Focused on confession, Chapter 5 opens with a vignette in which a royal justice prods a first-time criminal defendant to confess to being a horse thief. The chapter argues that medieval English culture was imbued with the practice of confession, which occurred not only in the ecclesiastical context but was also a central part of felony procedure. Moreover, it demonstrates that the priest-confessor’s art of circumstantial inquiry, designed to ensure that a person confessed his or her sins fully to receive the appropriate penance, was adapted and adopted by the king’s coroners, who undertook an inquiry into the facts underlying homicide offenses. Downplaying the English exceptionalist narrative of the diverging paths in criminal procedure in England and continental Europe after Lateran IV, the chapter emphasizes the central role played by confession in medieval English felony procedure.

In Neoplatonism, kosmos is the first ideal entity that human beings can emulate in their search for god-likeness. Kosmos displays perfection, harmony and completeness, all regulative of ideal selfhood. The chapter discusses cosmic activity as a human telos. It aims to contextualise human action within this ideal and to show the limits as such an ideal. First, human bodies are not totalities like the body of the universe or kosmos, nor perfect like the bodies of stars. Second, since human encounters are between parts, not totalities, human action is essentially different from the perfect and self-sufficient activities of cosmic entities. It involves either affecting or being affected in an encounter with something external to oneself. At 3.3.5.40-6, Plotinus offers a brief but telling glimpse at the challenges of human moral life. By using the example of the Trojan War, he outlines different kinds of encounters between virtuous and vicious people. Through situating the Homeric example in the Platonic framework of affecting and being affected, the text yields an opening for a theory of practical action and morality. Action emerges as ontologically relational, cosmologically situational and morally interpersonal. This human predicament is the inescapable framework of ethics for embodied human beings.