Chapter 1 uses the Middle English Charters of Christ to outline a medieval theory of money as debt. The charter lyrics pretend to be deeds, grants, or writs by which Christ cancels the debt owed to God by sinners, or, alternatively, bequeaths the kingdom of heaven to the faithful. In exchange for the remission or the inheritance, the charter stipulates that humankind owes a “rent” to Christ of love and the regular observance of the sacrament of penance. The form of the charter lyrics imitates the form of legal documents, using the verbal formulae and visual markers designed to ensure legal and documentary authenticity as a kind of spiritual guarantee: the lyrics are sincere forgeries. I argue that the kind of belief at work in this act of forgery is a monetary belief. The lyrics function as close analogues to money in that they measure debt and depend for their value on the creditor’s right to repayment. At the same time, like money, they depend for their operation on the community’s active willingness to participate in a shared fiction.

Christians oriented their lives towards the expectation of a life in the hereafter and yet had to orient themselves in this world. This resulted in very different attitudes. While some were fundamentally anti-family or, rather, against sex in general, others thought about what it meant to have a Christian marriage. While some wanted to participate in the pleasures of everyday life, others rejected this. All tried to live a humble life and do good works, especially towards the poor, orphans and widows. Penance was an institution that allowed Christians to be absolved of their sins, but it also allowed bishops to gain power, albeit in varying degrees Therefore, the question of a Christian way of life was always controversial.

In the first decades of the sixteenth century, humanists such as Erasmus and the Reformers such as Luther and Calvin subjected to a fierce critique the doctrine and practices of sacramental confession. The sacrament of penance and the hearing of confessions were scheduled for debate in each of the three periods of the council: during the first period in the context of the discussions on justiification and indulgences and in the draft canons on purgatory that were not promulgated; in the second period where the traditional teaching and related practices were affirmed in the doctrinal decree on the most holy sacraments of penance and extreme unction approved at that time; and in the third period where the rushed closure of the council prevented a deeper investigation, resting with a merely jurisdictional treatment of the topic.

The printed difusion of the conciliar decrees had a dogmatic character that assured the circulation of the teaching of the Roman Church, approved by the council and promulated by the pontiff, on the basis of which were updated the penitential summas and manuals of the confessors inherited and revised in the last centuries of the Middle Ages and now revised again.

In the pastoral practice after Trent, the effort to establish a control over the observance of the ecclesiastical precept of an annual confession with its registration in an appropriate book failed. Instead, a new ecclesiastical furnishing, the confessional box, appeared that assured at thesame time the making public and the secrecy of the administration of the sacrament.

This chapter traces the dual legacy of Christian asceticism as an art of living with distinct but related rules for virtue in monastic and married life. The forms of ascetic virtue cultivated in the early Church have a significant afterlife in sixteenth century fiction and drama, exemplified in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1610). In Utopia, married couples are essential citizens of an ascetic commonwealth, but also potentially at odds with its communal quasi-monastic virtues. The Winter’s Tale reveals a fault line in marriage as an ascetic mode of life: the tension between marriage as a legal code and marriage as a sacrament and relationship of fidelity can only be resolved by turning to the more radical asceticism of penance. These works demonstrate how ascetic practices mediate between self and society; they reflect on ways to cultivate a virtuous life that extend beyond the household or the cloister to the wider world of public and political action.

Chapter 4 argues in favor of seeing medieval justice as penitential justice with the ultimate goal of spiritual reform. Medieval society blurred the lines between sin and crime, penance and punishment. Recognizing this distortion is how one makes sense of peine forte et dure. Pain as an experience is key to the performance of penance. Through physical pain, the disordered soul is righted and the sinner gains entrance to heaven. Fasting, seclusion, denial of luxuries – these are all ascetic practices with a long association with Christian penance. Even pressing with weights appears as a penitential practice in numerous sermon stories from the era. Exposing the uncooperative sinner to an ascetic lifestyle, even if it was against his wishes, was in the best interests of the defendant’s soul. As a coercive measure, it helped to begin the process of purging his sin before he agreed to place himself in the hands of the jury. As such, he displayed to jurors his willingness to reform his ways and reconcile with the Christian community.

