Methods of repairing evil in Portugal in the 14th and 15th centuries

Abstract

The present project, to be developed together with the Faculty of Arts of the University of Porto, is part of the Master's research entitled Forms of reparation for evil in the Portugal of the 14th and 15th centuries (process nº 2021/04250-8), which is dedicated to the study and mapping of prescriptions referring to penitential amendments accepted and encouraged in the Portuguese society of the 14th and 15th centuries, based on pastoral treatises written or translated into Portuguese. With the institutionalization of auricular confession, promulgated by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 and reinforced in the Iberian Peninsula by the Council of Valladolid of 1322, the production of works written or translated into the vernacular, intended to teach and prescribe behavior models based on the main rudiments of the Christian faith, especially for the purpose of helping the clerics healers of souls to guide their penitents in the right examination of conscience, so that they could properly receive the sacrament of penance. Among the various prescriptions, the admonitions concerning the forms of absolution or reparation of the wrong, destined to the fulfillment of the practice of satisfaction - third stage of auricular confession -, divided between the goods of the soul, the temporal goods of fortune and the goods of the body and structured under the triad: prayer, alms and fasting. The objective of the research in which this proposal is inserted is to analyze, the from pastoral and doctrinal treatises written in Portuguese between the centuries XIV and XV - period in which the practice of confession becomes one of the main objects of the theological and pastoral literature -, the forms of reparation for the evil associated with restitution of the property of others, through the fulfillment of the practice of satisfaction of temporal goods of fortune for the reintegration of the faithful into the community and the Church. (AU)