The approach to penance and confession as social control--as methods the Church used to force the laity to act against its will--owes much to the work of Michel Foucault, the History of Sexuality. A theory of social control undergirds Foucault's writing about confession, at least in the first of the three volumes of the History, the only one to take up confession and penance in anything like detail (and there is not much detail). But there is a less developed and more stimulating basis for theorizing about the penitentials in Foucault's analysis of confession, and that is a primarily literary concept of confession as narrative. Foucault established the connection between sexual experience and discourse, conversation, what he called "the nearly infinite task of telling--telling oneself and another, as often as possible, everything that might concern the interplay of innumerable pleasures, sensations, and thoughts which, through the body and the soul, had some affinity with sex" (Vol. 1, 20).
Of course such "telling" was, as he notes, the privilege of a very few, at least insofar as it was "telling" that involved "everything" about one's sexual experience. But such telling was not only sexual: there was also telling by the humble about their experience. Telling, as a form of narrative, and indeed a form of fiction, is a subject that concerns what we may call the "literariness" of the penitentials. As we try to decode the kinds of telling that take place in penitential texts, we can begin to differentiate among the kinds of narrative and fiction that helped constitute the oral basis of early medieval piety.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality I: An Introduction. Paris: 1976; English trans. New York: 1978. 18-21, 58-73.
Why do you think the church required individuals to construct narratives about their sins? What sorts of self-conscious behavior could such narratives influence? How could the requirement to construct a narrative about one's sins lead to effects different from those that the church wanted? (Hint: Do contemporary "confession narratives" -- on television, for instance -- cause people to stop the kinds of behavior they are confessing? )
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