Krista A. Murchison has produced a well-researched, thoughtful and helpful study of the extant English medieval penitential manuals, an enormously popular and important body of texts that contributed a great deal to late medieval culture.
Murchison promises to show how the medieval penitential manuals ‘developed and functioned in Medieval society’ (p. 3) and therefore opens with a quick review of the situation before the Fourth Lateran Council required, in Omnis utriusque sexus, confession at least once a year of all the faithful, and here she is admirably clear and thoughtful. Murchison shows convincingly that clergy and laity were engaged in self-reflection, not just a mechanical process, well before 1215. This allows her to move into the subsequent chapter on the Ancrene Wisse (c. 1220–30) without having to argue that it represents something new, and instead focus on what was a genuinely new insight about this well-known guide for enclosed women: that it seems to be addressing, and expecting to be used by, multiple audiences. Using Ruth Evans's ideas – which are Wayne Booth's from The rhetoric of fiction – of a contrast between the ‘intended audience’ and the ‘implied audience’, Murchison shows through an intelligent analysis of pronoun use that the Wisse seems to have a ‘general audience as well as a specific one’ and could be ‘the crest of a thirteenth-century wave of lay penitential education’ (p. 53).
Thus the Wisse becomes a bridge in the shift in these manuals’ audiences from the cloister to the home. Murchison then begins to explore manuals such as the lay-focused Manuel des Péches (c. 1260), which ostensibly are teaching the elements of the faith but whose real interest is ‘in guiding an individual through confessional preparation’ (p. 68). These guides that ‘ground the abstract theology of the faith in accessible, everyday examples’ crucially use exempla to assist the examination of conscience. She is absolutely correct to say that these were not de-luxe volumes, but functional, practical books, like ‘a user manual rather than a coffee-table book’ (p. 75) that encouraged reading that was ‘frequent and engaged’ and ‘slow and careful’ (p. 76). A volume like Handlyng synne was indeed meant to be handled to do its work. Chapter v, ‘A reforming curriculum’, shows how ‘self-examination started to be described as a kind of reading itself’ (p. 102), with sin as a mark in a scroll that could be wiped away by confession. Indeed, the Ayenbite of Inwit, she notes, sees the ‘book of conscience compared to a physical book in the penitent's hands’ (p. 103).
Murchison is particularly good in these middle chapters, where she explores how reformers like Pecham, Rigau and Gerson propelled this reform into the fourteenth century, and how the structure of the Ten Commandments, the seven works of mercy, the seven deadly sins and the Pater noster, the ‘prayer of the people’, became a new framework not just for educating lay audiences about the tenets of the faith but the very terms in which they examined their souls and analysed their actions. ‘If you see the essentials of the faith as just something to be memorized’, she astutely notes, ‘you miss its potential for sites of engaged reading and self-analysis’ (p. 115). That is perfectly on point and a helpful corrective to misunderstandings of these guides.
At other times, however, Murchison accedes too far to today's post-Foucauldian interest in power. In her chapter iv she explores quite well the very persistent worry at the time that when the manuals discuss sexual sins, they should be careful not to describe things too vividly, as these might be occasions to excite interest in those very sins. With what we know today of pornography and its addictive qualities, that might seem sensible, but for Murchison, it only ‘points to an unease over who should have access to knowledge’ (p. 97). Soon the entire enterprise of the manuals and confessional practice falls under this shadow. As the manuals became more widely spread, she writes, ‘they must have also been felt as a potential threat to the role of the clergy in the penitent's life’ (p. 105). And again: ‘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 threatened by the potential for abuse’ (p. 142). One can acknowledge power differentials and abuses in religious life, one hopes, without the reductionism of that ‘must’, and one can acknowledge that confession might have negative aspects while allowing that many could through it experience freedom from the burdens of sin. Surely the rest of her book makes the implicit argument that the clerics who with no small effort composed these manuals were genuinely interested in the self-examination, reform and recovery of the penitent's lives, and not just power. But by her conclusion, Murchison doubles down on this position: ‘the medieval Church, regardless of modern theologians’ talk of altruistic interests, undeniably created a system of social control unlike any other the West had seen’ (p. 149). With one phrase, beginning with a sweeping ‘regardless’, Murchison here seems to damn with faint praise the very subject of her book: the efforts of these manuals’ authors, and the enormously popular reforms of the friars, to help the laity with genuine problems in their lives.
In the larger argument of the book, however, Murchison does quite well, contending with medievalists’ early modern brethren – as many of us have for some time – that self-reflection and self-knowledge well predated the fifteenth century. And she admirably defends the position that one could engage in self-reflection without leaving the realms of orthodox thought: ‘a work need not be considered heterodox to promote self-knowledge or self-reflection’ (p. 24). She is particularly good in her last chapter in answering unfortunate scholarly readings maintaining that Chaucer's Parson is a ‘harbinger of intellectualism and modernity’ (p. 145). Here in her last chapter she is able to use the evidence of her entire book to show that, quite the contrary, ‘there is … nothing unusual about the Parson's emphasis on self-examination, in-depth reflection, and the inner life’ (p. 146). It is a shame that in 2021 one still needs to make this argument, or that people still read Chaucer's final tale so poorly, but it is a very good thing that Krista Murchison engages so well in this effort.
