Chapter 3 reads Vladimir Nabokov’s banned, belle-lettristic best-seller Lolita as a complex interrogation of the presiding sexual, legal, and literary critical formalisms of the postwar period. Nabokov’s pathological protagonist, Humbert Humbert, attempts to produce the compliant literary and legal confession of a pedophile. His account requires that he characterize his sexual subjectivity as fixed and antecedent to the forbidden class of objects (children or, in his own rarefied taxonomy, nymphets) for which he has an unnatural desire. But his fine-grained account of his desire for Lolita cannot successfully repress, indeed depends on, a more fluid and relational erotic dynamic: his confession must simultaneously deny and rely on Lolita’s own position as sexual agent in order to illuminate his desire and his deeds. Likewise, the literary loyalty oaths taken by the novel’s formalist defenders (including Nabokov himself) and moralist detractors alike contain kindred contradictions. Ultimately the failure of these legal and literary confessions served to reveal the unsustainability of the oppositions – morality/aesthetics, natural desire/perversion, ordinary subjectivity/monstrosity – on which the concept of the postwar desiring subject was predicated.

The history of repentance provides a key context for the history of indulgences. One reason for the requesting and granting of innumerable indulgences was to encourage people to visit churches and contribute to their upkeep or to the communities they served. The primary aim of those who responded to such indulgences was to substitute them for penance on earth or in purgatory. A secondary function was to encourage repentance and confession. Indulgences operated only if their recipients were ‘truly penitent’ and had confessed their sins. This almost certainly encouraged many people to confess to a priest more frequently, beyond the once-yearly confession around Easter prescribed by the 1215 council. Confession itself required a moral effort. Papal indulgences thus served to promote the ideal of repentance, a thread running through medieval and post-medieval religious history.

How did a man go about repenting sex with men? Byzantine monks hearing confession drew guidance from the Kanonarion, a penitential manual developed between the sixth and ninth centuries. Unlike sermons that tended to lump together a range of sins between males, the manual separates the penetration of men (arsenokoitia) from the corruption of boys (paidophthoria), and identifies mitigating circumstances, such the penitent’s youth or poverty, or if he was raped. The penances for sex between men were, perhaps surprisingly, the same as for adultery and fornication, and less than for murder or the corruption of children. The Life of Nephon celebrates a repentant sodomite who became a holy man. If Byzantine pastoral care sought to produce the repentant sodomite, the Life of Nephon presents such a subject as a cultural hero. While this material hardly offers a model for contemporary LGBTQ+ liberation, the construction of the repentant sodomite, an identity that Symeon the New Theologian claims for himself, provides an important Byzantine chapter in queer history.

The work of Bourdieu and Foucault can help identify the processes and strategies bywhich the Irish Catholic Church gained dominance and control over the lives of itsmembers.  The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed the increasing power ofthe Church in Ireland, not least by its control over key institutions.  People lived ‘inCatholic time and space’, internalizing systems of discipline and codes of conduct.The intricate knotwork of ‘Catholic’ and ‘Irish’ identity meant that Church dominationwas bound up with the drive to modernize and civilize the nation. The keymechanisms used to create obedient subjects were penitential practices, corporalpunishment, confession, and confinement. John McGahern’s fictionand memoir explore the ways in which Catholic corporal punishment and patriarchalauthority extended into domestic spaces. His writings offer a useful representation ofthese mechanisms of control and punishment, but also narrate quiet moments ofresistance.

Between 1830 and 1850, anti-Catholics in the United States fixated on the ritual of Catholic confession and priests’ alleged sexual interrogation of young women, especially Protestant teenagers in convent schools. Protestant propagandists tied the moral and sexual contamination of confession to Rome’s supposed political and religious designs in the United States. This chapter examines how female sexual speech, public testimony, and the Protestant press were seen to abet this conspiracy. The first half of the chapter centers on Maria Monk’s blockbuster convent exposé, Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal (1836), and its sensational delineation of young women’s subjection to and participation in confessional sex talk and systemic convent turpitude. The second half studies the dilemma that preoccupied every Protestant publisher who sought to expose the purported sexual dangers of Catholicism and confession: How could one contain Rome’s defiling designs if by exposing Catholicism’s contagious carnality one risked infecting readers and adding them to the conspiracy’s ranks? The chapter’s final section examines the media storm around the Protestant publication of Catholic confession manuals.

This chapter addresses the profound indebtedness of the Spanish Inquisition to its medieval predecessor. Both were grounded in the procedures and priorities of ancient Roman law. The text explains the concept of “heresy” within Christianity, as well as the ways in which medieval European rulers -- popes and monarchs -- worked together in an attempt to stamp out public, persistent, and intentional religious dissent. The essay charts the structural formation of the Spanish Inquisition after 1478, and examines the processes that were eventually standardized. It addresses questions of proof and legal discretion, as well as potential defense maneuvers by suspects. It raises the frequency of torture and describes more and less typical punishments, which Spanish inquisitors called “penances” in accordance with their overarching pastoral goals. Finally, this essay addresses the pivotal question of support for the Inquisition from below, namely, from ordinary Spaniards.