Chapter 1 examines precisely what peine forte et dure entailed during the Middle Ages. Paying special attention to the vocabulary related to peine forte et dure in the legal record, this chapter argues that “hard prison” (prison forte et dure) should be considered an umbrella term that includes a wide variety of practices, such as fasting, cold and nakedness, seclusion, and sometimes pressing. The make-up of the punishment depended on the nature of the crime and the defendant’s conduct at court. The traditional narrative sees an evolution in the practice from prison forte et dure, described as a starvation diet and miserable prison conditions, intended as a coercive measure to encourage the defendant to plead, gradually superseded by peine forte et dure, pressing with stones and irons unto death. The medieval evidence, instead, shows that some silent defendants fasted while others were pressed, and at no point did the practice shed its coercive nature altogether. This chapter also locates the practice’s origins in the church’s penitential practices, specifically in the public penance (paenitentia publica) assigned to murderers, political rebels, and other serious crimes.

Between AD c. 400 and c. 1100, Christian ideas about the afterlife changed in subtle but important ways. This chapter outlines broad trends in thought about the afterlife in this period in the Latin West, and examines the concomitant changes in thinking about the post-mortem fates of souls. Ongoing contemporary discourse around topics such as sin and penance or baptism contributed to developments in the way that contemporaries understood the afterlife, including heaven, hell, and an interim state between death and universal judgement. Significantly, as Christians came to be more certain about some aspects of the afterlife, the possibility of salvation for individual souls was perceived to be less certain. As a result, by the end of the period there is much greater evidence for concern about the post-mortem fate of the soul than there had been at the beginning, laying the foundations for high medieval theological discussions and developments.

This chapter not only explores the efflorescence of ‘new’ visions that occurred, especially, but not only, in the British Isles, during the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, it also traces the reproduction of early medieval visions too, arguing that the slow evolution of ‘purgatory’ from early medieval origins facilitated their continued use. Change is nonetheless to be found in this period. There was renewed sensitivity to old anxieties about the authenticity of visions. There was a fresh flux of debate about conceptualisations of the afterlife that were so strongly material. And, most especially, new theological and pastoral priorities were imprinted on vision-texts, which were subtly reshaped by shifting thinking about penitence and prayer. The chapter examines some of the most ‘popular’ visions, measured in terms of manuscript circulation, but it also reconstructs something of the range of visionary experiences too, taking into account narratives that were little attended in their day.

One of the great Reformation debates during Shakespeare’s lifetime focused on the nature of “repentance” as represented in the Bible. The Biblical concept embraced the idea of a turn away from error and a return to righteousness (mostly as interpreted in later translations of the Hebrew Testament) and the idea of an interior change of mind or revision of one’s attitude toward patterns of behavior (mostly in the Christian Testament likewise as interpreted in later translations). Shakespeare dramatized these ideas in histories, comedies, tragedies, and romances throughout his career. This essay focuses on the dynamics of repentance in King Lear, where turning away and changes of mind engage with competing – but also sometimes complementing and mutually reinforcing – claims of ancient pagan Stoicism and Epicureanism in regard to fate, destiny, free will, and random change.

Scholars have typically turned to Aquinas’s Summa theologiae for the moral theology of Dante’s Purgatory. However Dante is, in fact, following an older, more conservative tradition of Christian ethics represented by Peraldus’s De vitiis et virtutibus. In the thirteenth century, theologians moved from trying to displace the structuring principle of the seven capital vices with other alternatives to reforming it from within, and Peraldus and Aquinas adopted markedly different approaches to this reform.

Peraldus’s rationale impels him to treat the vices separately, according to disordered love by excess or deficiency (gluttony, lust, avarice, and sloth) or to love of an evil (pride, envy, and anger). Aquinas, by contrast, introduces an Aristotelian anthropology and a new positive teleological frame, enabling him to treat vices and virtues together in terms of shared good objects desired or avoided. A comparative critique highlights the characteristics, including the weaknesses, of Dante’s poetic treatment (which clearly follows Peraldus’s treatise).

The parallel in ethical content between Peraldus and Dante is matched, furthermore, by a parallel in form: Peraldus’s De vitiis invites us to imagine Dante assuming in the Purgatorio the role of a venacular preacher against vice, with the reader envisaged as a Christian sinner.

