TY  - BOOK
AU  - Payer,Pierre J.
TI  - Sex and the Penitentials: The Development of a Sexual Code, 550-1150 
T2  - Heritage
SN  - 9781487580742
AV  - BT708 
U1  - 241.660902 23
PY  - 1984///]
CY  - Toronto : 
PB  - University of Toronto Press, 
KW  - Penitentials
KW  - Sex
KW  - Religious aspects
KW  - Christianity
KW  - History of doctrines
KW  - Middle Ages, 600-1500
KW  - Social history
KW  - Medieval, 500-1500
KW  - RELIGION / Christian Theology / Ethics
KW  - bisacsh
N1  - restricted access
N2  - The sexual ethic of the early Christian church was simple: sexual relations were permitting only between a man and a woman married to one another and then only for the purpose of procreation. It soon became necessary to articulate and then to refine this ethnic, to analyse departures from it, and to provide for a range of penances suitable to each kind of sexual sin. The penitential -- a confessional manual for the guidance of the priest -- played an important role in this process. Payer argues, despite modern orthodoxy, that the penitentials reflect reaction to actual practice and are not simply a record of the wild imaginings of monkish minds or the abstract categorizing or legal minds. He traces the history of the penitentials from their early Irish origins in the sixth century through their ninth-century descendants in continental Europe and Anglo-Saxon England, to the great legal collections of the tenth and twelfth centuries. In the process he illuminates an increasingly sophisticated treatment of a wide variety of sexual situations, from the heterosexual life of the married and the unmarried, through homosexuality and lesbianism, bestiality, and masturbation, to the preservation of chastity. Sex and the Penitentials is a systematic inquiry into one of the richest sources of sexual teaching in the early church. It represents a major step towards an understanding of the nature of that teaching and its role in the transformation of the classical ethic into a Christian one
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9781487579593
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9781487579593/original
ER  -