Thomas Fudge’s recent book, The Kidnapped Bishop: Coerced Ordinations in the Late Medieval Bohemian Province, comes festooned with laudatory comments on the back cover. They praise the author’s decision to examine a unique event in the history of the fifteenth-century church, a coerced ordination. This is what happened. In early 1417, a prominent Bohemian baron of the name of Čeněk of Vartemberk arranged for bishop Hermann Schwabb, the suffragan bishop of Prague, to be kidnapped and brought to Čeněk’s castle of Lipnice. There, he ordered him to ordain over a hundred aspirants to the priesthood, who would then serve in parishes that identified as Hussite, a version of the church that a recent council deemed heretical. The book at hand purports to investigate the question of whether or not coercion rendered these ordinations illegitimate.
Chapter 1 adds details to the episode and lists all the extant sources. This is helpful as it shows the way in which the different factions (and their spokesmen) reported the event. We also learn more of the context: both the archbishop of Prague and the Consistory refused to sanction the ordination, the archbishop subsequently ruled them “null and void,” and suspended Hermann from office. We also learn that Hermann accepted a benefice from the heretical lord Čeněk and that later in life he was said to have “regretted his role [in the ordinations] and resorted to calling his ordinands ‘scoundrels’.” But, in this retelling of context, the sources are taken at face value, and their potential bias is not interrogated. The exploration turns out to be a theological not a historical one.
Chapter 2 bears this out. Entitled “Medieval ordination and its challenges,” it seeks to explore “the nature and significance of the ordination rite itself” (p. 59). The chapter covers extensive territory, not always in an orderly way. We start with the meaning of apostolic succession, jump to medieval ordination lists in Prague in the fourteenth century, and meander to consider the way in which ordinations were practiced there. Alongside, the author scatters proscriptive texts that govern the practice of ordination. The source material jumps all over Christendom, in a way that is often hidden in the footnotes. For example, Prague diocesan records from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are judged against a council’s decision from 1095 (convened by Pope Urban II at Piacenza) and interpreted using an example from thirteenth-century practice in the English church (p. 63). A historian worries about such a free-wheeling use of sources, especially since this approach uses both descriptive and prescriptive sources.
The third chapter addresses sacramental coercion. It is a veritable melting pot of medieval opinions, decrees, and assorted commentary, little of which directly addresses the episode from Lipnice Castle. There is no argument here, but rather an attempt to extrapolate a principle from existing canon law. Here too, like a bird building a nest, Fudge brings all kinds of material from the Christian tradition, with many of the parallels and examples only tangentially relevant to the question at hand. Some examples address coercion on the part of those receiving the sacraments, such as Jews being forcibly baptized, men being forced into ordination, or women being married off under threat. Other examples speculate about Hermann’s inner state of mind whether he perhaps uttered the words of the ceremony but internally withheld the requisite consent. Fudge acknowledges that “[i]t is impossible to speculate meaningfully about what was in the mind of those coercing ordination” and then goes ahead anyway, to say that “it is doubtful that they were concerned with past precedents for the validity of coerced ordination, and it is quite likely the thought was not entertained” (p. 150). Or perhaps, they, like Aquinas (who is silent on this issue) assumed the ordination was valid based on the inviolable sacramental principle, ex opera operato (as opposed to ex opere operantis), a dispute settled by St. Augustine a millennium previously.
In the fourth and last chapter, Fudge restates the episode, which he still describes as “[a]n irresolvable paradox.” This is the most speculative of all the four, already very speculative, chapters. Fudge ponders the motives of various dramatis personae as well as various “irregularities” and “questionable procedures” (p. 178). He seems most perturbed by the lack of interest in this episode by virtually everyone else before him, including medieval canon lawyers, prominent living historians of Hussite Bohemia, and everyone in between. He laments that this [lack of interest in this episode] “overlooks the event’s implications and leaves an unfortunate intellectual lacuna” (p. 198). As someone who has spent an unpleasant week with this book, I must say that whatever lacuna there may have been, intellectually or otherwise, it still has not been meaningfully addressed.
Aside from the sloppy editing, missing footnotes, and haphazard structure, what bothers me most about the book is the methodological confusion on display here. The book purports to examine one episode in Bohemian history, but, really it laments an absence of a sacramental principle. This episode has the potential to illuminate life in a conflict-ridden society as well as the matter of changing allegiances (both the “kidnapped” bishop and the baron who orders his kidnapping each change sides at least twice in the course of a few short years). But the book accomplishes little of this. Instead, it whitewashes what historical richness there was to ponder a question that none of the contemporaries pondered. They all considered the priests ordained at Lipnice to be valid, whether they liked it or not. Fudge’s book does not give me sufficient reason to think they were wrong in doing so.
