ABSTRACT
Barbara Constable's manuscript Advice for Confessors offers a rare glimpse of an English nun's perspective on the priestly office of hearing confessions. Generically, Advice for Confessors examines the office itself, differing in style and purpose from biographies that described individual confessor-penitent relationships. Constable assesses the 'power' and 'authority', two words she uses frequently, of the confessor in both lay and religious contexts. In this manuscript, a compilation of materials on confession over 400 pages long, the Cambrai English nun boldly asserts her right to advise confessors on their handling of penitents. Following the recent trend in medieval and early modern studies to read across the Reformation divide, this chapter explores how Constable's manual makes an important intervention in the dominant medieval and early modern model of confessor-penitent relationships. It shows how it complements, in interesting ways, the independent model of female penitence portrayed in the fifteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe.
