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Performing Confession In Dante And Boccaccio, Anne C. Leone

Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics - All Scholarship

With the decree of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), the Church sought to implement changes to confessional practice, requiring (among other things) private confession to one's own priest once a year before Easter communion. I argue that both Dante and Boccaccio show an awareness of the decree, yet neither shows an uncritical acceptance of the intercessory role that the Church was trying to fashion for itself with recourse to the practice. Dante locates the source of authority for confession in biblical precedents, and in the Comedy itself, downplaying the role of the Church in administering it. Boccaccio pokes fun at …