Handling Sin in Seventeenth-Century Ukraine: the Sacrament of Confession between Community and Individuals

Abstract

Summary My paper has two aims: first to examine the place of early modern Ruthenian sacramental confession within the disciplining of attitudes enforced by the modern state and church upon the conduct of daily life. Second, to explore its contribution to the creation of a new relationship between the private sphere of conscience and the public sphere of politics and laws. In this study, I turn to homilies, sacramental treatises, and confessional manuals to reconstruct a “genealogy of confession” that takes into account both its disciplinary function as a means of preventing transgression and its role in stimulating the birth of an independent normative sphere for conscience.