The Manly Priest. Jennifer D. Thibodeaux
conclusion is that time period, region, and even ecclesiastical rank matter.29 To be sure, locating sexuality as a central component of medieval manliness poses difficulties for defining the clerical, celibate body, particularly if one accepts Vern Bullough’s assertion that masculinity is dependent on “impregnating women, protecting dependents, and serving as provider to one’s family.”30 Indeed, a medieval man who failed to perform these three criteria might have his manliness questioned, but not if he was able to demonstrate the struggle and resulting conquest over his own body. R. N. Swanson proposed that celibate clergy constitute a category between male and female, an “emasculinity” or third gender; others have followed suit.31 Yet medieval people recognized a gender system of binaries, male and female; and while there were manly women who transcended their bodies to become spiritually male and womanly men who failed to transcend their bodies and were viewed as softened, there is no evidence to suggest that a third gender existed.32
Recent work on clerical masculinity, clerical marriage, and clerical concubinage has all produced different answers to the question of manliness and embodiment. In contrast to Swanson’s assertions about “emasculinity,” scholars such as Patricia Cullum, Derek Neal, and Janelle Werner have presented studies of the clergy, sexuality, and celibacy based on the assertion that clerics saw themselves as masculine. Cullum has suggested that in late medieval England factors such as acquisition of a benefice and clerical rank were large determinants in clerical gender identity. Benefices provided clerics with householder status, and often minor clerics lived under the same roof with senior clergymen, who might act as surrogate fathers. For others, acquisition of a clerical, celibate identity was more fragile and resulted in lay-like masculine behavior.33 Derek Neal countered these conclusions in his examination of late medieval England, suggesting that lay masculinity and clerical masculinity were essentially the same, and that priests who broke their vows of chastity effectively became “false thieves.” By the late fourteenth century, “failure to maintain a clerical ideal could diminish one’s masculine social self in the lay world.”34 Janelle Werner’s research on concubinous priests probes the rural context of the late medieval diocese of Hereford. Werner concludes that, given the sizeable proportion of unchaste priests, historians should consider “a more flexible definition of clerical masculinity” since the existence of such men “might help elucidate what was quint-essentially masculine in late medieval society.”35 What all these studies have in common is that they are focused on the later Middle Ages, when celibacy was the rule and had been for over two hundred years. Any clerical unions that did exist had no claims to legitimacy, and the cleric and his parish community were well aware of this fact.36 My book examines gender identity, particularly masculine identity, from moments of conflict in the reform period, when two sides battled over the institution of clerical celibacy, the eradication of clerical marriage, and eventually, control over the entire priestly body.
Gender identity is not always obvious, especially in the Middle Ages. The actors under scrutiny do not always proclaim explicitly what they believed to be the proper role and function of a man in their time, and the vast majority of writers during this period were men in religious orders. Thus, historians, especially historians of gender, must look at the ways that masculinity was understood and expressed implicitly. The conflicts and struggles over celibacy and the reform of the clergy provide these very opportunities to examine the discourse of sexuality and the male body, particularly at the beginning of the reform period. Since masculinity is always tied to a struggle of some kind (manliness is proven by a defense and reinforcement of that particular masculinity), the religious tracts and laws mandating celibacy offer insights into how celibate men defended their manliness. I point to some common ideas presented by diverse voices who sought to change or simply chronicle the events and people of the Anglo-Norman Church. Orderic Vitalis and William of Malmesbury were not church reformers, but they absorbed and presented the ideas of that initiative in their chronicles and religious histories. Not all monastic reformers believed that chastity should be a requirement for the secular clergy; some, like the Cistercian John of Forde, were little bothered by married priests and their sons and believed in their moral suitability for the ministry.37 Yet the monastic voices that survive from this period overwhelmingly urge clerical continence, and they do so in a particularly gendered fashion. Similarly, the treatises authored by advocates of clerical marriage illustrate their own conceptions of male identity. Women were subjects in the conversation on clerical marriage and clerical celibacy, but they had marginal roles, their voices obscured through misogynist discourse.38
The Manly Priest offers a revisionist approach to the study of clerical celibacy, by illustrating the complex system of gender ideology that affected the creation, negotiation, and acceptance of the celibate ideal. Medieval scholars have written many books and articles on the subject of clerical celibacy, and they have largely concluded that increasing concerns over sacramental purity and the economic alienation of parish wealth and property led the Church to mandate a celibate priesthood. This is precisely the direction of the edited volume Medieval Purity and Piety, by Michael Frassetto, and the monograph Married Priests and the Reforming Papacy, by Anne Barstow.39 Sacramental purity and the economic alienation of ecclesiastical property were certainly factors in the drive for celibacy; what has been overlooked is how the discourse of this debate was gendered as part of a specific, masculine model. When contextualized, celibacy laws become a part of a larger initiative to reconceive the religious male body and, in doing so, elevate and separate the priesthood from the laity. Celibacy was only the first objective in the re-creation of a manly priesthood, however; reformers of the thirteenth century would continue this work by passing laws to control and regulate a full spectrum of behavior. What follows is not a case for Norman exceptionality in terms of manliness or clerical marriage; instead, this region provides rich and exciting evidence that offers, at times, a first-hand account of how the conflict over clerical celibacy laws played out.
In Chapter 1, I show how religious writers ascribed manliness to ascetic bodies, elevating the struggle against the flesh as the pivotal one in defining gender identity. By masculinizing monastic bodies, writers created an anti-norm of clerical behavior, one that rendered priestly bodies and elite bodies unmanly, through appearance, actions, and especially sexual behavior. Sexualized chastity emerged as the reform model for priestly bodies, a model that rendered chaste bodies virile as they fought sexual desire. This model was not an innovative creation of Anglo-Norman bishops and reformers, but it was disseminated in their hagiography, chronicles, histories, letters, theological tracts, laws, and conciliar decrees.
Social control plays out through the control of the body. Revised ideas on gender and masculinity can only become effective if deployed through a legal system. Chapter 2 depicts the social context of clerical marriage and underscores the legal maneuvers of those who sought to impose the manly celibate ideal on the priesthood. Both in England and Normandy, lay manliness was strongly connected to marriage and kinship, and the inability to procreate removed one from the primacy of the social network built on these values. Marriage was so entrenched among the elite clergy that even bishops had wives and cathedral canons placed their sons into prominent positions. Secular clerics drew their gender identity from lay society, participating in the same cultural framework that connected manliness to sexual prowess. Celibacy legislation directed at the clergy may not have been wholly successful in enforcing chastity, but it did begin to shape a new social understanding of clerical marriage, as these marriages were eventually legally invalidated.
Clerical sons were the most glaring reminders of their father’s virile bodies. In Chapter 3, I show how the manly celibate ideology had implications for clerical children, especially sons who intended to inherit their fathers’ benefices. Clerical sons first had liminal and then marginal bodies; while they were once assured of a career path, the passage of reform legislation ensured that they faced an existence in between cultural acceptance and legal bastardization. Certain communities in England and Normandy supported the training and education of clerical sons, and many clerical fathers passed their occupations to their sons, just as the sons of the laity did. Clerical sons faced an uncertain future and a marginal status,