The table of contents of McNeill and Gamer's Medieval Handbooks of Penance (Columbia, 1938), read in the archive.org OCR of the 1938 printing, lists in section V ('Anonymous and Pseudonymous Frankish and Visigothic Penitentials') only 'Selections from the Tripartite St. Gall Penitential', pp. 282-285, beside fuller treatments of the Burgundian and Pseudo-Roman penitentials. HOLLIS 'penitential St Gall tripartite English' returns nothing further, so the standard English anthology gives a sample rather than the book. The full Latin is edited in Reinhard Schmitz's collection, whose OCR shows the chapter heading 'Das Poenitentiale Sangallense tripartitum' and his own note that he named the text from its three divisions.
The tripartite penitential is the most elaborate Frankish attempt to organise penance into three coherent systems of judgement, and it is the immediate ancestor of the penitential books that Regino and Burchard later absorbed. English readers know it only through four pages of excerpts, which flatten precisely the structural feature, the threefold division, that gives it its name.
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| archive.org · PDF scan · public domain (Schmitz, 1898) |