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own good pleasure. 55
    William’s torments are not torture in the new legal sense—that is, pain impressed in order to extract a confession—although
     the word may be the same. The pains endured are instead punishments willingly embraced after the deed has been confessed to
     appease and please an angry God.
    A PILLAR OF BLOOD: RAYMOND OF PEÑAFORT
    While the increasing emphasis on verbal confession in both spiritual and secular arenas invited the imaginative excurses of
     William of Auvergne in Paris, a solidification of such comparisons was occurring farther south with the rise of fledgling
     tribunals for prosecuting heretics. Since heresy was both a sin and a crime, the actual status of a heretic’s confession—made,
     after all, to a priest who sought the heretic’s salvation—was necessarily ambiguous. (In recognition of this difficulty, prosecuting
     clerics would be forbidden to hear the confessions of penitent heretics.) 56 The Catalan canonist Raymond of PeÑafort would be responsible for making the two types of confession still more proximate
     through his successful promotion of the inquisitional process for obtaining sacramental and heretical confessions alike. 57
    A brilliant canon lawyer who studied and then taught at the celebrated University of Bologna, Raymond joined the Dominicans
     in 1222—a new and papally sponsored order that was formalized soon after Lateran IV precisely to combat heresy. 58 He was summoned to Rome to act as papal penitentiary, chaplain, and confessor to Pope Gregory IX in 1230. Yet despite his
     auspicious positioning in the papal curia, Raymond was entirely resistant to his own advancement in the ecclesiastical hierarchy.
     When Gregory IX attempted to elevate Raymond to the archbishopric of Tarragona, he refused adamantly, even withstanding the
     opprobrium of papal excommunication. 59 Returning to Barcelona in 1234 because of illness, Raymond was nevertheless elected to the position of master general of
     the Dominican order in 1238, a position he was forced to resign within two years, again for reasons of ill-health. 60 Raymond lived out the remain-der of his life among his Dominican community at Barcelona, where he continued to retain the
     title and many of the responsibilities of papal penitentiary. He died in 1275.
    Raymond played a central role in the evolution of canon law in this period. Immediately after his arrival at Rome, he was
     commissioned by Gregory IX to organize the papal decrees into a coherent canonical collection, completed in 1234 and known
     as the Decretals . 61 His pastoral work was equally influential. The magisterial Summa of Penance was begun soon after his entrance into the Dominicans and exemplified the pastoral orientation of the order’s vocation. An
     example of the newly emerging genre of confessors’ manuals, circulating in the wake of Lateran IV, Raymond’s Summa was designed to instruct priests in their newly acquired task of hearing confession. The revised and augmented version of
     the Summa , completed in 1234, was one of the most influential works of its kind, serving as the template for subsequent confessors’
     manuals. 62
    The various judicial feints and analogues in earlier writers are reified in the preface of Raymond’s work when he introduces
     the concept of a “penitential forum” ( forum penitentiale ) instituted for the “judgment of souls.” 63 Indeed, the very rubrics of his Summa are taken from contemporary canon law collections, apparently in an attempt to synchronize the individual penitent’s conscience
     with ecclesiastical law. Moreover, the confessor, as spiritual judge, assumes heavy interrogational responsibilities, a method
     that Raymond defends in the course of addressing the problem of “whether interrogations should be made.” First noting that
     some individuals argue against interrogations, owing to the simplicity and shame of individuals, Raymond counters this view
     with an excerpt from the