Natalie Brigit Molineaux became intrigued, she tells us, by the question of whether there were connections between the spiritual exercises of late antique ascetics and Celtic monastic penance (xiv). That enquiry broadened to encompass very large questions about the origins, functions, forms, and causes for change in penitential practices. This book presents the preparatory research for investigating those questions. Whether probing the concept of a priori religiosity (chapter 1), examining ante-Nicene authors for their perspectives on penance (chapter 6), investigating pre-Christian and Christian constructions of guilt and sin (chapter 5), rehearsing late antique interest in penance (chapter 7), arguing for “the monasticization of penance” (chapter 8), or reviewing the historiography of penance between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries (chapters 2–4), her method is to survey many, many authors and to summarize each one's stance, contribution, or context. The book as a whole, then, is a virtual DNB of authors who, throughout the ages, grappled with penance or subjects related to it. Molineaux demonstrates just how many such authors there were, and delineates the central issues that preoccupied them.

When there are the excellent, concise historiographic surveys by Mary Mansfield in The Humiliation of Sinners: Public Penance in Thirteenth-Century France ([Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995], 5–15) and Sarah Hamilton in The Practice of Penance, 900–1050 ([Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2001], 9–23) and most recently, the extensive essay by R. Emmet McLaughlin, “Truth, Tradition, and History: The Historiography of High/Late Medieval and Early Modern Penance” (in A New History of Penance, ed. Abigail Firey [Leiden: Brill, 2008], 19–71), one may wonder what more needs to be said. Readers familiar with scholarship on penance will readily recognize the major authors noted by Molineaux, and will find few surprises in the outlines she traces of prevailing trends and interests. Her work harvests, however, interstitial authors that may not be as familiar, and that accumulation of voices shows the tipping balances in debates, and in some instances clarifies that there were, indeed, debates, many of them still unresolved.

The chapters cast chronologically seem to this reviewer more successful than the chapters oriented around theoretical issues. In the latter, rather than excavating unexplored primary sources or offering new readings of known sources, Molineaux sets forth the historiographic trappings encasing the issues. The chapter on a priori religiosity places in the foreground the views of Hegel, Friedrich Max Müller, Locke, Hume, Kant, Christoph Meiners, Gerardus van der Leeuw, Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, Auguste Comte, Durkheim, William James, Lévi-Strauss, Eliade, Buber, Jung, Ricoeur, and others. A similarly sweeping approach shapes chapter 6, a general review of ante-Nicene writings on sin and penance, framed with a strong contrast between eastern and western authors even in the early Christian period. The equally general review of late antique asceticism, represented by well-known figures and standard texts, is framed largely with reference to Peter Brown's model of the “holy man” (chapter 7). Less conventional, but also less secure, are Molineaux's lexical descriptions of Sumerian, Babylonian, Akkadian, Egyptian, Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin references to sin and atonement. Lacking facility in these languages, Molineaux does not undertake genuine philological investigation or provide contexts that vest the selected terms with meaning. The same chapter (5, “Penance in pre-Christian Antiquity”) is weakened by inattention to the precept that the meanings of myths are neither static nor singular; thus, Molineaux's effort to investigate whether some cultures are more sensitive to guilt and sin than others (148) is compromised.

In the purely historiographic chapters, however, Molineaux hits her stride. The second chapter, “From Dogmatic History to the History of Dogma (ca. 1520–1920),” accords with the consensus among the present generation of scholars, identifying H. C. Lea as an extraordinarily influential scholar and confessional polemicist, pointing to the seventeenth-century scholars Arnauld and Morin as determining the historiographic infrastructure for centuries to come, and integrating Harnack as the story moves toward Wasserschleben and Schmitz. Incorporated as well are Cano, Canisius, Cajetan, Jean Daillé, Natalis Alexandré, Jacques Boileau, Sarpi, Nathaniel Marshall, Balthazar [Baldasarre] Francolini, Alphonse Maria de Ligouri, and others. The chapter is also thickened with consideration of early modern English scholars, such as Bucer, Cranmer, Jewel, and Hooker (38–41), and of writers reacting against Lea's work (60–61). Chapter 4, “Paradigms in the Contemporary Historiography of Penance,” reflects growing sentiment that the long-dominant accounts by Bernhard Poschmann and Cyrille Vogel need reconsideration, that Thomas Tentler's paradigm of penance's use for social control was transformative, that Mary Mansfield's work on late medieval public penance shattered the discursive dichotomies of public v. private and sacramental v. popular, and that Foucault's theories on power, sexuality, and secrecy sent tremors through scholarship on penance. Again, Molineaux details a host of authors (Boyle, Frantzen, Morris, Murray, deJong, Payer, Brundage, Biller, Kerff, Bossy, Natalie Davis, Gurevich, Vauchez, Ohst, and others) influenced by or responding to these works and themes.

