PENITENTIAL, a manual used by priests of the Catholic Church for guidance in assigning the penance due to sins. Such manuals played a large role in the early middle ages; they were mainly composed of canons drawn from various councils and of dicta from writings of some of the fathers. Disciplinary regula lations in Christian communities are referred to from the very borders of the apostolic age, and a system of careful oversight of those admitted to the mysteries developed steadily as the mem bership grew and dangers of contamination with the outside world increased. The treatment of the lapsed produced what has fre quently been called the first penitential, the libellus in which, according to Cyprian (Ep. 51), the decrees of the African synods of 251 and 255 were embodied for the guidance of the clergy in dealing with their repentant and returning flocks. This manual, which has been lost, was evidently not similar to the code-like compilations of the 8th century, and it is somewhat misleading to speak of it as a penitential. Certain patristic letters had acquired almost the force of decretals ; the most important were the three letters of St. Basil of Caesarea (d. 379) to Bishop Amphilochius of Iconium containing over eighty headings.
Three things tended to develop these rules into something like a system of penitential law. These were the development of auricular confession and private penance ; the extension of the penitential jurisdiction among the clergy owing to the growth of a parochial priesthood ; and the necessity of adapting the pen ance to the primitive ideas of law prevailing among the newly con verted barbarians, especially the idea of compensation by the wergild. In Ireland in the middle of the 5th century appeared the "canons of St. Patrick." In the first half of the next century these were followed by others, notably those of St. Finian (d. 552). At the same time the Celtic British Church produced the penitentials of St. David of Menevia (d. 544) and of Gildas (d. 583) in ad dition to synodal legislation. These furnished the material to Columban (d. 615) for his Liber de poenitentia and his monastic
rule, which had a great influence upon the continent of Europe. The Anglo-Saxon Church was later than the Irish, but under Theodore of Tarsus (d. 69o), archbishop of Canterbury, the prac tice then in force was made the basis of the most important of all penitentials. The Poenitentiale Theodori became the authority in the Church's treatment of sinners for the next four centuries. (See Haddan and Stubbs's Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents relating t,o Great Britain and Ireland, iii. 173 seq.) A Peniten tiale Commeani (St. Cumian), dating apparently from the early 8th century, was the third main source of Frankish penitentials. Bishop Halitgar was commissioned (in 829) by Ebo of Reims to prepare a definitive edition; he used among his other materials, a so-called poenitentiale romanum, which was really of Frankish origin. The canons printed by David Wilkins in his Concilia (1737) as being by Ecgbert of York (d. 766) are largely a transla tion into Anglo-Saxon of three books of Halitgar's penitentials. In 841 Hrabanus Maurus undertook a new Liber poenitentium and wrote a long letter on the subject to Heribald of Auxerre about 853. Then followed the treatise of Regino of Prum in 906, and finally the collection made by Burchard, bishop of Worms, be tween and 1023. The codification of the canon law by Gratian and the change in the sacramental position of penance in the 12th century closed the history of penitentials.