, while discussing fears of introducing new sins in Raymond de Pennaforte’s Summa de casibus poenitentiae, that these were generally centered on sexual sins: ‘It is difficult to believe that Raymond had anything in mind except sexual sins when he advised against descending into detail’ (Sin, p. 115). The same idea is expressed by Peter Biller in ‘Confession’, p. 13. 4 Karma Lochrie, Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), p. 199.

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are manifested in manuals for penitents.5 This is a shame, since there are striking and significant differences between the two types of writing that make it difficult to generalize about one from the other, and since manuals for penitents tend to reflect, more than manuals for priests, the kinds of confessional education that medieval penitents were receiving and are therefore worthy of study in their own right. The goal of the present chapter, then, is to shed light on the ways in which manuals for penitents approached the idea of teaching about sexual sin and, more broadly, to explore the kinds of tensions that emerged as education about sin increasingly happened at a distance from the established Church. As manuals for penitents proliferated after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, making material that was once aimed primarily at priests accessible to a wider cross-section of society, concerns started to emerge about what kinds of material were appropriate for lay audiences. Since these manuals enabled penitents to learn about potential sins on their own, they exhibit a marked trepidation about descriptions of sexual sin – and especially descriptions of sodomy – which could potentially give penitents new ideas. As the evidence presented here shows, this trepidation is even stronger in manuals designed for penitents than in manuals for priests. These fears – part of the wider ‘anxieties of outreach’ described by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne that emerged in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council – are at their heart about distance instruction and about access to knowledge.6 The focus here is on exploring how – and why – these fears are less pronounced when manuals address clerical penitents rather than more general audiences. As already established, manuals such as the Manuel des péchés and Handlyng Synne depict the ideal reader holding the book in hand and carefully choosing passages that will act as a salve to a heart wounded by sin; this reader is, by implication, alone.7 This ideal reader is of course a fiction, and many must have heard passages of these texts read aloud by a private confessor, a friend, or a parent. But the fiction is nevertheless suggestive; through manuals for penitents, confessional material was moving into private spaces. These manuals concomitantly made it increasingly possible for medieval penitents to learn about sins and to probe their consciences in a self-directed manner and at a remove from the established Church. With this change came a new interest in the inner life, and the fissure points at which inner lives threatened to rupture into public ones. Others have taken note of a late medieval interest in the tension between inner lives and public ones. Jennifer Bryan, writing about the fourteenth and fifteenth 5 See, for example, Karma Lochrie’s careful study about secrecy surrounding sodomy in the

medieval period, which draws much of its evidence from manuals for priests (Covert, p. 195). Allen J. Frantzen considers the depiction of sexual sins in Old English penitentials in The Literature of Penance. But, according to Frantzen, such manuals are written primarily from the perspective of the priest, not that of the penitent (p. 13). 6 Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, ‘Time to read: Pastoral Care, Vernacular Access and the Case of Angier of St. Frideswide’, in Texts and Traditions of Pastoral Care: Essays in Honour of Bella Millett, ed. by Cate Gunn and Catherine Innes-Parker (York: York Medieval Press, 2009), pp. 62–77 (p. 77). 7 See above, chapter 3.



The Compileison and ‘Anxieties of Outreach’ 81

centuries, finds that the new types of highly personal devotional reading that emerged during this period came accompanied by a redefined interest in the boundaries between inner and outer self and between individual and community.8 She notes that, while devotional guides of the period strongly encouraged a turn inward and toward the self, there were considerable anxieties surrounding this ‘inward turn’. These stemmed, according to Bryan, ‘in part from the flexibility of the concept’ – depending on how it was intepreted, an ‘inward turn’ could ultimately lead to what Bryan terms ‘a determined and unreachable religious individualism’.9 Bryan’s study explores a number of examples of this threatning individualism: ‘a break between the reader and her world … or between her heart and her mouth, or between imagination and everyday identity, or between individual judgment and public authority, or between ritual and belief’.10 Bryan’s interest is in tracing these conflicts through their fourteenth- and fifteenth-century developments, but, as the evidence presented below shows, similar conflicts lie at the heart of the new wave of manuals for penitents produced in the thirteenth century and the changes to religious education that occurred in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council.

Robert Grosseteste’s Perambulauit Iudas and the Compileison Two manuals addressed to penitents lie at the center of this investigation: Robert Grosseteste’s Perambulauit Iudas (before c. 1235), which was written in England, and Robert de Sorbon’s Qui vult vere confiteri (c. 1260–1274), which was written in France.11 Both texts provide insight into views of sexual sins because both were adapted for new audiences, and, as we shall see, in both cases this adaptation history contains clues about what medieval authors considered appropriate for different types of readers. Grosseteste’s was translated and incorporated into the Anglo-Norman Compileison (c. 1254–1274), a text which anticipates a wider audience and also contains an expanded translation of the well-known anchoritic guide, Ancrene Wisse (c. 1220–1230). Robert’s was translated into French for a more general audience and, eventually, incorporated into Friar Laurent’s widely popular Somme le roi (c. 1279). Of course, determining the audience of a medieval text requires careful consideration. As Ruth Evans notes, a text’s audience can be constructed in a variety of different ways, some of which are wholly implicit. Manuals for penitents, with their interest in audience differentiation, often explicitly address one audience but nevertheless describe some sins that would have no relevance to it; in other words, their intended and implied audiences often differ.12 Indeed, a tendency toward compendiousness in these manuals means that most contain sins that are applicable to those 8 Bryan, Looking Inward, p. 41. 9 Bryan, Looking Inward, p. 52.

10 Bryan, Looking Inward, p. 57. 11 For the dating of Grosseteste’s work, see Goering and Mantello, ‘“The Perambulauit

Iudas”’, p. 132. For its authorship, see pp. 126–129. For the dating of the latter work and its authorship, see Diekstra, ‘Robert de Sorbon’, p. 216. 12 See chapter 2 above.

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in a variety of specific circumstances, and most therefore have very broad implied audiences, whereas their intended audiences are generally narrower. Since any given text might have divergent implied and intended audiences, both types of audience are considered here. The earliest of the texts considered here is Grosseteste’s Perambulauit Iudas. It begins with a preface addressed to an anonymous learned friend who asked for a confessional guide for his own use.13 The guide that follows is a ‘form of confession’ text. This type of text, which has been studied in depth by Michael Cornett, is characterized by its brief list of sins, which are cast in the voice of a confessing penitent.14 Joseph Goering and F. A. C. Mantello suggest that the ‘form of confession’ in this first part of Grosseteste’s work, which includes, for example, references to the roles of cellarer and prior, has an implied audience of Benedictine monks. Based on the sins listed in this part and on the preface, Goering and Mantello suggest that the guide was written for ‘a superior in a house of monks or regular cannons’.15 The next part of the Perambulauit Iudas is addressed explicitly to a group of ‘simpler brothers’ (simpliciores fratres); Goering and Mantello describe this part as a ‘“mirror of confession” (speculum confessionis) concerning all the sins committed both in the cloister and in the world’. This second part begins with an interrogatory – questions that penitents could ask themselves to prepare for confession (sections 26–36), then supplies definitions of sins (sections 37–42). When both parts of the treatise are considered together, the text seems to have been designed for a group of monks and their spiritual advisor for their own self-examination practices.16 The Perambulauit Iudas exhibits a relative openness about sins that could be committed in privacy. It includes a lengthy discussion of lechery, which includes two of the traditional ‘sins against nature’: ‘the vice of sodomy’ and non-procreative ejaculation. Grosseteste’s phrasing merits attention; he describes sodomy as ‘vicium sodomiticum uel peculiale, uel aliquid simile actu’ (‘the vice of sodomy – either in itself, or a similar act’).17 It is not entirely clear what Grosseteste is describing here. While this Latin term, vicium sodomiticum, had been used prior to the twelfth century to describe any number of sexual acts that were deemed ‘unnatural’, in the twelfth century the term began to be used in a more limited sense to describe anal intercourse.18 13 Goering and Mantello, ‘“The Perambulauit Iudas”’, p. 132; Grosseteste writes to his friend,

14 15 16 17 18

‘me rogasti vt tibi scriberem formam confessionis’ (‘you have asked me to write a form of confession’) and specifies that the friend is ‘intelligenti’ (‘intelligent’) (pp. 148; 150). See further in chapter 2 above. Cornett, ‘Form of Confession’, p. 5; see the discussion of these forms of confession above, pp. 0–00. Goering and Mantello, ‘“The Perambulauit Iudas”’, pp. 132–133; 125. Goering and Mantello, ‘“The Perambulauit Iudas”’, p. 141. Goering and Mantello, ‘“The Perambulauit Iudas”’, pp. 125–168 (p. 164). The passage is given in full below. John Boswell writes that the term was nebulous in the medieval period. He finds that Peter Cantor uses the term in this limited sense in the late twelfth century to refer to same-sex male intercourse but that, in so doing, Cantor was departing from traditional



The Compileison and ‘Anxieties of Outreach’ 83

But it is worth noting that the concept of ‘sodomy’ remained nebulous throughout the period. Karma Lochrie, remarking on the vague reference to it in the Parson’s Tale, finds that even in the fourteenth century, vicium sodomiticum and its Middle English cognate were not used exclusively to refer to anal intercourse among men; sodomy continued to be an unstable category that could encompass a variety of the ‘sins against nature’ and, more broadly, any sexual acts that went beyond ‘natural’ sex. As Lochrie argues, the persistent ambiguity in the use of the term was in part a result of its status as an unmentionable sin. Lochrie notes, moreover, that the assumption in modern scholarship that the term ‘sodomy’ refers exclusively to anal intercourse between men ‘contributes to the assumption of a heterosexual or heteronormative/sodomitic divide for the Middle Ages that may not have existed’.19 Grosseteste’s classification of this sin – with reference to both a particular (‘peculiale’) variety of this sin and a related category of sins – reflects the shifting and nebulous connotations of the term; it shows that a more limited use of the term (i.e. to refer to anal intercourse exclusively) was available to writers in the early thirteenth century, but this more limited use was apparently not the default. In the section on the sin of touch, Grosseteste approaches another potentially scandalous subject: examples of lechery that could be committed through touching others. He clearly considers the subject a delicate one; he advises confessing such sins to a priest in particular – not just any confessor – or to God alone, for otherwise the ‘weak’ could be ‘scandalized’ (‘quia infirmi forte talia possint inde scandalizari’).20 Yet his decision to include these sins, as well as sodomy ‘in particular’ in his work – despite their apparent potential for scandal – suggests that he thought the benefit to his audience outweighed any possible risk. Almost all of the Perambulauit Iudas was adapted and incorporated into the Anglo-Norman Compileison.21 Before examining the changes that were made during the adaptation process, it is necessary to briefly consider the Compileison and its audience and sources. Although best known for containing an adaptation of Ancrene Wisse, the Compileison is in fact much wider in scope; Nicholas Watson and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne describe ‘the massive structuring and originality of conception and voicing of this 29,000-line prose work of moral theology’.22 All parts of Ancrene

19

20 21

22

usage; see Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 93; 277. Although the term was used in an ambiguous way throughout the medieval period, it is generally accepted that the term could also have a more limited meaning after the twelfth century; see, for example, Robert Mills’s Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 301. Lochrie, Covert, pp. 179–182, quoted at p. 180. Lochrie’s argument that sodomy was an unstable category throughout much of the period is supported and extended by Mills in Seeing Sodomy. Goering and Mantello, ‘“The Perambulauit Iudas”, p. 154. With the exception of the passages translated from Grosseteste’s text, passages from the Compileison have been transcribed from the copy in Trinity College Cambridge MS R.14.7, since this is the one W. H. Trethewey uses as a base text for his edition. Abbreviations have been silently expanded. Translations of the Compileison are my own. Watson and Wogan-Browne, ‘The French of England’, p. 42.

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Wisse are incorporated into the Compileison save for part 1, on anchoritic devotions. The other parts have been carefully reordered and substantially extended. W. H. Trethewey, who edited the Ancrene Wisse portion of the text, finds that Ancrene Wisse material accounts for only about 42 percent of the complete Compileison.23 The author’s other sources remain somewhat elusive, but parallels have been found in Guilelmus Peraldus’s Summa de vitiis, his Summa de virtutibus (both c. 1236), and Raymond de Pennaforte’s Summa de casibus poenitentiae (c. 1225).24 Aside from the translation of Grosseteste’s Perambulauit Iudas, the work includes a translation of the Peines de Purgatorie, which is occasionally ascribed to Grosseteste.25 The intended audience of the Compileison is complex and multivalent. It addresses ‘gent de religion’ (‘people of religion’), and ‘hommes e femmes de religion’ (‘men and women of religion’).26 These ‘gent de religion’ are not, as Cate Gunn notes, from one order alone; the address is more generally to those ‘living a dedicated religious life’.27 Yet the author also writes for others outside of a disciplined religious life: ceo est conquilli en semble. des set pechez morteus. e de lur esspeces. sicome nus les auom troue en seinte escripture pur aprendre les leaument e sanz feintise a tote genz mes especiaument e par deuant tuz autres a hommes e a femmes de religioun.28 23 W. H. Trethewey, ‘Introduction’, in The French Text of the Ancrene Riwle: Edited from

24

25

26 27

28

Trinity College, Cambridge MS. R. 14.7, with Variants from Paris Bibliothèque Nationale MS fonds fr. 6276 and MS. Bodley 90, ed. by W. H. Trethewey, EETS OS 240 (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. ix–xxxiii (p. xxiii). Germaine Dempster, ‘The Parson’s Tale’, in Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, ed. by W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941), pp. 723–760 (p. 727). Dean and Boulton, Anglo-Norman Literature, pp. 357, 366. For a study of the translation of the Perambulauit Iudas, see Matthias Hessenauer, ‘For a Larger Audience Grosseteste’s Perambulavit Iudas in Anglo-Norman’, in Robert Grosseteste: His Thought and its Impact, ed. by Jack Cunningham (Toronto: PIMS, 1964), pp. 259–313. In the copy preserved in Trinity College, Cambridge MS R. 14.7 (James no. 883), parts 1–26 of the Perambulauit Iudas are translated on fols 67a–70a of the Compileison. The Compileison then turns to a consideration ‘de dis commandemenz e de set mor/teus p[e]chez. e lour especes solonc le eseing/nement de seint gregorie’ (‘of the Ten Commandments and of the Seven Deadly Sins, and their species, according to the teaching of St Gregory’) (fols 70a–71a). It then returns to the Perambulauit Iudas. Parts 27–35 are translated on fols 71a–73b. Only parts 36–43 of Grosseteste’s text are omitted. Only two copies of the Compileison contain this translation: the Trinity copy and that in Paris, BnF, Fonds français MS 6276. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 90 does not contain the translation of the Perambulauit Iudas; the text cuts off before this section and in the middle of the Compileison de seinte penance. For an edition of the Peines de Purgatorie, see Robert J. Relihan, ‘A Critical Edition of the Anglo-Norman and Latin Versions of “Les Peines de Purgatorie”’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Iowa, 1978). fols 125d, 105d. The audience is also addressed under other titles, including ‘freres e suers en deu’ (fol. 106c). Cate Gunn, ‘Reading Edmund of Abingdon’s Speculum as Pastoral Literature’, in Texts and Traditions of Pastoral Care: Essays in Honour of Bella Millett, ed. by Cate Gunn and Catherine Innes-Parker (York: York Medieval Press, 2009), pp. 100–114 (p. 105). fol. 1b.



The Compileison and ‘Anxieties of Outreach’ 85 [This [work] was [lit. is] gathered together from the seven deadly sins and their species, as we have found them in sacred scripture, in order to teach them faithfully and without deceit to everyone, but especially – and above all others – to the men and women of religion.]

Here, the primary audience is those following a religious life, and the secondary one is anyone else. Occasionally, the text singles out the religious audience in particular. The adaptation of the Perambulauit Iudas, introduced by a rubric stating that it is for the ‘gent de religion’, is one such place: ‘Isci comence li primer chapitle de la secunde partie de la tierce partie de confession. ky nus mustre coment genz de religion se deiuent de tute leur uie confesser’ (‘Here begins the first chapter of the second part of the third part of confession, which shows us how people of religion should confess about all their lives’).29 The Compileison’s broad intended audience is consonant with its implied audience; many of the sins described in the first part of the work are more specific to lay life: ‘peche homme par auarice … par trop elarger ses terres ou ses mesons a tort’ (‘man commits avarice … by enlarging his lands too much, or his houses wrongfully’).30 In general, then, the text has a wider constructed audience than that of the Perambulauit Iudas, although sections, including the translation of the Perambulauit Iudas, are addressed to a more limited one. Lechery is discussed at length twice in the Compileison: once in the adaptation of the Perambulauit Iudas addressed to the ‘gent de religion’, and once in a passage for which no direct source has been found addressed to a more general audience. That addressed to a wider audience is markedly less candid about sexual sin than is the Perambulauit Iudas. The author includes many of the same species of lechery as Grosseteste does, but the treatment of ‘sins against nature’ is different and somewhat vague compared to that in Grosseteste’s text: peche en countre nature est. ky tout a homme tote la reson de la nature. issi ky il nen est pas pae de sa mauueste fere naturement. etuz sen entremet de totes maneres de ordures ky il poet ou par esgarder. ou par tast. ou par manier. ou par bestes. ou par oiseaus contrefere. kar il ne font si come nature les a prent. e li mauueis le fet encountre nature.31 [The sin against nature is that which deprives man of natural reason such that he is not satisfied – because of his depravity – to behave naturally, but instead engages in all kinds of indecencies, whether by looking, by touching, or by imitating animals and birds, since they only do as nature has taught them, but the depraved man [who does the same] does it against nature.]

The passage is marked by circumlocution – a practice that medieval rhetoricians considered a useful rhetorical technique for evading delicate subjects.32 While 29 fol. 67a. 30 fol. 17b. This sin could also be committed by religious houses, of course, but the singular

subject implies a lay actor.

31 fol. 24a. 32 Matthew de Vendôme, for example, suggests that through periphrasis, ‘sententiae foeditas

circuitu evitatur’ (‘the foulness of an idea may be avoided by a roundabout statement’)

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Grosseteste’s Perambulauit Iudas mentions ‘sodomy’ expressly in its list of sins, the Compileison here does not. The Compileison does place non-procreative ejaculation among the ‘sins against nature’, but is vague about what is intended: E sachez bien ky entotes les maneres ky homme ou femme par la uolunte en euillante sachant sul par sei ou e autre parcure pollicion de la char. hors de mariage ou en mariage autrement ky nature de homme e de femme demaunde. cest asauer en autre manere ky homme deit enfant engendrer. e femme conceuer; tot est peche mortel. e peche en countre nature.33 And know well that in all the manners in which a man or woman procures by will the pollution of his or her flesh, in watching or awareness, alone by oneself, or accompanied by another, out of marriage or within marriage, differently than nature requires of a man and woman – namely in another manner than man can [lit. should] engender a child, and woman conceive – all [this] is mortal sin, and sin against nature.

This passage, like the first, relies on circumlocution to avoid potentially sensitive details. Yet the second discussion of lechery – that addressed more specifically to the ‘gent de religion’ and adapted from the Perambulauit Iudas – gives more detail. As Matthias Hessenauer notes, the translation of Grosseteste’s work is, overall, remarkably faithful; ‘only rarely does [the author of the Compileison] make slight changes’.34 This makes the places where changes were made particularly interesting, and an extended comparison between the Compileison and its ultimate source for this section reveals the approach favoured by the author of the Compileison:

in ‘Ars versificatoria’, in Les Arts poétiques du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle, ed. by Edmond Faral (Paris: Champion, 1958), pp. 106–193 (p. 185); translation in The Art of Versification, trans. by Aubrey E. Gaylon (Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1980), p. 105. For others who championed periphrasis as a means of avoiding delicate subjects, see the discussion in Jan M. Ziolkowski’s chapter on ‘Obscenity in the Latin Grammatical and Rhetorical Tradition’, in Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages, ed. by Jan M. Ziolkowski (Leiden: Brill, 1998), pp. 41–60 (pp. 56–57). 33 fol. 24a. 34 Hessenauer, ‘Larger Audience’, p. 262.

The Compileison and ‘Anxieties of Outreach’ 87

Perambulauit Iudas

Compileison

DE LUXURIA Fornicacionem, incestum, adulterium, vicium sodomiticum uel peculiale, uel aliquid simile actu uel uoluntate patrasti, vel aliis consensisti. Virginem deflorasti. Excitasti in te affectus libidinis. In cogitacione libidinosa delectatus fuisti. Pudenda inpudenter tractasti. Si unquam extra uas ultro fudisti. Aliquo modo curam adhibuisti ut libidini satisfaceres. Per sompnum pollutus fuisti. Quo modo concupisti. Voluisti concupisci et ob hoc te ornasti. Quo modo fornicacionibus consensisti, consilium et auxilium impendendo. In puericia aliquid luxuriosum sinistrum egisti. Aliquam inpudenter tractasti uel te tractari permisisti.

De luxure deit venir avant la enqueste en tiele manere: Fornicacion, avoterie, incest, pecche encontre nature ou especial pecche ou acune semblance par fet ou par volunte avez fet, ou a ceo consentu; avez virgine despucele de soen pucelage? Avez vus esmu en vus le talent de leccherie? Avez delitee en leccheruse pense? Avez vus treite hontousement les hontouses membres ou en vus ou en autres? Si vus onkes hors du dreit vessel par vostre ein degre espandistes voste semence? Avez vus en acune manere mis diligence ke vus assez feissez a leccherie? Fuistes onkes soillee par pollucion en songe, e si vus avez este, dites coment? Avez onkes coveite ou voillez estre coveite e puis vus aurnastes; e si vus avez ceo fet, dites coment! Avez consenti a fornicacions en donant conseill ou eide? Avez fet en vostre enfance acun pecche de luxure? Avez nule femme trete hontousement ou suffert de lui hontousement estre tret?35

Perambulauit Iudas

Compileison

On Lechery Fornication, incest, adultery, the vice of sodomy – either in itself, or a similar act – either brought about by free will, or by consenting to others. You deflowered virgins. You roused, from within yourself, lecherous desire. You took delight in lustful thought. You stroked genitals shamelessly. If you ever expelled outside of the proper vessel. You have taken care to satisfy your lust in any manner. You have expelled in defilement during sleep. If you were, in any way, moved by desire – or wished to be desired – and, for this reason, adorned yourself. If you participated in fornication in any way through counsel and granted aid. You performed some sinister act of lechery during your childhood. You stroked someone shamelessly, or let yourself be stroked by someone.

Lechery should be subject to investigation in the following manner: fornication, adultery, incest, and sin against nature – either that specific sin or any similar deed – done in act or in intention, or by consent. Have you deflowered a virgin? Did you rouse, from within yourself, a desire for lechery? Did you delight in lustful thought? Did you very shamefully stroke shameful parts of the body – either your own, or those of others? If you ever by your own free will expelled your seed outside of the proper vessel? Have you taken care to satisfy your lust in any manner? Were you ever defiled by pollution while sleeping—and if you have been, say how? And have you been moved by desire, or wished to be desired, and then adorned yourself? And if you have done this, say how! Have you consented to fornication by giving counsel, or aid? Did you commit any act of lechery during your childhood? Have you shamefully stroked any woman, or let yourself be shamefully stroked by her?

35 Goering and Mantello, ‘“The Perambulauit Iudas”, p. 164; Hessenauer, ‘Larger Audience’,

p. 310.

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At first glance, it is hard to say if the Compileison is more or less explicit here than the Perambulauit Iudas. On one hand, the Compileison is more direct; it describes the spilling of ‘semence’ (‘seed’ or ‘semen’) which is described only implicitly in its source (‘Si unquam extra uas ultro fudisti’), and which the Compileison describes, as we have seen, more circuitously elsewhere, when addressing a wider audience. On the other hand, the Compileison is less specific about sodomy here; where the Perambulauit Iudas describes it as ‘vicium sodomiticum’ (‘the sin of sodomy’) the Compileison describes it in more general terms as ‘pecche encontre nature’ (‘sin against nature’). This is in keeping with the approach to sodomy elsewhere in the text. Overall, then, the Compileison is somewhat more guarded in its descriptions of sexual sin than the Perambulauit Iudas. The section addressed to a general audience deploys circumlocution to avoid describing it, and that addressed to ‘gent de religion’ gives some detail, but nevertheless does not mention ‘sodomy’ by name. The peculiar omission of sodomy in the Compileison merits some attention, especially since the period in which it was written was marked by a particular fervor for invective against sodomy – especially in the more limited sense of anal intercourse. This zeal was the culmination of several key changes in the Church. Over the course of the eleventh century, the Church had been turning its attention to what it saw as an increase in sexual immorality amongst its members, and concerns over sodomy had become increasingly pronounced.36 As Jennifer D. Thibodeaux has argued, these concerns over clerical sodomy, which intensified in the eleventh century, may have been motivated by a climate of conflict and suspicion within the Church itself – as clerical marriage increasingly fell under attack, members of clergy who opposed it were accused of sodomy by those who supported clerical marriage.37 One of the most vocal opponents of sodomy in this period was Peter Damian (c. 1007–1073), whose mid eleventh-century Liber Gomorrhianus (Book of Gomorrah) presented an impassioned diatribe against it.38 As Burgwinkle notes, ‘sodomy’ for Damian encompasses four specific ‘unnatural’ acts, including anal intercourse.39 The work’s invective is directed primarily at the clergy, and while the tract is aimed at encouraging Pope Leo IX to curb abuses within the Church, its editor notes that it was likely intended to be read to the clergy more broadly. Damian insists, for example, that, ‘Quod in reprobum sensum lapsi sunt, qui post hoc vitium habere sacrum ordinem concupiscunt’ (‘those who desire to have sacred orders after this vice have 36 See James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 214–220; and Pierre J. Payer’s ‘Introduction’, in Book of Gomorrah: An Eleventh-Century Treatise Against Clerical Homosexual Practices, trans. by Pierre J. Payer (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1982), p. 13 and Boswell, Christianity, pp. 208–213. 37 See Jennifer D. Thibodeaux, The Manly Priest: Clerical Celibacy, Masculinity, and Reform in England and Normandy, 1066–1300 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), pp. 98–101. 38 For the dating of the Book of Gomorrah, see Payer’s ‘Introduction’, in Book, p. 13. 39 William E. Burgwinkle, Sodomy, Masculinity and Law in Medieval Literature: France and England, 1050–1230 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 54. Lochrie notes, however, that the distinctions that Damian draws between the different types of sodomy break down throughout his treatise (Covert, p. 188).



