Saving one's face while saving one's soul? The refraction of tactical approaches to penance as a disciplinary device in Counter‐Reformation Italy

Abstract

Sociohistorical research suggests that religious discourses and practices have been powerful in producing disciplined lines of conduct. Typically, however, this work has only considered the long‐term consequences of discursive shifts or the one‐sided outcomes of disciplinary practices. In contrast, this paper shows how the creative appropriation of disciplinary devices can instigate their transfiguration into additional disciplinary tools. By examining manuals for confession published in Counter‐Reformation Italy, I identify three tactics via which believers allegedly approached Sacramental Penance as an impression management tool. The authors of these cultural objects detected the diffusion of these tactics and circulated their depictions to alert confessors and stigmatize believers who enacted them. These findings suggest that the theorizing of disciplining processes has to consider how the tactical appropriation of disciplinary practices can trigger processes of refraction via which their negative representations are reified and circulated as further disciplinary tools.