Urge without Desire? Confession Manuals, Moral Casuistry, and the Features of Concupiscentia between the Fifteenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Bibliographic Data

ID23213258
AuthorsFernanda Alfieri (corresponding author)
Year2011
Pages151-167
Publication date2011-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueBodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan UK (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/9780230354128_9
OpenAlexW2477290610
ISBN9780230354128
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited17

In these passionate verses from The Canticle of Canticles, a bridegroom longs for the unique beauty of his beloved bride. His eyes seek hers alone; his lips summon hers and no one else's; she is driven to him and to none other. Since the comments of the early Church Fathers, exegesis of The Canticle of Canticles departed from the sphere of matrimony and veered toward allegory. As such, this biblical passage became a part of monastic culture, where it was held to represent the union of the soul with God, and of Scholasticism, where it was seen as describing the matrimony of the Church with Christ.2 At the same time, the idea that two people could be brought together by a desire that was sparked by their specific traits seemed to vanish from the conception of matrimony in Christian Europe. This void, or rather this lack of reflection on desire, appears markedly in (or is notable for its absence from) the discourse on marriage produced between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries to instruct the clergy on how to administer confession to the sexualized laity (married, unmarried, or about to be married). This discourse may be regarded as a sort of juridical corpus concerned with the management of the body and soul, a guide on how to understand those speaking of themselves, of their bodies and of their innermost thoughts within confession.3 KeywordsEighteenth CenturyBodily PracticeTheological ReflectionAncient RegimeBiblical PassageThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Aesthetics · Allegory · Art · Beauty · Casuistry · Church Fathers · Confession (law) · Confessional · Fifteenth · Literature · Political science · Politics · Soul · Theology · Classics · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Religious studies

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