Ever since Colin Morris's The Discovery of the Individual: 1050–1100 (University of Toronto Press) appeared in 1987, medievalists have associated notions of the self or selfhood in western Europe or Christendom with the twelfth century. One might see the period as one of outward-looking forays by humans freed from the local. Others have emphasized more negative consequences of the developments of the time; centralized forces in governments, both secular and ecclesiastical, could lead to persecution of those who did not conform. Does the individual, or an autonomous self, emerge with more clarity in such a world, or is the self forced into a system and somehow lost along the way?
Interiority is another term often connected with the twelfth century. Scholars often cite the work of Peter Abelard, both his autobiographical account in Historia calamitatum and his academic writings—above all his Ethics, which carried the alternative title of Scito teipsum, or Know Thyself, a title that encourages self-awareness. Here, the standard account states, is a work that signals the Zeitgeist of the day. It focuses inward, stressing the importance of intention or consent, not external actions, for determinations of morality. Similarly, it argues that a person's sins are forgiven by God when that person is internally contrite for his or her sins, not when the person confesses to a priest or performs external acts of satisfaction.
Sin, interiority, and selfhood—these three elements form the focal point of Susan Kramer's investigation into what historians can responsibly say about how the individuality of each human being was conceived in Latin Christendom in the long twelfth century. Hanging over all three elements is the shadow of confession, and so the history of penance relates to what Kramer wants to uncover. The picture of a looming shadow does not over-dramatize the situation if one understands the historiographical context of Kramer's work, to which she provides a good introduction. One recent trend in the literature is to see the command to confess at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 as that which instigated “the notion of self as responsible agent” (12), responsible for sins and for vocalizing them. Confession thus drives self-awareness, but in a negative sense, oppressing the individual by making him feel guilty. As Kramer notes, this negative image has a more positive counterpart in the literature, namely a perspective that sees confession as that which drives self-reflection and an increasing awareness of the individual's inner life. With these perspectives in mind, Kramer wishes to hone in on the twelfth-century conception of self, on “what assumptions about selfhood and interiority underlay the dialectic of personalism and community, inner and outer, that characterized twelfth-century formulations of sin and penance” (10).
Kramer pursues two methods in her four chapters. First, she examines carefully how twelfth-century authors received texts from the tradition. This methodology is displayed in full force in chapter one, where she interprets several early Christian texts on the inability of anyone but God to perceive the occulta cordis in their original context, but then looks at how twelfth-century writers used those passages. A tension emerges between an acknowledgment that the interior life of the soul lies hidden to other men and the requirement to confess that interior life to other men, namely priests. As the realm of penance and especially oral confession expanded in the High Middle Ages to include more types of sins, including internal ones, the individual was compelled to express verbally what lay hidden in his heart, and he was recognized as a self that could do so and should take personal responsibility for it. This methodology is also fully employed in chapter two, where Kramer provides an interesting treatment of tears versus words and a growing insistence on words of confession as a voluntary articulation of the self's inner life. While words could deceive, they could also be a means to greater self-awareness. Chapter three focuses on original sin, a doctrine that would seem to threaten the autonomous self and the responsibility of each individual for her own moral state. Nevertheless, Kramer emphasizes how twelfth-century authors located responsibility for culpability in each soul, which supported their notions of divine justice, leaving God guiltless in each soul's suffering. Chapter four relies more heavily on Kramer's second method, namely looking at particular terms (for example “disease” and “contamination”) that are prevalent in discussions of sin and confession and uncovering their meaning in the twelfth century by comparing their usage in other arenas in which such terms were prevalent. Above all, she focuses on leprosy and heresy.
My few criticisms of the book fall within this final chapter. Kramer relies heavily on the second edition of R. I. Moore's The Formation of a Persecuting Society (Blackwell, 2007), and I remain unconvinced that his thesis should be the dominant lens for viewing the issues Kramer wants to treat. Her reliance on Moore makes her emphasize heresy to an extent that historians of penance have found misleading and exaggerated. It also seems to make her link texts about public sin as leprosy to heresy or “the public promulgation of false doctrine” (117), when such is not always the case. Thinkers of the period were concerned about public sin contaminating the body of the faithful, but such sin had a moral rather than doctrinal component in the majority of cases, even if both immorality and heresy could lead equally away from the goal of the salvation of souls. On a more minor note, Kramer accepts the thesis of Alexander Murray that confession by the laity before 1215 was rare (89), but historians of medieval penance have been skeptical of that conclusion.
All in all, Kramer provides in short order a thought-provoking and enlightening book that will be beneficial to those working on the intellectual and religious history of the twelfth century, on the history of penance, and on notions of identity and self in the Middle Ages. With the exception of some places in chapter four, her book relies on a careful and accurate reading of texts and is a valuable contribution to the field of medieval studies as a whole.
