In 1281, under the watch of the Franciscan Archbishop of Canterbury John Pecham, educational programs that had been developing through local constitutions became part of a wide-scale project. Pecham's Constitutions, instituted at the Council of Lambeth, are often considered the most influential documents for the development of medieval education and for vernacular literature. They required that priests teach all members of their parishes a set program four times a year: the articles of the faith – which had expanded in the same century from twelve to fourteen – the Ten Commandments, the two precepts of the gospels (to love God with one's full heart and soul and to love one's neighbour as one loves oneself), the seven works of mercy, the seven deadly sins with their progeny, the seven principal virtues, and the seven sacraments. These concepts were to be expounded in the vernacular, ‘without any fanciful and subtle compositional art’.

It is generally held that this emphasis on lay education stoked a desire for vernacular works, of which manuals for penitents, like Handlyng Synne, formed an important part. Of course, Pecham's decree was clearly not a novelty; it would have struck a familiar chord with many in attendance at the Council of Lambeth, given that similar decrees had been passed by Richard Poore in 1219 and, at a more local, diocesan level, by Grosseteste in 1238. And Pecham's decree did not give rise to vernacular pastoral writing by any stretch – the vernacular manuals for penitents produced before this decree, such as the Manuel des péchés, speak to a strong tradition of vernacular pastoral writing in England preceding it. Nevertheless, the emphasis on pastoral learning promoted by the 1281 Lambeth Constitutions must have helped bolster the popularity of this new wave of texts.

The holistic educational program that was authenticated and promoted by Pecham led to an increasingly large repertoire of tools for self-analysis. By the fourteenth century, penitents were being encouraged to examine their consciences through not just the five senses, the deadly sins, and the Ten Commandments, but also the works of mercy, the sacraments, and the seven virtues. As we have already seen, and as this chapter further establishes, when these essentials appear in manuals for penitents, they are not impersonal tracts designed for rote repetition but sites of deeply engaged, transformative reading.

It is generally accepted as a truism that the introduction of Canon 21 at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 represents the most important moment for the development of medieval pastoral education. The Canon, known by its famous opening words, Omnis utriusque sexus, called for annual confession for anyone who had reached the age of majority. According to the traditional narrative, the Canon's requirement of annual confession was an innovation – one which, on one hand, extended the powers of the Church through an insidious form of mind control, while, on the other, promoted a sustained form of self-reflection. This striking confluence of social control and inward reflection has led many to take the Fourth Lateran Council as the starting point for a master narrative of modernity.

This master narrative has been challenged and shown to be progressivist in various domains, and the premise on which it is based – the apparently innovative nature of the injunction to confession of Lateran IV – has been questioned. Most now recognize that the requirement of annual confession established at the Fourth Lateran Council was not a complete innovation. It is also amply clear from the self-examination material that preceded the Council that sustained self-reflection was in no way a novelty in the thirteenth century. The idea that the Fourth Lateran Council was a kind of gateway to self-reflection – and, concomitantly, to modernity – must therefore be firmly rejected. Nevertheless, as with many master narratives, this one contains a seed of truth. Even those who question the innovative nature of Canon 21 recognize that confessional legislation of this scale was unprecedented at the time, and that it brought with it a greater focus on pastoral education and a new need for tools for promoting self-examination among the laity and clergy alike.

As the evidence here shows, the authors of self-examination material in this period, facing new pastoral needs, drew on cutting-edge educational strategies of the sort that were being described in contemporary sermon-writing guides. These include educating a diverse audience through material pitched at individual audience members – a strategy referred to here as ‘differentiated instruction’. The goal at hand is to explore how these educational techniques are used in self-examination works, and to highlight the creative ways in which differentiated instruction is deployed in one of the bestsellers of thirteenth-century pastoral writing, Ancrene Wisse.

As manuals for penitents increasingly brought self-examination tools into the hands of the laity at the close of the thirteenth century, inviting penitents to explore their consciences at a remove from their confessors, a new possibility – and potential threat to the established Church – was being discussed: could the text act as a surrogate for the priest's interrogation? And could the written word stand in for a spoken confession? Such questions were not entirely new; in the twelfth century, and across the North Sea, Caesarius of Heisterbach had told the remarkable story of a clerk who had confessed through writing alone – albeit under extraordinary circumstances. According to Caesarius, the man had kept a deadly, soul-destroying sin hidden, terrified of the social repercussions of confessing it. A concerned priest suggested that the clerk write it down rather than speak it aloud, and as soon as the clerk did this, the words disappeared. The now-blank paper was a sign, for Caesarius, that the sin had been wiped clean from the clerk's soul. For Caesarius, the words’ disappearance and the absolution it represented were miracles signifying God's boundless grace.

