The Paenitentiale Ecgberhti (also known as the Paenitentiale Pseudo-Ecgberhti, or more commonly as either Ecgberht's penitential or the Ecgberhtine penitential) is an early medieval penitential handbook composed around 740, possibly by Archbishop Ecgberht of York. This work should not be confused with the vernacular works known as the Old English Penitential (formerly the Paenitentiale Pseudo-Ecgberhti) and the Scriftboc (formerly the Confessionale Pseudo-Ecgberhti). Background Authorship Sources Manuscripts and Transmission There are eleven extant manuscripts that contain the Paenitentiale Ecgberhti, dating from as early as the end of the eighth century to as late as the thirteenth, ranging geographically from southern Germany to Brittany to England. The sigla given below (V6, O1, etc.) are based on those established by the Körntgen–Kottje Editionsprojekt for the Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina, vol. 156, a project whose goal is to produce scholarly editions for all major early medieval penitentials; sigla in parentheses are those used by Reinhard Haggenmüller in his 1991 study. Haggenmüller divided these eleven surviving witnesses of the Paenitentiale Ecgberhti into three groups, based broadly on the regions in which they were produced, the nature and arrangement of their accompanying texts, and shared readings in the Paenitentiale Ecgberhti itself. The 'Norman' group consists of some of the youngest manuscripts (P22, O5, C2, O1), most of which originated in regions under Norman influence or control, namely tenth-century Brittany and eleventh to twelfth-century England; only O5 originates in a non-Norman context. The 'South-German' group (Se1, Sg10, V4, M17) represents a textual tradition emanating from a region in southern Germany (perhaps the Lake Constance area), even though only one constituent witness (Sg10) originates in a South-German centre. Haggenmüller's third group, the 'Lorsch' group, includes three manuscripts (V6, W9, V5), two of which (V6, W9) are the oldest extant witnesses to the Paenitentiale Ecgberhti tradition. Of the three manuscripts in this group, however, only one (V5) is known with certainty to have been produced at Lorsch (though V6 had provenance there by the first half of the ninth century). It is currently unknown where the two earliest witnesses of the Paenitentiale Ecgberhti (V6, W9) originate from, though it was likely not in the same place since they present rather different versions of the text. In addition to the eleven main witnesses listed above, the prologue to the Paenitentiale Ecgberhti is also transmitted in the following manuscripts: Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 572 (2026), fols 51–106 (written first third of