Chapter 2 - Repentance

Summary

Chapter 2 deals with the rituals of penance and reconciliation. These took two main forms: the ritual of public penance prescribed by the church courts for the readmission of excommunicated persons, and the more informal rituals of reconciliation in which individuals settled interpersonal conflicts and disagreements. Public penance has often been neglected by historians of the English Reformation, who have tended to echo the complaints of puritan critics that it fell short of a fully reformed system of discipline. Yet it deserves more attention as one of the few religious rituals in which the laity, rather than the clergy, took the leading role. This chapter argues that it was flexible and effective and that it resembled, more closely than has generally been realised, the consistorial system used in the Scottish and Continental Reformed churches. It also argues that penance and reconciliation were performative rituals which depended for their validity as much on gestures as on words. They were social interactions, in which an apology had to be both offered and accepted in order for the reconciliation to take effect, and in which the body language of the penitent was closely scrutinised for signs of genuine remorse.