...Lynn Staley Duke University Press 2007 a The Penitential Psalms: Conversion and the Limits of Lordship Lynn Staley...

...Julie Paulson © 2008 by Duke University Press 2008 a A Theater of the Soul’s Interior: Contemplative Literature and Penitential Education in the...

...Heather Hirschfeld This essay explores the penitential structure of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice in the context of the Reformation reorientation of human agency in matters of atonement. It suggests that the Protestant attack on the Roman sacrament of penance resulted, for both sides of the...

... childe” strives to understand sin, guilt, and culpability within the constraints of humanity’s limited self- knowledge. Julian both works within and transcends established scriptural and penitential traditions of representing childhood, childlikeness, and the related quality of meekness, a key virtue in...

...Jessica Rosenfeld Medieval penitential writings often proclaim envy to be the “worst” sin because it is committed without pleasure. Envy thus poses a problem for traditional moral frameworks that suggest sin can be avoided by turning one’s desire away from earthly pleasures — envious desire is not...

... scenarios as characteristically Catholic and Protestant involves a speech-act analysis, which replaces notions of cause and effect with notions of the direction of illocutionary force. This approach allows us to acknowledge the important differences between Catholic and Protestant penitential understandings...

...Clarissa Chenovick Henry of Lancaster's Livre de Seyntz Medicines is a vividly medicalized penitential narrative composed by a leading lay nobleman of fourteenth-century England. Grounded in the physiology of the medieval heart, Lancaster's understudied Livre demonstrates how medieval medical...

... intend to achieve that) and more reflection on “polemical distortion.” I My account of pre-­Reformation theology is erroneous, according to Shuger. Let us, she suggests, take a good look at how “late medieval Catholic theol- ogy envisaged the process of meriting salvation through penitential...

... begin with a story, an exemplum from Jacob’s Well, a fifteenth-century penitential text written in English by an anonymous author.1 While lying on his deathbed, Justice Herkenbald, famed for his impartiality in admin- istering the law, hears a woman crying out from the next room. When the judge...

... the post-Reformation period, where viewers received and appreciated it through different horizons of reception, favoring its biblicism and penitential narrative forms. Coletti sees evidence in these plays of a “toggling back and forth between traditionalist and reformist possibilities for...

... Magdalene—to demonstrate that even those so degraded by fleshly lusts could find their way to heaven.”46 Male-domi- nant culture presented the Repenties with a hagiographic penitential model to follow if they were to be successful assimilating into the moral order of their culture. The order’s success...

... Merchant of Venice explores the play’s “disavowed desire for an exact and now unavailable sys- tem of reparation.” Shylock’s bond stands for the most uncompromising, literal form of that penitential calculation. Here a cultural analysis of satis- faction and its discontents is brought to bear in a...

... “Reformation neither made virtue irrelevant to salvation nor divorced interior repentance from mate- rial restitution.”9 For Shuger, the medieval penitential practice of “material restitution” — ­that is, making good on sins committed against your neigh- bor before seeking absolution from a priest — ­was...

... De civitate Dei 14.19, “miscetur uxori.”59 The idiom comes closer to home in the Latin version of the Penitential of Halitgar, a vernacular adaptation of which constitutes one of the three surviving Old English penitential manuals.60 The Old English gemængde, by contrast, might perhaps be less...

...). If we read “workes” here as referring to the pardon itself, then Crowley has merely anticipated what many scholars have offered as a reading of this poem: that in tearing the pardon, Piers is attacking the economy of the church — ­the works that have come to dominate the penitential system. In...

... to a certain degree the sexual conflicts that found their way into her writings. In both early Christian stories about martyrs and Hrotsvit’s texts, numerous sexual transgressions commonly listed in later penitential literature are notably absent, such as masturbation, bestial- ity, or incest.41...

... historicism old and new. I begin with the scatological and sublime morality play Mankind. This play explores words as making and breaking community, and it is par- ticularly interested in “sins of the tongue” and in the penitential speech acts that make mercy available to sinners. Naming...

... sinner’s debt of punishment (pena) for sins already forgiven through the sacrament of penance, wherein moral guilt (culpa) was removed. An indulgence, then, was concerned solely with the satisfaction due for the requisite penitential punishment. It alleviated the “temporal” punishments which the sinner...

... penitential book said to be written by Theodore of Canterbury, dating from the second half of the seventh century, states the following: If anyone orders a mass for a dead heretic and preserves his rel- ics on account of his piety, because he fasted much, and he does not know the...

... link between sin and illness was meta- phorical as well as literal. Penitential texts, produced in great numbers in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, frequently deployed the image of the surgeon-­confessor, healing the wounds of sin: indeed, Jeremy Citrome has pointed out that, after the...