The third chapter, treating the period between 1920 and 2000, gives considerable weight to the question of Celtic influence on western penitential norms. In the preceding chapter, Molineaux weaves the 1622 treatise by James Ussher, archbishop (Protestant) of Armagh into her section on “a diffusion of Romantic idealism and a surge of national consciousness” (50) in the nineteenth century. Ussher, she notes, was “one of the most ardent advocates for the uniqueness of early Celtic Christianity” (50), and that uniqueness became integral in analyses of penance. Pointing to works such as Thomas Leland's History of Ireland (1773), Mervyn Archdall's Monasticon Hibernicum (1786), and Edward Ledwich's Antiquities of Ireland (1794), Molineaux affirms that, “Inexorably, in the ensuing decades, the forging of a distinctively Irish historiography served to underscore the ‘idiosyncratic quality of the Early Irish Church’” (51). Frederick Warren, George Stokes, and Thomas Olden advanced the theory that the Celtic Church's distinction from continental (leg. Roman) churches derived from eastern influence. In response, Heinrich Zimmer linked Celtic and British Christianity; this did still preserve some notion of “insular” Christianity. The emphasis on “Celtic” as a crucial category in the history of penance was maintained in John T. McNeill's The Celtic Penitentials and their Influence on Continental Christianity (Paris: Édouard Champion, 1923) and A History of the Cure of Souls (New York: Harper, 1951), Oscar Watkins's A History of Penance (London: Longmans, Green, 1920), and, although differently, studies by Thomas Oakley (1932–1940). Molineaux rightly sets the promotion of Celtic exceptionalism in the context of the debates between Karl Adam and Bernard Poschmann over “public” and “private” penitential rites. Indeed, this chapter reveals just how much resistance to Poschmann's constructs and their antecedents there was in the earlier twentieth century. Molineaux usefully draws our attention to the alternative views of not only Adam but also Emil Göller, LaGarde, Paul Galtier, Aloys Dirksen, Josef Jungmann, Bernard Carra de Vaux Saint-Cyr, and others.

Molineaux is an intelligent reader, and represents the evidence supporting standard interpretations fairly. Where there is slippage is in the early medieval domain. There is an egregious lapse of judgment in her suggestion that the churches of northern and southern Ireland had significantly different, oppositional “characters” in the late sixth and seventh centuries (265), for which, not surprisingly, she provides no evidence, and she misdates the manuscript Paris, B.N., lat. 3182 by six centuries (267). Although she asserts that the seventh-century diffusions of penitentials she considers Celtic “marked a culmination of processes that had been set in motion over two centuries earlier” (269), she offers no discussion of the content or texts of those penitentials.

The questions Molineaux raises are indeed vital, and her curiosity about the influence of Greek and Jewish penitential traditions on those of the Latin west is well-founded. Lamentably, her book appears to have had the benefit of neither an editor nor a pre-publication reviewer. An astonishingly high number of typographical and syntactical errors mar the majority of its pages (the missing words and extraneous words, incomplete sentences, and endnotes that do not correspond to their call numbers are especially disturbing), as do a set of frequently repeated, distracting authorial tics. Nevertheless, students interested in the historiography of penance may benefit from consulting the often informative pages of Medici et medicamenta.