Early medieval charms invoke the service of the Visitation of the Sick through the use of liturgical elements central to that rite, as Chapter 4 argues. Charms import the singing of psalms, sprinkling of holy water, praying of anointing and healing formulas, imposing of hands, anointing of the body, and the chanting of antiphons and litanies. Once present in charms, these and other sacred practices serve as indices of the Visitation of the Sick. When allusions to the Visitatio Infirmorum are successfully recognized or evoked, charms invoke the liturgy. Because recognition proves crucial, the question of charm participants’ familiarity with the Visitation of the Sick leads us to assess the resonance of Visitatio references through the construct of a continuum. At one end we find charms containing references to the Visitation of the Sick that seem subtle in light of their brevity or context. At the opposite end we find charms with numerous, lengthy utterances based in the sacramental rite. Over all, associations with Christ’s healing and liturgical Unction are meant to transform faithful charm participants in their time of need.

This chapter explores Kerouac’s rich understanding of literary history as manifested in his Duluoz Legend, focusing in particular on two mechanisms by which this understanding turns up in his work. The first mechanism was his deep desire to seek and speak the truth, as he wrestled with his need to lead a godly life, a product of his Catholic upbringing, while simultaneously recognizing the almost requisite demand that a great novelist experience the darkness of the human soul. The second is the confession, which was not the legal confession of a court room or the spiritual confession of the church, but the broader truth of any human being who follows a path to forgiveness and wholeness by repeatedly purging themselves of sin, guilt, or embarrassment. Kerouac consistently worked truth and confession together – often to the dismay of some readers – twinning and twining them as he grappled with his spiritual and bodily identity as an American writer living in two conflicting Americas, the “the essential and everlasting America” of the ethereal beauty and mysticism, and the post–World War II triumphalist America of materialism and militarization.

A criminal confession typically ends in conviction, raising a critically important question: Why do suspects decide to confess to their guilt against their own self-interests? The authors of this chapter answer this question by reviewing a large body of theoretical and empirical research related to decision-making involving confessions. Major topics covered include the distinction between different types of confessions, the Reid technique, Miranda waiver decisions, psychological and dispositional vulnerabilities that encourage a confession decision, and interrogation reforms and their impact on confessions and interrogations. The core message of the chapter is that the dominant method of police interrogation used in North America relies on well-established social influence tactics that cause suspects to perceive a confession as a rational decision under the circumstances. The authors examine research involving these tactics and their effects on interrogations and confessions, along with laws and policies that regulate interviews and interrogations of suspects in custody.

This chapter broadens the focus to the Spirit’s renovation of human community through a prayerful “confessional movement” of self-dispossession, the reception of one’s identity in Christ, and responsive self-offering to God. Attention to this confessional movement both emphasizes the Augustinian tradition’s capacity for self-critique, fosters greater solidarity with the oppressed, and builds conceptual bridges toward greater dialogue with liberatory theological traditions.

This chapter examines the cutting edge of Laudian theological, ecclesiological and liturgical experiment in Cambridge University during the 1630s. The protagonists here were mostly young men, anxious to push the envelope of the doable and the sayable, and in the process attract the approval of their superiors in the university and church. Moving on from the further reaches of Arminian theology they toyed with notions like justification by works and the necessity of confession to a priest, more and more elaborate decorations of college chapels, and more and more florid performances of what they took to be ceremonial decorum and their critics took to be popish superstition and idolatry. These antics attracted the opprobrium of the old university Calvinist establishment and the support of an emerging clique of Laudian heads of house. A dynamic emerged through which the Laudian agenda was pushed further and faster than some its leading lights, up to and including Laud himself, might have liked. This was a syndrome that continued to operate right up until the collapse of the personal rule in 1640/1.

This chapter explores the greater issue of moral responsibility for Mao-era injustices. Following a broader discussion that touches on intellectual debates beginning in the late 1980s, it focuses on a series of essays published in the semiofficial journal Yanhuang Chunqiu between 2008 and 2014 that provided a space for Chinese intellectuals to reconstruct alternative narratives of history. The term chanhui (“confess and repent”) provided a culturally significant and yet sufficiently flexible framework for a public discussion of individual guilt and atonement for acts of collective violence. The resulting Chanhuilu column represented a rare public forum accommodating both detailed narrations of events and public reflections on guilt, atonement, and justice. These authors not only took on the burden of individual guilt, but also shared historical knowledge that contextualized if not attenuated the perpetrators’ responsibility and sought the lenient judgment of later generations.

Chapter 1 sets out the growth of the Province from 1221 to 1348, the different patterns of development in different parts of the British Isles, and what explains them. The first part of the chapter examines who supported the new foundations, how the English and Scottish kings in particular aided them, but also the role played by nobles and townsfolk. The second part of the chapter considers what lay behind this support, by looking at the friars’ life and ministry in relation to their supporters’ needs, how they met them directly, and how their religious life and training within the cloister enabled them to do this.

