5 - Penance and the Carolingian Reforms

Summary

We have seen in the last chapter that penitential handbooks from Ireland were known in England and on the European mainland from the late sixth century onward. Probably they had been introduced there by Irish monks during their peregrinatio. Apart from particular historical figures such as Columbanus and Fursa, the influence of whom we have sketched above, there might have been more about whom we do not know a lot. However, the evidence for the existence of penitential handbooks and the practice of hearing confession that these texts presuppose, dating from the seventh and early eighth centuries, is scarce. Although, for example, Cummean’s penitential was used in a couple of eighth- and ninth-century texts, only one manuscript – and a rather late one – containing this text has survived. There are good reasons for this lack of manuscript evidence. As is clear from the case of the penitential attributed to Egbert, the manuscripts may have remained unbound, existing only as loose quires. This would endanger their preservation for future generations, while the fact that they probably were written in an insular script, which at some point was no longer easy to read, may also have contributed to the bad state of survival of these texts. At the Carolingian councils of the first half of the ninth century, penitential handbooks came under fire and, as we shall see in this chapter, the council of Paris (829) actually called for the destruction of such books. It is not very probable that such an inquisition had much success, but it goes to show that we must reckon with the fact that many penitential handbooks did not survive the ravages of time.