Manual of Confessors and Penitents by Martín de Azpilcueta Navarro: Confession as a path of correction, knowledge and self-care.

• Grant number: 22/09925-6
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: March 01, 2023
• End date: February 28, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - History - History of America
• Principal Investigator: Rafael Ruiz Gonzalez
• Grantee: Bruno Ribeiro da Silva
• Host Institution: Escola de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (EFLCH). Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). Campus Guarulhos. Guarulhos , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 23/06208-4 - Probabilism and confessional practices in Martin Azpilcueta Navarro and Juan Pérez Bocanegra: confession as a space of conversion, BE.EP.MS

Abstract

The following project proposes to investigate the work Manual de confesores y penitentes, written in 1557 by Martín de Azpilcueta Navarro. The objective is to analyze, through this source, whether the practice of confession aimed to help the penitent to form his conscience and, thus, create a space of normativity and judgment to define his own morality. Therefore, I intend to examine the influence of confession on the formation of conscience in the Iberian world of Early Modernity, where the concept of judgment was not separated from moral understanding. For such an analysis, I will take the Christian concept of love as the internal force that moves man. With this, I ask to what extent the intensification of the confession adopted in this period was a process of trying to control consciences, or an internal exit to the predominance of laws, whose result would be a moral flexibilization of sin/crime, with a view to its cure. and not punishment. Thus, confession would be more related to a process of correction, knowledge and self-care.