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fallen into a depraved sense’).40 Damian’s letter was apparently not successful in swaying the Pope, but his approach in this text is in many ways characteristic of the Church’s broader approach to sodomy at the time; the Church directed this new wave of concern inwards first, and toward its own ranks.41 It has been argued that concerns about sodomy became more pronounced in the twelfth century.42 At a local level, Anselm of Canterbury drafted a 1102 decree on the subject. Like Damian before him, Anselm insisted that anyone with sacred orders should be barred from advancement if found to have comitted sodomy. But unlike Damian, Anselm also stipulated a particular punsishment for layfolk: they were to be deprived of social status and excommunicated. Although Thibodeaux notes that Anselm’s decree was apparently not enacted, its composition nevertheless shows that the persecution of sodomy was extending beyond the ranks of the established Church.43 Indeed, William E. Burgwinkle notes the frequency with which Orderic Vitalis imputes sodomy to the Norman court and concludes that in the twelfth century charges of sodomy, increasingly being directed outside the Church, began to serve a regulatory function, dictating and prescribing acceptable behaviour.44 The pronounced concern about sodomy among the laity is apparent from the injunctions of the Third Lateran Council of 1179. This legislation, which represents the first Church-wide injunction against sodomy, has a clear target: ‘Quicumque in incontinentia illa quae contra naturam est’ (‘Whoever shall be found to have committed that incontinence which is against nature’). John Boswell notes that the injunction was passed at a time when the Church was putting increasingly restrictive limitations on Jewish people, Muslims, and other already marginalized communities. He suggests, based on the phrasing and context of the injunction, that it was aimed at curbing ‘homosexual practices’ in particular. The wording of the specified punishment is telling: ‘si clerici fuerint, ejiciantur a clero, vel ad poenitentiam agendam in monasteriis detrudantur; si laici, excommunicati subdantur, et a coetu fidelium fiant prorsus alieni’ (‘[the sinner] shall, if a cleric, be deposed from office or confined to a monastery to do penance; if a layman, he shall suffer excommunication and be cast out from the company of the faithful’).45 The punishments specified, which are apparently more severe for the laity than for the clergy, reflect a powerful and growing concern over lay sodomy in the twelfth century. 40 See Pierre Payer’s ‘Introduction’ and translation in Book, p. 13; the quotation is on p. 37.

I am grateful to my former MA student Dorien Zwart for drawing my attention to this edition. The original is from Peter Damian, ‘Liber Gomorrhianus’, in Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina, 145, ed. by J. P. Migne (Paris: Migne, 1853), chp. 5 [sect. 152], col. 164C. 41 On the Pope’s reaction to Damian’s letter, see Burgwinkle, Sodomy, p. 54. 42 Payer notes that before 1048, ‘censures of such practices by ecclesiastical councils are rare’, but points out that the penitentials powerfully suggest that the matter was a point of concern for the Church (‘Introduction’, in Book, pp. 7; 10–11). 43 On Anselm’s injunction, see Thibodeaux, Manly, p. 101. 44 Burgwinkle, Sodomy, pp. 50–52. 45 Quotations and translations of the injunction are from Boswell, Christianity, pp. 277–278. See also Brundage, Law, p. 399.

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Although the injunctions against sodomy at the next Church-wide assembly – the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 – target sodomy among the clergy rather than the laity, in England the thirteenth century was marked by a distinct attitude of hostility toward lay sodomy.46 The earliest reference to sodomy in English lawcodes appears in the thirteenth-century Fleta, where the punishment for it is severe; the code states that anyone found convicted of it was to be buried alive. In a thirteenth-century lawcode from England known as Britton, those convicted of sodomy are condemned to be burned alive.47 It is unclear to what extent such extreme punishments were enacted; D. S. Bailey notes that it is likely that the prosecution of sodomy was considered a matter for the ecclesiastical – rather than secular – courts.48 Nevertheless, the sudden appearance of sodomy in secular lawcodes of the thirteenth century suggests a growing concern about acts of sodomy practiced among the laity and reflects a key stage in what R. I. Moore has famously termed ‘the formation of a persecuting society’.49 Given the new and pressing concerns over lay sodomy that characterized the thirteenth century, it is perhaps surprising that the term – and associated concept – appears in Grosseteste’s clerically focused manual but was omitted when the manual was adapted into the Compileison – a guide that explicitly includes the laity among its audiences. The omission may of course be explained by the language of the Compileison; perhaps whoever produced it was afraid to express the idea in the vernacular. But the French word was used by contemporaries in other contexts; the Anglo-Norman Dictionary cites two instances from Andrew Horn’s late thirteenthor early fourteenth-century legal textbook known as Le mireur a justices.50 To understand the Compileison’s peculiar approach, then, we must look elsewhere.

Robert de Sorbon’s Qui vult vere confiteri (c. 1260–1274) and its Adaptations To see whether the increased trepidation that characterizes the depiction of sexual sin in the Compileison is typical of manuals for mixed audiences, it is useful to look at Robert de Sorbon’s Qui vult vere confiteri (c. 1260–1274) and its French translation, both of which were designed for self-examination.51 Both contain confessional statements in the first person, but unlike the first part of Grosseteste’s work, they are not, strictly speaking, forms of confession, because these confessional statements are introduced with third-person narration, such as ‘Et debet sic dicere peccator’ 46 On the Fourth Lateran Council, see Boswell, Christianity, p. 278. 47 See D. S. Bailey, Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition (London: Longmans, 48

49 50 51

1955), pp. 145–147; see also Paul Johnson and Robert M. Vanderbeck’s Law, Religion and Homosexuality (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), p. 30. Bailey, Homosexuality, p. 147. Ruth Mazo Karras notes that there is no evidence of the prosecution of sodomy under these laws in ‘Prostitution and the Question of Sexual Identity in Medieval Europe’, Journal of Women’s History, 11 (1999), 159–177 (p. 168). R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1987). ; see also below, pp. 96–97. Diekstra terms them ‘guides to confession’; ‘Robert de Sorbon’, p. 218.



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(‘And the sinner should say this’).52 The Latin version was written first and supplied the source for the French version according to F. N. M. Diekstra, who edited both versions. But Diekstra also notes that ‘it is not inconceivable that among the Latin versions there are instances of “backformation”, in which the French served as the model rather than the Latin exemplar’.53 Given the connection between them, both Latin and French versions printed by Diekstra can help with establishing the relationship between the audience of a manual for penitents and its author’s relative willingness to describe private sins. Both imply a mixed audience to some extent.54 Both include the passage, already discussed, about paying tithes.55 Both also list some sins that would have been particular to certain forms of clerical life. So, both include, also under ‘avarice’, the buying and selling of benefices, a type of avarice which, both versions acknowledge, pertains mostly to the clergy and others living religious lives. That said, the Latin text contains more sins particular to clerical readers than does the French one; in the same section on the sin of avarice, the Latin text lists both the selling of benefices and the selling of sacraments, whereas the French gives only the selling of benefices.56 As already established, manuals for penitents often have diverse and mutually exclusive constructed audiences, so the implied audience of a text – the one suggested by its contents – can only tell us so much. It is useful to consider the intended audience as well – that is, the one that is addressed explicitly by a work. It is worth noting that in the case of these two versions of Qui vult vere confiteri, the one with the fewest clerical sins – the French one – is also explicitly addressed to a more general audience; it alone ends with a statement that it is for ‘toute boine gent crestiienne’ (‘all good Christians’).57 So, while both works construct multiple audiences to some degree, the French one is particularly committed to a mixed audience that includes both the laity and the clergy. Like the Compileison, which also constructs a mixed audience, both versions of Qui vult vere confiteri exhibit some trepidation around sexual sin. This is especially 52 Robert de Sorbon, ‘Robert de Sorbon’s Qui Vult Vere Confiteri (ca.1260–74) and its French 53 54

55 56

57

Versions’, ed. by F. N. M. Diekstra, Recherches de théologie et philosophie médiévales, 60 (1993), 215–272 (p. 243). Translations from both Latin and French versions are my own. Diekstra, ‘Robert de Sorbon’, pp. 231–232. The only comment that Diekstra makes regarding the audience of these two works is that they were written for ‘laymen’ (‘Robert de Sorbon’, p. 218), but it would seem that Diekstra means ‘those examining their consciences’ since Diekstra makes this statement in a passage that states the works were designed for penitents (as opposed to priests), and since he does not provide any evidence for why the works might have been written for the laity in particular. For the Latin passage, see chapter 2, n. 33 above. The French text gives: ‘Sir, j’ai mauvaisement paiiés mes dismes’ (‘Sir, I have paid my tithes badly’) (p. 251). For the Latin passage, see chapter 2, n. 33 above. The French text has: ‘La sisime branche est simonie, quant lais hom vent u achate les benefisses de Sainte Eglise. Cis pechiés monte plus as clers u as gens de religion ke il ne fait as lais’ (‘The sixth branch is simony, when a lay person sells or buys benefices of Holy Church. This sin is more important to members of the clergy or to people of religion than it is to layfolk’) (p. 251). Robert de Sorbon, ‘Qui vult’, p. 259.

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true of the ‘sins against nature’. Robert, in his Latin text, avoids using the term ‘sodomy’ altogether, and describes this sin circuitously: ‘Sextus ramus luxurie est quando [homo facit] quoddam peccatum contra naturam, de quo legitur Deum fecisse talem vindictam quod quinque civitates destructe [et combuste] sunt igne fetido propter ardorem vel fetorem luxurie’ (‘The sixth branch of lechery is when man does a sort of sin against nature, for which we read God took [lit. made] such vengeance that five cities were destroyed and were burnt in stinking fire – because of the heat and the stench of lechery’).58 In this same discussion of sins against nature, Robert also describes masturbation and related acts in terms that are somewhat vague: ‘quando homo facit peccatum per se sicud faceret cum muliere et percipit bene quod est contra naturam; vel quando eciam illicite et [inhoneste] virilia membra sua vel aliorum tenuerit vel palpaverit vel [respexerit]’ (‘when a man commits a sin by himself as he would do with a woman and perceives well that it is against nature, and when he illicitly and shamefully holds, feels, or touches his own or others’ male members’). Robert finally notes that, aside from these ways, sins against nature can be committed ‘aliis modis qui non debent dici in aperto, sed omnia in confessione debent manifestari’ (‘by other ways that should not be said in the open, but all these things should be declared openly in confession’).59 Where Grosseteste, whose text is addressed primarily to monks and their spiritual director, was willing to list a variety of sins in this category, including sodomy, Robert describes these more circuitously.60 Following the tendency to be watchful when writing for a wide audience, the later, French version, which is addressed to all Christians, is even more cautious about describing the sins against nature than the Latin one. It includes the same vague description of sins against nature as those ‘dont Dex fist tel vengement ke .v. cités en [furent fondues et arses] de feu puant’ (‘for which God took such vengeance that five cities were melted and burnt in a stinking fire’). But it omits the description of ‘members’ from the discussion of masturbation, and does not mention touching the genitals of others: ‘quant li hons [u] la feme [fait] le pechié par soi et bien s’en apierchoit c’est contre nature’ (‘when the man or the woman commits the sin by himself or herself and knows well that it is against nature’).61 So, while both versions are circuitous in their descriptions of sexual sin, that addressed to a wider audience contains even fewer details. We cannot simply write this silence off as part of a wider tendency toward abridgement; although the French version omits several passages

58 Robert de Sorbon, ‘Qui vult’, p. 255. 59 Robert de Sorbon, p. 255.

60 There is, however, one copy of this work that goes into relatively explicit detail about

the carnal acts that it purports to discourage. Diekstra writes that ‘its elaborate dwelling on salacious details would appear to move far beyond the requirements of pastoral care’ (‘Robert de Sorbon’, p. 224). However, because Robert is generally cautious in his treatment of sexual sin, and because this version is only preserved in one manuscript, Diekstra concludes that this more explicit copy cannot be authorial (‘Robert de Sorbon’, p. 226). 61 Robert de Sorbon, p. 255.



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from the Latin, it also contains expansions, such as the lengthy section about penance at the end of the text.62 What emerges from the comparison thus far is that, out of the five discussions of lechery examined, those addressed expressly to clerical audiences – those by Grosseteste – are more explicit about sins against nature than those that address or imply both clerical and lay audiences – the Compileision and Qui vult vere confiteri. Moreover, of this latter work, the version that is addressed explicitly to both clerical and lay readers – the French one – is more circuitous about ‘sins against nature’ than the Latin. This correlation suggests that trepidation around sexual sins is heightened in works addressed to a general audience. To test this theory, it is useful to turn to the Somme le roi, since it was written for courtly readers while Laurent was in the service of Philip III and has some material in common with Qui vult vere confiteri. More specifically, the first two tracts of the Somme le roi, that on the Ten Commandments and that on the seven deadly sins, are derived from the Mirroir du monde (c. 1248–1280), which, in turn, is indebted to Qui vult vere confiteri.63 The treatment of sins against nature in the Somme le roi stands in stark contrast to those in the two versions of Qui vult vere confiteri. To illustrate the differences, it is worth quoting the relevant passage of the Somme le roi at length: Li derrains est li plus vilz et li plus orz, qui ne fet a nomer. C’est pechiez contre nature que li deables enseingne a fere a home ou a fame en mout de manieres qui ne font a nomer pour la matiere qui est trop abominable. Mes en confession le doit dire cil ou cele a cui il est avenu, car de tant comme li pechiez est plus granz et plus horribles, de tant vaut plus la confession, car la honte que on a dou dire est granz partie de la penitence. Cist pechiez desplait tant a Dieu que il en fist plovoir feu ardant et sofre puant sus la cité de Sodome et de Gomorre, et en fondi .V. citez en abisme.64 [The last is the vilest and the most putrid, which is not fit to be named. It is sin against nature, which the devil teaches man or woman to do in many manners that cannot be named, on account of the matter being too abominable. But in confession, he or she to whom [this sin] has befallen [lit. come] must say it, because the greater and more horrible the sin is, the more important confession is, because the shame that we have to say it is a big part of the penance. This sin displeases God so much that he made ardent fire and stinking sulfur rain on the city of Sodom and Gomorrah, and plunged five cities into the abyss.]

62 Robert de Sorbon, pp. 258–259. 63 For the relationship between Robert de Sorbon’s work and the Mirroir de monde (c.

1248–1280), see Raymo, Whitaker, and Sternglant’s ‘Introduction’, in The Mirroure, p. 7. For the relationship between the Mirroir de monde and the Somme le roi, see F. N. M. Diekstra’s ‘Robert de Sorbon’s Qui Vult’, pp. 215–216. Of course, for the present purposes, it would be valuable to examine how private sins are treated in the Mirroir du monde, but it has not been edited, and the wide divergence between its copies makes any analysis of it difficult at this stage. 64 d’Orléans, Somme, p. 150.

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Like Robert de Sorbon, Laurent avoids using the term ‘sodomy’. But Laurent’s account of sins against nature is even more censored than Robert’s. Gone is any discussion of touching genitals, and, aside from the cloaked reference to Sodom and Gomorrah, the account of ‘sins against nature’ is, in Laurent’s text, reduced to an insistence that these are too horrible to be described. Laurent’s silence resonates. As authors brought descriptions of sin out of the cloister and into the home, they tried to cover up descriptions of sodomy and other sins that they thought could be kept secret.

Sexual Sin and Textual Pleasure Other contemporary manuals for penitents addressed explicitly to lay readers voice equally powerful trepidation about private sins. William of Waddington’s Manuel des péchés (c. 1260), which circulated widely among the laity, is an important work in this context.65 William of Waddington first raises concerns about the treatment of private sins in the prologue. Here, William insists that none are described in his work: ‘De privetez n’i troverét rien, / Kar mal put fere ou poy de bien’ (‘You will not find anything about private matters here / because it can lead to harm, or little good’).66 His choice of ‘privetez’ here demarcates those sins that happen in secret from those that could be acquired through social observation. The context behind William of Waddington’s rejection of ‘privetez’ is particularly suggestive. The lines just quoted follow from a passage about pleasure in reading. Immediately before William states that he will not include any ‘privetez’, he writes: ‘Ke plus en lisaunt seit delitus, / Cuntes nus mettrum vus aucuns’ (‘To make the reading delightful, we will add for you some stories’).67 These stories are supposed to help the reader hate sin: ‘Sicum les seins nus unt cunté / Pur plus fere hayr peché’ (‘[these tales are] just as the saints have told us, to make sin more hated’).68 This idea, that delightful stories will make us hate sin more, is consistent with many of the justifications of literary pleasure described by Glending Olson that stress that literary pleasure supports a text’s moralizing goals.69 But the progression of ideas in the wider passage – from an insistence that stories are included to evoke a hatred of sin through literary pleasure, to an insistence that private sins are not included because nothing good will come of listing them – is curious. The proximity of these two ideas – literary pleasure and private sins – might suggest a link between them, as if William is suggesting that ‘private sins’, like the stories he includes, could delight the reader, albeit in the wrong way. In fact, William often uses cognates of ‘delitus’ in the context of sinful pleasures. So, for example, in the tale of the devil’s confession, the devil states that various sins, 65 See above in chapter 3. 66 Waddington, Manuel, I, ll. 61–62.

67 Waddington, Manuel, I, ll. 57–58; translated in Schemmann, Confession, p. 229. 68 Waddington, Manuel, I, ll. 59–60.

69 Glending Olson, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 1982), pp. 19–38.



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including lechery and gluttony, ‘[m]ut me delit’ (‘delight me very much’).70 There is, then, the possibility that William’s fear as it is expressed in the prologue is not just that the description of private sins might provoke his audience to commit them – although this is clearly a central part of it – but that such a description might prompt his audience to take the wrong kind of pleasure in his text. William generally follows through on his promise to not include private sins. In his discussion of lechery he avoids the typical sins against nature, limiting himself to seven branches: fornication, adultery, incest, lechery between the ordained, taking a woman’s virginity, rape of an unmarried woman, and the rape of another man’s wife.71 The descriptions of the branches of these sins are general and do not include specific sexual acts or body parts: ‘Le premer est fornicatiun: / C’est a dire kant simples hum / E femme hors d’espusage / S’asemblent en lur fol curage’ (‘The first is fornication, that is to say, when single men and women meet by their wanton desire outside of marriage’).72 The manual’s silence on private sins is striking. In his adaptation, Handlyng Synne (c. 1303–1307), Robert Mannyng repeats William of Waddington’s concern over private sins. In Mannyng’s work, it appears earlier than it appears in William’s text: ‘Of pryuytees speke y nouȝt: / Þe pryuytees wyle y nouȝt name, / For noun þarfore shuld me blame’ (‘Of private [sins] I will not speak; the private [sins] I will not name, for none therefore should I be blamed’).73 Avoiding private sins is, according to Mannyng, a way of avoiding guilt. The implication here is that including sexual sins in a text could make it offensive. The same idea appears later, in Henry of Lancaster’s Livre de seyntz medicines (1354), where Henry explains that he will not describe his sins of lechery because if he did ‘le livre feust plus haiez’ (‘the book might be the more loathed’).74 Toward the end of the prologue, Mannyng repeats his intention to eschew descriptions of private sins: ‘Þarfore may hyt & gode skyle why / Handlyng synne be clepyd oponly. / For hyt touchyþ no pryuyte / But opon synne þat callyd may be’ (‘Therefore may [this book], and with good reason, be called ‘Handlyng Synne’, and openly. For it touches on no private [things], but those sins that can be called ‘open’ [i.e. public]’).75 In other words, since it avoids private sins, it can be called by its title openly. The implication is that only in this way can a book be made fit for the public. Like his source, Mannyng is generally true to his word, and he avoids discussing private sins in any depth. He avoids the ‘sins against nature’ completely and describes the species of lechery without detail. Mannyng, then, like his

70 Waddington, Manuel, II, l. 9140. 71 Waddington, Manuel, II, ll. 5645–5854. 72 Waddington, Manuel, I, ll. 5819–5822. 73 Mannyng, Handlyng, ll. 30–33.

74 Henry, Duke of Lancaster, Le Livre de Seyntz Medicines: The Unpublished Devotional

Treatise of Henry of Lancaster, ed. by E. J. Arnould (Oxford: ANTS, 1940), p. 69; translated in The Book of Holy Medicines (Le Livre de Seyntz Medicines), ed. and trans. by Catherine Batt, FRETS 8 (Arizona: Arizona State University, 2015), p. 137. 75 Mannyng, Handlyng, ll. 137–140.

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aforementioned contemporaries, seems to understand that books that include private sins could be suspect. Both the Manuel des péchés and the Somme le roi circulated widely and had significant influence on other self-examination texts, so the trepidation around private sins in these manuals is suggestive of contemporary views of the subject. A comparison of the treatment of sexual sins in these lay-oriented texts to that in Grosseteste’s clerical texts, and to those intended for mixed audiences – the Compileison and Qui vult vere confiteri – reveals that authors addressing the clergy exclusively were more comfortable including details about sexual sin than authors addressing both the clergy and the laity. This might seem surprising when we consider that monks, and other members of the clergy, faced higher demands of chastity than layfolk and would therefore perhaps need less instruction in this area. Why, then, were authors more willing to describe private sins when addressing clerical audiences than lay ones? It is, of course, possible that it was because many of the sins in question were closely associated with monastic enclosure. James Brundage finds an emphasis on homosexuality and masturbation in pre-Lateran guides for priests and suggests that this emphasis reflects ‘the experience and concerns of the monastic environment in which most penitential writers received their spiritual and intellectual formation’.76 Jacqueline Murray, speaking of pastoral literature more generally, observes that ‘confession had … evolved in the peculiarly masculine monastic environment of the early Middle Ages’.77 It is possible, then, that these sins are described in greater detail in manuals designed for the clergy because they continued to be seen as predominantly clerical sins. However, even if these sins were thought to be particularly common in monastic environments, this does not explain why they are censored in manuals that address both clerical and lay readers, like the Compileison. We would expect, rather, that manuals that address clerical and lay readers alike would include these sins for the sake of the clerical ones. Another explanation is therefore required. Could authors’ silence on sexual sins when addressing lay audiences stem instead from a concern that lay audiences were more prone to trying new sins than clerical ones? It is not hard to imagine that an author like Laurent would have been more worried about the possibility of introducing new sins to his audience than an author like Grosseteste. Laurent’s audience is primarily secular and would presumably have more opportunities to practice sexual sin than Grosseteste’s monastic audience. It follows that authors would be more concerned about accidentally introducing new sins when addressing the laity than when addressing the clergy. And this interpretation is supported by the approach to sexual sin in Andrew Horn’s Le mireur a justices. This French manual of legal justice refers to ‘sodomie’ openly when addressing its clerical audience but expresses considerable reservations about mentioning the sin in a public forum: ‘cel pecche ne satteint james devant juge par accusement, einz en est laudience defendue’ (‘this sin is never attainted before a judge by accusation, for

76 Brundage, Law, p. 174. 77 Murray, ‘Gendered Souls’, p. 81.



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the hearing of it is forbidden’).78 Some sins, it would seem, could be spoken of in the restricted company of the clergy, but never in front of a broader public. The strange treatment of sexual sins in manuals addressed to the laity, then, points to an unease over who should have access to knowledge. But it may point to another source of unease as well. Manuals for penitents, which were – as we we have seen – associated with more secular forms of entertainment through both formal and linguistic features, had to guard against accusations of impropriety. While a manual written in Latin and addressed to the clergy may have escaped association with secular forms of entertainment, this was not true for the bulk of manuals for penitents – and especially not for those addressed to the laity. A work like Laurent’s Somme le roi would have been associated with secular media through its use of the vernacular, its remarkable popularity, and its courtly audience. The lavish adornment of many of its copies would have also raised questions about the work’s seriousness. These manuals, then, could have courted charges of frivolity, and on these grounds their authors may have been particularly wary of including potentially scurrilous material. This interpretation of the evidence is certainly suggested by Mannyng’s statement that he has decided not to mention private sins so that he will be shielded from blame. It would seem, then, that fears that the confessional interrogation could inadvertently teach new sins spilled over into manuals for penitents. These concerns were especially pronounced in manuals addressed explicitly to the laity, who – it was believed – needed to be guarded from this knowledge. This matters, because it shows that the new manuals for penitents written for lay audiences in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council were not simply an extension of the Church’s existing pastoral programme. Their emergence signalled a shift in its approach – one that came accompanied by significant tensions. It is of course true that the Church promoted these manuals and sought to distribute them widely. These manuals, through their written explorations of sin and its contours, brought the Church’s teachings directly into the homes of the faithful on an unprecedented scale and allowed the Church to convey these at a distance. Manuals for penitents that address a wide readership, such as the Compileison, reflect how far the injunction to confession of 1215 had been internalized by penitents and had permeated society. These works contributed to the same widening of the Church’s power that, according to Payer and others, developed through manuals for confessors. But while these manuals were extending the confessional apparatus of the Church, they also became sites of considerable unease. Their authors recognized that by releasing material that had largely been the realm of the clergy into private homes, they were losing some control over how this material would be used, circulated, and internalized. The concerns over sexual sin that are apparent in manuals addressed to general audiences suggest a significant fear that these manuals could also inadvertently introduce new sins – or even remind penitents of old ones. These concerns point to the heightened tensions that emerged as religious education became increasingly removed from the control of the institutional Church. 78 The quotation and its translation are taken from Andrew Horn’s The Mirror of Justices, ed.

and trans. by William Joseph Whittaker (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1895), p. 135.

