ANXIOUS CONFESSIONS: PENITENCE, MEMORY, AND DESIRE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
Open Access
- Author:
- Stegner, Paul Dustin
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- December 11, 2006
- Committee Members:
- Patrick G Cheney, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Robert R Edwards, Committee Member
Laura Lunger Knoppers, Committee Member
Garrett Sullivan Jr., Committee Member
Linda Woodbridge, Committee Member
Ronnie Po Chia Hsia, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Marlowe
Auricular Confession
Augustine
Penitence
Ritual
Memory
Reformation
Andrewes
Shakespeare
Donne
Spenser
Desire - Abstract:
- Anxious Confessions: Penitence, Memory, and Desire in Early Modern English Literature addresses the consequential intersections of literary imagination and penitential practices in early modern England. The English Reformation rejected the sacramental status of private, auricular confession and dispensed with the medieval requirement that individuals confess their sins at least once a year. The Church of England maintained a desacramentalized, voluntary form of private confession, but reserved it as an extraordinary rite for those individuals needing further consolation. However, this reorientation led to the effective disappearance of the rite in early modern England. The loss of private confession disrupted a significant means for achieving forgiveness and reassurance. Conventionally, literary critics have overlooked the importance of private confession in early modern England because they tend to categorize ritual practices as either Protestant or Roman Catholic and to associate literary representations of the rite of private confession with England's religious past or with contemporary Roman Catholicism. This received interpretation neglects the ongoing literary engagements with the developments in penitential practices in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. By reconstructing the discourses surrounding the rite of private confession in early modern England, this study explores how four major authors -- Spenser, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Donne -- represent the rite as a unique site for negotiating memories of past sins and achieving reconciliation and consolation. In its consideration of the widespread effects of the shifts in ritual confession, this study examines texts ranging from epic poetry, sonnet sequences, and female complaint to sermons, devotional prose, and early modern translations of St. Augustine. This study demonstrates how early modern representations of the rite of private confession engage the shifting relationship of individuals to political, ecclesiastical, and divine authority in the early modern period.