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"Master of Penance" investigates for the first time the most influential treatise on penance in the twelfth century, the "Tractatus de penitentia" by Master Gratian, a teacher of canon law whose textbook caused significant advances in the church's legal practices and jurisprudence. It will result in the first monograph on the intellectual influences on Gratian's theology and Gratian's influence on future penitential thought and law. After studying the treatise in its entirety, the project traces its influence among other figures and works, major and minor, in the rest of the twelfth century through Pope Innocent III and the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, in which annual confession became an official prescription of the church. The project makes an important contribution to current studies on medieval penitential genres, thought, law, and practice; the development of medieval schools and curricula; the general intellectual history of the twelfth century; and Gratian himself.