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Aside from illuminating this distinctive facet of the Church’s educational programme, the findings presented here also shed new light on medieval self-knowledge. According to Foucault’s well-known formulation, the emergence of unease surrounding sexual discourse is a marker of a developing self-reflexivity. In this model, discomfort with speaking of sex is a symptom of, and contributes to, the complex self-awareness of the subject. Foucault writes that such discomfort was largely absent in the medieval Church, and that it emerged only after the Council of Trent (c. 1545–1563).79 In so doing, Foucault credits the Early Modern period with giving rise to a particularly modern form of self-knowledge. Foucault’s views have been challenged in various quarters, but the idea that the Early Modern period was marked by the emergence of new forms of self-knowledge continues to hold influence in both literary and historical studies. The evidence presented here, by highlighting the significant unease about sexual discourse in manuals for penitents, contributes to a growing awareness of the forms of self-knowledge available to the medieval mind. In so doing, it supports a broader movement aimed at challenging progressivist narratives that locate the emergence of self-reflexivity in the Early Modern period.80

79 ‘Consider the evolution of the Catholic pastoral and the sacrament of penance after

the Council of Trent. Little by little, the nakedness of the questions formulated by the confession manuals of the Middle Ages, and a good number of those still in use in the seventeenth century, was veiled’; The History of Sexuality, pp. 18–19; 70. Foucault’s ideas about the development of the subject through confession and through the prohibition against discourse about sex are discussed above, in the introduction. 80 For critiques of the tendency to locate the emergence of self-knowledge in the Early Modern period, which form part of the ‘revolt of the medievalists’, see the introduction above.

Part III Manuals for Penitents, 1300–1350

Chapter 5 A Reforming Curriculum

A

s manuals for penitents increasingly brought self-examination tools into the hands of the laity at the close of the thirteenth century, inviting penitents to explore their consciences at a remove from their confessors, a new possibility – and potential threat to the established Church – was being discussed: could the text act as a surrogate for the priest’s interrogation? And could the written word stand in for a spoken confession? Such questions were not entirely new; in the twelfth century, and across the North Sea, Caesarius of Heisterbach had told the remarkable story of a clerk who had confessed through writing alone – albeit under extraordinary circumstances. According to Caesarius, the man had kept a deadly, soul-destroying sin hidden, terrified of the social repercussions of confessing it. A concerned priest suggested that the clerk write it down rather than speak it aloud, and as soon as the clerk did this, the words disappeared. The now-blank paper was a sign, for Caesarius, that the sin had been wiped clean from the clerk’s soul. For Caesarius, the words’ disappearance and the absolution it represented were miracles signifying God’s boundless grace.1 But as confessional material moved increasingly into lay hands, the possibility of a ‘long-distance confession’ – sending the priest a written statement rather than meeting him in person – started to be perceived as a real threat to the Church’s power. The Church had, for years, encouraged some penitents to keep written lists of their sins to use as a prompt during confession, but sending such a list as a surrogate was deemed unacceptable under most circumstances.2 The Manuel des péchés warns, ‘Ne par escrit ne vus poez / Vus confesser de vos pechez, / Si present vus memes ne saez / E de buche au prestre cuntez’ (‘You cannot confess your sins through writing if you, yourself, are not present, and recounting your sins by mouth’).3 1

Edited by J. A. Herbert, Catalogue of Romances in the Department of Manuscripts British Museum, 3 vols (London: Longmans, 1910), III, p. 351. Richard Rolle repeated the same story about a century later for an English audience; see English Prose Treatises of Richard Rolle de Hampole, ed. by George G. Perry, EETS OS 20 (London: Oxford University Press, 1921), p. 7, quoted in Herbert, Catalogue, III, p. 351. 2 James Aho writes that ‘by the time of Alain de Lille, some handbooks were urging that penitents keep written records of their sins, their companions in vice, their addresses, and their occupations, all as mnemonic aids in preparing full confessions’; Confession and Bookkeeping: The Religious, Moral, and Rhetorical Roots of Modern Accounting (New York: State University of New York Press, 2005), p. 27. 3 Waddington, Manuel, II, ll. 9945–9948. The translation is mine.

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The warning is extended further in the English translation in Handlyng Synne: Þou mayst nat þy synnes wryte, Yn shryfte þe so to quyte, Ȝyf þou mayste speke, and haste space To fynde a preste yn any place, with mouþe to speke, and nat to hyde, Elles hyt ys a spyce of pryde.4 [You cannot write down your sins as a means of atoning for them through confession if you are able to speak, and have the opportunity to find a priest somewhere to tell [your sins] with your mouth – and not to hide. Otherwise it is a species of pride.]

The conditions specified in this passage suggest that written confession may have been acceptable under certain circumstances, but in most cases was considered inadequate. It is not clear how often medieval penitents tried to confess through writing, but if these manuals make reference to the practice, it must have been a concern. Indeed, as manuals for penitents became increasingly widespread, self-examination started to be described as a kind of reading in itself. Urging his readers to reflect on their sins, the author of the Weye of Paradys writes that ‘Euerj man hath a book of conscience hymself wherejnne he owȝte ofte to studie for to knowe ȝif enythyng there be that be not wel’ (‘Every man has a book of conscience in which he ought to study in order to know if there is anything there that is not well’).5 This link between self-examination and reading was founded on the theory of the Book of the Heart – the notion that all of a person’s vices and virtues, from the smallest white lie to the greatest evil, are inscribed in a divine register.6 In medieval literature, this divine register is often described as the work of the devil, who watches everyone vigilantly and records every sin.7 So, the dreamer in Raoul de Houdenc’s Songe d’enfer is offered such a book by the devil; within it, all the sins of ‘menestrels’ are written: ‘Et de chacun la plus vil tèche, / Le plus vil péchié dont il pèche / I est escrit’ (‘And of each [person], the vilest moral blemish, the vilest sin that he commits, is written there’).8 Another brief reference to the devil recording sins in a register appears in the Manuel des péchés, in a passage warning about chattering in church: Ke kantke la avét janglé, Du Diable vus yert rehercé Quant sun role sera mustré, 4 Mannyng, Handlyng, ll. 11769–11774. 5 ‘Weye of Paradys’, in The Middle English ‘Weye of Paradys’ and the Middle French ‘Voie De

Paradis’, ed. by F. N. M. Diekstra (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991), pp. 119–333 (p. 145).

6 In his extensive study of this idea, Eric Jager finds that it was widespread in the later

medieval period; The Book of the Heart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 105–119. 7 See the work of Margaret Jennings on the subject in ‘Tutivillus: The Literary Career of the Recording Demon’, Studies in Philology, 74.5 (1977), 1–84 (p. 41). 8 Raoul Houdenc, ‘Le Songe d’Enfer’, in Le Songe d’Enfer suivi de La Voie de Paradis, ed. by Philéas Lebesgue (Paris: E. Sansot, 1908), pp. 49–95 (p. 93, ll. 643–645).

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Si yci ne seit amendé E par confessiun osté.9

[That however much you chattered there will be listed off to you by the devil when his scroll will be presented – if it is not corrected here and erased/expunged through confession!]

Here, sin becomes a mark on a scroll that can be scraped away through confession. The English translation in Handlyng Synne also includes this description of the devil’s scroll, and, apparently inspired by it, adds a tale that extends the metaphor. In short, a deacon starts laughing during a church service. When the priest asks him about this, the deacon explains that he saw two women chattering – accompanied by a curious sight: ‘Betwyx hem to, y say a fende / with penne and parchemen yn honde, / And, wrote alle þat euer þey spake / Pryuyly be-hynde here bake’ (‘Between the two of them I saw a devil with pen and parchment in hand, and he wrote down all that they spoke – secretly, behind their backs’).10 The devil runs out of writing space and scrambles to draw out more parchment. The force causes the parchment to rip and sends the devil flying against a wall – which is what inspires the deacon’s laugh. The tale, with its detailed account of the devil’s transcription work, extends the connection already found in the Manuel between the written word and the human conscience. Where the Weye of Paradys, in the aforementioned passage, compares the human conscience to the written word, it depicts the human conscience as superior: The bok of conscience auayleth to sauacion of the soule, whoso wyl study thereinne, and hit is the beest bok [and] the beste sciens that is, for withowten that science and that bok may no man be sauyd. For thowʒe a man were a grete clerke in alle science and he were a maister of gramer and logyk, of kyndes, of laue, of decrees, of theologie, and of alle sciences, ʒif he were no good clerk of the bok of conscience, alle the other sciences schulde auayle hym not.11 [The book of conscience is beneficial to the salvation of the soul for whoever will study in it, and it is the best book and the best body of knowledge there is. For without that body of knowledge and that book, no man can be saved. For even if a man were a great scholar in all fields, and were a master of grammar and logic, of the temperaments, of law, of decrees, of theology – of all fields! – if he were not a good scholar of the book of the conscience, all other knowledge would not help him.]

The work encourages the reader to prioritize the book of the soul rather than other books – including, presumably, this one. In the Ayenbite of Inwyt, this ‘book’ of the human conscience is compared directly to the physical book held in the reader’s hands. During a discussion of avarice, we learn that, ‘Ine manye oþre maneres is ydo þe zenne of wyckednesse. Ac lang þing 9 Waddington, Manuel, II, ll. 6804–6808. 10 Mannyng, Handlyng, ll. 9279–9282.

11 ‘Weye of Paradys’, in The Middle English Weye, p. 145.

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hit were to zigge. and betere may ech man rede þe ilke zenne and þe oþre ine þe boc of his inwyt: þanne ine ane ssepes scinne’ (‘The sin of wickedness can also be committed in many other ways. But to speak [of them all] would be a long account. And each man may better read [about] this same sin and others in the book of his conscience, than in any sheep’s skin’).12 Here, reading the manual and ‘reading’ the conscience are similar in the sense that both can reveal a person’s sins. But the conscience here is the better ‘book’, since it is capable of revealing a greater multitude of sins – far more than an actual book could ever contain. The message here is clear: while the manual can help identify sin, it cannot and should not be used as a substitute for a complete penitential self-examination. At a time when self-examination guides were becoming more accessible, warnings such as this one suggest a Church anxious to ensure that the use of these guides would not get out of control. Such fears are, at the heart, about the possibility of an educational tool replacing an educator, and in this respect they are not so different from some of the modern fears surrounding distance education. Warnings of writers like William that a manual cannot replace a confessor must have been motivated not only by a fear that material could otherwise be misinterpreted but also by a fear that confessors could lose contact with their parishioners through the process. Judging from the warnings in manuals for priests and penitents alike, writers were concerned that penitents who did not seek out confessors would face eternal damnation. A popular ghost story told by Caesarius of Heisterbach and repeated by Richard Rolle told of a canon of Paris who, after death, returned to warn others that he had been damned eternally because his deathbed confession had ‘wantede verray contrycyone’(‘lacked true contrition’).13 For some priests, losing touch with penitents was worrying because it could endanger their parishioners’ immortal souls. But aside from these apparently altruistic aims, some confessors must have also feared that losing penitents would result in considerable financial losses in the form of indulgences. A penitent in the late medieval period who felt unable to complete a prescribed penance could request an indulgence instead and, by making a donation to the Church or performing some alternate penitential deed, the penitent could be forgiven. Popular conceptualizations of indulgences often depict them as a kind of spiritual bribe that replaced true repentance and confession, but it is worth noting that medieval penitents typically had to perform a thorough confession and express sincere contrition before any indulgence would be granted.14 The revenue gener12 Michael of Northgate, Ayenbite, p. 44. 13 Described by J. A. Herbert, Catalogue, III, p. 351. For Rolle’s version, see Perry’s, English

Prose Treatises, pp. 6–7, quoted at p. 7.

14 Robert W. Shaffern, ‘The Medieval Theology of Indulgences’, in Promissory Notes on the

Treasury of Merits: Indulgences in Late Medieval Europe, ed. by R. N. Swanson (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 11–36 (pp. 11–12). The view that indulgences operated primarily as a form of spiritual bribery has been shaped, in part, by nineteenth-century historiographies of penance such as that of Henry Charles Lea which, as R. Emmet McLaughlin points out, ‘drew upon intra-Catholic arguments to attack the doctrine of attrition, the deleterious affects of indulgences, the granting of indulgences for the dead, and solicitation in the confessional’ in ‘Truth, Tradition and History: The Historiography of High/Late



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ated through the practice was considerable; as R. N. Swanson notes, money from indulgences was used to fund Thomas Cantilupe’s shrine in Hereford, the hospital at St Roche in Exeter, and even public works projects like York’s city bridges.15 Some Churches benefitted even more directly from confession, by charging the penitent a fee.16 The clergy’s concerns about manuals for penitents, then, undoubtedly had a pragmatic component; while these manuals extended the power of clergy beyond the confessional encounter, they must have also been felt as a potential threat to the role of the clergy in the penitent’s life. As the tools for penitential education have shifted, these concerns have apparently arisen yet again; the most popular app designed to help guide penitents through their self-examination comes accompanied by a warning that the app should be used only for the examination of conscience and not as a replacement for confession to a priest.17 This warning underlines the significant anxieties that accompany new forms of distance education while also pointing to the enduring tensions that surround education about sin and confession.

Manuals for Penitents and the Essentials of the Faith Despite significant and growing concerns in some quarters, the Church began to expand its educational program in the second half of the thirteenth century. The seven deadly sins continued to occupy a central place in manuals for penitents in this period, but these sins were increasingly packaged with other essentials of the faith, including the Ten Commandments (the Decalogue) – those well known ‘Thou shalt not’ statements – the Twelve Articles of the Faith (the Creed or Credo), and descriptions of the five senses. None of this material was new at the time. The Ten Commandments were derived from the Old Testament, where they are described as the direct orders of God; in Exodus 19–20, a thick cloud shrouds Mount Sinai and Moses bravely ventures into it, eventually emerging with two tablets of stone upon which the Commandments are written in God’s own hand. The Creed is found in various forms among early Church writings and was circulating in its characteristic twelve-part form by the eighth century.18 The five senses had an extensive commentary tradition in England and can be found in some of the earliest English theological works.19 Such essentials were not, therefore, innovative in the thirteenth

15 16 17 18 19

Medieval and Early Modern Penance’, in A New History of Penance, ed. by Abigail Firey (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 19–72 (p. 38). R. N. Swanson, Indulgences in Late Medieval England: Passports to Paradise? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 111. See Tentler, Sin, p. 87. See Little iApps, Confession. For the medieval history of the Creed, see James D. Gordon, ‘The Articles of the Creed and the Apostles’, Speculum, 40.4 (1965), 634–640. For early representations of the five senses in medieval England, see Dieter Bitterli, ‘Strange Perceptions: Sensory Experience in the Old English “Marvels of the East”’, in The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England, ed. by Annette Kern-Stähler, Beatrix Busse, and Wietse de Boer (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 137–162 (pp. 138–141).

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century. Nevertheless, the large-scale proliferation of these essentials among layfolk was unprecedented. Texts on these essentials, which are now commonly written off as impersonal scripts for rote repetition, actually played a key role in promoting personal, complex, and reflective self-examination.20 In manuals for penitents, these essentials appear as frameworks for identifying sin. Drawing on a love for schematization and enumeration that had taken hold in the cathedral schools of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, writers broke these essentials down into lists of carefully enumerated elements, such that the essentials served, much like the seven deadly sins, as lists of prohibitions.21 So, for example, the five senses were used as a framework for sin; a person could sin against the sense of smell by taking delight in pleasing scents, or against the sense of taste by indulging in too much wine. Each enumerated element – sight, touch, or smell, for example – could be tied to multiple sorts of sin, and writers were remarkably inventive with these, sometimes borrowing from prior works, sometimes adding their own examples, or changing the emphasis of others’. The Ten Commandments were compared to a stalk, which branched out into its constituent parts (each of the commandments). These, in turn, branched out further into various examples of sins. This branching metaphor became common – both textually, in written works about confession, and visually, in the diagrams of sins that started to appear in the same period.22 In its aim of systematizing sin, it reflected a broader interest in the enumeration and codification of knowledge that was increasingly gripping intellectual circles at the time. Some essentials of the faith, such as the Ten Commandments, were easily transformed into frameworks for identifying sin – others less so. So although the Creed is found in all the major manuals for penitents of the period, it is not consistently cast as a framework for identifying sin, and it tends to receive less commentary than other essentials. In the Somme le roi, the section on the Creed opens rather unceremoniously: ‘Ce sont li article de la foi crestienne, que chescuns crestiens doit croire fermement, car autrement il ne puet estre saus’ (‘These are the articles of the Christian faith, which each Christian must firmly believe, because otherwise he cannot be saved’). Each of the twelve parts of the Creed appears translated into French, but with only sparse commentary.23 In the Manuel des péchés, the Creed is treated at greater length, and is more directly linked to the penitential theme of the work as a whole. This is clear from the very first article of the faith, ‘Je crey, cum devum communement, / En Deu le Pere omnipotent / Ke cel e terre de nient fit / Kaunt il le mund establist’ (‘I believe – as we all should, together – in God, the omnipotent Father / who created Heaven and 20 For the tendency to write off these essentials as impersonal see, for example, Jolliffe,

Check-list, pp. 28–29.

21 For the twelfth-century interest in using structural devices for enumerating the essentials

of the faith, see the discussion in Millett, ‘Conditions’, pp. 196–199.

22 See, for example, Robert Grosseteste’s Templum Dei (c. 1220–1230), ed. by Joseph Goering

and Frank Anthony Carl Mantello (Toronto: PIMS, 1984), and the diagrammatic ‘Effects of the Seven Sins’ (Dean no. 652), which I have edited in Murchison, ‘Effects’. 23 d’Orléans, Somme, quoted at p. 107.



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Earth from nothing / when the world was formed’).24 A person who transgresses against this requirement is in mortal sin: Ver poét vus apertement Partaunt ke le pecheur ment Si il ad dit k’il creyt en Dé E gyse en morteu peché. Kar s’il ad a peché amur, Amer ne poet sun Creatur.25 [You can see plainly, therefore, that the sinner lies if he says he believes in God but wallows in mortal sin; because if he has such love for sin, he can’t love his Creator!]

The Creed here serves as a framework for identifying different types of sin. But while the Manuel des péchés uses the Creed in this penitential way, its English translation does not include it at all and, in general, although the Creed is integral to manuals for penitents and typically found within them, it is not consistently incorporated into these manuals’ penitential programmes. In contrast, the Ten Commandments and the five senses were considered particularly well suited to a penitential function. So, the section on the Ten Commandments in the Manuel des péchés is not simply an impersonal list of ‘Thou shalt not’ statements translated into French; it gives advice to the sinner about how to reflect on and identify his failures with respect to each commandment, and it explains the relative severity of these. This approach is set out from the very first commandment: C’est a saver, si par folur, Par aventure, u par pour Deu reneast u nut u jur, C’est de tuz pechez le greynur. Si en taunt avét trespassez, Merci de fin quer ly priez.26 [It is to be known that if by folly, by chance, or by fear, you renounce God, either during the day or at night, that is the greatest of all sins. If you have trespassed to this extent, pray to Him for mercy wholeheartedly.]

Here the worst possible transgression is not, surprisingly, one of the seven deadly sins, but sin against the first commandment. The manual is deeply invested in the question of how to recognize sin against the Commandments in daily life; the discussion of the fourth commandment begins, for example, by exploring the different kinds of sins against it: ‘Cuntre ce funt premereme[n]t / Ceus ke ne sunt obedient / A fere ke unt comaundé / Pere e mere sons peché’ (‘Firstly, against this [command-

24 Waddington, Manuel, I, ll. 105–108. 25 Waddington, Manuel, I, ll. 125–130.

26 Waddington, Manuel, I, ll. 869–874. The same idea appears in the English translation of

this manual, Mannyng, Handlyng, ll. 153–162.

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ment] are those who are not obedient in doing that which is commanded by a father or mother, without sin’).27 So important were the Commandments for self-examination that in Handlyng Synne these actually take priority over the seven deadly sins: Of þyse þan ys my sawe, Þe comaundementys of þe olde lawe. Þyse ten were fyrst vs ȝeuyn, And fyrst we weyln of hem be shreuyn. Yn what poyntys þat we falle Yn opon synne aȝen hem alle.28 [This [lit. of this], then, is my subject: the Commandments of the old law. These ten were given to us first, and we will be shriven of them first, in each of their points in which we fail [lit. fall], in open sin against them all.]

The idea that the Commandments were given to us ‘fyrst’ here is fascinating and suggests an awareness of the fact that the Commandments were biblically-derived while the seven deadly sins – the central structuring principle for good Christian behaviour at the time – were not. The structure here – with the Ten Commandments at the fore – is typical of manuals for penitents of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Though variation exists between manuscript copies, the same order is found in all the major vernacular manuals dating from the mid thirteenth to mid fourteenth centuries, including the Manuel des péchés, the Somme le roi, and their early derivatives. After a brief introduction to the topic, these texts provide a translation of the text of the first commandment. These translations are usually rather faithful, although in verse texts, they may stray from the Latin for the sake of rhyme. The first commandment is then briefly explained, and this exposition is followed by a series of pragmatic, everyday examples of sins against it. Through these examples, the notion of sin shifts from the theoretical to the concrete and is revealed to be inescapably embedded in the corporeal reality of the penitent – in coveted objects, pleasing sounds, and tempting sights. The sins against each commandment are introduced through a typical formula, such as that used in the discussion of the first commandment in the Ayenbite of Inwyt: ‘Aye þise heste zeneȝeþ þo þet to moche louieþ hire guod. gold. oþer zeluer. oþer oþre þinges erþliche’ (‘Against this commandment sin those who love too much their goods, gold, or silver – or other earthly things’).29 An explanation of the seriousness of these sins, or a recommendation for how to reform or do penance for them will sometimes follow, then the next commandment is introduced in the same way as the first. The discussion of the Commandments typically ends with a statement of their importance; ‘car qui fet encontre ces commandemenz devant diz a son escient, il peche mortieument’

27 Waddington, Manuel, I, ll. 1493–1496. 28 Mannyng, Handlyng, ll. 13–18. 29 Michael of Northgate, Ayenbite, p. 6.



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(‘because whoever knowingly goes against these aforesaid commandments is sinning mortally’).30 This penitential use of the essentials of the faith in the second half of the thirteenth century – as a framework for in-depth personal examination – had grown organically out of the confessional encounter itself; these same essentials of the faith had been incorporated into the lines of questioning used by confessors to identify sin. A powerful link between essentials of the faith such as the Ten Commandments and the confessional encounter can be seen as early as 1219, when Bishop Richard Poore drafted his first diocesan constitutions in Salisbury.31 In these, Poore insisted that priests should teach their parishioners the Pater noster, Creed, and a form of the Ave.32 About a decade later, Raymond de Pennaforte remarked on the importance of educating parishioners in the first two of these fundamentals and specified that a parishioner’s knowledge of them should be tested during the confessional encounter itself. Raymond advised priests that if parishioners were found wanting in knowledge of these, priests should either teach them to parishioners on the spot, or encourage them to learn them as soon as possible.33 In the constitutions he circulated for his own diocese of Lincoln around 1238, Grosseteste expanded the educational program further. He wrote that a priest ‘populo sibi subiecto frequentur predicet et exponat’ ‘decem mandata legis mosaice’ (‘should frequently preach and explain to the people subject to him’ ‘the ten 30 d’Orléans, Somme, p. 105. 31 But it is important to recognize that the tradition of teaching elements of the faith during

the confessional encounter can be traced back far further. As Allen J. Frantzen writes, ‘Even the earliest Irish handbooks, written in the sixth century, preface the confessional inquiry with moral instruction; ninth-century Frankish and tenth-century English penitentials include an ordo confessionis used to test the penitent’s faith and so to prepare him for confession and penance’; ‘The Tradition of Penitentials in Anglo-Saxon England’, Anglo-Saxon England, 11 (1983), 23–56 (p. 25). Bloomfield notes that the idea of assigning the Pater noster in particular as penance may be ‘of Celtic origin’ (Sins, p. 84). In some areas, the Pater noster was recited as penance during the confessional encounter itself; Hamilton describes a manual for confessors from the eleventh century that specifies that after a penitent has confessed his sins, both priest and penitent should prostrate themselves and sing the Pater noster, along with the Kyrie (Practice, p. 169). Catherine Rider notes that the practice of testing a penitent on his knowledge of the Pater noster and Creed was common in the eleventh century, although, in England, this practice ‘disappeared from episcopal legislation in the twelfth century’; ‘Lay Religion and Pastoral Care in Thirteenth-Century England: The Evidence of a Group of Short Confession Manuals’, Journal of Medieval History, 36.4 (2010), 327–340 (p. 333). 32 This Ave was, according to Cate Gunn, ‘probably the “short, biblical” form … without the later petition prayer that was “enjoined upon the faithful” by the Synod of Paris of c. 1210’ (Ancrene Wisse, pp. 670–678). 33 ‘Debet enim, in primis, interrogare paenitentem, utrum sciat Pater noster, Credo, in Deum, et Ave Maria; et, si nesciat, instruat eum, vel saltem moneat ut addiscat’; Raymond de Pennaforte, Summa de paenitentia, ed. by Javier Ochoa and Luis Diez (Rome: Commentarium pro religiosis, 1976), p. 831. Alexander of Stavensby put a similar emphasis on education in essentials of the faith in his 1237 statutes for the diocese of Coventry, although he did not specify which essentials should be taught; see Andrew Reeves, Religious Education in Thirteenth-Century England (Leiden: Brill, 2015), p. 67.

