Fine
The term of penance (other names: Summa de poenitentia, Summa de confessionibus, Summa confessorum, Summa de casibus, Summa de virtutibus et vitiis) is a catalog-like compilation of sins and the associated church punishments that was common in the Middle Ages.
history
The older books of penance with a simple case collection and rigid penance as an aid for the confessor no longer did justice to the increasingly differentiated living conditions of the 11th century. The growing influence of Roman law on ecclesiastical jurisprudence meant that more and more the circumstances of the individual case had to be taken into account when determining the penance. Since the sin presupposes the knowledge of the transgressed legal principle, the penalties also had to provide information about the regulations to be observed, because the confessors mostly did not have their own access to the specialist literature. For this purpose, the authors used the glossaries and legal sums of the decretists and decretalists for the Decretum Gratiani and the Liber Extra , the most important collection of decrees published in 1234, so that the fines can also be referred to as sources of law by providing information on what the confessors about the applicable law.
The first books of penance were written around 1180. After a last bloom around 1500, they became dispensable after the Tridentine educational reform.
Genera
The fines were never papally approved (= officially approved). There were two types of presentation:
- Raimundus von Peñaforte wrote the Summa de casibus conscientiae et de matrimonio (before 1225 to after 1234). It was a more academic work, in which the ethical and canonical knowledge necessary for confessors was summarized. It provided a model that the penalties adopted into the 15th century, such as the Summa Confessorum , which Johannes von Freiburg wrote between 1280 and 1298.
- The other sort were the Confessionalia , short, compact works written with a view to carrying out the sacrament of penance . The first sum of this genre was the Liber poenitentialis of Robert of Flamborough, which was written between 1208 and 1213. The Compilatio praesens des Pierre de Poitiers from around 1215/1216, the fine sum of Thomas of Chobham, which he completed in England around 1215, and the anonymous fine amount Quia non pigris and others are known as further penalties .
At the end of the 13th century, the alphabetical order began, as in the Summa Monaldina .
literature
- Norbert Brieskorn: Article “Bußsummen” in: Lexikon des Mittelalter. Vol. 2, Artemis Verlag, 1983. Sp. 1154.
- Patrick Hersperger: Church, Magic and “Superstition”. Superstitio in canons of the 12th and 13th centuries (= research on ecclesiastical legal history and canon law , vol. 31). Böhlau Verlag, Cologne 2010, ISBN 978-3-412-20397-9 .
Footnotes
- ↑ On Thomas von Chobham and his Summa confessorum see Jacques Le Goff : Art. Work. Part V: Middle Ages . In: Theologische Realenzyklopädie (TRE), Vol. 3, pp. 626–635, here p. 631.