Jennifer Thibodeaux has put her finger on what must have been a central, and possibly the key, reason for clerical resistance to the legal imposition of celibacy on medieval Christian priests: the threat it posed to their identity as men. She shows how proponents of “reform” attempted to construct a vision of masculinity that would enable celibate priests to feel “manly” despite their inability to participate in common male activities (including, but not limited to, fathering children), and she generally argues that this “manly priest” ideology ultimately carried the day. However, the great contribution of Thibodeaux's study lies not in retelling the story of the triumph of ecclesiastical reform, but rather in highlighting the extent to which both clerics and communities sometimes resisted and sometimes ignored these attempts to redefine masculinity well into the thirteenth century.
The new gender paradigm promoted for the priesthood by ecclesiastical reformers from the eleventh century onwards faced particular opposition in England and Normandy for a number of structural reasons unrelated to ideals of masculinity per se, among them the extremely high percentage of lay patronage over parish churches or the importance of what Eleanor Searle has dubbed a system of “predatory kinship” (Predatory Kinship and the Creation of Norman Power: 840–1066 [University of California Press, 1988]). Nevertheless, by the mid-thirteenth century, the majority of bishops in both regions had succumbed to the new behavioral model. Yet, I was not entirely convinced by Thibodeaux's explanation of why they did so. The textual evidence brought forward in this study (for instance, in her analysis of the sermons of Odo Rigaldus on pp. 118–125) frames the debate over clerical comportment largely in terms of ritual purity (and concerns over the loss of church property through inheritance) rather than in terms of masculinity. Thibodeaux may be exaggerating the importance of “manliness” as a dimension of the reformist discourse, but she appears to be spot on in insisting that the desire to remain manly (as understood by contemporary secular society) fueled opposition to that discourse, which ultimately had limited success convincing parish clergy that it was more manly to resist sexual urges than to indulge them, that it was more manly to avoid women and children than to govern them, or that it was more manly to shun sports, fighting, and drinking than to participate in them.
This study makes clear, more than any previous one, how dramatically the ecclesiastical legislation of the eleventh through thirteenth centuries “went against the very fabric of traditional conceptions of manliness” (41). Thibodeaux reveals in great detail the dilemmas faced by the men who were targets of reformist anti-marriage legislation and attends to their multifaceted strategies of resistance. These ran the gamut from a 1072 riot by the canons of Lisieux, who (manfully) threw stones at their reformist archbishop, John of Avranches, to more devious subterfuges. For instance, “married clerics found ways to keep their women . . . [when they] moved their women out of their homes in the towns, but into their country manors” (something I would have described as married couples finding ways to stay together and women moving to their country manors), while the sons produced by clerical unions were styled as nephews (particularly after 1150), enabling them to be trained for, and to inherit, their fathers’ benefices (52–53, 80–83). The letters of Arnulf of Lisieux testify to the existence of a network of protection to aid clerical families even in the late twelfth century, as well as to the fact that parishioners had few objections to such arrangements. Finally, proponents of clerical marriage (for instance as a natural right, justified by historical precedent and scriptural authority) and the retention of traditional masculine scripts for priests also produced a number of explicit textual defenses of their position. Such straightforward works of vocal advocacy, however, ceased to be written after the 1130s.
Thibodeaux's study culminates in a powerful analysis of the systematic visitation records of Archbishop Odo Rigaldus of Rouen (1248–1275), focusing on what they reveal about clerical masculinity in the thirteenth century. This source is extremely well known and has been utilized extensively by previous scholars, but never from this perspective. Everywhere he looked, Odo encountered priests who “acted like [secular] men, exhibiting sexual vigor, boldness, and physical prowess . . . bonding with laymen, fighting their opponents, and projecting a public presence of might. . . . Parish clerics still practiced a gender identity that integrated them into a community of peers” (126–127). This marvellous and incisive chapter, which could be profitably assigned in many different courses, introduces the reader to priests who perhaps embraced the scandal associated with brothels because it “established their bodies as virile and manly” (140), and who engaged in tavern brawls “to defend themselves against questions of their sexual prowess” (145).
As Thibodeaux notes in her conclusion (152), recent studies of late medieval England, Spain, Italy, and Germany have shown that, like the Norman priests who so frustrated Odo Rigaldus, parish priests elsewhere lived with women in quasi-marital relationships hundreds of years after clerical celibacy became established law for Christian Europeans. By explaining this potentially puzzling fact through the lens of masculinity, Thibodeaux has made an important contribution to church history.
