Der Körper des Priesters (The priest’s body) is a fascinating and original study of disability, and bodily difference more generally, in early modern Catholicism. Since members of the Catholic clergy were required to be ‘flawless in their whole bodies, and perfect from head to foot’ (p. 11), those whose bodies diverged from this faultless ideal could, in theory, be excluded from a clerical career. From this starting point, Brendan Röder investigates how disability among the clergy and laity was handled by church authorities between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, and therefore how bodily differences were categorised, problematised and experienced in this context. Röder examines discussions of disability in canonical, theological and medico-legal treatises and, most interestingly, how these understandings took effect in around five hundred cases concerning the real bodies of individuals. The latter come from the archive of the Congregation of the Council (Sacra Congregatio Concilii [SCC]) which was founded in 1564 to enforce the reforms established by the Council of Trent. Röder is the first to analyse these archival sources, which detail dispensation procedures followed by the SCC with regard to disabled bodies and offer unparalleled insights into how bodily difference was handled in practice. The majority of cases come from Italy (65 per cent), while the remainder are from Spain, Portugal, France and their colonies, as well as a small number from the Holy Roman Empire. These sources, in which petitioners described their bodies and sought clarification on how their physical differences could affect their clerical or religious status, lie at the heart of the book and enliven Röder’s investigation. We are introduced, for instance, to fourteen-year-old José de Andrade from Seville who was missing the lower part of his nose and hoped this would not prevent him from pursuing a clerical career. Then there is subdeacon Ignatius Rodrigo from Tarazona whose stutter meant he was unable to read the liturgy clearly, Prior Damianus Stella of Viterbo who sought permission to wear a wig due to a tumour on his head and the nun Alessandra Bechelli who was found to possess both female and male genitalia.

As these examples demonstrate, the book offers an expansive view of disability which is based on the cases put to the SCC as well as those discussed in contemporary treatises. This encompasses everything from sensory impairments and amputations to facial disfigurements, epilepsy and gender ambiguity. The book’s first section presents a necessary outline and contextualisation of the sources used, including the legal terms and administrative frameworks involved in handling such cases. The section also contains an overview of the development of expectations regarding clerical bodies, including how this ‘genealogy of norms’ (p. 43) for the body was used and constructed by treatise authors.

The second section focuses on the administrative and practical concept of ‘ability’ (Können) and methods of proving capability for clerical duties in SCC cases. In this context, a ‘disability’ may be understood as a bodily condition which prevented the successful completion of such duties, for example when failing eyesight made it difficult to read the liturgy or when a priest with a missing hand could not elevate the host in the usual way during mass. Supplicants would be observed performing clerical tasks in practices known as ‘experimentum’, which Röder connects to the seventeenth-century boom of practical experimentation contributing to the ‘scientific revolution’. Successful completion of the rituals of mass were especially important and most stringently tested. Nevertheless, Röder finds the SCC could be remarkably flexible, as observations could be repeated in different settings to enable different outcomes, and adaptation was possible through the use of material objects such as liturgical texts with larger letters or chalices with adapted handles. Röder also shows these sources to offer unique insights into understandings of embodied processes of learning in this period; priests could be given time to learn new means of performing tasks in ways which accommodated their physical differences. A supplicant from Burgos, for example, learned to break the host with his index and middle finger, since he was missing the thumb of his left hand, and was also able to suppress a resulting tremor within fifteen days. As Röder argues, therefore, these sources provide an awareness of how clerical routines became sedimented in the body through everyday practices.

The book’s third section focuses on bodies which possessed all necessary abilities, yet which were deemed problematic due to their appearance and the responses this might elicit. Such cases involved those with unusual body sizes, missing features such as ears or noses, or other cosmetic ‘deformities’. These cases were categorised using the concept ‘scandalum in populo’, since they held the potential to encourage negative reactions (such as laughter, horror and contempt) from a church community. Rather than church experts, therefore, such cases relied on the evaluations of local worshippers and, Röder states, they reveal the social function of clerical bodies. Here too the sources present a certain flexibility, since the response a body received could depend on the particular community in which it was visible. Bodies were only irregular when not among those who shared the same characteristics, and thus a rule to the effect of ‘pygmies among pygmies’ (p. 148) could be adapted for a wide range of bodily traits. In particular, Röder shows how a similar understanding informed debates concerning skin colour as, in the global Catholic Church, some authors argued that non-white priests were only acceptable when serving non-white congregations. Röder has published on this aspect of his research in a recent article in the Journal of Religious History (2024), making it accessible for anglophone scholars.

The final section examines bodily conditions that were less discernible to observers and required verification from medical experts, including reported cases of epilepsy, syphilis and intersex bodies. Such discussions highlight in particular the bodily expectations of those entering religious orders, since undisclosed yet contagious infections were believed to threaten the community as a whole. In this context, the reasoning of ‘pygmies among pygmies’ was not applied for cases of ambiguous gender, since it was believed that intersex people could not live among one another for risk of sexual impropriety. With regard to sex and gender, Röder finds far less negotiability than for other forms of bodily differences. For women (or those believed to be women), arguments concerning ability or ‘scandalum in populo’ held limited significance – more important was establishing their essential womanhood. Röder has also published research on this topic in English in Gender & History (2023). In cases requiring medical expertise, physicians could claim interpretative superiority over canonical irregularities, yet Röder shows that their findings rarely decided a case, as church authorities combined a range of perspectives to reach a final judgement. This analysis makes an original and compelling contribution to the growing field of research concerning the role of medicine within early modern Catholicism.

Overall, Röder’s use of SCC records to reveal the flexibility with which expectations for priestly and monastic bodies were enforced in practice, and in relation to the real bodies of individuals, is captivating. The book is an innovative addition to recent scholarship regarding ‘dis/ability’, a conceptual approach which acknowledges the co-constitution of disability and ability, since defining what constitutes a ‘disabled’ body requires defining an ‘abled’ body. Röder shows how bodily difference could be conceptualised in relation to understandings of ability which were specific to the context of the Catholic Church (for example, the capability to perform the rites of the mass). While perspectives from ‘dis/ability’ studies permeate the book, this concept and the anglophone scholarship surrounding it (for example, Goodley, 2014) is not engaged with as explicitly as it could be. Moreover, while Röder highlights the agency of disabled individuals throughout, the book’s division into sections which centre external observers, whether church authorities, congregations or medical experts, somewhat undermines the autonomy supplicants are shown to have exerted through persuasive argumentation and the careful use of material assistance and disguise.

Nevertheless, Der Körper des Priesters is a brilliant investigation of clerical bodies and bodily difference which will be of interest to historians of the body, religion, dis/ability, gender, race and material culture. Particularly noteworthy is Röder’s attention to the materiality of the body and its engagement with other material things, including objects which alleviated physical impairments as well as those which disguised them. Röder uncovers instances of bodily and material experience and adaptation which can be difficult to find in early modern sources. Such cases confirm Röder’s argument for flexibility and creativity regarding the perfection of clerical bodies and make for fascinating reading.