This is the fifty-second fascicle of the Cahiers de Fanjeaux. For those unfamiliar with the series, the annual fascicles explore elements of the religious history of southern France, broadly defined to include communities, concepts and structures. Contributions come from history, art history, archaeology, literature and other fields to address southern French sources. An important goal of the series is to better understand southern France and integrate it into the history of Europe. The Cahiers de Fanjeaux is a valuable source for important and emerging voices in many fields. The series also makes available work by scholars who may not publish widely outside of southern France.

The eighteen essays in L’Église et la chair prove a fine example of the series. The collection takes a broad view of the concept of ‘the flesh’, though most contributing scholars understand it as sexuality, including celibacy, adultery, incest, accusations of heretical depravity, legal punishment of inappropriate sexual behaviour and clerical marriage. The collection begins with an overview of the study of sexuality and gender in Europe and North America and concludes with an overview of medieval Christian attitudes towards sexuality, weaving in the main points of individual essays from the collection.

Though the essay topics and approaches vary, most essays in the collection seek to uncover practices and attitudes towards sex that can be obscured by medieval religious scholars upholding and enforcing Gregorian reforms. To expose varying practices, some contributing authors analysed legal records to see what people did, what they got punished for and how they were punished. For example, Michelle Armstrong-Partida uses registers of bishops’ visits to local parishes in Catalonia to show large numbers of priests married in all but name, with sons and daughters and concubines integrated into local parish life. These priests faced little punishment and Armstrong-Partida argues that they created a fatherly masculinity in contrast to male saints’ triumph over sexual desire. John Arnold uses communal statutes to uncover lay attitudes to sexual relationships, navigating a sexual world between the fabliaux and Christian rhetoric. He looks for evidence of men and women engaged in sexual relationships before marriage and outside of it, even in the face of potential public humiliation if caught. In an insightful study of the thirteenth-century Coutumes de Toulouse, Alessia Trivellone studies imagery and marginalia, including images of a punishment for adultery that required both the man and woman to run naked through the streets with a chain or rope connecting them. Trivellone's research method reveals significant wordplay between image and text with an underlying mocking critique of the new French rulers.

Contributing authors also re-analysed familiar texts of heretical inquisitions and anti-heretical literature. Their research reveals the place of sex in marriage, abstinence and pregnancy in the testimonies of people identified as Cathars. Mark Pegg pushes the envelope farthest here, arguing for a reinterpretation of who has ‘honour’, a concept based on landownership and social practice of status. Pegg argues that many scholars erroneously leave Cathars out of the honour system found in courtly literature. In his assessment, Cathar ‘good men’ received honour in ways that ‘good women’ did not. Jacques Paul reconsiders heresy inquest testimonies to understand sexual abstinence, finding that the chastity of Cathars and Catholic Christians might look the same on the outside, but the reasons for that chastity could differ significantly. Jean-Louis Biget frames the inflammatory accusations of sexual depravity found in anti-heretical literature in the broader picture of Gregorian reforms that made marriage a sacrament. He argues that the accusations of practices such as secret orgies were purely polemical attacks using newly charged taboos surrounding marriage.

While the individual essays are strong, the reader could wish for a bit more integration among the essays. Scholars discussing anti-heretical texts refer to one another's work, for example, but few scholars refer to work beyond their own topic. This means that essays that do not fit easily into a topic, like Christina Weising's analysis of obscene statuary in southern French churches, seem isolated. Her meticulous study raises the reader's awareness of sexual imagery on church facades, columns and walls, but the essay does not link to other research in the collection. The essay by Jacques Berlioz and Alain Guerreau on the flesh in sources of exempla seems a missed opportunity to show how topics like heresy, adultery and incest fit into a bigger Christian picture of ‘the flesh’. Berlioz and Guerreau use exempla to question what medieval authors meant by ‘the flesh’ and if there can be southern French exempla in medieval European Christian writing. Their statistical and analytical approach to the word caro in three sources of exempla puts the whole essay collection in broad Christian discussions of the physical body. They reveal deeper resonances for ‘the flesh’ beyond sex to a broader set of associations, including the Incarnation of Christ, food and the earth and earthly things. These resonances remain largely limited to their essay, however.

L’Église et la chair will interest and inform anyone studying sexuality in medieval Christian thought. It particularly highlights lay attitudes and recontextualises polemical texts, giving the reader refreshing insight into long-studied topics like heresy, adultery and clerical marriage. The essays highlight subtle changes over time in both local and Europe-wide contexts. The contributing scholars use creative methods of study that would benefit scholars even outside the study of sexuality.