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

Abstract

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