SOURCE: “Telling Secrets: Sacramental Confession and Narrative Authority in the Heptameron,” in Critical Tales: New Studies of the Heptameron and Early Modern Culture, edited by John D. Lyons and Mary B. McKinley, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993, pp. 146-71.

In the essay that follows, McKinley elaborates the connection between the institutional requirement of women's speech in confession and the increasing authority of that speech on the part of individual women in the Renaissance.

Confession is to be made before the eyes of all in an open place, to prevent a rapacious wolf from sneaking into corners and causing unthinkably shameful things.

—Jean Gerson, c. 1409

In Heptameron story 41 Saffredent tells of the countess of Aiguemont, who sends for a priest to administer the sacrament of penance to her household. On Christmas Eve, he hears the confessions of the countess, her maid of honor, and the lady's young daughter. Something in...