Perhaps the clearest example of the early penitentials’ shared interest in the intersection of the social and the spiritual emerges in their censures of violence. Although they receive less attention for this issue than they do for their treatment of sexual transgressions, the manuals address a wide variety of violent behaviours, from coercive maleficia to premeditated murder. Given the amount of space they dedicate to these discussions, the penitentials are particularly important sources for assessing early medieval perceptions of violence. When viewed simply as catalogues of human depravity and punishment, these handbooks seem to support the paradigm of medieval society as inherently and overwhelmingly violent. Representative of this view, Marc Bloch characterized medieval violence as imbedded in both ‘the social structure and the mentality of the age’, particularly in the practice of reciprocal violence, a system, he argued, of ‘private vengeance which, according to the ideas of the time, could plead a moral justification’. Part of the weakness of this persistent narrative is that it groups all violence together without distinguishing between types, and ignores the ways those acts were perceived by the people who recorded them. As such, it presents violence as not only endemic, but also normative and unchallenged. The early penitentials show something very different.

The authors of these little books viewed sins as manifestations of human fallibility that brought harm to the soul, body, and community. In essence, their view of sin was equivalent to the broader definition of violence as acts that cause trauma, be it physical, emotional, or spiritual, to an individual or a group. Penance, as both punitive and reparative, was intended to address the consequences of sin, or in other words, repair the damage of the violence and prevent further social and spiritual damage resulting from it. Sin, like violence, was perhaps inevitable and sometimes necessary, but even legitimate violence was assigned a negative value, at least according to the standards of behavior of the knowledge communities represented by these manuals.

As these manuals demonstrate, the capacity for violence was understood to be universal, but not everyone was expected to engage in it in the same way.