But as confessional material moved increasingly into lay hands, the possibility of a ‘long-distance confession’ – sending the priest a written statement rather than meeting him in person – started to be perceived as a real threat to the Church's power. The Church had, for years, encouraged some penitents to keep written lists of their sins to use as a prompt during confession, but sending such a list as a surrogate was deemed unacceptable under most circumstances. The Manuel des péchés warns, ‘Ne par escrit ne vus poez / Vus confesser de vos pechez, / Si present vus memes ne saez / E de buche au prestre cuntez’ (‘You cannot confess your sins through writing if you, yourself, are not present, and recounting your sins by mouth’).

Scholars of medieval history and literature have long recognized that the manuals that were designed to guide confessors through the confessional interrogation express significant unease around sexual activity – and with good cause. Medieval confessors were, as Pierre Payer relates in his study focused on manuals for priests, deeply concerned with the question of how to probe a penitent's conscience without inadvertently introducing new sins, or reminding penitents of old ones. The Summa de casibus poenitentiae (c. 1225), Raymond de Pennaforte's remarkably influential guide for priests, warns confessors about this specific danger: ‘I advise [the confessor] that in his questions he not descend to special circumstances and special sins; for many fall severely after such an interrogation who otherwise would never have dreamt of it’.

Since sexual sins could be committed in private, knowledge of them could be guarded – in theory, at least. While many sins, such as theft, could be learned through social observation, sexual sins were thought to be less easily learned in such a manner, and priests were therefore concerned with keeping them hidden. So significant were concerns over teaching new sexual sins that, according to Payer, written trepidations surrounding confessional interrogations ‘are virtually always about sexual offenses’. Among all sexual offenses, same-sex acts were thought to merit extra secrecy, according to Karma Lochrie. The unease surrounding sexual sin in general and same-sex acts in particular reflects a broader climate of tension surrounding confessional education in the thirteenth century and it is therefore worthy of further examination.

While much has been written about how anxieties surrounding sexual sin are manifested in manuals for confessors, there has been relatively little about how these are manifested in manuals for penitents. This is a shame, since there are striking and significant differences between the two types of writing that make it difficult to generalize about one from the other, and since manuals for penitents tend to reflect, more than manuals for priests, the kinds of confessional education that medieval penitents were receiving and are therefore worthy of study in their own right. The goal of the present chapter, then, is to shed light on the ways in which manuals for penitents approached the idea of teaching about sexual sin and, more broadly, to explore the kinds of tensions that emerged as education about sin increasingly happened at a distance from the established Church.

One of the earliest works that prescribes penances, a short Welsh tract known as The Synod of North Britain (c. 545), stands as an important witness to early Christian confessional practices. Its penitential discipline is aimed primarily at the clergy, as is clear from the passage on illicit liaisons:

The severity of a sinner's punishment here depends on his clerical rank, and his penance – banishment to a monastery abroad and, possibly, exclusion from his order – is centered around monastic life. Insofar as the text outlines a programme of confession and penitential discipline aimed at the clergy, The Synod of North Britain is broadly representative of writing on confession prior to 1250. As we shall see, such writing tended to be directed toward the clergy and read under the careful watch of the Church.

The Synod of North Britain may be one of the earliest works to prescribe penances, but it is not otherwise an outlier. There is nothing unusual about finding a work about confession written before the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Moreover, while it is true that manuals for penitents – in the sense of comprehensive guides expressly aimed at coaching an individual through confessional preparation – were an innovation of the thirteenth century, texts that could guide penitents through the process of identifying and reflecting on their sins were not. Nor were such texts new in the twelfth century – which is typically cast as having been particularly concerned with the individual and with the discovery of the self.

Chaucer's Parson, who notably refuses to tell a ‘tale’ but instead offers a lengthy exposition on sin and confession, has been read as a Promethean figure bringing the high ‘Latinate’ theology of sin to the uneducated masses – either the travelling group of pilgrims or Chaucer's actual medieval audience. According to this view, the Parson's Tale is unusual and potentially subversive, because it operates as an ‘academic treatise’ in the vernacular. Proponents of this view include Derrick G. Pitard, who claims that the Parson's Tale functions as an ‘academic’ text because it is ‘a translation and compilation of three Latin penitential tracts originally intended for use by clerics’, it contains ‘internal references to various academic authorities, including Saint Jerome, Saint Bernard, Saint Augustine, and of course the Bible’, it ‘exhibits a dearth, and hence an apparent mistrust, of narrative plotting and poetic imagery’, and because it contains ‘a hierarchically organized, encyclopedic attention to detail’. Pitard writes that these supposedly ‘academic’ elements make the Parson's Tale distinctive among texts in English – ‘the language of the illiterati, a language with little or no academic tradition’. He argues that, ‘Before the last half of the fourteenth century, and especially the last quarter, academic treatises on religious matters intended for lay consumption are rare’.

