Uploaded July 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 hours ago
Lecture at the conference on "Charisma", June 26, 2026
What makes a person endlessly compelling, an enigma others will spend centuries trying to figure out? The Middle Ages had an answer to this question. Confession was an intimate revelation, sometimes recorded and made public. It promised truth and intimacy, a glimpse into another’s soul, even as it threatened to seduce and deceive. The right kind of confession could make a saint; the wrong one could lead to the stake. The tension between radical honesty and calibrated performance is what has made confession a charisma machine over the ages, from Augustine of Hippo and Joan of Arc to Fleabag and the reality show confessional booth.
Irina Dumitrescu is a writer, literary critic, and Professor of English Medieval Studies at the University of Bonn. She studied at the University of Toronto, Columbia, and Yale, where she received the English department’s James A. Veech Prize for best dissertation. Before coming to Bonn she was an assistant professor at Southern Methodist University, and an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin. She is the author of The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature (2018), and the editor of Rumba Under Fire: The Arts of Survival from West Point to Delhi (2016). Her collaborative editorial work includes Everyday Arts: Craft, Voice, Performance, a special issue of Medieval Feminist Forum (57.1, 2021), and In Brief, a special issue of New Literary History (50.3, 2019) as well as three collections of essays focusing on early English poetics and medieval women and power.
Lecture at the conference on "Charisma", June 26, 2026
What makes a person endlessly compelling, an enigma others will spend centuries trying to figure out? The Middle Ages had an answer to this question. Confession was an intimate revelation, sometimes recorded and made public. It promised truth and intimacy, a glimpse into another’s soul, even as it threatened to seduce and deceive. The right kind of confession could make a saint; the wrong one could lead to the stake. The tension between radical honesty and calibrated performance is what has made confession a charisma machine over the ages, from Augustine of Hippo and Joan of Arc to Fleabag and the reality show confessional booth.
Irina Dumitrescu is a writer, literary critic, and Professor of English Medieval Studies at the University of Bonn. She studied at the University of Toronto, Columbia, and Yale, where she received the English department’s James A. Veech Prize for best dissertation. Before coming to Bonn she was an assistant professor at Southern Methodist University, and an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin. She is the author of The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature (2018), and the editor of Rumba Under Fire: The Arts of Survival from West Point to Delhi (2016). Her collaborative editorial work includes Everyday Arts: Craft, Voice, Performance, a special issue of Medieval Feminist Forum (57.1, 2021), and In Brief, a special issue of New Literary History (50.3, 2019) as well as three collections of essays focusing on early English poetics and medieval women and power.
