The Manly Priest. Jennifer D. Thibodeaux

      

       The Manly Priest

      THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES

       Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor

       Edward Peters, Founding Editor

      A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

       The Manly Priest

       Clerical Celibacy, Masculinity, and Reform in England and Normandy, 1066–1300

      Jennifer D. Thibodeaux

      UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

      Philadelphia

      Copyright © 2015 University of Pennsylvania Press

      All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

      Published by

      University of Pennsylvania Press

      Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

       www.upenn.edu/pennpress

      Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      ISBN 978–0–8122–4752–7

       For Owen Edward

       Contents

       Introduction

       Gendered Bodies and Gendered Identities

       Chapter 1

       The Manly Celibate

       Chapter 2

       Legal Discourse and the Reality of Clerical Marriage

       Chapter 3

       The Marginality of Clerical Sons

       Chapter 4

       “The Natural Right of a Man”: The Clerical Defense of Traditional Masculinity

       Chapter 5

       “They ought to be a model and example”: The Expansion of Religious Manliness

       Chapter 6

       Policing Priestly Bodies: The Conflict of Masculinities Among the Norman Parish Clergy

       Conclusion

       The Manly Priest

       Notes

       Bibliography

       Index

       Acknowledgments

      Introduction

       Gendered Bodies and Gendered Identities

      In the late twelfth century, the Anglo-Norman archdeacon Gerald of Wales questioned the custom of clerical unions by describing the misfortune that priests suffered through their sexual relationships with women:

      For they rob you of your money and property, and you spend on them what should be used to adorn the churches and help the poor…. They rob you also of your good name and honor throughout the country when, because of them, you cannot hold your head high before your superiors, your patrons, or even your parishioners (among whom all your authority becomes worthless)…. To lose heaven because of this shameful part of the body and over a relationship which you possess neither by personal right nor as yours forever.¹

      Gerald acknowledged in his Jewel of the Church that nowhere in the Bible or in apostolic tradition was marriage prohibited for the clergy. Yet celibacy was advocated for “the sake of greater purity and integrity.” Throughout this work, he consistently linked priests with sexual temptation, sexual disorder, and the misfortune that resulted from such illicit behavior.

      For the medieval clergy of the reform era, there was a growing conflict between the concept of the celibate male body and that of the sexual one. Post-Conquest England and Normandy present a vibrant story of the intense competition between monks and clerics over a redefinition of the religious male body, a competition spurred by the prevailing custom of that region, clerical marriage, and new efforts to impose clerical celibacy. This book examines the changing models of the religious male body from the late eleventh to the thirteenth century at a pivotal, transformative moment in the history of clerical masculinity, a period when celibacy laws were created and enforced. Celibacy decrees were motivated by a need to enforce sacramental purity and to prevent the alienation of church revenues, as others have argued; but the discourse of celibacy that reformers promoted throughout England and Normandy was inspired by a new gender paradigm for the priesthood. The Manly Priest looks at how this norm affected the religious male body, from monastic reformers who elevated the ascetic celibate to married clerics who defended their rights to marry; and also from the perspective of clerical sons, men who followed their cultural tradition and entered their fathers’ occupations, to the lived experience of thirteenth-century parish priests, who, more than one hundred years after the beginning of the reform movement, continued to define their bodies by the local, cultural markers of manliness. This book highlights the complex intersection