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As the nineteenth book of his Decretum, Bishop Burchard of Worms (d. 1025) included a penitential titled the Corrector or Medicus. Although the Corrector has traditionally been described as a manual of private confession, this article argues that it was primarily used to judge public penances at church courts and synods. Focusing on the manuscript transmission of the Decretum in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, we find that the Corrector was almost never copied apart from the rest of the Decretum and that it was almost always copied alongside other legal texts. Turning to individual abbreviations, we also find that Burchard's collection was frequently reworked and rearranged so as to integrate canonical and penitential texts. These findings call into question current definitions of canon law collections and penitentials which presume functional exclusivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article uses thirteenth-century hospital sermons as a window into the moral and religious environment of these charitable institutions, large numbers of which were founded during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. What emerges from the reportationes of sermons preached in the hôtel-dieu of Paris and ad status sermons directed at hospitals'' personnel and inmates by Jacques de Vitry, Humbert of Romans and Guibert de Tournai is a spirituality that stressed the penitential (and potentially salvific) power of doing works of mercy (in the case of hospital workers) and bodily suffering (in the case of hospital inmates). The particular social context of hospital preaching is also evident in preachers'' anxieties about the quality of hospital administration. The sermons that were preached in thirteenth-century hospitals reflect the heightened value placed on caring for the sick and poor, a historical development more often associated with the later middle ages. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]