All three of the prime suspects in the Dongo investigation have previous experience with serious accusations. They show their understanding of the justice system with different levels of sophistication and with their aggressive or evasive responses to Emparan’s questions. Finally, faced with bloodstains on each of their belongings and the pressure of face-to-face confrontations, Quintero, Blanco, and Aldama can no longer avoid the truth. They admit that they all killed on the night of October 23, 1789, but not before Emparan’s court collects more evidence and the judge calls them in for several sessions of questioning.

This chapter investigates which factors affect the timing of guilty pleas for defendants under the current regime of a quantified sliding scale of sentence discounts. Certain vulnerable defendants are found to be more likely to plead guilty such as young adult defendants. It is discovered that the stages of the criminal process preceding plea taking have been found to significantly affect plea outcomes. Defendants who have confessed to the police and who are represented by publicly funded lawyers are more likely to plead guilty, and to plead guilty earlier. Furthermore, the extant literature also points to defendants remanded in custody to be susceptible to pleading guilty earlier as well. Under a guilty plea process that features a sliding scale of sentence discounts, different factors may serve as potential pressures for defendants to plead guilty, and to plead guilty as early as possible.

This chapter sketches the shape of Tolstoy’s oeuvre by focusing on a key text from each decade of his long and varied career. In Childhood (1852), his first published work, Tolstoy had already begun both to draw upon and to distrust the powers of realist fiction. This tension is palpable in his great novels War and Peace (1865–9) and Anna Karenina (1875–8), and it motivated his sporadic turns away from artistic literature during the years he was writing them. Confession (1879–82), which marked the most dramatic of these crises, is a conversion narrative that ends with a call to rethink the edifice of Christianity. In the second half of his life he pursued this task in a range of genres. Lavishing his gift for evocative description on polemical accounts of social atrocities, in his fiction he now reached for emblematic universality. The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), a celebrated short story, and “The First Step” (1892), a treatise on vegetarianism, exemplify these divergent styles. However, they stirringly reconverge in posthumously published works like the historical novella Hadji Murat (1896–1904), where Tolstoy represented escape from the mortal body in paradoxically vivid realist detail.

This chapter presents the resolution to Hegel’s account of the problem of recognition by considering the “moral” self, that of “conscience” (Gewissen). It begins by showing that “morality” is the stance that adequately countenances the self-productive character of self-conscious beings, so that the self is understood to be constituted through activity. Only conscience, however, acknowledges the social character of this constitution of the self, the fact that, to count as a self, I must realize my moral knowledge both through my actions, and through participation in moral discourse along with others. For Hegel, successful recognition as a moral self requires the development of particular social practices, confession and forgiveness, through which we can respond to moral disagreement, and I demonstrate that recognizing one another as conscientious requires a continuing dependence on practices like these.

In this concluding chapter, I summarize the argument about the conditions for the achievement of recognition that Hegel sets out from Chapters IV-VI of the Phenomenology. I consider the ways in which the conclusions of this argument are significant for the project of the text as a whole, pointing to the role of the idea of the self both in the Phenomenology’s “Preface” and account of “Absolute Knowing,” and in the Science of Logic. At the same time, I also argue that the account of reciprocal recognition is completed in Hegel’s account of “spirit,” and so does not depend on the subsequent accounts of religion or philosophical science. I conclude by stressing the precarity of relations of reciprocal recognition which are dependent on the achievement of moral agreement.

This chapter introduces the two inscribed monument types which were characteristic of Roman Hieradoumia: the familial epitaph and the propitiation-stēlē. Both categories of monument tend to be dated by year, month, and day, which allows us to map the development of the epigraphic habit in the region with unusual precision. Hieradoumian tombstones generally take the form of pedimental marble stēlai, often bearing a depiction of a wreath, either incised or in relief. The associated funerary inscriptions have a highly stereotyped structure, in which the deceased is ‘honoured’ by a smaller or larger group of family members, whose relation to the deceased is very precisely defined. These funerary monuments have several formal similarities to the propitiation-stēlai erected in many Hieradoumian rural sanctuaries, which narrate individual transgressions, divine punishments, and acts of propitiation. Taken together, these two categories of ‘commemorative’ monument provide a vivid picture of the moral universe of rural Hieradoumia in the first three centuries AD.

This chapter argues that the personal essay came into being at the beginning of the twentieth century, evolving from the familiar essay favored by writers such as Charles Lamb and Virginia Woolf. Prior to the twentieth century, the essay as a form was assumed to be personal but only in a deliberately circumlocutory manner. But the pressure to constitute a stable self brought to bear by academic and other institutions gave rise to a new conception of the personal essay, and to confession more generally, as a vehicle of “spectacular personhood.”

