The Manly Priest. Jennifer D. Thibodeaux

       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