Gauging Anger and Qualifying Forgiveness in Late Medieval Summae Confessorum

Latin manuals of casuistry (summae confessorum) for priests hearing confession from the turn of the fourteenth century to the turn of the sixteenth century offer sources for the history of ethical teachings about emotions such as anger in medieval Europe. These summas are casuistic in the sense of offering practical moral reasoning about anger and forgiveness based on the study of cases from Church law and theology. Whereas more public religious exhortations in sermons and treatises on the vices denounced anger and demanded forgiveness with little qualification, the summae confessorum provided a method to gauge the relative morality of anger confessed by penitents and admitted that Christian forgiveness is conditional. This study examines how the discussion of anger developed along with the genre as compilers synthesised and reorganised material from more academic sources, especially that of Thomas Aquinas, to make it more accessible to priests hearing confessions in medieval Catholic Europe.