Confessional Fictions: Penance in Medieval Romance c.1150-1450

Abstract

This study explores medieval romance in relation to religious changes from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries. While the genre has been viewed as secular literature in tension with spiritual instruction, authors such as Marie de France, Thomas of Britain, Béroul, the Pearl Poet, and Thomas Malory engaged with religious questions about repentance through this imaginative cultural form. Their works depict the romance protagonist whose trials of conscience produce a new battlefield within the mind. I argue that they display profound sympathy for human limitations through narratives of failure, self-knowledge, and atonement. Romance becomes an important witness to the practice of penance in medieval society, a cultural phenomenon that spanned politics, theology, liturgy, and law. Through the genre, the project traces the shifts that led to the widespread administration of the sacrament, beginning in the decades before the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 and its mandate for annual auricular confession. These stories reveal an intense desire for penance and confession, counter to traditional histories of ecclesiastical regulation and discipline. I suggest that participation in penance becomes an ambitious assertion of lay spirituality within this literature, representing both the pervasive influence of the examination of conscience encouraged by the Church and the sources of religious dissent that would prepare the ground for the Reformation.