The Manly Priest. Jennifer D. Thibodeaux
while celibacy measures were promulgated, but they did little to enforce those laws. Hereditary transmission of benefices was quite common in England and Normandy, and reform legislation did little to disrupt this pattern, even well into the thirteenth century.
The Anglo-Norman Church was known for its unique “cross-Channel” clergy, men who were educated on one side of the English Channel and were appointed to positions on the other side. After the conquest of 1066, many Norman clerics were trained in English cathedrals, only to return eventually to Normandy. Others were educated in Norman chapters but assumed higher appointments in England. The level of training for elite clerics refutes the idea that clerical resistance to mandated celibacy was due to the lack of education, as many have argued.21 This cross-Channel nature of the elite clergy allows the historian to track not only the various ecclesiastical appointments of one cleric but also to connect him to his father, brothers, and sons, along with other relatives, who also served the Church. The Anglo-Norman realm was not exceptional among medieval states in its tradition of married clergy and hereditary benefices, but the extensive prosopographies undertaken on this time period and region allow greater connections to be made than those possible for other regions of Europe.22
Following Judith Bennett’s lead that scholars should develop long-term historical narratives of gender, I have crossed traditional chronological boundaries in order to highlight the effect of the manly priest model on clergy over two centuries.23 Thirteenth-century Normandy, part of France since 1204, provides a wealth of evidence for studying the effectiveness of reform legislation, particularly for the parish clergy. Most thirteenth-century Norman dioceses have not been studied in detail; however, the diocese of Rouen offers a unique set of documents for comparing the perspectives of those who opposed clerical celibacy and those who advocated it. Odo Rigaldus’s visitation record amply shows that, as bishops and other elites conformed to the celibate model, the rural parish clergy continued to retain their unions with women, possibly passing benefices to their children while also blurring the boundaries between the laity and the clergy. The case study of the diocese of Rouen also shows another dynamic in play, as a series of reform measures were passed that broadened the regulation of the priestly body beyond celibacy. Following the lead from Lateran IV, the archbishops of Rouen began holding regular councils and synods, delivering papal mandates to the parish clergy, many of which included prohibitions on inappropriate dress, gambling, tavern frequenting, and other forms of errant behavior.
Historically, the secular clergy defined their gender identity differently because of the nature of their occupation, but they were not a homogeneous group. The analysis presented here highlights the social positions of clerics in major orders, those of priest, deacon, and subdeacon, along with those who held secular canonries, typically cathedral clerics. These men were the targets of clerical celibacy laws. While clerics in minor orders were allowed to marry, they were generally discouraged from doing so, particularly if they desired to ascend to Holy Orders. Men in monastic orders, to the contrary, followed ascetic practices, with celibacy at its core; in this way, they held themselves as distinct from the secular clergy. Many historians of gender do not consider these distinctions, or even the varied experiences of clerics in minor and major orders. If it is true that manliness is defined by a particular culture, time, and region, it must also be considered within the complexities of a growing and diverse medieval Church.
Ecclesiastical reform in the Middle Ages was eclectic, and my use of the terms “reform” and “reformers” is for the sake of stylistic simplicity and is not meant to describe a unified movement. Clerical celibacy laws, while uniformly directed at one goal, the separation (physical or sexual) of priests from their wives, actually reflect different motives on the part of any one group of reformers. In the fourth century, sexual continence was first mandated for clerics out of the desire for cultic purity. While cultic purity was also the motive behind the Carolingian reform of clerical sexuality, by the time of the Councils of Pavia (1022) and Bourges (1031), economic concerns prompted a renewed effort at clerical chastity, as local reformers feared the despoliation of churches. While the secondary literature on clerical celibacy is rich, there is no scholarly consensus on how large a role celibacy played in the minds of ecclesiastical reformers. Gerd Tellenbach asserted that clerical celibacy was not at the heart of the papal reform movement;24 and there is some dispute over whether cultic purity or moral suitability was the key motive behind Pope Gregory VII’s legislation on the matter.25 No matter the goals and motives of papal reform during the mid-eleventh century, the discourse from England and Normandy after 1066 was more concerned with the effects of impurity on the priestly body and the masculinization of that body. Clerical celibacy became part of a larger agenda, as I show by including the pastoral revolution of the thirteenth century, a movement spurred by the canons of Lateran IV. The celibate ideal was built over the course of centuries, by reformers who installed an ascetic model of manliness as the dominant paradigm for the clergy. The discourse promoted from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries emphasized a different form of manliness, one that not only defined a code of sexual purity for the secular clergy but one that would also eventually encompass their bodily appearance and comportment.
The body, then, becomes a new model for historicizing clerical celibacy and, more broadly, clerical reform. The anthropologist Mary Douglas theorized that the body is a reflection of society and that societies use “different degrees of disembodiment to express the social hierarchy.” Within these social structures, there are varying means in which “the social system seeks progressively to disembody or etherealize the forms of expression.”26 Bodies that leak, that produce substances, are believed by many societies to cause pollution; in the Middle Ages, many religious men equated leaking bodies with feminized bodies. Thus, bodies that produced nocturnal emissions, menstruated, ejaculated, or bled after childbirth were seen as contaminating and feminine. Dyan Elliott, Conrad Leyser, and Jacqueline Murray have all studied how religious men wrote about pollution by involuntary ejaculations and how they addressed solutions to this “problem of male embodiment.”27 Drawing on diverse works on the body in history, Lynda Coon has examined the Carolingian monastic body as a “sign of the rift between civilized and barbaric” and theorized a “massive continuity” between classical definitions of gender and those of the early Middle Ages. The “bounded body” of the monk became a symbol of the cloister, both impenetrable and controlled, while the bodies of laymen were viewed as closer to feminine, due to their “bodily fluxes and the all-consuming libido.”28
Douglas’s formulations have been further applied by scholars like Peter Brown and others who have focused on the body and its relation to society, primarily with how groups that are threatened by external forces express anxiety about bodily purity. England and Normandy between 1066 and 1300 provide an excellent case study of how monastic anxiety about ritual purity created a drive to claim the priestly body and assimilate it to a greater masculinity. Monastic discourse focused on depicting the monastic body as superior to the priestly, and its superiority was expressed by its greater degree of manliness. In this regard, priests had to assimilate to this model of manliness, not only to ensure the purity of the sacraments but also to embody a religious masculinity. This discourse appeared at a time when elite laymen entered Church service, and when there were few monastic bishops in England and Normandy. Nonetheless, monastic reformers pushed laws mandating clerical celibacy, focusing on the bodily impurity and effeminacy of priests. Clerical defenders of marriage pushed back, emphasizing the integrity of their priestly bodies within marriage. The pastoral revolution of the thirteenth century brought councils and synods along with reforming archbishops who were concerned not only with sexual continence among the clergy, but also with their bodily comportment, gesture, and appearance. Lateran IV had given reformers an administrative system to enforce their standards of priestly masculinity; armed with these legal procedures, reform bishops sought to eradicate among the clergy the practices of gambling (which corrupted the body through the love of wealth), tavern frequenting and excessive drinking (which threatened somatic control on many levels), scurrilous speech (which violated the boundaries of vocal control), and violent behavior (which brought pollution on the most basic level by bloodshed).
How might the adoption of a chaste body affect the masculine identity of religious men, especially priests, in the Middle Ages? The answers depend on whom you ask. Work on medieval masculinity and religious men has produced numerous answers