Sin and Society in Fourteenth-Century England

Abstract

Abstract Penetrating behind the seal of medieval confession is among the most formidable historiographical challenges. One route is through confessors’ manuals. This is a full-scale scholarly study of a fourteenth-century confessor’s English example. It contributes to the European-wide research on pre-Reformation confessional practice and clerical training. On another level, the Memoriale Presbiterorum’s peculiarly intense concern with social morality affords pungent commentary on contemporary English society. The author analyses a remarkable treatise both as a vehicle of social doctrine and as a mirror of the milieu to which it is directed. While presenting it against its general intellectual background, continental and English, he also argues for its setting within a vigorous and largely neglected episcopal regime, that of Bishop Grandisson of Exeter.

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