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18/6/2014

Sex in early medieval penitentials: confession, the power of the mind - and nuns' toys!

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Early medieval penitentials were handbooks for confession used by priests. They provided a 'tariff' system for confessors to help them determine how much penance -- usually in the form of fasting -- should be handed out for a particular sin.

Sexual sins are prominent in extant penitentials, and it is surprising how explicit the details are. At times, some of the guidelines to the priest are almost excruciating in their attention to sexual minutiae. For example, in one Old English penitential, there is a penance applied for someone who uses the power of his mind to create an orgasm!

I believe we can learn a great deal about medieval attitudes to sex, and about the range of sexual practices in the early medieval period, if we take the penitentials as serious historical evidence. What we have to realise is that these works don't simply represent an obsessional or even lurid taxonomy of sin, but rather they signify what Allen Frantzen has described as an intersection of text and the actual practice of confession. In other words, they are a distillation of the real-life experiences of countless people confessing, or being urged to confess, intimate details about their lives. The penitentials are, in effect, a recorded performance or narrative of everyday medieval people.

One final point about the penitentials -- and I apologize for my weakness for salacious detail -- but it is rather amazing that one Latin penitential actually refers to nuns using a machina in fornicating -- which seems to suggest the use of dildos! Remarkable!

2 Comments

Carol-CW

19/6/2014 05:31:12 am

As a young girl of 12, I was 'prepared' for confirmation in the 'High Anglican' C of E -
as part of the prep we were told to prepare and make a confession of all sins to date and then given the choice
EITHER to make the confession to our school Chaplin ( a very reverend gentleman!)
OR go to Chapel at quiet time - individually - to kneel at the sanctuary rail ( shades of medieval knighthood rituals) and recite the confession there.
I remember being ACUTELY embarrassed at the thought of such intimacy with a gentleman I barely knew - and I felt it was an intimacy.
but - I was in the minority - most chose to confess to the Chaplin.

I did go through the Chapel ritual - but again my main feeling was embarrassment - because I couldn't really think of any 'sins' - not in the the sense my twelve year old mind thought 'they' -the Church- considered to be sins
so I talked about lying to parents and getting angry with school peers, but I still remember coming away from the chapel feeling as if I had 'cheated' someone somewhere along the way -
afterwards I wondered whether I should have made something up - that 'they' would have accepted as a 'real sin' -
and, I wonder, what DO people who make a practice of ritual, weekly or daily confession - do ?
Do they hedge themselves about with minutiae of daily existence and thereby magnify their penitence - or are they tempted to embellish in order to 'do the thing properly'?

I think, Historically, Church and State have couched sexuality in such stringently 'verboten' 'terms and conditions' that there could be that 'salacious' element involved in regular confession - being for once, 'allowed' to express the feelings and activities generally forbidden, and the confession and penitence themselves are a delicious re-enactment?

Question - Is the Anglo-Saxon God all-seeing and all-knowing - in people's minds - ever pervasive and present? - the laity - I mean -
How very uncomfortable - to a 21st century mind - which values privacy in this world of social media extravagance - above all!

There's a wonderful moment in the film 'One Fine Day' where divorced Dad George Clooney, forced to look after his daughter during a busy day, meets with his psychiatrist in the presence of his daughter - he tries to explain his 'thoughts' about his female protagonist (played by Michelle Pfeiffer) - in desperation to convey his ideas he takes and scrambles his metaphors from his daughter's life and ends up talking about 'fish' with 'cookies' and 'fish fish' ... and 'dark-chocolate insides' - a wonderfully written comic moment of modern day confession?

Chris

19/6/2014 12:32:14 pm

The idea of embellishing one's sins is fascinating. Making them up, even! I was brought up to believe in directly confessing to God daily, well more like just owning up and saying sorry. Though big sins -- fornication, drunkenness, that kind of thing -- I was supposed to report to an elder, who would in turn report it to his fellow elders (raised a JW). When I got around to the big sins, well I didn't stick around for what was called a judicial hearing. I reckon one confessor's enough!

Thinking about making it up or embellishing, it's interesting that some penitentials include a formulaic confession for all broad categories of sin. This probably has a monastic origin. It was important to be fully absolved before one could either partake of or minister the Eucharist, so confessing the whole caboodle of sins was a good, though potentially insincere, way of being sin free.

On the question of the all seeing Anglo-Saxon God, it's difficult to reconstruct the experiences or feelings of the laity. The big theologians saw God like that, but how much ordinary individuals really believed that is hard to say. One thing the penitentials suggest is that people were bothered about dying unabsolved. We have an actual pocket sized penitential (in the Bodleian) that contains not only the canons about sins and fasting but also a section of Latin ordines that had to be read out by the priest if someone was on the brink of death. These Latin formulas are accompanied by vernacular instructions, which suggests the Church wanted to make sure the laity was looked after.

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Sex in early medieval penitentials: confession, the power of the mind - and nuns' toys!

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