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commandments of the law of Moses’). Grosseteste insisted further that priests should teach the laity the form of baptism and the seven deadly sins, in addition to ‘orationem dominicam, et symbolum, et salutationem beate virginis, et crucis signaculo se recte consignare’ (‘the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, and the Salutation of the Blessed Virgin, and to make the sign of the cross correctly’).34 For Grosseteste, the confessional encounter was the perfect opportunity for teaching these essentials: quia, ut audivimus etiam quidam adulti hec ignorant, precipimus ut cum laici ad confessionem accedunt, diligenter examinentur utrum scierint predicta, et secundum quod expedit in eis a sacerdotibus instruantur.35 [because, or so I have heard, even some adults are ignorant of these [i.e. the Pater noster, Creed, and Ave] I am ordering that when people come to confession they are to be carefully examined as to whether they know them and be instructed in them when appropriate by their priests.36]

Grosseteste’s statutes were widely influential and bishops in his circle began to make similar recommendations for the priests they supervised, transforming the confessional encounter into an opportunity for education in the fundamentals of the faith.37 The link between the confessional encounter and pastoral education became so powerful that priests started using the essentials of the faith as a means of identifying sin. Penitents were increasingly advised to prepare themselves for confession by considering how they had sinned against the essentials of the faith, including each commandment. By the thirteenth century some of these essentials of the faith, such as the five senses, had been used in this penitential way for years, but others, such

34 The Latin is printed in F. M. Powicke and C. R. Cheney’s Councils & Synods: With Other

Documents Relating to the English Church, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), II. 1, pp. 268– 269. The translation is from Robert Grosseteste, The Letters of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, ed. by F. A. C. Mantello and Joseph Goering (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), pp. 183–184. 35 Quoted in Powicke and Cheney, Councils, II. 1, p. 269. 36 This Latin is printed in Powicke and Cheney, Councils, II. 1, p. 269, the translation in Grosseteste, Letters, p. 185. Grosseteste’s insistence on teaching these concepts during the confessional encounter is echoed by Walter de Cantilupe, who, as Joseph Goering and Daniel S. Taylor describe, recommends that priests ‘teach the penitent, either in his sermons or in the confessional itself, to consider each of the commandments in turn to determine if he or she has sinned in some way against God’s law’; see Joseph Goering and Daniel S. Taylor, ‘The Summulae of Bishops Walter de Cantilupe (1240) and Peter Quinel (1287)’, Speculum, 67.3 (1992), 576–594 (p. 586). 37 For the influence of Grosseteste’s statues, see Reeves, Religious Education, p. 37. Joseph Goering and Daniel S. Taylor find that Walter de Cantilupe issued a similar educational program for his diocese of Worcester, and that this program may have been based on Grosseteste’s (‘Summulae’, p. 590).



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as the Ten Commandments, were a new addition to the repertoire of penitential self-reflection.38 In the case of the Ten Commandments, the idea that such a framework could be used for identifying sin may have originated in the theological schools of Paris; among the earliest examples of this use is that of Parisian Hugh of St Cher, who, in his guide for priests (c. 1231–1232), recommends interrogating penitents about their sins using ‘the ten commandments, the five senses, thoughts, the seven sacraments, and the articles of faith’.39 This new function for the Ten Commandments quickly caught on across the channel; Grosseteste, in many ways an innovator, was among the earliest to adopt it in England judging from his Notus in Iudea Deus – a Latin form of confession that he wrote toward the end of his life, and possibly intended for his own episcopal community. After treating the seven deadly sins in a rather typical manner, Grosseteste adds lists of sins against the five senses, the Sacraments, and, finally, the Ten Commandments.40 Sins in this last category are rather creative and include, under the fifth commandment, stealing wax from candles.41 How a priest’s interrogation about sins against the Ten Commandments played out in practice can be gleaned from Omnis etas (1240), a guide for priests by Walter de Cantilupe, Bishop of Worchester (c. 1236–1266). Cantilupe tells priests to teach about the Ten Commandments, during either their sermons or their confessional encounters, and he then insists that priests should use these Commandments as a tool for identifying the penitent’s sins.42 According to Cantilupe, many sins can be categorized according to the Ten Commandments, so priests must know how to perform an interrogation using them.43 The sins against the Ten Commandments are the first subject treated by Cantilupe. His discussion offers a fascinating glimpse into the kinds of sins that were thought to be related to each commandment: Videat etiam si periuraverit nomen dei, maxime inspectis sacrosanctis vel tactis sicut sepe fit in assisis, et ibi doceantur mala periurii, vel si iuraverit sine causa, maxime nominando caput vel cetera menbra Christi, et hoc ex consuetudine.

38 Alexandra Barratt finds that the five senses had been used for inquiring about sin for

many centuries prior to the Fourth Lateran Council; ‘The Five Wits and their Structural Significance in Part II of Ancrene Wisse’, Medium Aevum, 56 (1987), 12–24 (pp. 18–20). 39 Hugh of St Cher, ‘Glossa in 4 Sent. D.17 (Vatican City, BAV, Vat. lat. 1098, fols 159vb–161va)’, ed. by F. N. M. Diekstra, Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale, 61 (1994), 37–39 (pp. 38–39), quoted in Payer, Sex, p. 62. Payer writes that the anonymous Cum ad sacerdotum, written c. 1231–1232, ‘provides one of the first extended accounts of sins against the commandments’ (p. 62). 40 Joseph Goering and F. A. C. Mantello, ‘Notus in Iudea Deus: Robert Grosseteste’s Confessional Formula in Lambeth Palace MS 499’, Viator, 18.1 (1987), 253–274 (pp. 254; 256). 41 See further James McEvoy Maynooth, Robert Grosseteste (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 143. 42 See Goering and Taylor, ‘Summulae’, p. 586. 43 Powicke and Cheney, Councils, II. 2, p. 1062.

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[Let the penitent also consider if he has forsworn God’s name, especially while looking upon or touching relics (sacrosanctis), as often happens in secular assizes. And here let them be taught about the evils of perjury. And [let the penitent consider] whether he or she has sworn without reason and habitually, especially by the head of Christ or his other members.44]

As with Grosseteste, Cantilupe views the five senses as a framework for self-interrogation.45 Cantilupe’s guidebook suggests a penitent comparing previous behaviour, thoughts, and desires to that required by each of the Commandments and five senses, deploying them as tools for self-reflection. Omnis etas was influential. It was noticed by Peter Quinel (c. 1230–1291), Bishop of Exeter, who found it the perfect guide for priests who were charged with hearing confession. Quinel added a new prologue and conclusion to the text and then reissued it, otherwise verbatim, as his Summula (1287).46 In the Constitutions he issued that same year, he insisted that every priest under his jurisdiction own a copy or risk a fine: Ut autem quilibet sacerdos, cui animarum cura incumbit, melius sciat et intelligat qualiter debeat in ipsa versari, precipimus quod quilibet, cui regimen parochialis ecclesie incumbit, quandam summulam plurimum utilem verius ymmo necessariam … citra festum sancti Michaelis habeat scriptam, et ipsam sane intelligat ac ea utatur pena unius marce, loci archidiacono aplicande. [So that every priest who has the care of souls might better know and understand how he ought to exercise that care, we require that every incumbent of a parish church should possess a copy of a certain most useful (nay, necessary) summula … He should obtain this treatise before the feast of St Michael, soundly understand it, and use it, on pain of one mark to be rendered to the local archdeacon.47]

The proliferation of priests’ guides recommending the use of the Ten Commandments for penitential interrogation shows plainly that the practice was more than a passing regionalism. At the same time that it was gaining currency in priests’ guides, the idea of using the Ten Commandments and other essentials of the faith as frameworks for penitential interrogation was appearing in self-examination writing. In Robert Grosseteste’s Perambulauit Iudas, the five senses are particularly important; they are the first essentials of the faith treated in the tract and they are linked rather imaginatively to the Bible. The discussion opens with a passage from Isaiah: ‘“Erant”, ait Ysayas, “v ciuitates in terra Egypti loquentes lingua Canaan”’ (‘“There were”, says Isaiah, “five cities in the land of Egypt speaking the language of Canaan”’). Grosseteste then

44 Edited and translated in Goering and Taylor, ‘Summulae’, p. 586. 45 Powicke and Cheney, Councils, II. 2, p. 1072; quoted in Goering and Taylor, ‘Summulae’,

p. 589.

46 See the discussion in Goering and Taylor, ‘Summulae’, pp. 582–586. 47 Edited and translated in Goering and Taylor, ‘Summulae’, p. 582.



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explains, ‘Terra Egypti est corpus peccati; v ciuitates v corporis sensus’ (‘The land of Egypt is the body of sin; the five cities are the five senses of the body’).48 The tract then proceeds with a series of confessional statements regarding the types of sins that can be committed through the five senses. These statements are detailed and concrete, offering specific examples drawn from daily life: ‘murmuraui contra cocum’ states the model confession for someone who sinned against taste, ‘si sibaria non essent bene parata; contra priorem uel celerarium si non haberem pitanciam’ (‘I grumbled at the cook if the food seemed bad; against the prior or the cellarer if I didn’t get my fair share’).49 Someone who has sinned against hearing is encouraged to declare, ‘Per auditum peccaui audiendo libenter dulces sonos, carmina secularia et ioculatoria, et uerba vana’ (‘I have sinned by hearing through willingly listening to sweet sounds, secular songs and jokes, and vain words’).50 These statements are to be used interactively; the reader is encouraged to use them for self-exploration and to shape a personal penitential statement using any applicable sins. Under Grosseteste’s detailed framing, the concept of the five senses materializes as a tool for probing the depths of one’s conscience. Grosseteste’s treatment of the five senses was translated rather closely for the Anglo-Norman Compileison (c. 1254–1274), but, following the general pattern of the guide, the confessional statements are introduced with headings (‘Coment home se doit confesser de sa veue’) (‘How man should make his confession regarding his sight’) and explanations to the penitent (‘Apres la veue confessez vus de vostre oie e dites’) (‘After sight, make your confession about your hearing and say’).51 The Compileison also adds further examples taken from daily life; so, for the passage about the sins of taste already discussed, the Compileison lists grouching not only over food that seems bad and portions that are too small, but also food that has arrived too late.52 As with other contemporary manuals already discussed, including the Manuel des péchés, the Compileison casts other essentials of the faith as frameworks for self-examination as well, urging the penitent to confess according to not only the seven deadly sins but also the Ten Commandments.53 Contemporary manuals for penitents from across the channel also contained diverse frameworks for identifying sin. Like the earlier Manuel des péchés, Laurent’s Somme le roi provides material for examining one’s sins using the Ten Commandments. After a brief explanation of the first, ‘Tu n’avras mie divers dieux’, Laurent gives an example of a sin against it: ‘Contre ce commandement pechent cil qui trop aiment leur tresor, or ou argent ou autres choses terriennes, qui en ces choses trespassanz metent tant leur cuer et leur esperance que il en oblient leur Createur et lessent’ (‘Against this commandment sin those who love excessively 48 ‘“The Perambulauit Iudas”’, ed. by Goering and Mantello, p. 149. The translation of these

passages is mine. Grosseteste’s Perambulauit Iudas is discussed further in chapter 4 above.

49 ‘“The Perambulauit Iudas”’, ed. by Goering and Mantello, pp. 152–153. 50 ‘“The Perambulauit Iudas”’, ed. by Goering and Mantello, p. 149. 51 Hessenauer, ‘Larger Audience’, pp. 274; 276. 52 Hessenauer, ‘Larger Audience’, p. 278. 53 See Trethewey, ‘Introduction’, p. xxii.

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their treasure, gold or silver, or other earthly things; who dedicate [lit. put in] so much of their hearts and their hopes in these transitory things that they forget and abandon their Creator’).54 Later in the guide, Laurent also gives instructions on how to recognize sins of the five senses: Aprés, doit l’en encore aler es. V. sens dou cors ou l’en peche mout sovent, ou par les euz en folement reguarder, ou par les oreilles en folement escouter et oïr volentiers mesdisenz, losengiers, menteurs et autres folies ; ou par la boiche en folement parler, en trop boire et en trop mengier ; ou par les narilles en soi trop deliter es bones odeurs ; ou par folement toichier et deshonnestement ou en soi ou en sa fame.55 [After, one must go over the five senses of the body, through which one sins very commonly, either through the eyes, by looking foolishly; or through the ears, by listening foolishy and by voluntarily hearing slanderers, flatterers, liars, and other foolishness; or through the mouth by speaking foolishly, or by drinking or eating too much; or through the nostrils by either taking too much delight in pleasant scents; or by foolishly and dishonestly touching, either personally or through one’s wife.]

By giving concrete examples of sins against the five senses, Laurent encourages in-depth reflection on one’s daily affairs. Laurent’s goal here is not only to teach the Commandments and the five senses, but also to give concrete examples of sins against them, encouraging each reader to reflect on whether these sins mar the reader’s own conscience. While often understood as an impersonal list for rote memorization, the Commandments were becoming a tool for intense self-reflection in this period. Manuals for penitents encourage their readers to approach the Commandments and other essentials of the faith interactively; the concrete examples of sins against the Commandments that they provide invite comparisons with one’s own daily life. They call, often explicitly, for both intense self-reflection and immediate penitential action; so the Ayenbite of Inwyt proclaims ‘huo þet agelt ine enie of þe ilke hestes: him ssel þerof uor-þenche and him ssriue and bidde god merci yef he wyle by yborȝe’ (‘he who sins against any of the given Commandments – he shall repent of it, and shrive himself, and beg God for mercy, if he wants to be saved [from damnation]’).56 By the fourteenth century, then, the essentials of the faith had become fully embedded into the confessional encounter, with the Ten Commandments and the five senses increasingly understood as tools for identifying sin in both manuals for priests and those for penitents. The connections between these essentials and penitential interrogation were so embedded in popular culture that they even emerged in contemporary romance literature. Perhaps the most interesting example – at least from the perspective of 54 d’Orléans, Somme, p. 99. 55 d’Orléans, Somme, pp. 289–290.

56 Michael of Northgate, Ayenbite, p. 5.



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the contemporary canon – comes from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Gawain’s shield, which is famously emblematic of his virtues, signifies that the knight is ‘funden fautles in his fyve wyttes’ (‘considered faultless in his five senses’), and though this line is often taken to mean that Gawain’s senses never failed him, the more sensible interpretation, based on the context of the passage, is that Gawain is not guilty of any of the typical sins against the senses.57 This passage, embedded in a poem that is fundamentally invested in the exploration of sin and confession, speaks to the extent to which frameworks like the five senses had become integral to penitential theology in the fourteenth century.58 The medieval use of frameworks like the five senses for penitential interrogation just discussed will perhaps not come as a surprise to Catholics and others who practice private confession. The essentials of the faith, such as the Ten Commandments, continue to be used for this penitential function in contemporary confessional interrogations. Yet this particular function of the essentials often goes unnoticed in discussions of the medieval Church and its pastoral works. Commentaries on these essentials are treated as tools for memorization, and the possibility that these were used for penitential reflection is rarely acknowledged. This tendency is undoubtedly in part a legacy of nineteenth-century Protestant scholarship, that, whether consciously or not, tended to sever medieval writing from its connections to the Catholic Church – and, concomitantly, from confession, which, despite being practiced by several denominations, was viewed as a particularly Catholic practice.59 But it is also, to some degree, a result of confirmation bias. Editors, unaware of the role of these essentials in penitential contexts, tend to extract them from larger self-examination works, and this approach has, in turn, reinforced the idea that these essentials do not belong in self-examination works in the first place. The effect has led to a distorted view of these essentials of the faith, obscuring their role within both manuals for penitents and medieval society more generally as sites of engaged reading and self-analysis.

57 The Middle English is from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. and trans. by Simon

Armitage (New York: Norton, 2007), l. 640. A new translation has been supplied here to more closely match the Middle English. 58 For a nuanced discussion of the penitential themes in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, see Lochrie, Covert, p. 43. 59 It is perhaps no coincidence that one of the few scholars who has remarked explicitly on the penitential function of these essentials, Eamon Duffy, is himself Catholic. Linda Georgianna remarks on attempts to scrub medieval writing of elements associated with modern day Catholicism in her ‘Protestant Chaucer’.

Chapter 6 Teaching Virtue

I

n 1281, under the watch of the Franciscan Archbishop of Canterbury John Pecham, educational programs that had been developing through local constitutions became part of a wide-scale project. Pecham’s Constitutions, instituted at the Council of Lambeth, are often considered the most influential documents for the development of medieval education and for vernacular literature.1 They required that priests teach all members of their parishes a set program four times a year: the articles of the faith – which had expanded in the same century from twelve to fourteen – the Ten Commandments, the two precepts of the gospels (to love God with one’s full heart and soul and to love one’s neighbour as one loves oneself), the seven works of mercy, the seven deadly sins with their progeny, the seven principal virtues, and the seven sacraments. These concepts were to be expounded in the vernacular, ‘without any fanciful and subtle compositional art’.2 It is generally held that this emphasis on lay education stoked a desire for vernacular works, of which manuals for penitents, like Handlyng Synne, formed an important part. Of course, Pecham’s decree was clearly not a novelty; it would have struck a familiar chord with many in attendance at the Council of Lambeth, given that similar decrees had been passed by Richard Poore in 1219 and, at a more local, diocesan level, by Grosseteste in 1238. And Pecham’s decree did not give rise to vernacular pastoral writing by any stretch – the vernacular manuals for penitents produced before this decree, such as the Manuel des péchés, speak to a strong tradition of vernacular pastoral writing in England preceding it. Nevertheless, the emphasis

1

Richard Newhauser writes that the Constitutions promoted a growing emphasis on learning the traditional material of the confessional encounter on one’s own in ‘Religious Writing: Hagiography, Pastoralia, Devotional and Contemplative Works’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Literature, 1100–1500, ed. by Larry Scanlon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 37–56 (p. 49). 2 Translated in Wenzel, Latin, p. 232. ‘In quorum remedium discriminum statuendo precipimus, ut quilibet sacerdos plebi presidens, quater in anno, hoc est, semel in qualibet quarta anni, die una sollempni vel pluribus, per se vel per alium exponat populo vulgariter, absque cuiuslibet subtilitatis textura fantastica, quatuordecim fidei articulos, decem mandata decalogi, duo precepta evangelii, scilicet, gemine caritatis, septem etiam opera misericordie, septem peccata capitalia, cum sua progenie, septem virtutes principales, ac septem gratie sacramenta’ (quoted in Powicke and Cheney, Councils, II. 2, pp. 900–901). For the two precepts of the gospel, see E. A. James’s ‘Literature of Religious Instruction’, in A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture, C.1350–C.1500, ed. by Peter Brown (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 406–422 (p. 409).



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on pastoral learning promoted by the 1281 Lambeth Constitutions must have helped bolster the popularity of this new wave of texts. The holistic educational program that was authenticated and promoted by Pecham led to an increasingly large repertoire of tools for self-analysis. By the fourteenth century, penitents were being encouraged to examine their consciences through not just the five senses, the deadly sins, and the Ten Commandments, but also the works of mercy, the sacraments, and the seven virtues. As we have already seen, and as this chapter further establishes, when these essentials appear in manuals for penitents, they are not impersonal tracts designed for rote repetition but sites of deeply engaged, transformative reading. This expanded set of tools for self-analysis can be seen already in France by the early fourteenth century in the work of the Franciscan Jean Rigaud (c. 1309–1312). While guiding penitents through the self-examination process, Rigaud suggests identifying sin by using not only the seven deadly sins and the circumstances of sin, but also the five senses, Ten Commandments, works of mercy, sacraments, and virtues.3 Jean Gerson, in his fourteenth-century Opus tripartitum, speaks to the range of essentials that could be used for penitential reflection. Although he gives only two rather typical frameworks that priests can use for identifying sin (the Ten Commandments, and the seven deadly sins), he acknowledges that the methods for interrogating penitents had become far more extensive among his contemporaries; he insists that the seven deadly sins he describes – while limited – can cover all a penitent will need, as they can encompass all the sins against the five senses, the works of mercy, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments.4 Across the English channel, the interrogation process was becoming remarkably extensive. One late Middle English text includes interrogations based not only on the sins, the Ten Commandments, seven works mercy, and seven principal virtues, but also the beatitudes, the five inner and outer wits, and the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit.5 A penitential lyric copied into the late fifteenth-century register of the nuns of Godstow Abbey (near Oxford) gives some insight into how a confession based on such an extensive self-examination may have played out in practice. The lyric, which is structured like a ‘form of confession’, begins ‘I knowlech to god, with veray contricon’ (‘I acknowledge [my sins] before God, with true contrition’) (l. 1). After a brief introduction, the sinner confesses to having sinned against the Ten Commandments – ‘First: I knowlech þat I haue broken / His x. commaundementis in many a place’ (‘First I acknowledge that I have broken His Ten Commandments in many areas’) (ll. 8–9) – and the seven deadly sins. The sinner then confesses ‘my fyue wyttes I haue ofte myspend’ (‘I have often misspent my five senses’) (l. 36), then discusses ‘the werkes of mercy I haue not fulfilled’ (‘the works of mercy I have not fulfilled’) (l. 43). The sinner then acknowledges all the spiritual works left undone: 3 Jean Rigaud, ‘La formula confessionis du frère mineur Jean Rigaud’, ed. by A. Teetaert,

in Miscellanea historica in honorem Alberti de Meyer, 2 vols (Leuven: Bibliothèque de l’Université, 1946), II, 651–676. 4 See the discussion of this work in Tentler, Sin, p. 137. 5 See the confessional interrogatory in St John’s College, Cambridge, MS 257 described by Raymo in ‘Works’, p. 2300 (no. 88).

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The gostely werkes y haue lefte also: to councel and teche þem þat were lewde, Geuyng no comfort in socour and wo, Neyther to chaste such as were shrewde, and so þer harmes not sore me rewed, Neyther forʒeuyng with true pacience, Or prayed for þem þat dide me offence. (ll. 50–56) [I have also failed to perform the spiritual works: to counsel and teach those that were uneducated, I gave them no comfort in succor, nor in woe. I failed to reprimand those that were wicked, and so did not pity their harms very much, and I failed to forgive them with true patience, and to pray for them that did me offense.]

