| Commentary: |
Snow 2007: "Expounds on the possibility of the Cantigas de Santa Maria as a source of attitudes to confession after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. The decrees of the Council are reflected in the Siete Partidas (not officially promulgated until 1348) but not so easily seen in actual practice in the CSM. What is clear is that confession is clearly associated with death and dying, that no one could be saved if unconfessed at the time of death (CSM 14), and that these attitudes result in fairly frequent depictions of battles over the soul of the dying (CSM 45). There seems to be some ambiguity in CSM 96, 26, and 24, in which divine intervention resolved the special case of sudden death (in unconfessed state) of devotés of Mary. The authors' suggestion that laws and decrees that were slow in being promulgated would tend to show up late in literary texts is a reasonable one. There are eight illustrations for this study." |
