Marjorie Plummer's new book on clerical marriage makes two valuable contributions to scholarship on the Reformation. The first is to show just how central questions of gender and sexuality were from its earliest days. The second centers on the “process of reform” in her book's title. Scholars often treat the early Reformation as beginning with theological insights of Martin Luther, which had political, social, and cultural consequences that transformed German and European society. In the case of clerical marriage, Plummer book demonstrates that this is an oversimplification. While marriage became a litmus test of evangelical pastors by the mid-1540s, she shows, this was not the natural result of theological differences. Rather, clear theological disagreement between Protestants and Catholics on this issue was the outcome of complex political, cultural, and social developments, not the other way around.

From Priest's Whore to Pastor's Wife investigates this issue in the adjacent archbishoprics of Mainz and Magdeburg from 1513 to 1545, roughly the period in which diocesan authority in both was held by Albrecht von Hohenzollern. The region covers a variety of political frameworks in which religious reforms were worked out, though Plummer devotes more attention to Saxony, Franconia, and Swabia than elsewhere. Her monograph is based on research in more than forty archives and an impressive collection of print sources, both of which helped her build a remarkable prosopographical database of more than 2,500 clergy.

The first three chapters cover the period from the pre-Reformation to 1525. Plummer shows a far more diverse picture than a monolithic late medieval church in which clerical concubinage was a potent symbol of Catholic corruption. Episcopal officers struggled to deal with actions they deemed moral failings. Their meager success reflected the fact that often secular authorities only cooperated when concubinage endangered some aspect of public order and parishioners usually tolerated concubinage unless it threatened local social norms. On this point, the Reformation marked less of a break than earlier scholarship has allowed. Luther was initially reluctant to support clerical marriage. His change of heart, culminating with his 1525 marriage to Katharina von Bora, came as the unintended result of interactions between territorial authorities, episcopal authorities, local magistrates, evangelical leaders, and parishioners. Andreas Karlstadt urged Wittenberg's clergy to break their vows of celibacy as unbiblical and distinguished between the immorality of clerical concubinage and honorable clerical marriage. The Wittenberg city council followed suit by ordering that priests renounce their concubines or marry them. This allowed magistrates to encroach on episcopal jurisdiction, and reaffirmed claims about the moral failings of the Roman church, but did not force them to expel clergy with sex partners. Meanwhile, territorial officials reinforced the legitimacy of clerical marriage without intending to, largely through inaction in enforcing episcopal or imperial mandates. Here again, jurisdictional conflicts inherited from the Middle Ages were a central factor. By the mid-1520s evangelical clergy were expected to marry. Territorial leaders, magistrates, clergy, and parishioners were now forced to respond on an issue about which many felt ambiguous at best.

The subsequent chapters tackle these responses from three perspectives. Chapter four looks at former monks and nuns who married. Parishioners were more likely to see these marriages as transgressive, though practical realities encouraged magistrates to recognize these unions. Many feared the public disorder and sexual misconduct that might result if former monks and nuns who had renounced their vow of celibacy remained unmarried. Even so, few encouraged their integration into lay society. Often even their families were reluctant to take them back, given the questions about inheritance that their departure from the cloister raised. Chapter five takes the view of secular authorities. Even as evangelical authors drew sharper distinctions between themselves and Catholics with regard to the sexual activities of clergy, secular officials grew ever more confident in asserting their jurisdictional autonomy against episcopal officers and imperial mandates. Chapter six examines those women who decided to marry former priests. While debates about clerical marriage treated women as passive subjects, Plummer shows women as essential agents of the Reformation. After all, marrying a former clergyman put a woman at risk—she broke imperial law, faced an uncertain economic future, and might become known as the “priest's whore,” an epithet used by laypeople to criticize clerical marriage. While women often defended their actions using the same biblical arguments as men, they faced different decisions. Parents often pressured former nuns to marry, for instance, as a way of demonstrating their own evangelical leanings or to avoid their daughter becoming a burden. Plummer shows that clerical marriage only became a defining characteristic of Protestantism as a result of the complicated interactions of these various actors with their own interests.

Chapter seven carries the story to the mid-1540s. Doubts about the legitimacy of clergy marrying remained, even among committed evangelicals, and the new model of the pastoral family raised many challenging questions that were hard for religious leaders, secular leaders, and parishioners to answer. In fits and starts, theological arguments coalesced while secular and religious authorities refined their policies. Many local authorities worked to preserve social order by ensuring that pastors found “honorable” wives, while parishioners patrolled the boundaries of social acceptability using rumors about sexual and familial behavior. Still, as Plummer's conclusion makes clear, confusion and anxiety about married clergy remained into the seventeenth century, even if the theological and legal debates waned after 1545.

Plummer paints a world in which religious reform was uncomfortable, multidirectional, and contingent. Individuals only made decisions within a complex set of political, legal, intellectual, cultural, and social parameters. The author convincingly argues that laypeople, parish clergy, and magistrates played a critical role in the outcome of the Reformation, even if the results were sometimes unexpected and unsettling.