Finnegans Wake and confession, in both secular and religious contexts, are each examined through the lens of the other. The aim is to ‘de-confuse’ the fusion, thrice repeated in the Wake, of ‘confession’ and ‘confusion’. Eight observations are illustrated through close reading: i) confession directs the text in two chapters, Shem’s in I.7 and HCE’s in II.3; ii) both present as public not private confessions; iii) there is no auricular confession; iv) widespread inadvertent confessions found in the Wake’s ‘fallen’ language, supposedly Freudian slips, are a source of sense-making power; v) any confession is always a qualified confession – blame is always dispersed; vi) there is no torture leading to involuntary confession; vii) the book doesn’t operate within the tradition of classical confessional texts; viii) it knows that confession split Christianity and projects that split onto the dialectical operations of the narrative. The chapter argues for the productive and overlooked potential of ‘syntagmatic’ or narrative approaches that read the text as sequential form, and it suggests that the plurality of narratives undermines theoretical generalizations of the human as ‘a confessing animal’.

This chapter examines the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s capital drug law and its application, using the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) as the normative framework. The 2017 amendment to Iran’s capital drug law is examined against the aims and likely motivations behind the amendment. Judicial legitimacy is assessed by examining how judges apply drug laws in capital cases and the extent to which fair trial guarantees are observed, and by assessing the structure of the judiciary in which these judgments are delivered. We use 10 judgments – rarely available in the public domain – handed down by the judiciary during 2014–2020 to argue that there have been positive developments in improving fair trial guarantees. Nonetheless, capital drug cases fall below the standard required under the ICCPR. The amendment sought to limit the application of the death penalty to major drug syndicates, but our analysis shows serious issues that may hamper the realisation of the amendment’s objective.

Early medieval charms invoke the service of the Visitation of the Sick through the use of liturgical elements central to that rite, as Chapter 4 argues. Charms import the singing of psalms, sprinkling of holy water, praying of anointing and healing formulas, imposing of hands, anointing of the body, and the chanting of antiphons and litanies. Once present in charms, these and other sacred practices serve as indices of the Visitation of the Sick. When allusions to the Visitatio Infirmorum are successfully recognized or evoked, charms invoke the liturgy. Because recognition proves crucial, the question of charm participants’ familiarity with the Visitation of the Sick leads us to assess the resonance of Visitatio references through the construct of a continuum. At one end we find charms containing references to the Visitation of the Sick that seem subtle in light of their brevity or context. At the opposite end we find charms with numerous, lengthy utterances based in the sacramental rite. Over all, associations with Christ’s healing and liturgical Unction are meant to transform faithful charm participants in their time of need.

This chapter explores Kerouac’s rich understanding of literary history as manifested in his Duluoz Legend, focusing in particular on two mechanisms by which this understanding turns up in his work. The first mechanism was his deep desire to seek and speak the truth, as he wrestled with his need to lead a godly life, a product of his Catholic upbringing, while simultaneously recognizing the almost requisite demand that a great novelist experience the darkness of the human soul. The second is the confession, which was not the legal confession of a court room or the spiritual confession of the church, but the broader truth of any human being who follows a path to forgiveness and wholeness by repeatedly purging themselves of sin, guilt, or embarrassment. Kerouac consistently worked truth and confession together – often to the dismay of some readers – twinning and twining them as he grappled with his spiritual and bodily identity as an American writer living in two conflicting Americas, the “the essential and everlasting America” of the ethereal beauty and mysticism, and the post–World War II triumphalist America of materialism and militarization.

A criminal confession typically ends in conviction, raising a critically important question: Why do suspects decide to confess to their guilt against their own self-interests? The authors of this chapter answer this question by reviewing a large body of theoretical and empirical research related to decision-making involving confessions. Major topics covered include the distinction between different types of confessions, the Reid technique, Miranda waiver decisions, psychological and dispositional vulnerabilities that encourage a confession decision, and interrogation reforms and their impact on confessions and interrogations. The core message of the chapter is that the dominant method of police interrogation used in North America relies on well-established social influence tactics that cause suspects to perceive a confession as a rational decision under the circumstances. The authors examine research involving these tactics and their effects on interrogations and confessions, along with laws and policies that regulate interviews and interrogations of suspects in custody.

This chapter broadens the focus to the Spirit’s renovation of human community through a prayerful “confessional movement” of self-dispossession, the reception of one’s identity in Christ, and responsive self-offering to God. Attention to this confessional movement both emphasizes the Augustinian tradition’s capacity for self-critique, fosters greater solidarity with the oppressed, and builds conceptual bridges toward greater dialogue with liberatory theological traditions.

