Review

Reviewed Work(s):
L'Aveu et le pardon. Les difficultés de la confession, XIIIe-XVIIIe siècle
by Jean Delumeau
Review by: Francis Oakley
Source: The English Historical Review, Vol. 108, No. 429 (Oct., 1993), p. 1010
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/575573
Accessed: 05-03-2018 22:27 UTC

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 IOIO SHORTER NOTICES October

Over the past decade and more, building on his earlier fine contributions to
our understanding of the same historical period, and pursuing an historiographic
tactic indebted to Lucien Febvre's histoire de mentalite', Jean Delumeau has
attempted to reinterpret the culture of Catholic Europe from the later Middle
Ages to the eve of the French Revolution. He has done so especially in La
Peur en Occident: XIV-XVIIIe siecle (I978), La Peche et la peur: la culpabilisation
en Occident: XIIIe-XVIIIe siecle (I983), and Rassurer et proteger. Le sentiment de
securite dans l'Occident d'autrefois (I980). As those titles suggest (and following
in this, he says, an idea of Febvre's), he believes that two important keys to
the understanding of a culture are an identification of its characteristic fears
as well as of the ways in which it seeks to assuage them and to attain a sense
of security. In Rassurer et prote'ger he was led, accordingly, to explore a great
many late-medieval and early-modern texts pertaining to the practice of private
confession and to ask himself if confession did indeed serve to promote a sense
of security. L'Aveu et le pardon. Les difficultes de la confession, XIIIe-XVIIIe siecle
(Paris: Fayard, I990; pp. i96. Pb. F89) is closely connected with that earlier work.
The two books, in effect, 'depend on each other.' For if the Church did indeed
seek to offer the faithful security by communicating to them the divine pardon,
'it exacted from them in exchange an explicit confession.' Delumeau has separated
the present from the earlier book because he regards it as forming a distinct
entity centred on 'a profoundly original doctrine and religious practice ... and
[one] without historical equivalent.' No other Christian church (for that matter,
no other religion) has placed as much emphasis as Catholicism on the repeated
and detailed confession of sins. 'We remain marked,' he says, 'by this incessant
invitation and this powerful contribution to the knowledge of the self.' In four-
teen short chapters, then, starting out from the Fourth Lateran Council's impo-
sition on the faithful of obligatory annual confession, he explores the enormous
body of literature generated by the efforts of ecclesiastics and spiritual writers
to cope with the challenges and difficulties with which that obligatory practice
presented the confessor. He ranges, accordingly, from Jean Gerson to Cajetan,
Andreas of Escobar to St Francis de Sales, St Charles Borromeo to St Alphonsus
de Liguori, taking in en route such sharply-debated issues as the delay of absol-
ution, attrition vs. contrition, and the challenge presented by 'probabilism.' He
does so with characteristic sensitivity and insight and the book forms a useful
companion piece to Rassurer et prote'ger. It is situated, he says, at the intersection
of 'the three great preoccupations' informing his recent work: the fears besetting
people, the promotion of a sense of guilt (culpabilisation), and the sense of security.
So far as the difficult practice of private confession is concerned, while noting
its tendency to nourish over-scrupulosity, he inclines here to place considerable
emphasis also on its power to console.

Williams College, Massachusetts FRANCIS OAKLEY

Giuseppe Petralia's Banchieri e famiglie mercantili nel Mediterraneo aragonese.

L'emigrazione dei pisani in Sicilia nel Quattrocento (Pisa: Pacini Editore, i989;
pp. 432. N.p.) is a major contribution to the recent revival of studies of the

EHR Oct. 93

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