Related to this view is the claim that the Parson's Tale is unusual among works on sin in that it places a powerful emphasis on the inner life. So, Katherine C. Little suggests that the Parson's Tale is unique among contemporary theological guides in the vernacular in its emphasis on contrition and in its interest in the ways in which the vernacular shapes the self. This suggestion, that the tale encourages a profound interest in the self, sounds much like Pitard's claim that the tale encourages penitents to ‘become their own interpreters’.

These models, by variously reading the Parson as the purveyor of previously inaccessible forms of academic thought and a particularly modern form of self-reflexivity, cast the Parson – and through him, Chaucer – as a harbinger of intellectualism and modernity. As such, these models participate in a broader pattern of reading Chaucer as a quintessentially modern figure – one who celebrated the kinds of self-reflexivity and freedom of thought that are now associated with modernity in the face of a restrictive medieval Church that unilaterally imposed uniformity and control upon medieval civilization.

The middle of the thirteenth century saw the rise of the first true manuals for penitents – in the sense of long guidebooks about sin that explicitly advertise their benefit to penitents, rather than priests. It was in the same period that self-examination practices, which had since the early days of the Church been the particular – but by no means exclusive – realm of the clergy, started to move decisively out of the cloister and into the home. This shift was heralded by Ancrene Wisse, which celebrates, describes, and dwells on self-examination practices, despite being addressed to a non-clerical audience. While a few other earlier works, like the twelfth-century Vices and Virtues, also anticipate non-clerical audiences, it is only in the second half of the thirteenth century that authors began to address members of the laity – as in those whose vocations fell primarily outside of the institutional church – in a significant way, and that manuals for penitents truly emerged. As the evidence here shows, these manuals reached lay audiences, who were expected to read them in their own homes, alone or in groups.

The movement of self-examintion material out of the cloister and into the home brought learning that had largely been controlled by the clergy into the hands of the laity and it can therefore be thought of as reflecting, and contributing to, the laity's growing interest in imitating clerical lives. Pastoral texts promoted a form of imitatio clerici among the laity, and encouraged the laity to engage in the lectio divina – a kind of meditative reading that had traditionally been the near-exclusive realm of the clergy. Claire Waters notes that religious works in this period addressed to the laity invite their readers to experience a clerical mode of reading: ‘Rather than shaping their audiences primarily as readers, these texts imagine and address them as students, as discipuli, in a model sometimes explicitly and more often implicitly tied to the monastic and scholastic modes in which their teachers had been trained’. Waters notes that this mode of reading ‘became available, as these texts were copied, recopied, and retranslated, to an ever-wider audience’.

The author of the thirteenth-century religious guide Ancrene Wisse, echoing a sentiment shared among many of his contemporaries, insists that ‘Schrift ah to beon biþoht biuore longe’ (‘Confession ought to be thought out well beforehand’). Medieval penitents understood that before going to confess to a priest they had to prepare themselves through careful reflection on their sins. Doing so allowed them to make the kind of detailed, reflective, and personal confession that was considered essential for the salvation of the soul. Just as a single hole in a ship could drown a group of sailors, a single forgotten sin, according to the author of Ancrene Wisse, could sink a soul to the pits of hell.

The importance of penitential self-examination in the late medieval Church was the direct result of a decision that took place at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Canon 21 of this council famously placed an unprecedented emphasis on confession by requiring those who had reached the age of majority to confess their sins to a priest at least once per year. This new Church-wide requirement created an urgent need for written works that could educate the public about the process of confession, and that could explain the abstract concept of sin through recognizable, real-world situations and desires. Among these works are some of the best-known literary creations from medieval England, including Robert Mannyng's Handlyng Synne (1303–1317) and Chaucer's Parson's Tale (c. 1400). Educational guides such as these traced the shape and topography of the human heart for medieval penitents by describing specific types of sins and how to recognize them; ‘Ȝyf þou yn yre a man hate’, one manual explains, ‘And þat wraþþe wylt nat late, / Greuusly þou art yn synne!’ (‘If you hate a man in a fit of anger, and refuse to let go of that wrath, you are sinning gravely!’).

These guidebooks, now known as ‘manuals for penitents’, make no attempt to hide their educational aims. One guide, written by the French King Philip III's confessor Friar Laurent, announces that anyone who uses it ‘i porroit mout profiter et aprendre, et counoistre toute maniere de pechié, et a soi bien confesser’ (‘could greatly profit and learn [from it], and identify all types of sin, and how to confess well’).