ABSTRACT
The gradual rediscovery of the history of penance that has occurred during the last quarter of a sixteenth century has long exhibited a peculiar blind spot. The chapter proposes a first generation of Tridentine bishops, in particular the archbishops of Milan, attempted to reshape confession as an instrument of social discipline and to retool their personnel (that is, the confessors) accordingly. The seal of confession, one of the sacrament’s most basic features and the ultimate guarantor of its social and psychological feasibility, defied any outside meddling with the exchange between confessor and penitent. Federico Borromeo’s remarks to his confessors were more than an exercise in political theory or jurisdictional polemics. Infant mortality was of course a plague of early modern society. The system also exhibited considerable limitations in effectiveness and, as the Carnival crisis of 1579 demonstrated, produced serious cracks in the overall consensus between State and Church.
