Beyond the Penitentials: Early Medieval Discourse on Penance

Abstract

Sometimes the most obvious questions are the hardest ones to answer. For historians of early medieval confession and penance, one of the greatest puzzles has been the cultural context of the penitentials that have dominated, as essential sources, most discussions of early medieval penitential traditions. While there is excellent scholarship on the question of their institutional context— that is, whether they should be located in monastic, parochial, or sacramental settings (or overlapping and evolving contexts of this type)—there is still much work to be done on other, contemporary sources that might help us understand more fully the breadth and depth of penitential culture in the early Middle Ages. This paper explores three ideas: how sources other than the early medieval penitentials are, in fact, necessary to understanding early medieval penance; how, for example, the Synonyma of Isidore of Seville illuminate early medieval penitential discourse; how the imprint of the Synonyma as a penitential and pedagogical text is visible in glosses in a manuscript (Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Reg. lat. 849) of a Carolingian prose treatise on penance. Since the nineteenth century, the sources most frequently consulted as evidence for early medieval practices of penance and confession have been the penitentials. These texts are concise descriptions of specific sins, with a corresponding prescription of specific penances, or ‘remedies’ for each of those sins. Their descriptions of sins includes such offences as losing a consecrated