Penitentials once had a bad name. In one widely quoted assessment penitentials were a ‘deplorable feature of the medieval church [and it] is hard to see how anyone could busy himself with such literature and not be the worse for it’. Over recent decades, however, painstaking textual and codicological research, new critical editions, revisionist histories of penance and increasingly sophisticated use of penitentials in historical research have transformed scholarship on the penitentials. Allusion to the penitentials’ older reputation is well on its way to becoming a cliché.

Penitentials listed specific sins and corresponding penances, usually in the form of periods of fasting. Some also included prologues or epilogues outlining theologies of sin and reconciliation. Penitentials have traditionally been associated with the development of confession and so-called private penance, though more recent scholarship has expanded our picture of the use of penitentials together with the social and religious functions of penance in dispute settlement, canon law and political culture. Their emergence in early Ireland roughly coincided with conciliar rulings on abortion issued in sixth-century Spain and they soon spread to Anglo-Saxon England and Merovingian Gaul. By the ninth century they had become a significant if controversial textual resource for Carolingian bishops and clerics.

Rewriting penitentials into the history of abortion

Penitentials constitute the most significant corpus of material on how early medieval clerics and bishops thought about abortion. One reason is related to why Protestant and Catholic historians found penitentials uncomfortable in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: their detailed scrutiny of sexual sin. New penitentials were composed and older penitentials copied or adapted throughout the period under study. The majority addressed abortion. Several which did not were briefer addenda within manuscripts containing penitentials which did. Penitentials offer snapshots of the different concerns that abortion evoked together with different responses which mingled the care of souls and a kind of social discipline. Scholars interested in abortion as well as sexuality and magic have sifted through penitential rulings on abortion. Their works provide valuable insights into specific penitential rulings on abortion and add up to a very useful inventory.