Confessors and confessees

In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault influentially argued that medieval confessional practices served as a form of social control which ultimately determined the experience of desire and the self in Western civilisation. Even decades later, the idea that confession enabled a system that dominated the social practices and inner lives of European Christians remains nearly an article of faith. But what of those arms of this authoritarian culture, the legions of priests who administered confession and other rituals across Europe after confession became mandatory in 1215? How did they command such respect and inspire such fear as to induce their flocks to divulge their innermost desires and repent? And what might depictions of priests in pastoral and penitential manuals tell us about practice and the way that sin was experienced and understood?

John Mirk's Instructions for Parish Priests, a fifteenth-century English pastoral manual from Shropshire, provides glimpses into how average and even backcountry priests managed rituals, including confession, for their communities. At the beginning of the section on administering the sacraments, Mirk offers English country priests a sage piece of advice that illustrates the flavor of his manual and intimates another side to the power relationship that Foucault and others have described. He solemnly writes: ‘if you are supposed to officiate a baptism but find yourself so drunk that you cannot remember or say the words of the ceremony, then just don't go through with it’.