The Penitential of Theodore and the Iudicia Theodori

Abstract

Penitentials have often had a bad press, from the ninth century to the nineteenth. As Theodulf of Orleans remarked, ‘many faults are read in the penitential which it is not becoming for the man [the penitent] to know’; or, as Plummer put it more vividly, ‘The penitential literature is in truth a deplorable feature of the mediaeval church. Evil deeds, the imagination of which may perhaps have dimly floated through our minds in our darkest moments are here tabulated and reduced to system. It is hard to see how anyone could busy himself with such literature and not be the worse for it.’ Theodore's Penitential suffers from further handicaps. Although there are several penitential texts claiming a connection with Theodore, not one of them was written by him. The most extensive of these texts, that compiled by the Discipulus Umbrensium , ‘Disciple of the Northumbrians’, makes it quite clear, not merely that Theodore did not write the work, but that the Disciple's knowledge of Theodore's views was second- or thirdhand. Yet even if no text was written by Theodore himself, a version of his penitential teaching was already known outside England within a generation of his death. Rules were already quoted as Theodore's in the A-Recension of the Collectio Canonum Hibernensis , compiled before 725. The source for the Hibernensis was not, however, the work of the Disciple, but Finsterwalder's D, entitled Indicia Theodori , but generally known as the Capitula Dacheriana after D'Achéry, its first editor. As a result this text has the earliest terminus ante quem of all the Theodoran penitential literature.

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