I assume we are talking about a confession of sins, not a confession of
faith. The BCP is not going to be of much help here. Confessions of
sin, of course, were carried in the vernacular, at least for most
penitents, though absolution was in Latin.
Thomas Tentler has a nice summary of scholarship on the issue of private
confession, including a description of practice, with brief but
well-chosen bibliography in _The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation_,
ed. Hans J. Hillerbrand (Oxford U.P., 1996), vol. 1, pp. 401-404. Eamon
Duffy, _The Stripping of the Altars_ (1992), 310-327 and 53-87 may be
helpful; see also Ann Eljenholm Nichols, "The Etiquette of
Pre-Reformation Confession in East Anglia," _The Sixteenth-Century
Journal_, 17.2 (Summer 1986), 145-63, reconstructing practice from
English baptismal fonts sculpted between 1463 and 1544. See also
Tentler's book, _Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation_
(Princeton, 1977).
Dennis Martin
Loyola University Chicago
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