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RESEARCH PRODUCT

What exactly is the forum confessionis ? Secrecy and Scandal in Church Governance (12th-14th centuries)

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International audience; First of all, let us establish the difference between secrecy and privacy. In latin, secretum comes from secernere which means to isolate, to distinguish or to put something aside. According to this etymology, «secret» or «secrecy» refers to institutions and governance, since the verb secernere indicates the sovereign gesture of hiding something or reserving it for a small group of individuals. Does not the piece of furniture we call a «secretaire», whose drawers contain objects and papers we do not want to be visible , remind us of the gesture of hiding or concealing? In the same way, the office of «secretary» refers to the political function that consists in working in the shadow of a public authority. Policy secrets or confidential information are not topics we will deal with here, even though they are obviously related to the growth of the modern State in the West. Among the many forms of institutional secrecy – spying, torture, judicial instruction, denoun-ciation – I will focus here only on one, that of confession, which is at the same time specific and paradigmatic of the way Roman Church used secrecy as a tool for the judgement and government of Christians in the Middle Ages. * When we read or hear the word «confession», I assume we immediately think about sacramental confession and about the «seal of confession» (sigillum confessionis), that is to say the secrecy of the confession of sins that the Parisian master in theology Pierre le Chantre theorizes at the end of the 12 th century 1. A few years later (1215), annual confession to a parish priest (proprius sacerdos) becomes a legal obligation under the canon 21 of the Fourth Lateran Council 2 , but we know private and secret confession * Université de Bourgogne; arnaud.Fossier@u-bourgogne.fr. I would like to express my thanks to Armando Torres, Sara McDougall and James Plumtree for having revised this paper. 1 Pierre le Chantre, Summa de sacramentis et animae consiliis, Secunda pars. Tractatus de pae-nitentia et excommunicatione, Ed. by J.-A. dugAuquier, Nauwelaerts, Louvain 1957; L. honoré, Le secret de la confession, Ch. Beyaert, Bruges 1924, p. 47, n. 3; J. ChiffoLeAu, « " Ecclesia de occultis non iudicat " ? L'Église, le secret et l'occulte du XII e au XV e siècle», Il segreto nel Medio-evo. Micrologus, Nature, Sciences and Medieval Societies, 13 (2005) 359-481, particularly pp. 382-385, quoting the texts of 12 th-13 th centuries which attempt to protect the secret of the confession. 2 P.-M. gy, «Le précepte de la confession annuelle et la nécessité de la confession», Revue des sciences philologiques et théologiques, 63 (1979) 529-547; J. AvriL, «À propos du " proprius sacerdos " : quelques réflexions sur les pouvoirs du prêtre de paroisse», in S. kuttner – K. Pen-nington (eds.), N. Bériou, «Autour de Latran IV (1215): la naissance de la confession moderne et sa diffusion», in grouPe de LA Bussière (ed.), Pratiques de la confession, Cerf, Paris 1983, pp. 73-93.