Finally, the speaker confesses that ‘I haue not reuerensed þe seuen sacramentes’ (‘I have not respected the seven sacraments’) (l. 57). Sin, here, is no longer about what was done but what was left undone: ‘Al þis I knowlech in general / Of synnes doyng, and leuyng good werkes’ (‘All this I acknowledge in general terms: the sins I have done and the good works I have left undone’) (ll. 64–65).6 It is unlikely that the prayer would have been used as an individual’s confession, but it nevertheless highlights the comprehensive approach to sin that was taking hold in medieval England. Some confessors seem to have used extensive interrogations about the essentials of the faith as a last resort; one guide, which contains advice both for those examining themselves and for those examining others, recommends using this extensive framework only if a penitent is reticent.7 For others, this wide-ranging interrogation was established and normative; one guide about conducting confession urges that ‘if the penitent does not confess his sins by the Ten Commandments, seven deadly sins, seven works of mercy, and five wits, to interrogate him according to these points’.8 Although the guide may or may not reflect contemporary practice, it certainly suggests that a penitent was expected to cover not only sins committed, but also the failure to enact the works of mercy. The idea of sins against the works of mercy here, and in the penitential lyric already examined, is striking. While the general idea of sinning through a failure to 6 The poem appears in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MS B. 408; it is edited under

the title ‘General Confession of Sins’, in The Middle English Penitential Lyric: A Study and Collection of Early Religious Verse, ed. by Frank Allen Patterson (New York, NY: AMS Press, 1911), pp. 48–50, quoted at pp. 48–49. 7 This is the confessional guide preserved in British Library, MS Sloane 1584 and British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian A.xxv. In this guide, ‘the priest should examine [the penitent’s] conscience with a series of interrogations on the seven deadly sins, Ten Commandments, fourteen articles of the faith, seven works of bodily and spiritual mercy, seven sacraments and five wits’ only if the penitent is reticent; see Raymo, ‘Works’, p. 2301. 8 This is the guide contained in the early fifteenth-century collection Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson D. 913; see Raymo, ‘Works’, p. 2301.



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perform good deeds does show up occasionally in early Church writings, it became increasingly important in the fourteenth century. Suddenly a failure to do good was understood as a form of transgression in itself. The penitent was now supposed to reflect on not just the sinful actions he had done, but the virtuous actions he had not done – the theological equivalent of criminal negligence. This change in the conceptualization of sin, and the first extended treatments of what are now known as the sins of omission, were part of the Church’s broader program of promoting virtue in the fourteenth century.9 The virtues themselves had become frameworks for identifying sin, and every aspect of a person’s life – from what he had done to what he had failed to do – was to be considered, weighed, and subjected to intense critical reflection. The most popular manuals for penitents written in the century following Pecham’s Constitutions reflect this new interest in how to best stir their readers’ hearts to virtue. The typical manual will cover the full curriculum of penitential education and of virtuous living, including the Ten Commandments, Creed, the seven deadly sins, the seven virtues, the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, and the seven sacraments, along with a general introduction to the importance of confession. They are, perhaps unsurprisingly, lengthy volumes, and many circulated independently. The structure of these manuals varies considerably. Earlier vernacular manuals – those of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries – tend to start with the Ten Commandments, but in the second half of the fourteenth century, manuals experiment with other structures. The Speculum vitae – the most popular manual for penitents of this period – begins with an exposition on the Pater noster, as does the late fourteenth-century prose adaptation of this work known as A Myrour to Lewde Men and Wymmen.10 Book to a Mother (c. 1370–1400) begins with a brief introduction that explains that despite being addressed to the speaker’s mother it is, in fact, for everyone (‘I desire euerych man and womman and child to be my mother’), then gives the Pater noster, Ave Maria, and Creed. These are followed by brief expositions on other essentials of the faith, including the Ten Commandments.11 The Book’s 9 As Boyle observes of pastoral guides more generally, ‘from the 1280s onward the theme

of “the extirpation of vices” gives way to that of the “fostering of virtues” and the soul comes to be seen as something to be cultivated with virtues and not just kept clear of weeds’; ‘The Fourth Lateran Council and Manuals of Popular Theology’, in The Popular Literature of Medieval England, ed. by Thomas J. Heffernan (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), pp. 30–43 (p. 36). 10 The two translations of the Somme le roi dated to the first half of the fifteenth century and edited by Emmanuelle Roux also experiment with a new structure; both begin with the seven deadly sins. See the editions in Two Middle English Translations of Friar Laurent’s ‘Somme le roi’: Critical Edition, ed. by Emmanuelle Roux (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010). 11 ‘Book to a Mother: An Edition with Commentary’, ed. by Adrian McCarthy (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Fordham University, 1961), ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global [accessed 8 September 2018], pp. 1–4, quoted at p. 1. This introductory material, comprising the Pater Noster, Ave Maria, Creed, and Ten Commandments, appears in only one of the three manuscripts collated in McCarthy’s edition. Another copy is missing the section that would be expected to contain this material. The third skips over this material and begins with a discussion of the importance of keeping God’s Commandments. The apparent omission in this third copy may be because the Pater Noster, Creed, and

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innovation here is in keeping with its broader approach. On one hand, the Book contains the foundations of orthodoxy of its day; its editor considers the Book orthodox on the whole and dates it partly on these grounds to the early Wycliffite period.12 On the other hand, the Book appears in manuscripts alongside reformist writings and it has some distinctly reformist moments. These features, taken together, support Nicole Rice’s view that the work on the whole reflects an ‘orthodox reformism’.13 The work’s innovative arrangement of the essentials of the faith reflects a broader climate of experimentation surrounding the set curriculum for self-examination.

The People’s Pater noster The Pater noster occupied a central place in this new wave of manuals and, as Vincent Gillespie notes, discussions of it were increasingly incorporated into works of pastoralia starting in the fourteenth century.14 The prayer is derived from the New Testament, where it appears twice – once in the Sermon on the Mount and once in the Gospel of Luke. The significance of its biblical origins was not lost on medieval writers, many of whom considered it the most important prayer on the grounds that, in the words of one translator, ‘God Hym-selfe mad it’.15 The Pater noster became so central to late medieval theology that the author of the mid fourteenth-century English guide known as the Lay Folks’ Mass Book could write that it was not worth recording, since ‘[those] who con [know] not this are lewid [uneducated] men’.16 Writing about half a century later, Nicholas Love describes a proliferation of treatises on the prayer; he will skim over it, he

12 13

14

15

16

Ten Commandments appear in one of the tracts that precede Book to a Mother in this manuscript (p. ix). McCarthy, ‘Book’, pp. lvi–lxix; xli. Rice, Lay Piety, p. 107. For the manuscript context of Book to a Mother, see Nicholas Watson’s ‘Fashioning the Puritan Gentry-Woman: Devotion and Dissent in Book to a Mother’, in Medieval Women – Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain, ed. by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al. (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2010), pp. 169–184 (pp. 170–171). On its potentially reformist attitude, see pp. 171; 177–180. The work’s editor also identifies some reformist moments; see ‘Book’ , pp. lvi–lxix. The work’s heterodoxy is discussed at length by Fiona Somerset in Feeling like Saints: Lollard Writings after Wyclif (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), pp. 253–272. It is worth noting that while Somerset considers the work’s discussion of confession ‘to God’ heterodox (p. 262), the writer shows no discomfort with the priest’s role in confession and indeed suggests he is himself a priest who administers the sacrament (McCarthy, ‘Book’, p. xxxi). But Somerset is undoubtedly right that the Book has reformist tedencies. Vincent Gillespie, ‘Thy Will Be Done: Piers Plowman and the Pater Noster’, repr. in Vincent Gillespie, Looking in Holy Books: Essays on Late Medieval Religious Writing in England (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp. 79–110 (pp. 81–82). Edmund of Abingdon, ‘St Edmund’s Mirror’, in Religious Pieces in Prose and Verse, ed. by George G. Perry, EETS OS 26 (London: Oxford University Press, 1914), pp. 16–51 (p. 36). The same idea appears in the Book of Vices and Virtues, ed. by W. Nelson Francis, EETS OS 217 (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 97. The Lay Folks Mass Book, ed. by T. F. Simmons, EETS OS 71 (Oxford: Trubner, 1879), p. xxxiii.



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says, because it is ‘spoken of in many oþer tretees & bokes boþe in latyne & in english’ (‘described in many other treatises and books, both in Latin and in English’).17 Such comments ring true; although medieval expositions on the Pater noster now tend to be ignored and considered dull or uninspired, they were, in terms of the sheer number of copies circulating, among the most popular texts in late medieval England.18 Along with the Ten Commandments and the seven deadly sins, the Pater noster was a central structuring device for medieval Christianity and both lay and clerical textual engagement. Of the mass of English Pater noster and Decalogue tracts that survive from medieval England, a number of these give only the essentials, with little to no commentary. Some of these simple texts must have served as a form of children’s literature, since the Pater noster and Decalogue were often among the first biblical texts taught to medieval children, and since the Pater noster in particular was used for teaching basic literacy.19 But in the fourteenth century, writers increasingly considered them not only basic teaching aids but also ready frameworks for more complex expositions on topics including moral virtue, profound religious passion, and scathing social critique. The Pater noster was, for many, the prayer of the people. This attitude is evident in Passus 10 of Piers Plowman where Langland sets up a contrast between the Pater noster’s elementary power and the vanity of clerical education; Wil claims: Arn none rather yravysshed fro the righte bileve / Than are thise konnynge clerkes that konne manye bokes, / Ne none sonner saved, ne sadder of bileve / Than plowmen and pastours and povere commune laborers, / Souteres and shepherdes – swiche lewed juttes / Perce with a Paternoster the paleys of hevene.20 None are more easily driven from true belief than are these cunning clerks that understand many books. And no one is sooner saved, nor more dedicated to the faith than the plowmen and pastors and poor common labourers, cobblers and shepherds – such uneducated, lowly people pierce with a Pater noster the palace of heaven.

The Pater noster here offers a kind of spiritual levelling; where clerks’ books may or may not save them, the Pater noster offers certainty to the poor man, with whom it 17 Quoted in Christopher G. Bradley, ‘Censorship and Cultural Continuity: Love’s Mirror,

the Pore Caitif, and Religious Experience before and after Arundel’, in After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth-Century England, ed. by Vincent Gillespie and Kantik Ghosh (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp. 115–132 (p. 125). 18 For the view that expositions on the Pater noster were uninspired, see chapter 5, n. 20 above. 19 The fourteenth-century Book of Vices and Virtues notes that ‘Whan men setten first a child to lerne lettrure, men techeþ hym his pater noster’ (‘When people first introduce a child to learning letters, they teach the child the Pater Noster’); Book of Vices and Virtues, p. 97. See also Michael of Northgate, Ayenbite, p. 98. 20 William Langland, Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-text, ed. by Derek Pearsall (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2008), ll. 10.455–10.459.

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is associated through both context and alliteration. Vincent Gillespie, in his perceptive analysis of the role of the Pater noster in the poem, notes that Wil’s egalitarian view of the prayer is ultimately challenged in the B text, when ‘Scripture’ offers a scornful Latin rejoinder to Wil’s statement, but the passage nevertheless points to the prayer’s associations with lay working-class spirituality.21 A new emphasis on the prayer’s simplicity can be felt in the mid fourteenth-century Speculum vitae – a work that Ralph Hanna describes as ‘the least-known major poem in Middle English’.22 Where its source, the Somme le roi, highlights a contrast between the shortness of the prayer and its complexity – ‘Ele est mout courte en paroles et mout longue en sentence; legiere a dire, soutive a entendre’ (‘It is very short in speaking and long in meaning; easy to say, complex to understand’) – the Speculum translates this passage literally and then elaborates at length:23 Þis prayere es short in worde wroght; It es in sentence lange in thought. It es light to say prayande; It es sutill to vnderstande Short in worde es þis prayere, For men it suld lyghtlyar lere And thurgh shortnes of it by kynde, Haf it þe titter in þair mynde. In sentence it es lange to se For þe mare deuocioun þarein suld be. For þe naked lettre þat es noght heuy Men suld say by mouth anely, And alle þe sentence of it Vnderstande and in hert knytt. It es also light to say For men suld thurgh it ofter pray. Sutill to vnderstande es it

This prayer is designed to be short in words; it is in meaning, long in thought. It is easy to say in prayer, it is complex to understand. Short in length is this prayer so that men should be able to learn it easily and on account of its fundamental shortness have it the firmer in mind. In meaning it is long to see so that there should be all the more devotion in it. For the naked letter that is not of import men can say by mouth alone, but all the meaning of it they should understand and knit to the heart. It is also easy to say so that men should pray with it frequently. It is complex to understand

21 See Gillespie, ‘Thy Will’, p. 88. The Pater noster is also associated with the less advantaged

classes in the passage given below, in which the prayer is contrasted to the Famulorum.

22 Ralph Hanna, ‘The Yorkshire Circulation of Speculum vitae’, in Design and Distribution of

Late Medieval Manuscripts in England, ed. by Margaret Connolly and Linne R. Mooney (Woodbridge: York Medieval, 2008), pp. 279–291 (p. 279). 23 d’Orléans, Somme, p. 207, l. 6.



Teaching Virtue 123 For men suld mare sette þair witte On þe sentence of it namely Thurgh grete bisynes and study.24

so that men should set their mind on the meaning of it above all through great attention and study.

The prayer is accessible, according to the poet, because it is short and because it is ‘light to say’ (‘easy to say’) – possibly a reference to its many vernacular translations. The Pater noster is praised for making ‘sutill’ (‘complex’) theology accessible. The poet stresses that the prayer should be read in a deeply engaged way; its meaning must be ‘understood’ and ‘knit to the heart’. In the framing text on the Pater noster, the poet contrasts this engaged type of reading to rote memorization. In a passage not found in his source (the Somme le roi), the poet writes that it is not enough to know the ‘naked lettre’ of the prayer – one must understand it in order to ‘feel its sweetness’: ‘we may fynde many a man / Þat þe naked lettre anely can / Of þis prayere þat Cryst wroght, / Bot þe vnderstandynge can þai nought. / Þarefore thynk þam it sauourles / For þarein fele þai na swettenes’ (‘we can find many a man who knows only the naked letter of this prayer that Christ wrought, but knows not the meaning of it. Therefore they think it savourless, because within it they feel no sweetness’).25 The Pater noster here is simple, and while it contains complex ideas, accessing these does not require clerical knowledge – simply a willingness to knit the prayer to one’s heart. The Pater noster, then, was viewed as a homely prayer in the fourteenth century. It was widely available and considered wholly accessible, in contrast to more complex teachings of the Church. In this sense, it was at the heart of the democratization of the essentials of the faith. It was depicted as simple, accessible to all, and yet fundamental to salvation, and, on these grounds, as a salve for labourers. This populist aspect of the Pater noster appealed to early Wycliffites, who incorporated it into their own devotional writings. Their approach to the prayer overlapped in many ways with that of the established Church. Fiona Somerset’s discussion of the role of the prayer in Wycliffite theology – the most extensive to date – finds far more similarities than divergences between Wycliffite approaches to the prayer and those of the established Church.26 Indeed, most of the Pater noster commentaries that show up in Wycliffite collections of texts also appear in wholly orthodox contexts in much the same form, which suggests that the question of how best to comment on the prayer was not a particularly divisive one. Wycliffites’ interest in vernacular theology – an interest that has led Matti Peikola to posit a distinctly Wycliffite ‘“programme” for catechetical instruction in the verncular’ – might lead one to expect the Wycliffites to have generated an extensive 24 Speculum, I, p. 10, ll. 171–191. 25 Speculum, I, p. 9, ll. 143–152. The same passage is analysed further below. The same

sentiment occurs at I, p. 10, ll. 182–184.

26 Somerset, Feeling, pp. 103–133. Somerset finds that ‘mainstream and lollard writers,

compilers, and book producers engaged in the production of miscellaneous religious manuals across the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries would agree’ on many of the goals of the Pater noster (p. 129).

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commentary tradition around the Pater noster, but the surviving record does not support this view.27 There are only five stand-alone commentaries on the Pater noster that have been considered distinctly Wycliffite; these are the works now known as ‘The Pater noster of Richard Ermyte’, Septem hereses contra septem peticiones, ‘Matthew’, ‘Arnold I’, and ‘Arnold II’.28 And of these commentaries, three – ‘Arnold I’, ‘Matthew’, and ‘The Pater noster of Richard Ermyte’ – have been considered Wycliffite only due to their manuscript contexts; their content has been viewed by modern scholars as chiefly orthodox.29 Even ‘Arnold II’, which contains some distinctly reformist commentary, has what Anna Lewis in her study of Wycliffite Pater noster commentary describes as ‘strong connections to the existing commentary tradition, not only in terms of its ideas, but also in terms of its vocabulary and phrasing’.30 The surviving evidence, then, suggests that Wycliffites were satisfied with existing vernacular Pater noster commentary and did not feel the need to establish their own tradition of it. A few commentaries on the Pater noster that circulated with Wycliffite compilations do exhibit divergences from the broader tradition. These are largely at the 27 Matti Peikola, ‘“And after all, Myn Aue-Marie almost to the ende”: Pierce the Ploughman’s

Crede and Lollard Expositions of the Ave Maria’, English Studies, 81.4 (2000), 273–292 (p. 273). 28 See Somerset, Feeling, p. 107. The final three tracts on this list are titled based on their Victorian editions. For ‘Arnold I’ see ‘The Pater noster’, in Select English Works of John Wyclif, ed. by Thomas Arnold, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1871), III, pp. 93–97; for ‘Arnold II’ see ‘Þe Pater noster’, in Select English Works of John Wyclif, ed. by Thomas Arnold, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1871), III, pp. 98–110; for Matthew see ‘The Pater noster’, in The English Works of Wyclif Hitherto Unprinted, ed. by F. D. Matthew, EETS OS 174 (London: Trübner, 1880), pp. 197–202. 29 For the question of the orthodoxy of Matthew and ‘Arnold I’, see Anna Lewis, ‘Discerning Devotional Readers: Readers, Writers, and the Pursuit of God in some Late Medieval Texts’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Ottawa, 2010), ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global [accessed 18 October 2020] (p. 195). Somerset is more convinced by the reformist nature of these texts but does not provide a detailed explanation for her position on them. She does note that ‘Arnold I’ shares with Wycliffites the view that only some will be saved on Judgment Day (p. 130, n. 81), but this view was also shared by members of the orthodox Church and cannot alone be taken as evidence of Wycliffite leanings – as she herself makes clear. ‘The Pater noster of Richard Ermyte’, written in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century and spuriously attributed to Richard Rolle, is a devotional treatise addressed to a nun – a ‘dere sistir in God’. The editor of the treatise, F. G. A. M. Aarts, is of the opinion that it was produced before 1408, since the author apparently shows no awareness of the Arundel Constitutions, although some caution is required here since treatises of this nature continued to be produced after the Constitutions themselves. The text did have some Wycliffite associations; its editor notes that it circulated in Sidney College Cambridge MS 74 with a number of Lollard sermons. But aside from some rather conventional praise of the value of vernacular learning, the text is orthodox, according to Aarts; Þe Pater noster of Richard Ermyte: A Late Middle English Exposition of the Lord’s Prayer, ed. by F. G. A. M. Aarts (Nijmegen: Katholike University, 1967), pp. lxxx; xv; lxxxii, quoted at p. 3. 30 Anna Lewis, ‘Textual Borrowings, Theological Mobility, and the Lollard Pater noster Commentary’, Philological Quarterly, 88.1 (2009), 1–23 (p. 2). For reformist ideas in ‘Arnold II’ see Somerset, Feeling, pp. 120–121; 130.



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level of wording and may reflect what Matti Peikola, describing Wycliffite approaches to the Ave Maria, has termed the ‘intertextual mechanisms’ of Wycliffite writings.31 Two commentaries, both discussed by Somerset, exhibit such differences of phrasing; these are the two Wycliffite versions of the Pater noster commentary ultimately derived from a traditionally orthodox text, Edmund of Abingdon’s Speculum religiosorum (also known as the Speculum ecclesie). Somerset finds in these commentaries some phraselevel divergences which reflect an ‘intensive focus on feeling and intention’ – but she writes that this focus is ‘by no means heterodox’.32 This emphasis on feeling is in keeping with Wycliffites’ attitude toward the role of prayer more broadly; Somerset finds that Wycliffites felt that prayer ‘should be accomplished in and through daily actions accompanied by properly directed feelings and intentions’.33 But despite their distinctive attitude toward the role of prayer in daily life, Wycliffites were, it seems, largely in agreement with the established Church over what constituted effective Pater noster commentary. They seem to have also been largely in agreement on the relative emphasis that should be placed on the Pater noster. It is true that vernacular Pater noster commentaries appear in many of the compilations that are considered Wycliffite today, but these compilations were far from unique in this respect; such commentaries circulated widely and were, as we have seen, also a standard feature of compilations that circulated in wholly orthodox contexts. Indeed, the populism of the prayer seemed to have appealed to Wycliffites, and it is raised as a point of concern in one of the two identifiable stand-alone Wycliffite commentaries on the prayer, which is known as the ‘Seven Heresies of Friars’ (Septem hereses contra septem peticiones). This short prose treatise appears alongside several other Wycliffite writings in British Library, MS Harley 2385.34 Here, each petition of the prayer is transformed into a vehicle for an attack against established church practices. So, in the treatment of the fourth petition of the Pater noster – ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ – where we would expect an explication, we have instead a critique of those who believe that sacramental bread has no real existence after consecration – an idea that Wycliffites firmly rejected: ‘Þe ferthe heresie of þe ferthe askynge says, þat þe sacrid ooste is no maner of brede, but ouþer nouȝt, or accident wiþouten ony sogett’ (‘the fourth heresy of the fourth petition says that the sacred host is no manner of bread, but is either nothing or metaphysical and

31 Peikola, ‘And After Alle’, p. 290. 32 Somerset, Feeling, pp. 121–125, quoted at p. 125.

33 Somerset, Feeling, p. 125. 34 In the Harley manuscript the work is attributed to Wyclif and, based on this inscription and

the tract’s style, Thomas Arnold insists that Wyclif’s authorship ‘can hardly be doubted’; Select English Works of John Wyclif, ed. by Thomas Arnold, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1871), III, p. 441. Arnold goes further to suggest that the tract was written ‘quite at the close of Wyclif’s life, in 1383 or 1384’ (III, p. 441). Yet the Wycliffite attribution does not appear in either of the other two manuscripts containing the tract: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 274, and Trinity College Dublin, MS C.V.6. The title was assigned to it by Fiona Somerset in Feeling, p. 74.

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without any material substance’).35 Embedded within the petitions of this most central prayer, the critique of the Church is imbued with implied biblical authority. The structure of the work, with the Pater noster at its center, reinforces one of its main themes: that the Pater noster must be venerated before all other prayers. This idea is established in the commentary on the first petition, where the author claims that priests focus too much on the Famulorum (a prayer said during mass), when they should instead focus on the Pater noster; ‘fals men’, he says, claim that ‘one Famulorum saide of a frere is better þen a Pater noster, wiþ oþer þinges even’ (‘one Famulorum said by a brother is better than a Pater noster, with all other things being equal’). He reports that deceitful priests try to claim that the Famulorum is better by suggesting that the ‘Pater noster is moste generale, and þe Famulorum moste special, of alle þe prayers þat God heris’ (‘Pater noster is the most general prayer that God hears, and the Famulorum the most intimate’).36 These complaints are ultimately grounded in concerns over the privatization of prayer; during the Famulorum, the congregation was generally asked to pray for one or more specific individuals and these were typically those who had made substantial donations to the Church. In one Wycliffite tract, the Pater noster is set in opposition to prelates’ masses: ‘a symple pater noster of a plouȝman þat his in charite is betre þan a þousand massis of coueitouse prelatis & veyn religious ful of coueitise & pride & fals flaterynge & norischynge of synne’ (‘a simple Pater noster said by a ploughman in charity is better than a thousand masses said by covetous prelates and vain religious full of greed, and pride, and false flattering, and the nourishing of sin’).37 In this passage, which powerfully echoes Piers Plowman, the Pater noster, virtuous and simple, is associated with an important figure of moral reform, the virtuous, simple, and socially useful plowman. Another anonymous sermon writer of the late fourteenth century considers a disparagement of the Pater noster among prelates part of a deliberate power-grab.38 These Wycliffite writings tapped into a more widely held notion that the Pater noster was fundamentally populist – available to, and helpful for, anyone who learned it.

35 ‘Septem hereses contra septem peticiones’, in Select English Works of John Wyclif, ed. by

Thomas Arnold, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1871), III, pp. 441–447, at p. 443.

36 ‘Septem hereses’, p. 441. 37 John Wycliffe, ‘How Satan and his Priests and his Feigned Religious Cast by Three

Cursed Heresies to Destroy all Good Living, and Maintain all Manner of Sin’, in The English Works of Wyclif Hitherto Unprinted, ed. by F. D. Matthew, EETS OS 174 (London: Trübner, 1880), pp. 271–274 (p. 274). 38 Warning against ‘ypocritis’ (‘hypocrites’), he states that, ‘to blynden þe peple more þei feynen long preiers þat þei seien ben moche beter þan þe Pater noster’ (‘to blind the people more, they create long prayers that they say are much better than the Pater noster’); ‘The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy’, in Selections from English Wycliffite Writings, ed. by Anne Hudson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), pp. 75–82 (p. 76).



