Freshly Printed - allow 7 days lead
Couldn't load pickup availability
The Humiliation of Sinners
Public Penance in Thirteenth-Century France
Mary Mansfield (Author)
9780801429392
Hardback, published 10 February 1995
360 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 3 cm, 0.907 kg
Mansfield argues that public penance continued to flourish throughout the thirteenth century.... She examines a rich variety of sources drawn primarily from northern France. The surviving narratives report a surprising number of cases of public penance involving notorious figures. Mansfield's book challenges long-held assumptions about the disappearance of public penance after the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.... The Humiliation of Sinners shows that Mansfield was a young woman of extraordinary promise in the field of medieval studies. The Humiliation of Sinners is the work of a formidable scholar whose intensive research... produced a bold reinterpretation of the history of medieval penance. This book is a major achievement. Its masterly synthesis is extensively documented, based on very close reading of a wide range of manuscript and printed material. Coherent in itself, it contains much of value beyond its own immediate concerns. This book will command the attention of anyone interested in the religious transformations of the High Middle Ages, and more broadly, in issues of private conscience and public justice.
This compelling book, first published in 1995, changed historians' understanding of the history of public penance, a topic crucial to debates about the complex evolution of individualism in the West. Mary C. Mansfield demonstrates that various forms of public humiliation, imposed on nobles and peasants alike for shocking crimes as well as for minor brawls, survived into the thirteenth century and beyond.