In his Holy Sonnets, Donne seeks to forget rather than remember his sins, begging God for ‘a heavenly Lethean flood’ to ‘drown’ his ‘sin’s black memory’ and implying that his very salvation may depend upon it: ‘That Thou remember them, some claim as debt; / I think it mercy if Thou wilt forget’. Such a desire for divine oblivion would seem to be the very inverse of the theologian Dr Donne’s well-known assertion that ‘the art of salvation is but the art of memory’, yet, this chapter argues, they are intimately joined in the Holy Sonnets. This chapter explores how the speaker’s uncertainty about his salvation connects the ‘art of death’ (ars moriendi) with the ‘art of memory’ (ars memorativa) as a mnemonic poetics of ruin and recollection. The transformation of the art of memory into an art of salvation in Augustine’s Confessions is central not only to Donne’s reputation as a ‘second St Augustine’ but also to the poetics of memory that shape the Holy Sonnets. Donne constructs the Holy Sonnets as a memory theatre in which to enact the drama of salvation by performing the role of Doctor Faustus, a part drawn from both Augustine’s Confessions and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.

The image of Gestapo officers relying on threats and violence is a myth. Informants were for investigating opinionmakers and torture was for networks of organized resistance. Routine procedure was different with lone critics. The Gestapo knew that denouncers could abuse the system. The return to formal prosecution also demanded proof of both an offence and subversive motive. An “impeccable conviction” required corroborating witnesses to establish subversive attitudes and either confirm a single public offence or a broader pattern. As a result, the Gestapo used conversational techniques to gauge the reliability of witnesses and suspects as officers gathered information from their social circle. Behaviour during questioning, discrepancies, connections between witnesses, and personal quarrels were all evaluated. Political background, severity of the statement, and publicness of an offence dictated how widely the net was cast. However, laying out evidence and offering clemency ultimately secured far more confessions than violence. The result was a two-track system of routine police work according to the demands of formal justice subject to cancellation under specific criteria.

This chapter addresses the significant place of psychoanalysis in Roth’s life and work, his changing notions of its value, and the way his work contributes significantly to “confessional” literature. Roth himself has admitted the ways that placing his characters in analysis created a kind of stylistic freedom; in Portnoy, the confessional setting allowed him to create “completely unbuttoned” scenarios. While Portnoy’s Complaint is perhaps the most famous example of this, Roth engaged with the “talking cure” as early as 1963 in the short story “The Psychoanalytic Special,” and psychoanalysis figures significantly into novels such as Letting Go, My Life as a Man, Deception, Patrimony, and Sabbath’s Theater. These novels not only illuminate Roth’s fraught relationship with Freudian analysis, but also highlight the connections between Roth’s representations of psychoanalysis and gender, as his protagonists’ anxieties are expressed through an engagement with psychoanalysis.

The illegitimacy of present accounts of privacy is revealed by the manner in which normalisation has long taken place through a series of social transitions. Other historical perspectives of societal evolution have been adopted, but the mythological analysis here is distinctive. Following Christian confessionalism and pastoralism, we see the methods of governmentalizing discipline that led to the civilising of the sovereign State through the rise of the bourgeoisie; then the liberalism and neoliberalism that ultimately promoted the dominance of the Market over the State, by which the consumer has been constructed; and now the Technological ‘algorisation’ of social and individual perspective and practice. Many of the elements that have accumulated in this long process are thereby being brought to bear in technologies of the self as self-creation. Each of these regimes was founded on the distancing and camouflage of existential reality, inducing subjection to the ideas and practices promoted within these mythological magnitudes and primarily for the benefit of their respective dominant interests.

During 48 hours in October 2017, nearly one million women shared the words ‘MeToo’ on social media and brought a new level of visibility to the old problem of sexual violence in women’s lives. Words were central, but images quickly emerged to visualise a graphic witness that was testimonial rather than confessional. This chapter explores how the histories underlying the MeToo movement were revealed by the co-evolution of words and images in the early months of a resurgent public conversation about sexual violence and accountability. Taken together, they illustrate the testimonial trajectories of women’s accounts of harm in a public sphere primed to doubt and discredit them. In the absence of intersectional feminist analysis about the history of advocacy for survivors by women of colour and the harm of chronic and pervasive doubt, blame, and injustice in women’s lives, MeToo narratives fragment into confessional shards that are as likely to cut the victim as the victimiser. However, contextualising the MeToo movement within the testimonial tradition of race and gendered self-representation and the history of feminist advocacy for survivors explains the power of graphic witness.

Housed in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the assiduously organized (and carefully curated) Coetzee Papers include manuscript drafts of Coetzee’s novels (formerly available at the Houghton Library, Harvard College), as well as notebooks, correspondence, teaching materials, and photographs. Only recently opened, this archive has prompted a new wave of critical studies, only some of which have been sufficiently alert to, or indeed sceptical of, the procedures and decisions involved in its establishment and organization. Reflecting on this, this chapter considers the provenance and particular character of these papers in light of Coetzee’s career-long quarrying of autobiographical materials, his project of self-archiving, his explorations of archival themes and use of archival energies in his fictions, and his particular interest in the nature of secrets and lies, of concealment, distortion, and revelation. It argues that it is vital that critics think carefully about their own purposes in reading the archives; about the writer’s purposes in producing them; and about the kinds of truth at stake in the works, the archives, and the literary criticism they occasion.