Performing Confession in Dante and Boccaccio

Abstract

AbstractWith 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 the Church's over-ambitious attempts at controlling the faithful via confessional practice. Both writers stress to different ends the performative nature of confession. For Dante, expressive difficulties bolster the truth-claims of the confessional utterance. For Boccaccio, confessional moments become spectacles conveying messages that may conceal or distort the truth.