LAUSR

The sacrament of penance as crisis or moment of danger is treated brilliantly in chapters five and six. Here, Archambeau breaks down the three elements or requirements involved in the sacrament, as well as the challenges of completing the perfect confession and subsequent penance (including, for example, the challenge of knowing, or properly identifying, one’s own sins). It thus serves as an exposé into the inherent complexity—both difficult and potentially dangerous for some (p. 142)—of saving one’s soul. To my mind, this exploration of the intricacy of confession and penance, and the anxiety that comes with such a critical and serious task, is one of the book’s greatest contributions. In their analyses of the crisis of confession, the two final chapters effectively unify the three “moments of danger” into a single kind of spiritual crisis for inquest witnesses. As the author insightfully points out in the introduction, plague, mercenary violence, and confession may be considered separately by those who study them today, yet for the people who lived through them, the calamities were “interconnected through the moral worldview of sin” (p. 4). All represented both spiritual and physical dangers, revealing “a concept of health that included body and soul equally” (p. 163). The external crises of disease and warfare were perceived as “new symptoms of widespread spiritual sickness,” the remedy for which lay in the internal transformation of sinners through the sacrament of penance (p. 6). And when the latter yielded an internal crisis of confession, it was here that witnesses described finding “consolation and certainty about their souls” through their holy woman, Delphine (p. 166). Souls Under Siege enriches our understanding of the fourteenth century and of the experiences of those who lived in a time of crisis and change, not entirely unlike our own. Meticulously researched and written in clear, readable prose, it is certain to find an audience with scholars and students interested in medieval and/or religious history, plague history and the history of medicine, and the history of disaster and crisis.