Medici et Medicamenta: The Medicine of Penance in Late Antiquity (review)

This is an ambitious work by an author whose imagination takes the reader far beyond the late antiquity of her title. Eighteen pages of impressively diverse bibliography place the standard literature familiar to historians of penance in wider contexts (for example, contemporary theological study or the history of scholarship). An unfortunate cutoff date of 2000 excludes important work—for example, Sarah Hamilton’s The Practice of Penance 900–1050 (Rochester, NY, 2001) and fourteen contributors to A New History of Penance, ed. Abigail Firey (Boston, 2008). Nevertheless, the territory covered is vast.

The book is divided into two parts. The first examines the historiography of penance from the Reformation to 2000; the second, penance from the pre-Christian era to late antiquity. The introductory chapter’s sweeping survey of the study of religion—from the Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, and romanticism to contemporary anthropology, psychology, sociology, and philosophy—is designed ultimately to establish penance and its manifestation in confession as universals across time and culture, evidence of “natural religion,” “a religious a priori” (p. 3). The remaining seven chapters examine the historiography and the actual evolution of ritualized penance. She will not, she warns, settle for a conventional institutional narrative; she will explore deep roots in pre-Christian religion, the Judaic background, and the desert Fathers. Her favorite mode of analysis identifies dichotomies at the heart of scholarly reconstructions: from 1520 to 2000 as described in the second to fourth chapters; and even more pronounced dichotomies in the four final chapters (c.1650 BC–650 AD), where she contrasts the penitential cultures of eastern and western Christianity.

It is difficult to assess this ambitious undertaking. One cannot help but admire her expansive definition of this history (for example, the massive cataloguing of comparative penitential practices by Rafaele Pettazoni and Paul Ricoeur) or her eye for the salient detail (pre-Christian antiquity’s widespread connection between sin and disease, contamination and suffering; Babylonian laying-on of hands to heal and exorcise; Egyptian priests’ certificates of innocence to accompany the dead to the next world). Her most interesting chapter elevates, at the expense of the Celts, the contribution of eastern monasticism—through St. John Cassian—to the “monasticization” of ritual penance in the west (pp. 210–32). And it will be an unusual reader who does not become acquainted for the first time with new literature—primary and secondary— as she explores penance from pre-Christian antiquity to the present.

So it seems ungenerous to criticize a work that provides so many ways to think about penance and accumulates so much information about so many disputed moments in the long history of penance. But problems abound. Proofreading should have eliminated the many typos, garbled titles, and inadvertent grammatical lapses. Footnotes go astray at pages 88 and 177. There also are factual errors. It is not quite accurate to say that God’s judgment in Genesis 3:16 ff. “entails a dissolution or disintegration of the soul” (p. 151). Peter the Chanter and William of Auvergne were not fourteenth-century authors (p. 122). Alexander Murray’s examination of confession before 1215 was not a challenge to “the conventional notion that the Omnis utriusque sexus decree had successfully affected [sic] the change from public to private confession” (p.116). The account of procreative purpose in John T. Noonan Jr.’s history of contraception is confused (p. 105). Indicative absolution is not an issue at Lateran Council IV (p. 91). The Council of Trent does not confine Matt. 16:19 solely to Peter (p. 175)—it extends that verse’s power of forgiveness to all priests, even those in mortal sin (Trent Sess 14, chap. 6; cf. ibid, can.3).

More important than these lapses, however, is a tendency to oversimplify. Thus the contrast between the medicinal penance of the Christian East and the judicial, bureaucratized, legalistic penance of the West (pp. 188, 194, 199...