The Trade of Penance: Commercial Practice and Penitential Piety in Late Medieval Literature

摘要

Situated at the intersection of literary, religious, and economic studies, this dissertation examines how late medieval writers used commercial practice to invent new modes of penitential piety. Challenging scholarship that characterizes the relationship between church and commerce as exclusively antagonistic or corrosive, I argue that the convergence of these two spheres was spiritually productive for many writers, enabling them to interrogate and reimagine the boundaries and possibilities of a confessing Christian community. Each chapter of this dissertation takes up one particular commercial practice: bargaining, accounting, suretyship, and credit. Pairing contract laws, account books, merchant manuals, and debt suits, with pastoral literature, devotional poetry, dream visions, morality plays, sermon collections, and hagiographies, my chapters reveal how these texts from two seemingly disconnected realms are deeply implicated with each other. I uncover the bookkeeping technologies that shaped penitential handbooks, the haggling techniques within exempla on confession, the surety contracts framing narratives of atonement, and the lending mechanisms that taught readers of hagiographies how to borrow rewards from their saints. In doing so, I show that marketplace tactics filtered into the contemporary religious imagination to form a new model of penance for the increasingly mercantile population of late medieval England—a model that not only reconciled people's growing economic ambitions with their spiritual imperatives but also afforded them a more active role in their salvation.