The Making of Confession and Penance in the Late Middle Scots Makars

In the post-Lateran-IV Christian moral view, the perennial themes of sin and love have inextricably intertwined in reference with confession. This dissertation undertakes to examine the penitential discourses among the fifteenth-century Scottish poets, particularly the presumed author of the Kingis Quair, Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, and Gavin Douglas. These literati, conversant with the catechesis of confession, strategize a salvific edge of self-discipline and spiritual renewal in their writings on sin and love. Their rhetorical verve treats love as part of the confessional project to secure individual salvation and social stability. My first chapter will pry into the history of sacramental and non-sacramental confession and its secrecy concerning the care of souls. The edifying literature with biblical and patristic exemplarity has pervaded preaching and confession-hearing, with which the priest-confessors utilize to direct confession and assist the faithful in the scrupulous examination of conscience prior to shrift. My second chapter further explores the homiletics preparing people for the requisite sacrament and the love narratives infusing interrogation and admonition in fifteenth-century Scotland. The pastoral literature has developed the most grassroots kind of texts that catechize the confessing populace on their faith and amplify the doctrines via self-avowals of sins. The formae confessionis, like those by John Ireland and Dunbar, purport to be an omnibus mirror for self-examination and provide a multiple checklist of mortal sins and their provisions to regularize amorous conduct. With these models transferable into the writing experience of the Kingis Quair, my inquiry will fathom the personal frailties within the traditions in which self-examination shall be mastered through a first-person speaker as an agent in moral ramifications of contrition, confession, and satisfaction. From the standpoint of negotiating the humble confessant in the atonement-led precepts and sociopolitical duties, both the court of love and the internal court of conscience (forum conscientiae) can be found to dispose the weak lover to God’s law and thus fortify him. Chapter three inspects the judicial confession in pastoral eloquence which either redeems a sinful lover or tampers with the bawdy self-revelations. Henryson and Dunbar exhort the audience to witness the confessed iniquities of Cresseid and inordinate talks of the dissolute ladies desecrating matrimony. Their admonitory examples in the manner of the Magdalenes instruct a conscientious reader to find true love embodied in Jesus and congruent with penitence and order. The final chapter of this dissertation investigates the royal court and the equitable administration of reason, justice, and ideal pastime. Being the professional preachers and loyal servitor-clerics pursuing career preferments, Dunbar and Douglas fulfill their public vocations by giving counsels and expounding princely duties in the ken of advice-to-princes literature. The semi-sacerdotal king enjoying the prerogative arcana imperii tolerates a license for advisory voices. To the sympathetic ear of the sovereignty, Dunbar invests the operations of freely-confessed sins in civic and court life with a moralistic habit or epideictic motley. Addressing to the king, Douglas consciously invigorates a mirror of the virtuous proprieties of “armypotent” governance in “plesand stedfastnes,” “constant merynes,” and “joyus discipline” conducive to honor. Given their innovative treatments of confessional examinations and scenarios, these northern authors have performed the arts of self-regulation in permissibly ascetic deeds, thoughts, and words, or have otherwise resorted to the seriousness of the Lord’s “extreme Iustice” which exacts death and severe penances to a full rigor on the false sinners. This thesis concludes with the poetic integrity of these makars, who have exploited the demand for the interior truth and spoken through a mouthpiece of the confessing speaker. Their poems have gotten at the professed profanity and social ills, timely reflecting the concerns and interests of the intellectuals and mirroring the import of remedial virtues and self-governance for the spiritual well-being of the sovereigns and people in the realm.