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‘Sutill to vnderstande’: Virtue and Self-Vigilance in The Speculum vitae The use of the Pater noster in penitential contexts was not particularly innovative in the late medieval period; as the writings of Richard Poore and Robert Grosseteste have illustrated, a link between the Pater noster and confession was already emerging in the thirteenth century. But this link seems to have become stronger in the fourteenth century. In works from this period, the prayer is often divided into seven ‘petitions’, with each cast as a remedy to one of the seven vices.39 The prayer had transformed into a salve for vice and a spur to self-reflection. In the fourteenth-century Book of Vices and Virtues, the Pater noster is not just translated and explained; even the shortest section of the prayer becomes a springboard for complex theological thought. The first words in the second line of the prayer (‘Qui es’) are translated (‘þat is’) and then used as inspiration for a reflection on the particular nature of God’s infinitude. Then, a beautifully paratactic passage describes the ways in which God is eternal: ‘For he is veraliche wiþ-out vanite, stedefast wiþ-oute any flittynge, euere-more wiþ-oute any bigynnyng and wiþ-oute ende and wiþ-oute euer schal be, for in him passeþ no time’ (‘For He is truly without ephemerality, stability without any change, eternal without any beginning and without end, and forever will be, for no time passes in Him ’).40 The ideas here, that God is unchanging and outside of time itself, echo the Boethian conception of freewill that was gaining traction within fourteenth-century scholarly circles and illustrate how the Pater noster could be used to represent, and engage with, intricate philosophical thought.41 The new interest in using the Pater noster and other essentials of the faith as frameworks for the virtues becomes obvious when comparing the most popular English manual for penitents of the period, the mid fourteenth-century Speculum vitae, to its source, the earlier Somme le roi. The Speculum poet borrows much of his material from its source, including expositions on a wide range of devotional topics such as the Ten Commandments, the Creed, and the seven virtues. But as the analysis below reveals, the Speculum vitae calls for a more complete moral transformation than its source by engaging in greater detail with the idea of virtue, emphasizing that even a failure to enact virtue is a sin.42 The translation is, in general, faithful; the Speculum vitae poet even tries at times to substitute English cognates for the French words found in his source material:

39 See Gillespie, ‘Thy Will’, pp. 81–82. 40 Book of Vices and Virtues, pp. 102–103.

41 For the discussion of the Boethian conception of free will in the fourteenth century,

see John Marenbon, The Cambridge Companion to Boethius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 297. 42 The Speculum vitae survives in no fewer than forty-five copies. For copies of the Speculum vitae, see Hanna’s ‘Yorkshire Circulation’, p. 279.

128

Manuals for Penitents in Medieval England Somme le roi Ceste fleur doit avoir . VI. fueilles et . III. grains dorez par dedenz. This flower is said to have six leaves, and three golden seeds within.

Speculum vitae To þis flour þat clerkes calles ‘Flour of Maydenhede’ sex leues falles And thre greyns endored withinne. To this flower that clerks call ‘The flower of virginity’ appear six leaves and three golden seeds within.43

Here, ‘greyns’ – an accepted, if relatively uncommon Middle English synonym for ‘seeds’ – is used for the French ‘grains’ (‘seeds’), and the cognate ‘endored’ for the French ‘dorez’. Such similarities suggest that the translator was following his French source closely. Yet the Speculum vitae is in many ways a significantly different text from its French source.44 The most obvious is, of course, that the Speculum vitae is in verse while its source is in prose, but there are also meaningful structural differences between these two texts. Copies of the Somme le roi are generally structured as reference guides; Édith Brayer, who has studied the work’s rich manuscript tradition in depth, finds that in the majority of manuscripts, the constituent parts – which reflect the Church’s ever-expanding pastoral programme – follow a fundamentally utilitarian order: 1) The Ten Commandments; 2) The Twelve Articles of the Faith; 3) The seven deadly sins; 4) The virtues, in general; 5) The virtues, in particular. Aside from the elaborate cycle of images preserved in many copies, the work opens without ceremony: ‘Li premiers commandemens que Dieus commande, c’est cestui’ (‘The first commandment that God commands is as follows’).45 The Speculum vitae incorporates most of this material from the Somme le roi, but it sets this material within an imaginative framing device: the petitions of the Pater noster.46 This prayer, according to the author, contains within it the key to all good Christian virtue: Þis bede puttes alle ille oway And al þat gode es wynnes vs ay. It festens in vs alle gode to last

This prayer puts away all ill and wins for us all that is good. It fastens in us all lasting good

43 d’Orléans, Somme, p. 361; Speculum, II, ll. 11725–11728. 44 Ralph Hanna writes that Speculum vitae poet engages in ‘some quite elaborate restructuring

and rationalization of what he found in Laurent’; ‘Introduction’, in Speculum vitae, ed. by Ralph Hanna, EETS OS 331, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), I, pp. xiii– lxxxviii (p. lxxi). 45 Édith Brayer, ‘Contenu, structure et combinaisons du Miroir du Monde et de La Somme le roi’, Romania, 79.313 (1958), 1–38, 433–470 (pp. 2–3). 46 Hanna, ‘Introduction’, I, p. lxxii.

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And mas our hert to Godde stedefast. In þis prayere er askynges seuen; Whilk þai er I sal þam neuen. Of whilk seuen I fynde thurgh skille Thre þat dose away alle ille. I fynde also thre othir askynges Þat alle þat gode es to vs brynges.47

and makes our hearts steadfast to God. There are seven petitions in this prayer I will tell what they are. Of these seven I find through reasoning Three that do away with all ill. I also find three other petitions that bring to us all good.

Unlike the Somme le roi, which launches without introduction into its discussion of the Ten Commandments, the Speculum vitae opens with a protracted prologue. The poet begins by drawing a clear distinction between the matter at hand and the matter of chansons de geste, stating that he ‘wil make na vayne carpynge / Of dedes of armes ne or amours’ (‘will tell no foolish stories of deeds of arms nor of loves’).48 He then explains, in a commonly excerpted passage, why he has chosen to write in English. Then, the poet turns to the idea of the Pater noster and begins to construct the framework for the other tracts around it. He notes that it is the first prayer taught to children, but stresses that though it may seem elementary, it is complex, and too many repeat its words without truly understanding it; ‘Bot whaso vnderstondes it wele, / A swete prayere þai may it fele’ (‘but whoever understands it well can experience it as a sweet prayer’).49 The claim here, as in the passages quoted above, that the Pater noster is both complex and simple, draws on a common pastoral trope advanced, as Gillespie finds, by Innocent III, of praising the prayer for being at once extremely brief and extremely complex and comprehensive.50 Whether this richly imaginative Pater noster framework was the invention of the Speculum vitae poet himself or taken from some other source has presented somewhat of a mystery. Working before good critical editions of the Speculum vitae and its related works were available, Hope Emily Allen identified a potential parallel in a short Latin text that contained both a close match for the Speculum vitae’s sweetness passage and a similar Pater noster framing device. This anonymous Latin text, known as a ‘tabula vtilitate oracionis dominice’, contains material that is ultimately derived from the Somme le roi, but it is considerably abridged. Its similarities to the Speculum vitae have led to the suggestion that the ‘tabula vtilitate oracionis dominice’ was a direct source for the Speculum vitae’s Pater noster framework.51 47 Speculum vitae, I, pp. 10–11, ll. 191–200. 48 Speculum vitae, I, p. 6, ll. 36–37. This passage is discussed at further length in the

introduction above.

49 Speculum vitae, I, p. 9, ll. 151–152. 50 See Gillespie, ‘Thy Will’, p. 87.

51 Hanna, in his introduction to the text, suggests that the Speculum vitae ‘relies upon’

a version of the ‘tabula’; he argues that the longer ‘argumentative prose’ version

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But there is no need to turn to this ‘tabula’ text for a source for the Speculum vitae’s sweetness passage; the passage finds an immediate parallel in the Somme le roi, as a comparison shows: Speculum vitae When first a chylde es sette to boke, Þe Pater Noster he sal first lere For it es mas precious prayere. Þat lessoun Godde almyghty Taght his discyples specially; Þarefore may it be right callede Goddes prayer, als we it halde. Wharefore þai þat vnderstand wille Þis lessoun als þai suld thurgh skille, Þai suld become bathe meke and mylde And debonere als a chylde. Swilk er þe verray skolers right Of our wyse mayster Godde of myght, Þat of his wisdome oft þam leres And teches þam als his awen skolers. Bot we may fynde many a man Þat þe naked lettre anely can Of þis prayere þat Cryst wroght, Bot þe vnderstandynge can þai noght. Þarefore thynk þam it sauourles For þarein fele þai na swettenes

Somme le roi Qui de ceste clergie veut savoir deviegne humbles comme enfes, car a tiex escoliers aprent nostre bons mestres Jhesucriz ceste clergie qui est la plus bele, la plus profitable qui soit, qui bien l’entent et le retient, car tiex la cuide bien savoir et entendre qui n’en set fors que l’escorce par dehors, c’est la lettre qui bone est ; mes petit vaut au reguart dou nouel qui est par dedenz douz.52 Whoever wants to understand this lesson will become humble as a child, because our good Lord Jesus Christ teaches to his pupils this lesson – which is the most beautiful, and which would be the most profitable to whoever hears it and retains it.

But he is well equipped to know and understand who knows that there’s nothing but an empty shell on the outside: the letter, which is good, but it’s worth little compared to the material within that is sweet.

represented by two manuscripts of the ‘tabula’ was the source of the Speculum vitae introduction (‘Introduction’, I, p. lxxiii). This ‘tabula’, which has been edited by Ralph Hanna as an analogue to the Speculum vitae, opens with ‘Pater Noster tanquam caput omnium orationum euidenter approbatur’; see Hanna, Speculum, II, pp. 632–637. It is no. 8834 in Morton Bloomfield et al., Incipits of Latin works on the Virtues and Vices, 1100–1500 A.D.: Including a Section of Incipits of Works on the Pater noster (Cambridge: Medieval Academy of America, 1979). Hope Emily Allen was the first to identify parallels between this Latin ‘tract on the Pater noster’ and the Speculum vitae, in ‘The Speculum vitae’, pp. 142–144. She notes that the similarities between the two works are ‘unmistakable’ (p. 43) but she does not consider this Latin Pater noster tract a direct source for the Speculum vitae (pp. 142–143). Allen notes that while Carl Hortsmann ascribed this tract to Rolle, it is, in fact, anonymous (p. 156). The Latin Pater noster tract seems to have achieved some medieval renown, since it survives in six manuscripts; Hanna, ‘Introduction’, I, p. lxxiii. 52 The passages are printed in Speculum vitae, I, pp. 8–9, ll. 128–148; and d’Orléans, Somme, pp. 206–207.



Teaching Virtue 131 When a child is first set to book, he shall first learn the Pater noster, because it is a most precious prayer. God almighty taught to his disciples that lesson in particular. Therefore it can rightly be called God’s prayer, as we consider it. For that reason those who can understand this lesson as they should, through skill, they will become both meek and humble and gentle as a child. So the true scholars are right, through our wise lord God of power, who educates them often through his wisdom and teaches them as his own scholars. But we can find many a man who knows only the naked letter of this prayer that Christ wrought but knows not the meaning of it. Therefore they think it savourless Because within it they feel no sweetness.

My own comparison of these texts indicates that most of the Speculum vitae’s Pater noster framework finds a close parallel in the Somme le roi and that there is no need to posit the ‘tabula’ as an intermediary source for all or part of it; the Latin text appears to be instead a greatly condensed translation of the Speculum vitae.53 And given 53 The suggestion put forth here that the ‘tabula vtilitate oracionis dominice’ is a translation

and abridgment of the Speculum vitae is also supported – though not confirmed – by the dating of surviving copies of the ‘tabula’; while the Speculum vitae is dated to the mid fourteenth century, the earliest manuscript of the ‘tabula’, London, British Library MS Harley 1022, dates from the 1380s. Other copies are Oxford, Bodleian Library, Merton College MS 13 (15th c), Bodleian Library, Rawlinson C. 72 (early 15th c), London, British Library, Burney MS 356 (15th c), British Library, Additional MS 15237 (15th c) and British

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the close, sometimes word-for-word, parallels between the Speculum vitae’s Pater noster framework and the same tract in the Somme le roi, it seems most likely that the Speculum vitae was working from the Somme le roi’s Pater noster tract directly, reshaping it into a complex structuring device. After this discussion of the sweetness of the prayer, the Speculum vitae launches into an elaborate discussion of the first few words of the prayer, beginning with Pater. From this single word unfolds an intricate theological programme drawn largely from the exposition on the Pater noster that is embedded in the Somme le roi; so the Speculum vitae, in a passage lifted directly from the Somme le roi, states that the word ‘Father’ alone can show us what to believe and how to behave: ‘Þis worde “Fader” to vndirstande, / Þat makes swete al þe remenande, / Shewes vs what we sal trowe / And what we sal do here and howe’ (‘To understand this word “Father”, that makes all the rest sweet, shows us what we should believe and what we should do here and how’).54 While the Speculum follows its source rather closely throughout this part, it also departs from it in places to offer more extended commentary. For example, the Speculum vitae departs from its source to engage in a discussion of predestination which, based on the debates going on at the universities at the time, must have been rather au courrant.55 Such additions – which, in absence of any other evidence, seem to be authorial – reflect the poet’s conviction that the Pater noster is a prayer for complex and in-depth meditation. Both sources next discuss God’s power, wisdom, and bounty, and how the first word of the Pater noster asks six things of us: love, fear, obedience, service, honour, and reverence. The Speculum vitae then expounds on these things at much greater length than its source. The section on honour, for example, has been considerably expanded. It states that it is a sin to spend time on follies, but also to forget to dedicate one’s time to honouring God: For vs byhoues acount to gif Of þat we do whyle we here lif, And of alle þat Godde here wil vs sende And shew how we haf þam spend, And of alle þe folys þat we do

For it behooves us to give account of that which we do while we live here and of all that God deigns to send us and to show how we have spent that, and of all the follies that we do

Library Harley MS 1648 (15th c). For descriptions of these manuscripts, see Hanna, Speculum, II, pp. 631–632. Doyle initially suggests that the Speculum vitae is an expanded version of the ‘tabula’ but he apparently bases this claim on Allen’s (more cautious) conclusions about the relationship between these texts and he elsewhere recognizes the Speculum’s significant debt to the Somme le roi; Doyle, ‘Survey’, I, pp. 77; 82. 54 Speculum vitae, I, p. 13, ll. 275–288. The corresponding passage from the Somme le roi is: ‘Cis douz moz Peres, qui fet douz le remenant, te moustre ce que tu doiz croire et te semont a ce que tu doiz fere’ (‘This sweet word “Father”, that makes sweet all the rest, shows you what you should believe and teaches you what you should do’); d’Orléans, Somme, p. 208. 55 Speculum vitae, I, p. 14, ll. 287–294.



Teaching Virtue 133 And of ilkan hour and tyme þarto. Þarefore we suld Godde honour Ilka tyme and ilkan hour, Outhir in worde or in dede.56

and of each hour and moment dedicated to these things. Therefore we should honour God every moment and every hour, both in word and in deed.

The passage, which emphasizes that we must give an account of how we spend our time, is suggestive of the growing emphasis on the sins of omission in the fourteenth century; it is no longer enough to avoid sin – one must actively foster virtue. The passage is characteristic of many of the departures from the Pater noster tract in the Somme le roi; such moments, relatively rare though they are, tend to put an added emphasis on the importance of fostering virtue and the serious risks of forgetting to do so. Apparently not satisfied with the framing Pater noster alone, the Speculum vitae poet added a second Pater noster tract, and while this one is closer to Laurent’s than the first, it is much longer than Laurent’s.57 Both of these significant alterations – apparently, though we cannot be certain, introduced by the Speculum vitae author himself – bring the Pater noster, which is treated only briefly in Laurent’s manual, to the fore. In so doing, the poet was participating in, and contributing to, a broader interest in using the Pater noster as a tool for fostering virtue.58 The other major difference between the Speculum vitae and the Somme le roi lies in the treatment of the sins. It is worth examining at some length. In the majority of copies of the Somme le roi, the seven deadly sins are presented in the third tract, and their related virtues are not explored until almost the end of the treatise. In contrast, the Speculum vitae interweaves each sin with its opposing virtue – a change which brings the virtues to the fore.59 The general pattern can be observed in the section on ire. In the Speculum vitae, the section is slotted into the main Pater noster framework, embedded within the discussion of the fifth petition of the Pater noster. The interpretation of this line unfolds schematically; this petition can grant the ‘Gift of Knowing’, and this gift is a remedy to ire.60 The introduction to the sin, which sets up its opposing virtue and related Pater noster line, represents a marked departure from the source of the Speculum vitae, which simply proceeds from sin to sin. The treatment of the sin itself, however, closely resembles that of its source; in both, ire leads a person to rage against God, himself, associates, and, finally, neighbours. In both, these abstract effects are then brought to life with concrete, everyday examples. In a passage modelled closely on its source, the Speculum vitae notes that ire makes a person rage against himself: ‘when a man þat es brathe / Agayne 56 Speculum vitae, I, p. 19, ll. 455–463. 57 Hanna, ‘Introduction’, I, p. lxxii.

58 It is not surprising that in three copies, the Speculum vitae is given ‘a title such as, Liber de

Pater noster’; see Allen, ‘Speculum Vitae’, p. 146.

59 Hanna, ‘Introduction’, I, p. lxxii. 60 Speculum vitae, I, p. 156, ll. 4621–4632.

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himseluen es so wrathe / þat he may nouthir ete na drynke’ (‘when a man that is mad is so wrathful toward himself that he can neither eat nor drink’).61 After the last effect of ire, the Speculum vitae departs from its source to subdivide ire into seven species, including ‘rancour in hert’ and ‘Yhernynge of [Yearning for] Vengeaunce’. The Speculum vitae then returns to the Somme le roi to emphasize the seriousness of this sin, which had led to ‘Touns brende and landes distroyed’ (‘Towns burned and lands destroyed’).62 Then, in a more structural departure from its source, which simply proceeds to the next sin, the Speculum vitae circles back to a discussion of the ‘Gift of Knowing’, which counters ire: ‘þis synne of Ire withouten dout / þe Gift of Knawynge puttes out / Of þe hert and settes þareinne / a vertu instede of þat synne’ (‘this sin of ire, without doubt, is extinguished from the heart by the Gift of Knowing, which sets therein a virtue instead of that sin’).63 This virtue is ‘Euenhede, / þe whilk a mans resoun suld lede’ (‘equity, that which should lead a man’s reason’).64 The discussion that follows is taken largely from a different section of the Somme le roi: the discussion of the virtues.65 In both sources, equity is next divided into seven parts. In the Somme le roi, these parts are called ‘degrees’ or ‘rungs’ (‘degrez’) and in each part, a bodily metaphor is used to describe a direction in which a person should extend equity. So the first ‘degrez’ is ‘que li hons soit droiz juges et tiegne droitement la ligne d’equité entre soi et ce qui est desouz soi, c’est son cors que il a en guarde’ (‘that man holds himself righteously and holds straight the line of equity between himself and that which is below him, which is the body that is under his watch’).66 The Speculum vitae extends the directional metaphor already embedded in the Somme le roi to describe ‘seuen maners of clere sight’: the first is to look within oneself and the rest are to look toward the various sides of the body. The treatment of the first manner of ‘sight’ establishes the general pattern, which is marked by an emphasis on self-reflection and valuation: First suld a man withinne himself se His consciens þat es pryue, And ransake it wele þat tyde, And examyne on ilka syde, Ilka thoght and ilka wille,

First a man should look within himself to his conscience, which is private, and ransack it well at that moment, and examine it from each angle, each thought and each desire,

61 Speculum vitae, I, p. 157, ll. 4653–4655; cf. d’Orléans, Somme, pp. 128–129. The quoted passage

appears in the Somme le roi as ‘ire seurmonte ou seurporte l’omme et li tormente et l’ame et le cors si que li hons ne puet dormir ne reposer, aucune foiz li tot le boire et le mengier’ (p. 129). 62 Speculum vitae, I, p. 158, ll. 4678–4680; l. 4689; cf. d’Orléans, Somme, p. 130. 63 Speculum vitae, I, p. 159, ll. 4705–4708. 64 Speculum vitae, I, p. 150, ll. 4709–4710. 65 The discussion of the virtues is chapter 55 in Laurent’s Somme le roi, pp. 260–273. 66 d’Orléans, Somme, pp. 264–265.

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Whilk es gode and whilk es ille.67

which is good and which is evil.

The treatment of the manners of sight extends over a hundred lines and follows the Somme le roi closely.68 Both texts then discuss the ‘branches of the tree of equity’, or remedies to the seven deadly sins, such as ‘Mekenes agayne Pryde’ (or, in the Somme le roi, ‘humilité contre orgueuil’ [‘humility against pride’]).69 Both texts then describe the importance of equity at greater length. The description in the Somme le roi is detailed and attributed to Solomon, St Bernard, and the rule of St Benedict, but that of the Speculum vitae differs; it is more truncated and contains no references to authorities, stating little more than that ‘withouten Euenhed to hald / Na vertu may be vertu called’ (‘without holding onto equity, no virtue can be called a virtue’).70 It then follows its source more closely by offering a treatment of six ‘gretynges’ (‘lamentations’) – notions, such as ‘þe payne of helle’ (‘the pain of hell’), that the sinner is encouraged to reflect on and lament.71 In the Somme le roi, this discussion is followed by the next gift: the gift of strength. The Speculum vitae, however, circles back to the idea that equity springs from the ‘Gift of Knowing’, and which can be achieved through the fifth petition of the Pater noster. The structure of the Speculum vitae, then, is strikingly schematic: Fifth petition -grants the Gift of Knowing -which counters ire -4 effects of ire (cf. Somme le roi on ire) -7 manifestations of ire (cf. Somme le roi on ire) -the seriousness of ire (cf. Somme le roi on ire) -the Gift of Knowing -grants equity (cf. Somme le roi on equity) -equity merges reason with will (cf. Somme le roi on equity) -4 parts of reason -4 parts of will -7 branches of equity (manners of ‘clere sight’) (cf. Somme le roi on equity) -7 virtues against the 7 vices (cf. Somme le roi on equity) -causes one to weep; 6 things to weep over (cf. Somme le roi on equity) -equity comes from the Gift of Knowing -the Gift of Knowing comes from the Fifth petition

This finely wrought structure emphasizes both equity and the Gift of Knowing by circling back to these topics. It makes a discussion of the Gift of Knowing, and the 67 Speculum vitae, I, p. 160, l. 4760; p. 161, l. 4763; ll. 4779–4784. 68 Speculum vitae, I, p. 160, l. 4757; p. 164, l. 4867.

69 Speculum vitae, I, p. 164, l. 4877; d’Orléans, Somme, p. 271. 70 d’Orléans, Somme, p. 271; Speculum vitae, I, p. 165, ll. 4899–4900. 71 Speculum vitae, I, p. 166, l. 4928.