This chapter examines the cutting edge of Laudian theological, ecclesiological and liturgical experiment in Cambridge University during the 1630s. The protagonists here were mostly young men, anxious to push the envelope of the doable and the sayable, and in the process attract the approval of their superiors in the university and church. Moving on from the further reaches of Arminian theology they toyed with notions like justification by works and the necessity of confession to a priest, more and more elaborate decorations of college chapels, and more and more florid performances of what they took to be ceremonial decorum and their critics took to be popish superstition and idolatry. These antics attracted the opprobrium of the old university Calvinist establishment and the support of an emerging clique of Laudian heads of house. A dynamic emerged through which the Laudian agenda was pushed further and faster than some its leading lights, up to and including Laud himself, might have liked. This was a syndrome that continued to operate right up until the collapse of the personal rule in 1640/1.

This chapter explores the greater issue of moral responsibility for Mao-era injustices. Following a broader discussion that touches on intellectual debates beginning in the late 1980s, it focuses on a series of essays published in the semiofficial journal Yanhuang Chunqiu between 2008 and 2014 that provided a space for Chinese intellectuals to reconstruct alternative narratives of history. The term chanhui (“confess and repent”) provided a culturally significant and yet sufficiently flexible framework for a public discussion of individual guilt and atonement for acts of collective violence. The resulting Chanhuilu column represented a rare public forum accommodating both detailed narrations of events and public reflections on guilt, atonement, and justice. These authors not only took on the burden of individual guilt, but also shared historical knowledge that contextualized if not attenuated the perpetrators’ responsibility and sought the lenient judgment of later generations.

Chapter 1 sets out the growth of the Province from 1221 to 1348, the different patterns of development in different parts of the British Isles, and what explains them. The first part of the chapter examines who supported the new foundations, how the English and Scottish kings in particular aided them, but also the role played by nobles and townsfolk. The second part of the chapter considers what lay behind this support, by looking at the friars’ life and ministry in relation to their supporters’ needs, how they met them directly, and how their religious life and training within the cloister enabled them to do this.

All three of the prime suspects in the Dongo investigation have previous experience with serious accusations. They show their understanding of the justice system with different levels of sophistication and with their aggressive or evasive responses to Emparan’s questions. Finally, faced with bloodstains on each of their belongings and the pressure of face-to-face confrontations, Quintero, Blanco, and Aldama can no longer avoid the truth. They admit that they all killed on the night of October 23, 1789, but not before Emparan’s court collects more evidence and the judge calls them in for several sessions of questioning.

This chapter investigates which factors affect the timing of guilty pleas for defendants under the current regime of a quantified sliding scale of sentence discounts. Certain vulnerable defendants are found to be more likely to plead guilty such as young adult defendants. It is discovered that the stages of the criminal process preceding plea taking have been found to significantly affect plea outcomes. Defendants who have confessed to the police and who are represented by publicly funded lawyers are more likely to plead guilty, and to plead guilty earlier. Furthermore, the extant literature also points to defendants remanded in custody to be susceptible to pleading guilty earlier as well. Under a guilty plea process that features a sliding scale of sentence discounts, different factors may serve as potential pressures for defendants to plead guilty, and to plead guilty as early as possible.

This chapter sketches the shape of Tolstoy’s oeuvre by focusing on a key text from each decade of his long and varied career. In Childhood (1852), his first published work, Tolstoy had already begun both to draw upon and to distrust the powers of realist fiction. This tension is palpable in his great novels War and Peace (1865–9) and Anna Karenina (1875–8), and it motivated his sporadic turns away from artistic literature during the years he was writing them. Confession (1879–82), which marked the most dramatic of these crises, is a conversion narrative that ends with a call to rethink the edifice of Christianity. In the second half of his life he pursued this task in a range of genres. Lavishing his gift for evocative description on polemical accounts of social atrocities, in his fiction he now reached for emblematic universality. The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), a celebrated short story, and “The First Step” (1892), a treatise on vegetarianism, exemplify these divergent styles. However, they stirringly reconverge in posthumously published works like the historical novella Hadji Murat (1896–1904), where Tolstoy represented escape from the mortal body in paradoxically vivid realist detail.

This chapter presents the resolution to Hegel’s account of the problem of recognition by considering the “moral” self, that of “conscience” (Gewissen). It begins by showing that “morality” is the stance that adequately countenances the self-productive character of self-conscious beings, so that the self is understood to be constituted through activity. Only conscience, however, acknowledges the social character of this constitution of the self, the fact that, to count as a self, I must realize my moral knowledge both through my actions, and through participation in moral discourse along with others. For Hegel, successful recognition as a moral self requires the development of particular social practices, confession and forgiveness, through which we can respond to moral disagreement, and I demonstrate that recognizing one another as conscientious requires a continuing dependence on practices like these.