The Humiliation of Sinners: Public Penance in Thirteenth-Century France

by Mary C. Mansfield

This compelling book, first published in 1995, changed historians' understanding of the history of public penance, a topic crucial to debates about the complex evolution of individualism in the West. Mary C. Mansfield demonstrates that various forms of public humiliation, imposed on nobles and peasants alike for shocking crimes as well as for minor brawls, survived into the thirteenth century and beyond.

360 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1995

Reviews

[The American Conservative]

“Mansfield died before she was able to polish the manuscript, and it shows in a few repetitive or clunky phrases. She’s also got some odd preferences: The drama of scapegoating, in which the sins of an entire community are washed clean by the public expulsion and humiliation of a few, is always described in positive terms. Any time Mansfield says “dramatic” or “organic” (!) she means scapegoating; any time she laments a new “drier” form of public religion, she means they’ve taken the scapegoats away. Nonetheless the book is studded with insights: “The celebration of community … inevitably meant a remembrance of the dead,” for example.

Mansfield makes vivid the jury-rigged, experimental, even madcap religious world of the 1200s, which brought me comfort here in 2016. She draws out some of the aspects of medieval French religion we have lost: the intense focus on the sins of the rich and middle-class, for example. Confessors quizzed their better-off parishioners closely about usury or abuse of power; one man had to do public penance because the money he gave to the poor on his wedding day was counterfeit, which is three separate things that wouldn’t happen today.”

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