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related virtue of equity, the overall subject of the passage; ire becomes secondary and the manual’s goal of fostering good behaviour is brought to the fore. This same structure, which embeds the sin within a broader discussion of virtue, is used for all of the seven deadly sins in the Speculum vitae and represents a marked departure from the Somme le roi, which simply proceeds sin to sin. It is not clear if this intricate structure, which sets each vice against its opposing virtue, was an innovation of the author of the Speculum vitae or was found in a rearranged copy of the Somme le roi. It seems likely that Laurent himself had kept the vices and virtues separate in his French text, since that is how he found them in his own source, the Miroir du Monde, and since that is how they are found in most versions of the Somme le roi.72 But this structure was by no means stable among copies of the Somme le roi; Édith Brayer, in her wide-ranging study of the adaptation history of the Somme le roi notes that vices and virtues are intertwined in the version of the Somme le roi that appears in Paris, Bibl. nat. fr. 1134, a fifteenth-century manuscript.73 Brayer notes, moreover, that the Somme le roi was often blended with the Miroir du Monde in creative ways and while most of these blended versions preserve the division between the vices and virtues, one, which Brayer dates to the fifteenth century, interweaves the vices and virtues.74 Both this blended copy and the version of the Somme le roi in Paris, Bibl. nat. fr. 1134 postdate the Speculum vitae and so could not have been the direct inspiration for the Speculum vitae’s decision to interweave the vices and their opposing virtues, but these copies do show that the Speculum vitae was not the only adaptation of the Somme le roi with this interwoven structure. Regardless of whether it was an addition by the Speculum vitae poet or was suggested to him by some source, the structure, by embedding the sins within a broader discussion of virtue, emphasizes the importance of fostering constant self-vigilance and good behaviour. The two major differences between the Somme le roi and the Speculum vitae, by underlining the importance of virtue as a framework for self-examination, powerfully illustrate the changing conceptualization of sin in the fourteenth century. This new approach to sin, and the first significant articulations of what are now known as the sins of omission, were part of a broader program advanced by the Church in the fourteenth century that was aimed at extending the scope of the confessional system and at fostering virtue.75 Every aspect of a person’s life – every action taken or not taken, every word spoken or not spoken – was being transformed into a potential site of ethical and moral concern This ethical and penitential function of the Speculum vitae is embedded into its material history, which contains, to borrow a term from Bernard Cerquiglini, a complete ‘paratexte médiéval’ – in the sense of a fully developed textual apparatus that

72 See Brayer, ‘Contenu’, p. 434. 73 See Brayer, ‘Contenu’, p. 463.

74 Brayer, ‘Contenu’, pp. 468–469. 75 See chapter 5, pp. 116–120 above.



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supports the process of searching or fetching for information.76 Most surviving manuscripts contain running titles, and these may have been introduced by the author himself.77 These would have served much the same function as the search feature on modern confessional apps: they supported selective engagement with the penitential material by highlighting the major divisions of the work, and by allowing the reader to quickly locate relevant passages. Working with a tool in this way would have been an intrinsically interactive experience – one that would have been guided by intense self-reflection. On the basis of the Speculum’s ‘quasi-diagrammatic (visual) progression’, Ian Doyle counts the guide among those that attest to the growth of private reading in the fourteenth century.78 And the compact size of most copies would have made them perfect for reading alone, since a small volume can be carried on one’s person, and can be read comfortably without designated physical supports.79 Such reading, according to the prologue of the work, was to be done outside of the Church and away from its powerful book collections; it is aimed at ‘lewed men namely / þat can na manere of clergy’ (‘uneducated men in particular, who know no manner of book learning’), with ‘lewed’ here, as in the source for the text, contrasted to the ‘clerkes’ who have many books already.80 This evocation of a lay reader, and the material history of the Speculum, paint the picture of a lay owner of the text – one such as Hugh Damlett, a London rector and prominent book collector who owned a copy – withdrawing to a private chamber with his manual, thinking about his sins, and selecting the relevant passages to better understand them and – through this examination – himself.81 76 Cerquiglini draws on Gérard Genette’s own discussion of paratexts; see Bernard 77

78 79 80



81

Cerquiglini, Éloge de la variante: histoire critique de la philologie (Paris: Éditions Du Seuil, 1989), p. 49. See Vincent Gillespie, ‘Vernacular Books of Religion’, in Book Production and Publishing in Britain 1375–1475, ed. by Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 317–344 (p. 333). Doyle, ‘Survey’, I, 80. For the size of Speculum vitae manuscripts, see Gillespie, ‘Vernacular’, p. 333. ‘And al for lewed men namely þat can na manere of clergy. To kenne þam war mast nede, For clerkes can bathe se and rede In sere bokes of Haly Writte How þai sal lif, if þai loke itt’ (I, p. 7; ll. 83–88) Eamon Duffy, in The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400–c. 1580, 2nd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 69, takes these lines to mean that the work is written for ‘unlettered lay people’, and Doyle (‘Survey’, I, p. 78) writes that the whole manual is addressed to an uneducated audience. On Hugh Damlett’s ownership of the copy of the Speculum in Stonyhurst College, MS 27, see Mary C. Erler, Women, Reading, and Piety in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 78. While the lay context of the Speculum vitae is most notable, the work also circulated among clerical owners; surveying the evidence, Doyle concludes that it circulated among ‘the better-educated and more comfortable

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Contemporary inscriptions describe the manual as ‘good and useful for the salvation of the human life and soul’.82 And the Pater noster itself, now generally seen as material for impersonal rote repetition, was understood by readers of the Speculum as a tool for reflection and personal transformation; that is the impression suggested by the colophon in one copy of the Speculum vitae, which draws a direct link between the manual’s self-examination function and its central prayer: ‘Explicit tractatus de oracione dominica sive de paternoster. In quo reprehenduntur multa vicia. Et in quo continentur omnes virtutes que in hac vita degentibus sunt necessarie. Et specialiter illiteratis docende. ad dei honorem’ (‘Here ends the tract on the Lord’s Prayer – that is, the Pater noster. In which many vices can be checked. And in which is contained all the virtues that are necessary in this life of men, and especially to be taught to the uneducated. To the honour of God’).83 In another copy, this central prayer is described in an inscription through its ‘usefulness’.84 For these readers, the Pater noster was not an impersonal prayer for memorization but a tool for identifying missed opportunities for virtue and for reforming the soul. The emphasis on virtue and the reformation of the soul, already embedded in the Speculum vitae, was extended when the text was adapted into prose in the late fourteenth century in what is known as the Myrour to Lewde Men and Wymmen.85 The work is addressed to the ‘lewde’ (‘uneducated’) folk mentioned in its modern title, and most of the identifiable owners of the work seem to have been members of the laity.86 According to its editor, Venetia Nelson, the Myrour to Lewde Men and

82 83 84

85

86

clergy and laity’ (‘Survey’, I, 92). Nor should the design of the copies, which prioritize private reading, be taken as evidence that the book was not read to others and in groups; Doyle notes that a few of the surviving copies are larger, and that these may have been used in shared reading situations (‘Survey’, I, 84). He also notes that the author occasionally writes with an eye to oral recitation (‘Survey’, I, 79). And the donor of one volume – Cambridge, University Library, MS Ii.i.36 – envisages either type of engagement: ‘Ȝe þat rede þis boke or here it redde I pray ȝow praith for sir Roberte soule’ (‘You who read this book, or hear it read, I pray you, pray for the soul of Sir Robert’); Hanna, ‘Introduction’, p. xxi. The full inscription, which appears in British Library, Additional MS 8151, reads ‘tractatus benus et utilis pro salute humane vite et anime’; Doyle, ‘Survey’, I, 87. Quoted in Doyle, ‘Survey’, I, 87. The copy is Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS McClean 130. The inscription in the copy owned by the Augustinian priory of Bolton states that the book ‘continet utilitatem oracionis dominice’ (‘contains the usefulness of the Lord’s Prayer’); quoted in Doyle, ‘Survey’, II, 49. In another copy, Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Peniarth MS 395, the work is entitled ‘Liber sapientie’ (‘The Book of Wisdom’); Doyle, ‘Survey’, II, 49. The most recent dating of the Myrour assigns it a c. 1375 date; see David J. Falls, ‘Reflecting English Lay Piety in the Mirrors of Oxford, Bodleian Library Ms e Museo 35’, in Manuscript Culture and Medieval Devotional Traditions, ed. by Jennifer N. Brown and Nicole R. Rice (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2021), pp. 152–175 (p. 156). See the overview of manuscripts in ‘Introduction’, in A Myrour to Lewde Men and Wymmen A Prose Version of the ‘Speculum vitae’, ed. from B.L. MS Harley 45, ed. by Venetia Nelson (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1981), pp. 9–70 (pp. 41–47). In his analysis of the circulation of the work, David J. Falls finds that the manuscript evidence suggests that



Teaching Virtue 139

Wymmen has the Speculum vitae as its direct source. The similarities between the two texts are striking; in places, the Myrour to Lewde Men and Wymmen is so close to its source that it preserves its rhymes. The Myrour is, however, marked by what Nelson describes as an overall tendency toward clarification and simplification. By using prose, the Myrour smooths out and clarifies some of the lines of the Speculum that are awkward or ambiguous but that fit the strictures of verse. The Myrour is also marked by a tendency toward abridgment. Nelson finds that it contains a few expansions, including some explanatory passages not found in its source, but most of these are individual words or brief phrases.87 The structure of the Speculum vitae, which brings the Pater noster and, concomitantly, the virtues, to the fore, is reproduced almost exactly in the Myrour. But the Myrour extends even further the Speculum’s interest in promoting virtue. This tendency is clear in the longer sections that are unique to the Myrour. The most significant of these is the first section of the prologue, which finds no parallel in the Speculum vitae. The passage draws on Augustine’s City of God; man must choose between two paths, each leading to a different city: ‘þat oon þat ledith to endeles blis is vertues & virtuous lyvinge, and þat other þat ledith to endeles peyne is synne & synful lyuyng’ (‘the one that leads to endless bliss is virtues and virtuous living, and the other that leads to endless pain is sin and sinful living’).88 Helping a man distinguish between these two paths is, according to the redactor, the motivation behind the work: And for [a] man may not knowe in whiche of these two weyes he goþ ynne, ne whiderward he is but he knowe what is vertu and what is synne, therefore þis writing is made for lewed and menliche lettred men and wymmen in suche tonge as þei can best vnderstonde, and may be cleped a myrour to lewde men and wymmen in whiche they may see God þorgh stedfast byleue and hemself þorgh mekenes, and what is vertu and what is synne.89 [And since a man may not know in which of these two ways he is going, nor where he is, unless he know what is virtue and what is sin, this writing is designed for the work circulated among small communities of lay readers, some of whom had ‘close connections to religious institutions’ (p. 171). 87 For a comparison between the Myrour and the Speculum, see Nelson, ‘Introduction’, especially pp. 10, 25, and pp. 32–33. Falls tends to agree with Nelson on this subject, writing that the Myrour ‘rarely deviates from a simplification of the perhaps overly complex verse of its original’; ‘Reflecting’, p. 174. 88 The expansion occurs in A Myrour to Lewde Men and Wymmen A Prose Version of the ‘Speculum vitae’, ed. from B.L. MS Harley 45, ed. by Venetia Nelson (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1981), p. 71, ll. 1–37, although ll. 30–37 find parallels in the Speculum vitae, I, p. 7, ll. 82–96. The quotation is at Myrour, p. 71, ll. 28–30. 89 Myrour, p. 71, ll. 31–37. The copy of the text in Oxford Bodleian Library, Rawlinson A 356 [S. C. 11242] omits the reference to virtue in the last clause, such that the clause reads ‘and what is synne’ (Myrour, p. 71, notes to ll. 36–37). But the Rawlinson text does contain the first reference to virtue in this passage and, based on the context, the omission of the latter reference to virtue here seems to be a simple case of eyeskip. This latter reference to virtue appears in all three of the other copies of the Myrour and seems to have been the work of the original redactor of the Myrour.

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lewd/uneducated and little lettered men and women – through which they may see God through steadfast belief, and themselves through meekness, and what is virtue and what is sin.]

The passage makes explicit the goal, already present in the Speculum vitae, of not merely discouraging vice but also of actively promoting virtue. As David J. Falls notes in his exploration of the Myrour, this goal is strikingly extensive.90 The same goal is made explicit again in another passage that is unique to the prologue of the Myrour. Here, the redactor offers a justification for treating the Pater noster first: when said devoutly, a prayer that is inspired by God such as this one promotes good deeds.91 The material unique to the prologue of the Myrour, then, works to draw out the lesson that was already embedded in its source: it is not enough to avoid sin – one must actively seek out opportunities to perform virtuous acts. The same goal of promoting virtue is also at the fore in the other lengthy passage that, according to Nelson, the redactor added to his source material. The passage occurs in a section on the works of mercy. For much of this section the Myrour, in its characteristic manner, follows the Speculum vitae very closely. Both texts explain the importance of almsgiving, and of giving to those in need. But the Myrour here departs from its typical approach to its source material by adding a story about St Nicholas, which finds a parallel in the Legenda Aurea.92 The story recounts how St Nicholas became aware of a man who was nearly driven by poverty into selling his daughters to a brothel. St Nicholas then ‘priueliche caste his good into þe mannes hous’ (‘secretly threw his wealth into the man’s house’) and ‘rescowed hem & releued [hem] wiþ his good for Goddes loue vnpreyed and vnasked’ (‘rescued them and relieved them with his wealth for the love of God without having been asked or requested’).93 The story – an early account of St Nicholas secretly bestowing gifts upon a family – ends with a moralization, drawn from the Speculum vitae, that while it is good to give to the needy when asked for, it is even better to give without having been asked.94 This episode, like the other extended passage added by the Myrour redactor, emphasizes the importance of seeking out good deeds. Thus the few extended passages in the Myrour that were not taken from the Speculum vitae work to promote a holistic pastoral programme – one that emphasized both the avoidance of sin and the active pursuit of virtue. The same tendency can be seen in some of the shorter additions found in the Myrour. Most of these shorter additions offer examples or explanations that support what the Myrour’s editor describes as a ‘concern for clarity’.95 But even some of these smaller expansions extend the work’s emphasis on virtue. The tendency is apparent in the 90 Falls, ‘Reflecting’, p. 164. 91 Myrour, p. 71; ll. 37–44.

92 See Myrour, p. 267, notes to p. 161, ll. 20–25. 93 Myrour, p. 161, ll. 20; 24–35.

94 Myrour, p. 161, ll. 27–29. The moralization occurs in the Speculum vitae in I, p. 299, ll.

8989–8991.

95 See Nelson, ‘Introduction’, p. 31. For examples of expansions aimed at clarification, see

Nelson, ‘Introduction’, pp. 31–35.

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discussion of Doomsday. The Speculum vitae warns: ‘Þarefore we suld ay haf drede / To do ille thurgh worde or dede / For we sal gif acount þat day / Of ilk idell worde þat we say’ (‘therefore we should indeed fear committing evil through word or deed, since we shall give an account on that day [i.e. Doomsday] of each idle word that we say’).96 The Myrour elaborates on these ideas: ‘And þerfore we schulde all oure lyftyme busyen vs to do wel and fle yuell wiþ all our myght, for at þat day we schal ȝeue rekenyng of all oure þoghtes and wordes and moche more of alle oure werkes’ (‘And for this reason we should occupy ourselves all our lives to do well, and flee evil with all our might – because on that day [i.e. Doomsday] we will give an account of all our thoughts and words and above all [lit. much more] of all our works’).97 Both texts emphasize the importance of doing good works. But the texts differ in their accounts of what matters at Doomsday; while in the Speculum vitae, it is idle words, in the Myrour it is words, thoughts, and action. Salvation, in this model, requires more than avoiding sin; it involves guarding the mind from sinful thoughts and actively embracing virtue. The epilogue of the Myrour, which follows that of the Speculum vitae closely, stresses that the goal of the work is not only to shield the reader from vice but also to promote virtue: ‘Thus endiþ this tretys or writing þat touchiþ many vices & vertues þat beþ nedeful to knowe to wite what is Goddis will and what is good and what is yvell and what plesith God and what displesith’ (‘So ends this treatise, or writing, which touches on many vices and virtues that are helpful for knowing what God’s will is, and what is good and what is evil, and what pleases God and what displeases Him’).98 The epilogue makes it clear that it is simply no longer enough for a man to avoid vice; he must actively promote virtue: ‘Ne a man may not kepe Goddes lawe but he knowe vertues. For it is not inow to kepe him fro synne but he vse vertues & doo good’ (‘Nor may a man keep God’s law, unless he know the virtues. For it is not enough for him to keep himself from sin unless he practice virtue and do good’).99 The work thus ends as it begins: with a conviction that the good Christian is aware of both the vices he had done and the virtues he should have done but missed. Salvation required sustained, vigilant reflection on not only the sin one had committed by also on missed opportunities to embrace virtue.

Coda: Reading Manuals for Penitents in Reflection In his groundbreaking work Montaillou, Emmanuel Bernard Le Roy Ladurie described a deposition as having taken place ‘in the confessional’ – a space designated for confession that typically separates the priest from the penitent by a screen,

96 Speculum vitae, I, p. 52, ll. 1465–1469. 97 Myrour, pp. 83–84, ll. 44–43. 98 Myrour, p. 234, ll. 6–8. 99 Myrour, p. 234, ll. 20–21.

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theoretically rendering the encounter anonymous.100 But there was no ‘confessional’ in the medieval period. Penitents generally confessed by kneeling directly on the floor in front of a priest. This is a strange mistake for a great historian to make, and, in the sense that it places the penitent in an all-encompassing darkness and within a pre-established framework for confession, it could be thought of as reflecting a broader tendency at the time that Ladurie was writing of downplaying the more personal aspects of medieval confession. In some cases, these more personal aspects have been diminished by early modernist scholars seeking to locate the origins of subjectivity in the early modern era. But even scholars of the medieval period have had a tendency to cast medieval devotional activity as impersonal, and to depict late medieval layfolk as unthinking subjects simply going through the motions of the liturgy.101 Confession must have been felt by many as a terrifying burden and a mechanism of social control – one that, like its modern analogue, was fundamentally tarnished by the potential for abuse. But, crucially, the powerful role that manuals for penitents occupied in medieval society indicates that penitents were not simply going through the motions of penitential ritual; some actively prepared for confession and had apparently deeply internalized their confessional requirements. They brought manuals for penitents home in large numbers, and they, if the authors of these manuals are to be believed, studied their manuals in an engaged way, reflecting on not just the sins they had committed but the virtues they could have committed but did not. Even tracts that seem like scripts for rote repetition, such as the Ten Commandments and the Pater noster, were being read in an engaged, self-reflective way. Through their connections to parochial educational programs and the confessional encounter, essentials such as the Ten Commandments and the seven works of mercy were becoming tools for interrogation and frameworks for understanding the topography of human souls – both one’s own and those of others. When they are included in manuals for penitents, then, commentaries on essentials like the Ten Commandments supported the overall aims of these guides by helping readers prepare for the kinds of personal questions they would be met with during their penitential encounters. When found in this context they are not, therefore, digressions. Rather, these essentials of the faith are an integral part of manuals for penitents, and it is therefore not surprising or accidental that they recur in so many of these texts. Their penitential function in these manuals suggests that, at least in this context, they are not intended exclusively for instruction in basic doctrine. Since they are cast as frameworks for identifying one’s sins, they call for a deeply personal type of engagement. Recognizing the role of these essentials has important implications for how they are viewed and approached. The implications become obvious in light of P. S. Jolliffe’s reason for excluding this kind of commentary from his otherwise comprehensive list 100 This particularity was first noticed and commented on by Leonard E. Boyle in ‘Montaillou

Revisited: Mentalité and Methodology’, in Pathways to Medieval Peasants, ed. by J. A. Raftis (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1981), pp. 119–140, p. 123. 101 For a discussion of the tendency to diminish and simplify the complexity of medieval religion, see the introduction above.



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of works of spiritual guidance. Jolliffe writes that collections such as The Lay Folk’s Catechism were ‘clearly intended for impersonal instruction rather than for spiritual guidance, either individual or general’, and that these texts ‘are to be distinguished from the much longer treatises or compilations … which deal with sins and their remedies, virtues and their pursuit, and the sacrament of penance’. In particular, Jolliffe omits ‘expositions of the Decalogue’ partly because ‘they are moralised writings on the commandments, intended to expound them rather than apply them to the needs of the individual’. He excludes, too, most tracts on the Pater noster because they ‘simply expound the meaning of that prayer: it is unusual to find a tract of this type containing anything but a brief, impersonal exposition which is not directed to the needs of the individual and is of little assistance to him while praying’.102 The assumptions here are plain: commentaries on the essentials of the faith are ‘impersonal’, and, therefore, do not belong among works aimed at providing individuals with spiritual guidance. Scholars are rarely so explicit about the view that such commentaries are impersonal. But the idea that they are antithetical to subjectivity is undoubtedly implicit in the exclusion of these commentaries from all major collections of literature and from most discussions of medieval literary culture. Since literary canons, and the ways in which they are studied, continue to be touched by a legacy of ascribing literary merit based on the representation of subjectivity, it is important to recognize how many of these commentaries served as frameworks for identifying sin – and were, therefore, intended to be used in a deeply personal way. This is not to suggest that the undergraduate classroom needs to be introduced to the Pater noster tracts of the Speculum vitae, but it is a call for recognizing that the artificial distinctions now placed between works like the Speculum vitae and Piers Plowman divests medieval penitents – and their literary culture – of a capacity for self-reflection and complexity.

102 Jolliffe, Check-list, pp. 28–29.

‘To enden in som vertuous sentence’: Concluding with Chaucer’s Parson

C

haucer’s Parson, who notably refuses to tell a ‘tale’ but instead offers a lengthy exposition on sin and confession, has been read as a Promethean figure bringing the high ‘Latinate’ theology of sin to the uneducated masses – either the travelling group of pilgrims or Chaucer’s actual medieval audience. According to this view, the Parson’s Tale is unusual and potentially subversive, because it operates as an ‘academic treatise’ in the vernacular. Proponents of this view include Derrick G. Pitard, who claims that the Parson’s Tale functions as an ‘academic’ text because it is ‘a translation and compilation of three Latin penitential tracts originally intended for use by clerics’, it contains ‘internal references to various academic authorities, including Saint Jerome, Saint Bernard, Saint Augustine, and of course the Bible’, it ‘exhibits a dearth, and hence an apparent mistrust, of narrative plotting and poetic imagery’, and because it contains ‘a hierarchically organized, encyclopedic attention to detail’. Pitard writes that these supposedly ‘academic’ elements make the Parson’s Tale distinctive among texts in English – ‘the language of the illiterati, a language with little or no academic tradition’. He argues that, ‘Before the last half of the fourteenth century, and especially the last quarter, academic treatises on religious matters intended for lay consumption are rare’.1 1

See Derrick G. Pitard’s ‘Sowing Difficulty: The Parson’s Tale, Vernacular Commentary, and the Nature of Chaucerian Dissent’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 26 (2004), 299–330 (p. 299). Pitard is not alone in this view that Chaucer democratizes ‘academic’ material that was otherwise restricted to the clergy. In her doctoral dissertation, Dawn Fleurette Colley (2012) arrives at the conclusion that ‘the Parson’s Tale draws on texts that were intended to guide religious leaders (confession manuals for priests) and were primarily written for readers within religious institutions; it reaches out beyond these particular audiences to proffer its knowledge to a secular readership’; Dawn Fleurette Colley, ‘Reclaiming Reason: Chaucer’s Prose and the Path to Autonomy’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Colorado, 2012), DAI A 74/01(E) (2012): item 3527278, ProQuest Dissertations & Theses [accessed 27 April 2016] (p. 169). Here, Colley, like Pitard, assumes that Chaucer brings ‘academic’ material, which she considers the realm of the clergy, into the hands of lay audiences. Colley’s argument, like Pitard’s, draws on a limited and potentially unrepresentative sample of texts; see p. 174. While arguments for the Tale’s heterodoxy often depend on its relationship to contemporary conventions of vernacular theology, this approach is in no way universal. For example, in her booklength study of the Parson’s Tale, Frances McCormack reads the tale as heterodox, but not because of its relationships to the conventions of vernacular theology but because of its potential relationships to Lollard texts. She finds in the Parson’s biblical translations echoes of the Wycliffite Bible, and concludes that ‘Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale is a subversive text on these grounds alone’; see Frances McCormack, Chaucer and the Culture of Dissent: The Lollard Context and Subtext of the ‘Parson’s Tale’ (Dublin: Four Courts, 2007), p. 183.



