Writing Sin in the German Lands, 1050-1215 : Confession, Penance, and Textuality

Writing Sin in the German Lands, 1050-1215 is about how sin and atonement function as an impetus for textual production and formal, linguistic, and intellectual creativity.It focuses on the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, a time in which various social and cultural conditions came together to provoke both an interest in sin and an opportunity for writing experimentally about it, and its area of enquiry is the German-speaking world.Working with a remarkably rich body of German-language texts, this book allows us not only to grasp with greater clarity aspects of medieval penitential thought and practice, but it also offers new ways of thinking about the development of German as a literary language.The book joins bodies of work on the history of penance and on devotional writing in the European vernaculars, and through the interconnection of these two fields of study, it offers a new perspective on questions that currently occupy scholars of the Middle Ages: the medieval conception o