Antoninus Florentinus, Confessional, in Latin, manuscript on vellum [northern France (perhaps Paris), mid- to late fifteenth century]

85 leaves (in agreement with a contemporary inscription at the end of the volume: “fueilles iiii.^xx et cinq”), now foliated 1-82 in seventeenth- or eighteenth-century hand (omitting index and blank leaf at beginning, but followed here), same eighteenth-century hand adding folio reference numbers to entries of index), 215mm. by 140mm., complete, collation: i ⁸ (including pastedown), ii-x⁸, xi⁶,catchwords, single column, 28 lines in brown ink in a fine and precise late gothic bookhand, ornamental cadels to some rubrics and uppermost lines, rubrics in red, pen-trials and later religious exhortation in Latin added to last leaf, eighteenth-century “36” and “No.66” on front pastedown, index at beginning stained, else in good condition, contemporary blind-stamped binding of brown leather over wooden boards, with tools of a stag, a flower bud and a ‘P’ surrounded by prickly foliage, thongs perished with lower board detached and upper board held in place by pastedown, spine rebacked, now split and with small losses, gilt edges

Discovered in 1937 in the attic of a friend of the Rt. Rev. John Percy Phair (1876-1967), dean of Ossory, Southern Ireland, from 1923-40, and later bishop of Ossory until his retirement in 1961: scholar’s letter addressed to him enclosed, discussing the manuscript. 

text

This manuscript contains the Confessional of Antoninus of Florence (1389-1459). The author was a Dominican friar who became archbishop of Florence in 1446 and who was canonised in 1523. He wrote a number of manuals for confessors (one in Latin and three in Italian) containing abridgments or extracts from his magnum opus, the Summa Theologica Moralis. The present manuscript starts with the rubric, “Incipit quoddam breve inductiuum ad confessionem per exempla; et sacerdotem instruit de interrogacionibus fiendis. Editum per Fratrem Anthoninum Archiepiscum Florentinum” (fol.1r). A contemporary hand has added a instruction for the confessor in verse, ascribed to Peter of Blois (d.1211; also recorded in BnF. Lat. ms.14883: see Hauréau, Notices et Extraits de Quelques Manuscrits Latin de la Bibliothèque Nationale, III, 1891, p.226) to the front pastedown.

The confession of sins in order to receive God’s forgiveness became compulsory in the thirteenth century, and increasingly more frequent and obligatory, and was practiced by most Christians in the West from the fifteenth century onwards. Manuals such as the present one were in great demand in the later Middle Ages, and many hundreds of exemplar survive.