Excuse me if the following is very very obvious. It does seem so to me
because I am always staring at those sources (in french we say
having the nose into it; in english I believe the expression has something
to do with the neck). There is a lot
written about penances in the monastic rules, monastic commentaries of
the rule of saint Benedict and monastic customaries. Pages and pages. One
can begin by Saint Benoit (chap.xxiii, "De excommunicatione culparum",
chap.xxiiii, "Qualis debeat esse modus excommunicationis", chap.xxv, "De
grauioribus culpis", chap.xxvi, "De his qui sine iussione iunguntur
excommunicatis", chap.xxvii, "Qualiter debeat abba sollicitus esse circa
excommunicatos", chap.xxviii, "De his qui saepius correpti emendare
noluerint").
To have the list of the best editions of the old monastic rules (and it
might be of some interest for you to look at the provencal ones), take
Adalbert de Vogue's booklet in Typologie des sources occidentales.
For the commentaries of the RB: Hildemar is certainly the most
fascinating, but I wish you good luck to find the book edited in 1880 by R.
Mittermuller. I spent wonderful hours reading it in the Abbaye de la
Source in Paris, thanks to the help of Dom Jacques Dubois.
For the customaries: look at the corpus consuetudinum monasticarum whose
chief editor was K. Hallinger.
But there are plenty other customaries which are not yet into this serie, as
the ones by Bernard and Ulrich for Cluny.
I have not read the dominican constitutions for a very long time, but of
course those might prove to be of a greater interest than anything I just
said. I have Saint Francis' writings here, so I gave a look. It is
fascinating (but not astonishing) to see that he wrote almost nothing on
the subject in his two rules. The chapter V of the first rule is extremly
vague on the penance ("De correctione fratrum in offensione"), same as
the chapter 7 of the second rule ("De poenitentia fratribus peccantibus
imponenda").
I hope all this might be of some help.
Isabelle Cochelin
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