Concluding with Chaucer’s Parson 145

Related to this view is the claim that the Parson’s Tale is unusual among works on sin in that it places a powerful emphasis on the inner life. So, Katherine C. Little suggests that the Parson’s Tale is unique among contemporary theological guides in the vernacular in its emphasis on contrition and in its interest in the ways in which the vernacular shapes the self. This suggestion, that the tale encourages a profound interest in the self, sounds much like Pitard’s claim that the tale encourages penitents to ‘become their own interpreters’.2 These models, by variously reading the Parson as the purveyor of previously inaccessible forms of academic thought and a particularly modern form of self-reflexivity, cast the Parson – and through him, Chaucer – as a harbinger of intellectualism and modernity. As such, these models participate in a broader pattern of reading Chaucer as a quintessentially modern figure – one who celebrated the kinds of self-reflexivity and freedom of thought that are now associated with modernity in the face of a restrictive medieval Church that unilaterally imposed uniformity and control upon medieval civilization.3 Yet the fundamental premise behind these models – that the theological content of Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale makes it unusual among works in the vernacular – can be called into question. While the Parson’s exposition was once considered a sermon, it is now recognized that it is a manual for penitents and it closely resembles the other manuals of this sort explored in this study.4 The Parson’s Tale covers contrition, McCormack identifies insinuations of Lollardy throughout the tale, but states that the Parson ‘does not adopt categorically a Lollard or Anti-Lollard position’ (p. 236). 2 Little, much like Pitard, views this as a reformist approach – but not a wholesale espousal of Lollardy; see Katherine C. Little, Confession and Resistance: Defining the Self in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), pp. 94–100, especially at pp. 95; 99. Not everyone who reads the Parson’s Tale as a departure from the conventions of its day takes this as a sign of the Parson’s reformist sympathies. Patterson holds that the Tale’s departures from convention reinforce a ‘concern with the largest possible context for individual acts, the Christian historia salutis’. For Patterson, the Tale should not be read as a commentary on the pilgrims of Chaucer’s fiction alone, but as a meditation on all men (‘“Parson’s Tale”’, pp. 369–370, quoted at p. 370). 3 For a discussion of attempts to read Chaucer as a figure of modernity resisting an oppressive medieval Church, see Linda Georgianna’s ‘Protestant Chaucer’. 4 Confusion around the genre of the tale persisted for much of the twentieth century and contributed to its neglect. In 1936, Homer G. Pfander observed that the tale should not be counted among sermons but among ‘manuals of religious instruction’, without distinguishing between manuals for interrogating penitents and those for penitents themselves; ‘Some Medieval Manuals’ (p. 243). W. A. Pantin described it among other vernacular manuals ‘intended both for the laity and for unlearned priests’, as a ‘rather conventional example of a treatise on confession’ (English, pp. 221; 226–227) and E. T. Donaldson described it in more specific terms as a manual for confessors in Chaucer’s Poetry: An Anthology for the Modern Reader (New York: Ronald, 1975), p. 1112. Lee Patterson challenges this interpretation, writing that ‘[i]t is an instance of a clearly defined and recognizable genre, the manual intended exclusively for penitential use’; ‘“Parson’s Tale”’, pp. 339. Yet the view that the Parson’s Tale is a sermon, or a manual for priests, continues to hold some currency. See, for example, Pitard, ‘Sowing’, pp. 299–330. Siegfried Wenzel followed Patterson in counting the Parson’s Tale among ‘penitential handbooks’, but did not distinguish between penitential writing aimed at penitents, such

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confession, and satisfaction, with the bulk of the manual dedicated to an extensive discussion of the seven deadly sins and their progeny, and these same subjects lie at the heart of the manuals for penitents already discussed. Indeed, the only significant difference between the Parson’s Tale and contemporary manuals for penitents is that while most contemporary manuals contain commentary on biblically derived essentials and prayers – like the Ten Commandments, the Creed, and the Pater noster – the Parson’s Tale does not; it is limited to a discussion of the sins, the virtues, and penitential theology more generally.5 But the absence of these biblically-derived tracts is, in fact, highlighted by the Parson himself. He states that he must leave an exposition on the Pater noster to the ‘maistres of theologie’ (X. 1043), and, speaking of the Ten Commandments, proclaims ‘so heigh a doctrine I lete to divines’ (X. 957). Aside from these acknowledged differences, the Parson’s Tale is wholly typical for its genre. In bringing self-examination material to the laity, the Parson’s Tale was, in fact, participating in a widely popular trend of creating long manuals designed to teach the laity about the shape and contours of sin. It is not, in this respect, remarkable. Nor is the Parson’s Tale unusually ‘academic’ in tone. A text like the widely popular Somme le roi, as an exhaustive prose compilation relying heavily on Peraldus, would certainly meet the requirements for an ‘academic treatise’ in the vernacular, and, like the Parson’s Tale, it has an implied lay audience. Even a versified work like the Manuel des péchés has much in common with the summa for priests written by Richard of Wethringsette known as Qui bene presunt (c. 1230–1240) and, as we have seen, draws on the Latin Church Fathers such as Gregory the Great.6 The ‘academic’ nature of the Parson’s Tale, then, is only unique when the work is severed from its links to contemporary manuals for penitents. There is, moreover, nothing unusual about the Parson’s emphasis on self-examination, in-depth reflection, and the inner life. As we have seen, manuals for penitents had, for centuries, underlined the importance of reflecting on one’s sins and one’s relationship to the established Church. While in the early years, confessional practices were associated most strongly with the clergy, even the earliest insular guides to confession suggest that these practices were encouraged among the laity as well. Old English penitential prayers speak to a long tradition of encouraging the penitent to reflect carefully on his sins prior to making a confession and speak to the importance placed on the inner life, even in this early period. In the thirteenth century, as confessional practices moved increasingly out of the cloister, members of the laity were increasingly encouraged to examine their consciences carefully, and the division between inner life and outward performance became a point of particular interest to the Church. The interest in the inner life in the Parson’s Tale, and its calls as that in Edmund of Abingdon’s Speculum religiosorum, and that aimed at priests to assist them in their pastoral duties, such as Thomas of Chobham’s confessional summa; ‘Notes on The Parson’s Tale’, The Chaucer Review, 16.3 (1982), 237–256 (pp. 249–256, quoted at p. 249). 5 These differences are noticed by Patterson, ‘“Parson’s Tale”’, p. 340. 6 For the Manuel’s resemblances to Wethringsette’s Summa, see Kemmler, ‘Exempla’, pp. 57–59, and the discussion in chapter 3 above.



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for intense self-reflection, then, represent the culmination of a much longer and well-established tradition of self-examination writing in England. While the circumstances behind the Parson’s delivery of his ‘myrie (merry) tale in prose’ – apparently on horseback to the other pilgrims – would have struck Chaucer’s contemporaries as unusual, the context of the Parson’s exposition within a secular tale-telling framework would have been more familiar. As we have seen, manuals for penitents had a close and uneasy relationship with more secular narrative forms; on one hand, manuals for penitents made use of the appeal of popular narrative for the sake of moral exempla, but on the other, manuals for penitents were keen to distance themselves from these more secular forms in terms of their truth function. This uneasy relationship proved to be a site of considerable creative potential, and by exploring the relationship between tale-telling and truth-telling through his ‘myrie tale’, the Parson is participating in a broader tradition that includes works like the Speculum Gy de Warewyke and the Speculum vitae. Thus, while the Parson’s Tale stands out among manuals for penitents for not including the Decalogue and the Pater noster, its discussion of Latinate theology, its calls for an intense and in-depth self-reflection, and its playful embedding of religious doctrine within a more secular narrative context were not unprecedented qualities. Instead, the manual was participating in an established and highly popular form of writing – one that would have been immediately recognizable to a medieval audience who would have already encountered any number of bestsellers like the Somme le roi or the Manuel des péchés. Indeed, this popular form of writing was promoted extensively by the clergy in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, who found it a powerful tool for bringing self-examination into the home and extending and enforcing penitential discipline across a large and varied cross-section of the medieval population.

Complicating Orthodoxy The significant popularity and support from the clergy that manuals for penitents enjoyed, as this study has established, should not be taken to suggest that manuals for penitents were without controversy. It is true that the development of manuals for penitents in the thirteenth century helped extend the clergy’s control over the individual conscience – control that had been both signified and bolstered by the injunction to annual confession of 1215. At a time when priests were increasingly gaining access to individuals’ most secret hopes, desires, and fears through confessional encounters, these manuals served as powerful tools for encouraging and enforcing obedience and conformity to the Church. In this sense, these manuals, by extending the confessional apparatus into the homes of more penitents, helped grant the Church unprecedented power. For many, this must have been experienced as a deeply troubling development – one that created new arenas for abuse and for harm. Priests must have found in manuals for penitents a valuable tool for encouraging and enforcing obedience and conformity to the teachings of the Church. Yet as manuals for penitents increasingly moved out of the relatively safe confines of the cloister and into the home in the thirteenth century, they increasingly gave penitents

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access to the ideas of the Church without the clergy’s direct supervision. While many of these manuals were undoubtedly used by the clergy or under the clergy’s careful supervision, they were also read in the lay home, without any clerical oversight. In this sense, these manuals represent the first real wave of distance education in medieval England. This new form of distance education came accompanied by new challenges and concerns. As we have seen, when self-examination writing moved out of the cloister, the clergy needed strategies for addressing the broad and diverse audiences that were grappling with ever-increasing confessional obligations. To meet this challenge, the authors of manuals for penitents drew on differentiated instruction – an educational method that was well established within sermon writing traditions. By including material addressed to highly specific and at times apparently mutually exclusive audiences, these manuals aimed to promote a thorough and complete confession in the greatest possible number of penitents. But this was not the only challenge that accompanied the new wave of manuals for penitents that emerged in the thirteenth century. In this period, the authors of these manuals began to worry that the manuals could potentially introduce penitents to new sins. These concerns, which also arose during the confessional encounter itself, were especially pronounced surrounding sins that could not easily be observed through social observation – especially sexual sins. As we have seen, the authors of manuals for penitents were especially careful with these sins when they were addressing those outside the established Church. The trepidation surrounding these sins reveals a distinct climate of unease about who should have access to knowledge and in which contexts. As authors grappled with how to teach penitents about how to make a full confession without introducing them to new sins, they also worried that their readers might take the wrong kind of pleasure in their texts. So, as already discussed, Robert Mannyng suggests that by avoiding private sins, his work will be appropriate for public consumption – an idea that speaks to a fear over what kind of content should appear in these manuals. The authors of manuals for penitents worried, too, that their manuals would be considered a substitute for face-to-face confession, or that confession would become so intertwined with the written word that penitents would start trying to send written confessional statements instead of going to confess in person. As with modern day innovations in distance learning, manuals for penitents extended the reach of educational material, but not without significant resistance and concerns. Recognizing these concerns is important, because they remind us that even a body of writing that was, in many ways, the foundation of religious orthodoxy for years, and that aimed to bring human behaviour in line with a strict set of ethical and behavioural norms, could nevertheless be seen as a threat. These texts illustrate the kinds of complications and contradictions inherent in late medieval orthodoxy – ones that are gaining interest as scholars increasingly work to reject binary modes of thinking about medieval religious culture and work to map the overlapping and shifting terrain between orthodoxy and heterodoxy in the late medieval period. Medieval concerns surrounding manuals for penitents serve as a valuable reminder



Concluding with Chaucer’s Parson 149

that the Church did not operate as a single monolithic unit, but, like many bureaucratic entities, was mired by internal conflicts. In insisting on annual confession, the medieval Church, regardless of modern theologians’ talk of its altruistic interests, undeniably created a system of social control unlike any other the West had seen, and in so doing, regulated and structured the everyday lives of the medieval faithful – from the amount of food they ate, to their simplest desires. But the confessional apparatus was not without controversy nor, on the whole, inimical to independent thought. Medieval manuals for penitents, which deploy the essentials of the faith as sites of self-examination, encouraged critical analysis and complex self-awareness at the same time as they promoted conformity to a prescribed code of ethics. They provide uncontroversial evidence that even writing that happened firmly within the control of the established Church in the medieval period could promote a new way of thinking about religion and a new interest in the self. In this sense, these manuals firmly resist presentist models that confine to medieval heterodoxy everything that is typically deemed modern – including introspection, critical analysis, and self-reflection.

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Index Ad status collections  44–48, 51 Alcuin 33 Advice to Wido  11 n. 37, 33 Allen, Hope Emily  9 n. 31, 10, 129–130 Anchorites 52–63 confessional requirements of  58–62 definition of 52–53 expectations for  54, 56–62 sins of 60–62 Ancrene Wisse  1, 7, 14, 17, 22, 23, 41, 43, 52–63, 67, 81, 83–84 Anselm of Canterbury  89 ‘Arnold I’  124 ‘Arnold II’  124 Arnold, Thomas  125 Arundel’s Constitutions  13–15, 124 Audience  13, 23, 38, 41, 43–63, 67, 71–73, 78, 81–82, 85, 88, 91–93, 137 ‘always a fiction’  23, 55, 77 implied, intended, and actual  37, 41, 50–52, 77, 78, 81–82, 91–93, 144, 146 Augustine of Hippo  139, 144 City of God  139 Ave Maria  109–110, 119–120, 125 Ayenbite of Inwyt  2, 8, 75, 103–104, 108, 114, 121 Battle of Hastings  31 n. 5, 37, 44 Beatitudes 117 Bede 69 Bernard of Clairvaux  135, 144 Bible  13, 15, 30, 45, 105, 108, 110, 112, 120, 144 I Corinthians 45 Exodus 105 Luke 120 Biblical translation  13–15, 144–146 Body metaphor  53, 62–63, 103–104, 112–114, 134 Boethius 127 Book history  18 Book of Hours  3–4, 74 Book of the conscience  102–104 Book of Vices and Virtues (14th c)  120, 121, 127 Book to a Mother 119–120 Boyle, Leonard E.  16 n. 55, 42 n. 3, 53 n. 38, 119 n. 9, 142 n. 100

Bryan, Jennifer  80–81 Burckhardt, Jacob  20–21 ‘free personality’ 20–21 Bynum, Caroline Walker  20, 30, 63 Caesarius of Heisterbach  101, 104 Canterbury Tales  1, 11–12, 43–44 The Parson’s Tale  1, 6, 9, 11–12, 16–17, 83, 144–147 Cantilupe, Walter de  110–112 Catechism  4–5, 143 Cerquiglini, Bernard  136–137 Chansons de geste  9–11, 37, 69, 129 Song of Roland  69 Chastity  37, 96 Chaucer, Geoffrey see Canterbury Tales Circumstances of sin  43–44, 60, 79, 117 Clensyng of Mannes Sowle  8–9, 52, 75 Clergy  29, 36–37, 51, 52, 53, 67–68, 72–73, 76, 105, 144, 147 as audience  29, 36, 41, 67–68, 72–73, 144 Compileison  2, 66, 76, 79–91, 96, 97, 113 Conditions of Confession  53, 56–61 Confessio Amantis see under Gower, John Confession app 18, 105 cleaning metaphor for  2 complete  1, 51, 119, 136, 148 early history of  29–34 historiography of 29–32 importance of 1–3 Confessional  18, 141–142 Cornett, Michael  2 n. 8, 16 n. 55, 19, 23, 32, 34, 43, 59, 82 Council of Lambeth  116–117 Council of Trent (c. 1545–1563)  98 Credo see Creed Creed  11, 105–107, 109–110, 117, 119, 127, 146 development of  105–106, 109 in the Manuel des péchés  106–107 not in the Parson’s Tale  146 and pastoral education  105–107, 109–110, 117, 119, 127, 146 in Pecham’s Constitutions  119 in the Somme le roi  106 in the Speculum Gy de Warewyke 11

172

Index

Damian, Peter  88–89 Liber Gomorrhianus (Book of Gomorrah)  88–89 David (Saint) (d. c. 589–601)  32–33 Decrees of the Synod of North Britain  32–33 Excerpts from a Book of David 32–33 Grove of Victory  32–33 Decalogue see Ten Commandments Devil  7, 38, 56, 59, 62, 93, 94, 102–103 Devil’s register  102–103 De virtutibus et vitiis see Alcuin’s Advice to Wido Dialogue Between a Wise Man and a Fool 10 Diekstra, F. N. M.  81, 90–91, 92 Differentiated instruction  43–50, 52, 61–63, 148 ‘Dispute Between a Good Man and the Devil’ 9 Distance education  5, 24, 78, 80, 104–105, 147–148 Dominicans 7 Doomsday see Judgment Day Doyle, A. I.  2, 131–132, 137, 138 Duffy, Eamon  74, 115, 137 Early Modern period  17, 22, 98, 142 Edmund of Abingdon  125, 145 n. 4 Speculum religiosorum  125, 145 n. 4 Education concerns surrounding  79–81, 94–98, 105, 148–149 ‘Effects of the Seven Sins’  39, 106 n. 22 Enumeration 106 Ermenfrid of Sion (Bishop) Penitential Ordinance  37 Estates 43–48 Estates satire  43–44 Eucharist see Transubstantiation Excerpts from a Book of David see under David (Saint) Exempla  7, 12–13, 69, 73, 102, 104, 147 chattering in church  102 confession lacking contrition  104 monk pretends to be obedient  7 shepherd bear 69 Fable 11–12 Falls, David J.  138 n. 85, 86 Famulorum  122, n. 21, 126 Firey, Abigail  16, 21, 23, 30 n. 4, 33 n. 22, 43 n. 4 Five senses  24, 105–107, 110–117 Fleta  90 Forms of confession  16 n. 55, 19, 34, 59, 82 Four cardinal virtues see virtues

Fourth Lateran Council  1, 17 n. 58, 21–23, 29–31, 34, 35–37, 39, 41 viewed as a gateway to modernity  42–43 Foucault, Michel  21–22, 98 Franciscans 7 Free will  127 Georgianna, Linda  18, 57, 62 n. 68, 115 n. 59 Gerson, Jean  73, 117 Gifts of the Holy Spirit  117, 119 Gildas 31–32 The Preface of Gildas on Penance  31–32 Gillespie, Vincent  120, 122, 129 Goering, Joseph  36, 50 n. 28, 81 n. 11, 82 Gower, John  3, 12, 17, 40 Confessio Amantis  3, 12, 17, 40 Greenblatt, Stephen  20 Renaissance Self–Fashioning 20 Gregory I the Great  7,45 n. 11, 46–47, 50, 63, 69, 146 Dialogues 7 Pastoral Care  45 n. 11, 46–47 Grosseteste, Robert  8 n. 28, 50, 81–88, 90, 92–93, 96, 106 n. 22, 109–113, 116, 127 Peines de Purgatorie  8 n. 28, 84 Perambulauit Iudas  50, 81–88, 90, 92–93, 96, 112–113 Grove of Victory see under David (Saint) Gunn, Cate  40–41, 44 n. 8, 56 n. 51, 84, 109 n. 32 Guy, the prior of Southwick  35–36 Tractatus de virtute confessionis 35–36 Guy of Warwick  9–11 Hamilton, Sarah  31 n. 5, 109 n. 31 Hanna, Ralph  122, 128 n. 44; 129 n. 51 Haskins, Charles Homer  20 n. 68 Heng, Geraldine  22 n. 77 Henry 37 Estates of Man, the Vices and Virtues 37 Henry of Lancaster  95 Livre de seyntz medicines 95 Heresy  13–16, 25, 123–126 associations with modernity  15, 25 and censorship  13–15, 124 and vernacular writing  13–15, 124 Wycliffite accusations of  125–126 in Wycliffite compilations  123–126 Hessenauer, Matthias  84 n. 25, 86 Hibbard, Laura  10 Hilton, Walter  14 Scale of Perfection 14 Horn, Andrew  90, 96 Le mireur a justices  90, 96 Hugh of St Cher  111



Index 173

Imitatio clerici 67 Indulgences 104–105 Innocent III  129 Intention  43–44, 125 Ire see sins Jauss, Hans Robert  16 Johnson, Ian  13 Jolliffe, P. S.  106 n. 20, 143 Judgment Day  124 n. 29 Karras, Ruth Mazo  90 n. 48 Kay, Sarah  30 n. 4 Kemmler, Fritz  68 Ker, W.P.  30 n. 4 Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval Literature  30 n. 4 Kerby–Fulton, Katherine  14 n. 48 Knapp, Peggy  12 n. 40 Kuper, Adam  30 n. 4 Laurent (Friar)  2, 73, 93–96, 113–114, 128, 136 Somme le roi  2, 73, 93–96, 113–114, 128, 136 Lay Folks’ Mass Book 120 Lea, Henry Charles  16 n. 55, 30 n. 3 Lechery see sins Lectio divina  67, 76 Legge, M. D.  17 n. 58 Le Goff, Jacques  43–44 Lerer, Seth  6 n. 19 Lewis, Anna  124 Lille, Alan de  44–46 Ars Praedicandi  44–46 Literary canons  5–7, 13–17, 142–143 Little, Katherine C.  145 Liturgy  126, 142 Lochrie, Karma  79, 83, 88 n. 39 Lollards see Wycliffites Lord’s Prayer see Pater Noster Mannyng, Robert Handlyng Synne  1, 2, 7, 8 n. 29, 12, 70, 73, 76–78, 80, 95, 102, 103, 108, 116 Mansfield, Mary C.  31 n. 5 Manuals for penitents difference from Books of Hours  3–4 difference from catechism  4–5 difference from form of confession  19–20 form of 8–9 language of  6, 8 relationship to secular entertainment  6–13 Manuel des péchés  3, 6, 8, 44, 51 n. 32, 68–73, 94, 96, 101, 102, 106–108, 113, 116, 146 analogues and sources  68–69 audiences of  51 n. 32, 71–73

contents of 68–69 popularity of  3, 70–71 use of concrete examples to describe sin  7, 69–70 use of essentials of the faith for self– examination  69, 106–108 use of exempla  7, 69–70 Manuscript layout  74, 78, 97, 136–137 Manuscript survival  17 Master narratives  20–22, 42–43, 145–146 Matthew 124 Mirroir du monde  41 n. 50, 93 Mirror metaphor  2 Monfrin, Jacques  39, n. 39 Montibus, William de Peniteas cito peccator  36, 41 Moore, R. I.  90 Myrour to Lewde Men and Wymmen  8 n. 29, 119, 138–139 Newhauser, Richard  4, 116 n. 1 Nogent, Guibert of  47 Book About the Way a Sermon Ought to be Given (Liber quo ordine sermo fieri debeat)  47 Norwich, Julian of  13 Showings 13 Olson, Glending  94 Omnis utriusque sexus see Fourth Lateran Council Ong, Walter J.  23, 55 Ordinatio see manuscript layout Orthodoxy  5, 12, 15–16, 24, 120, 124, 147–149 and presentist approaches  42–43 Pantin, W. A.  145 n. 4 Paratext see manuscript layout Parson’s Tale see under Canterbury Tales Pastoral education and the circumstances of sin  43–44, 60, 79, 117 concerns surrounding  79–81, 94–98, 105, 148–149 during the confessional encounter  109–111 and Lateran IV  1, 42–44, 50, 63, 80–81 Pastoralia  53 Pater noster  2 n. 5, 4, 109, 110, 119–135, 138–143,146–147 in the Bible  120, 146 as both complex and simple  122–123 and confession  109–110, 127 elementary power of  121–123 and social critique  121–126 The Pater noster of Richard Ermyte  124

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Pecham’s Constitutions  116–117 Penitential prayers  34–35, 39, n. 43, 146, 117–119 Penitentials  29, 31–33 Pennaforte, Raymond de Summa de casibus poenitentiae  44, 79, 84, 109 Peraldus, Guilelmus Summa de vitiis and Summa de virtutibus  68, 84, 146 Pfander, Homer G.  145 n. 4 Piers Plowman  3, 14, 40, 121, 126, 143 Pleasure in reading  94–96 Poore, Richard (Bishop)  109, 116, 127 The Preface of Gildas on Penance see Gildas Pride see under sins Priests’ guides  8, 16 n. 55, 29, 31–33, 44, 68, 74, 79–80, 84, 96–97, 104, 109 n. 31, 111–114, 144–146 Private reading  75–78 Private sins  79–94, 96–98 Prose  8–9, 146 Prudentius Psychomachia 38 Public penance  30–31 Quinel, Peter (Bishop)  110 n. 36, 112 Raoul de Houdenc  102 Songe d’enfer  102 Reading  5, 7, 23–24, 59 n. 61, 67–68, 72 n. 23, 75–78, 81, 94–96, 102–104, 117, 123 Religion grassroots approach to  13–15 ‘Revolt of the medievalists’  20–21, 98 n. 80 Rhetoric  13, 47–50, 53 Rigaud, Jean  117 Robert de Sorbon  81, 90–94 Qui vult vere confiteri  81, 90–94 Rolle, Richard  13, 101 n. 1, 104, 124 n. 29 Romance  6–13, 30, 55 n. 47 Romans, Hubert de  47–48 De Eruditione Praedicatorum 47–48 Rule of St Benedict  32, 135 Sacraments  68, 91, 110, 111, 116, 117, 118 Saenger, Paul  75 Saligia order see under sins Salvation  1, 103, 106, 114, 121, 123, 124, 138, 141 Self-examination material characteristics prior to 1215  36–37 as a new technology  34–35 popular interest in  2–3, 5, 13, 24, 52, 68, 70–74, 78, 81, 117, 146

Septem hereses contra septem peticiones Sermons  23, 43–48, 50, 52, 60, 126, 145, 148 Sermon guides audience differentiation in  23, 43–48, 50, 52, 60 Sins against the commandments  107–115 against nature  85–87, 92–94 avarice  35, 48, 51, 69, 85, 91, 103, 126 circumstances of see circumstances of sin envy  35, 38, 62, 69 gluttony  38, 95, 126 ire  2, 38, 76 n. 44, 133–136 lechery  38, 70, 82–87, 92–93, 95 of omission  119, 132–133 pride  35, 38, 47, 62, 69, 102, 126, 135 remedies against (see virtues) Saligia order 38–40 seven deadly 32 sexual 79–94, 96–98 sloth 38, 62 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight  6, 115 Social Control  16, 21–24, 42, 142–143 Sodom and Gomorrah  92–94 Speculum Gy de Warewyke  11, 147 Speculum vitae  2 n. 5, 8 n. 29, 9–10, 119, 122–143, 147 differences from the Myrour to Lewde Men and Wymmen  138–139 differences from the Somme le roi  127–136 structure of  132–136 Subjectivity  21–22, 142–143 Suso, Henry de  39 Summa (c. 1250–1253)  39 Synod of North Britain see under David (Saint) ‘Tabula vtilitate oracionis dominice’  129–131 Tateshal, Joan  72, 75 Ten Commandments  3, 4, 18, 24, 84, 93, 105–121, 127, 129, 142, 146 in the Bible  105 branching metaphor for  106 and confession 107–118 position in manuals for penitents  119 sins against the  107–115 as a tool for self–examination  117–118 Third Lateran Council of 1179  89 Transubstantiation 125–126 Treatise on Vices and Virtues  4 n. 15 Twelve Articles of the Faith see Creed Vere, William de (bishop)  35 Vernacular  6, 8 Vernacular theology  13–15, 123, 144 n. 1 Versification  8–9, 146



Index 175

Vices and Virtues (c. 1175–1200)  8 n. 29, 39–41 Virtues  11, 102, 115, 116–119, 127–139, 141–142 Vitae patrum  69 Vitalis, Orderic  89 Vitry, Jacques de  7, 45, 47 Watson, Nicholas  13–15 Wethringsette, Richard of Qui bene presunt 146 Weye of Paradys  102–103 Works of mercy  116–118, 140, 142

Wycliffites attitudes toward the Eucharist  125–126 attitudes toward non-biblical stories in sermons  12 n. 40 attitudes toward prayer in daily life  125 censorship of 13–15 collections 123 commentaries 123–126 distinctive phrasing 125 and the Pater noster  124–126 and proto-Protestant thought  15