Penance has traditionally been viewed exclusively as the domain of church history but penance and confession also had important social functions in medieval society. In this book, Rob Meens comprehensively reassesses the evidence from late antiquity to the thirteenth century, employing a broad range of sources, including letters, documentation of saints' lives, visions, liturgical texts, monastic rules and conciliar legislation from across Europe. Recent discoveries have unearthed fascinating new evidence, established new relationships between key texts and given more attention to the...

Penance has traditionally been viewed exclusively as the domain of church history but penance and confession also had important social functions in medieval society. In this book, Rob Meens comprehensively reassesses the evidence from late antiquity to the thirteenth century, employing a broad range of sources, including letters, documentation of saints' lives, visions, liturgical texts, monastic rules and conciliar legislation from across Europe. Recent discoveries have unearthed fascinating new evidence, established new relationships between key texts and given more attention to the...

Religious Franks is a coherent, thematically well-defined collection of essays that focuses on the importance of religion for Frankish politics and elaborates on the work of Mayke De Jong, the book's honouree. To many scholars today it may seem self-evident that religion and politics in the Middle Ages were inextricably bound up with each other, but this awareness is in fact the result of ground-breaking research of amongst others Mayke De Jong, who in her work unremittingly urges students of early medieval society to take religion seriously. The contributors of this volume have taken her...