This chapter reappraises Dante’s relationship with his reader in Purgatorio through the interpretative paradigm of medieval preaching against vice. The terrace of pride is particularly interesting, in this context, as the medieval Church provides its implicit backdrop. The terrace’s centrepiece is Dante-character’s encounter with three prideful souls (Purg. XI, 37–142), and this encounter is framed by the three examples of humility (Purg. X, 34–93) and the twelve examples of pride (Purg. XII, 25–63). This chapter interprets these three groups together as a triptych.

Dante openly acknowledges that he sinned gravely in pride, and he models a spiritual exercise of conversion from pride to humility. As sinner and preacher, he invites his reader to reflect upon the three prideful souls identified (Omberto, Oderisi, and Salvani) and upon the three groups of prideful examples (delineated by the acrostic ‘VOM’) in counterposition with the three exempla of humility (Mary, King David, and Trajan).

Dante’s choice of exempla (which has puzzled critics) becomes understandable when, and only when, we interpret them in relation to each other in terms of his moral purpose for the terrace as a whole.

This chapter provides a corrective to a dominant ‘political’ reading of Purgatory, according to which Purgatory represents an ethical journey guided by ‘justice and the teachings of philosophy’ towards the beatitudo huius vitae. It presents a way to read the poem as informed by Dante’s dualistic theory (a critical exigency demanded by recent philosophical evidence) without being drawn into a forced reading of Purgatory in overly political terms.

Dante explicitly associates himself with the sin of pride (Purg. xiii, 133–38), and scholars have emphasised, in particular, the temptation to pride in the composition of the Commedia itself. By contrast, Dante makes no such explicit association between himself and the sin of sloth. Sloth might seem a strange sin to ascribe to the poet whose magnum opus, he informs us, had made him for many years lean (Par. xxv, 3).The terrace of sloth, nonetheless, is privileged by Dante: structurally, it is at the literal centre of Purgatorio and thus of the poem as a whole; narratively, it is midway (nel mezzo del cammin) both through Purgatory (the fourth of seven terraces) and through the afterlife (the fourth day on the pilgrim’s seven-day journey); thematically, it includes the discourses on ordered and disordered love as the Christian principles of moral good and evil respectively. Moreover, the very first group of souls whom Dante encounters on his journey through Hell (the ‘wretched souls’ of Inferno iii, 35) are partly characterised by sloth, as are the ‘sad souls’ (tristi) who emit the ‘accidioso fumo’ of Inferno viii. Sloth dominates the moral colour of Ante-Purgatory (Purgatorio i–viii), a region invented by Dante and occupied specifically by those who delayed, albeit in different ways, their conversions to the path of Christian holiness and penitence. Likewise, sloth is associated with the very first group of blessed souls whom Dante-character encounters in Paradise, the ‘slowest sphere’ of the Moon (Par. iii, 30). In each of the three canticles, therefore, the first group of souls is characterised – at least in part – by the vice of sloth. Moreover, after his Christian conversion, sloth was the dominant sin – we learn in Purgatory – of the poet Statius, one of the important autobiographical ‘cyphers’ for Dante in the Commedia. Most significantly, there is good reason to believe, as I shall argue, that sloth is Dante-character’s first sin in the dark wood of Inferno i, and a key to his dramatic confession to Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise.

During the Middle Ages, the justification of humanity increasingly came to be linked with an explicitly sacramental economy of salvation, with a particular emphasis upon the sacramenta mortuorum (baptism and penance) as the divinely ordained means of establishing and restoring justification. This chapter considers this development, which forged an increasingly robust link between the practice of justification and the institution of the church. Although the possibility of extra-sacramental justification was recognised, the normative account of the initiation and restoration of justification was now firmly linked with the sacramental ministry of the church. This chapter explores the development of this move, and considers its implications. In closing, it turns to deal with some trends in Renaissance biblical scholarship which opened up new and important questions in relation to the theory and practice of justification, such as the revision of the accepted words of Christ on beginning his ministry from ‘Do penance, for the kingdom of God is at hand’ to ‘Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand’.