Composed in Nicosia in 1288 by Jehan de Journi, an educated crusader knight, La Disme de Penitanche is a versified manual designed to help the laity prepare themselves for confession. It is a fascinating mixture of the learned and the popular, drawing on university textbooks and scholarly methodology to paint an up-to-date picture of the academic approach to penance, but also employing popular elements such as the Three Enemies of Man (the World, the Flesh and the Devil), lively exempla, and proverbial expressions to present the Seven Deadly Sins to a wide audience. A concluding prayer catalogues many notable figures who were active in the eastern Mediterranean as the crusades drew to their close in the late 1280s, and the work also contains a hitherto largely unnoticed passage giving information about games and pastimes of the period. Written in the Picard dialect, the manual offers many points of linguistic interest, phonological, morphological and lexical. It will appeal to students of history, cultural history, divinity, historical linguistics, dialectology, and medieval French literature. In this edition the text is accompanied by an introduction dealing with the manuscript, author, background and language, detailed explanatory notes, a glossary and an index of proper names.
