RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Confession and Women’s Writing: Sacrament Envy and the Body in the Bekenntnisse einer Giftmischerin (1803) JF Monatshefte FD University of Wisconsin Press SP 242 OP 266 DO 10.3368/m.116.2.242 VO 116 IS 2 A1 Erickson, Peter YR 2024 UL http://mon.uwpress.org/content/116/2/242.abstract AB Although scholars have long recognized the importance of confessional writing for the novel, less attention has been paid to the way that “confessions” were still commonly seen as a Catholic genre in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, associated especially with translations of French authors such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Originating in monastic and ascetic practice, before being codified by the Catholic church in the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, the practice of religious confession only gradually came to be secularized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Turning to the example of the anonymously published Bekenntnisse einer Giftmischerin, most commonly attributed to Friederike Helene Unger, I make the case that the poisoner of the novel’s title explicitly sees her “confessions” as part of a broader engagement with Catholicism, revolving around questions of materiality, embodiment, and sanctification. (PE)