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00.08.12, Frassetto, ed., Medieval Purity and Piety

00.08.12, Frassetto, ed., Medieval Purity and Piety


It is one of those paradoxes of history that advocates of clerical celibacy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries are commonly identified by medieval historians as religious reformers, while defenders of the practice within the contemporary Roman Catholic church are viewed as religious conservatives. Given that clerical celibacy has provoked so much impassioned debate since the Reformation, the nuanced collection of essays on the subject, edited by Michael Frassetto, is very welcome. Henry Charles Lea established the foundations for modern study of clerical celibacy with his An Historical Sketch of Sacerdotal Celibacy in the Christian Church (1867). It is thus very appropriate that Edward Peters, Lea Professor of Medieval History at the University of Pennsylvania, should survey its historiography, from the early polemicists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to more recent scholarship. Despite the controversial nature of the subject, good scholarly literature on clerical celibacy is still relatively hard to come by. Medieval Purity and Piety remedies an important deficiency in this respect.

There is a pleasing unity to this volume. A dominant theme, initially formulated in a general survey article of Paul Beaudette, but surfacing in all the essays, is that the ideology of clerical celibacy is embedded in notions of cultic purity and can be traced back to the ascetic movement of the third and fourth centuries. This perspective emphasizes the Church, and the priesthood in particular, as fundamentally separate from the world. In prescriptive literature from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the term "celibacy" is not as important as notions of chastity and freedom from sexual pollution. Another strong theme that emerges is that although prohibition of marriage or any other sexual union was not officially imposed on all clerics of the rank of subdeacon and above until the early twelfth century, the ground was laid for such policies in the ninth and tenth centuries, long before the reign of Pope Gregory VII. The process by which monastic ideology was imposed on clerics in higher orders was a long drawn out affair, intricately bound up with the evolution of society in the Latin West between the ninth and eleventh centuries.

In "The Cloister and Clerical Purity in the Carolingian World", Mayke de Jong explores how monastic ideals of sexual continence were enjoined on clerics during the Carolingian period. Even if its observance was far from widespread, monastically trained intellectuals ensured that continence was promoted as a clerical ideal. In "Why Celibacy? Odo of Cluny and the Development of a New Sexual Morality", Phyllis G. Jestice argues that Odo of Cluny played an important role in urging ideals of sexual purity on the clergy as a whole. When read against de Jong's essay, it becomes less clear that Odo's morality can really be described as "new". In many ways Odo simply extends the value system of the Carolingian era. Nonetheless, there can be little doubt that Cluny in the tenth century was influential in extending the influence of a monastic ideal within the Latin Church as a whole. The paper of Elizabeth Dachowski, ("Tertius est optimus: Marriage, Continence and Virginity in the Politics of Late Tenth- and Early Eleventh-Century Francia") draws similar conclusions through looking at the writing of Abbo of Fleury.

One of the more intriguing features of the early eleventh century are reports of heretical communities that preached renunciation of marriage while denouncing the worldliness of the clergy. The hostility of Ademar of Chabannes to these heretics, studied by Michael Frassetto through the testimony of Ademar's as yet unpublished sermons ("Heresy, Celibacy, and Reform in the Sermons of Ademar of Chabannes") demonstrates the anxiety provoked among orthodox Christians by communities who rejected eucharistic orthodoxy. Frassetto suggests that the reforming demands of these dissident groups exercised a powerful influence in shaping the ideology of eleventh-century religious reform. Whether we can here speak about an eleventh- century 'revolution' is debatable. There can be no doubt, however, that by the early eleventh century monastic ideology was endeavoring to assert its influence on the social order as a whole, as David C. Van Meter makes clear in "Eschatological Order and the Moral Arguments for Clerical Celibacy in Francia Around the Year 1000." Monastic concern to quell heresy, as at Orleans in 1022 and at Arras in 1031, testifies to the turbulence afflicting the social order, as well as the powerful influence of models of sexual purity as embodying a vision of a reformed social order.

One of the most subtle of the essays in this volume is R. I. Moore's paper, "Property, Marriage and the Eleventh-Century Revolution: A Context for Early Medieval Communism." Moore considers that the ideals of sexual purity and common ownership shared both by heretics and reformed monasticism in the eleventh century, mask a profound revolution in land ownership. Moore sees monastic ideology as providing a mechanism by which a privileged elite could establish its authority in society just as primogeniture enabled inheritance to be consolidated. Monastic renunciation of property and sexual relations paradoxically served to reinforce the social order, even when the same ideals were invoked to criticize authority. Megan McLaughlin focuses more on ideology than on power, in "The Bishop as Bridegroom: Marital Imagery and Clerical Celibacy in the Eleventh and Early Twelfth Centuries." Her study of how reform-minded bishops in the eleventh century adopted the image of the Bridegroom wedded to the Church helps explain how such bishops succeeded in asserting their own authority (not without much controversy) and thus demonizing in the process married clergy.

The labels of "conservative" and "reform-minded" are extremely dangerous within the context of the eleventh century. Gregory VII, so often labeled 'a revolutionary', emerges as indebted to clerical tradition in the essays of both Uta-Renate Blumenthal ("Pope Gregory VII and the Prohibition of Nicolaitism") and H. E. J. Cowdrey ("Gregory VII and Chastity"). Blumenthal demonstrates how so many of the initiatives of Gregory can be traced back to at least the mid-eleventh century. Gregory was certainly the most forceful of the popes in imposing monastic ideology on the clergy, but he was not the innovator that he is sometimes imagined to be. Cowdrey's essay looks closely at the letters of Gregory VII to show the unprecedented extent of his involvement in the every day affairs of the Church, particularly in Germany. The essay of Maureen C. Miller, "Clerical Identity and Reform: Notarial Descriptions of the Secular Clergy in the Po Valley, 750-1200" is more specific in focus. She observes how clerical identity shifted from formula relating to kin to allegiance to specific churches. The shift that she describes is fully consistent with that process documented in other essays, whereby the institutional Church came to assert its authority in ways that had been unimaginable in the eighth century. These changes were not initiated by Gregory. Rather Gregory brought them to a head, provoking great conflict in the process.

Celibacy is not just a device, however, by which clerical institutions maintain power in society. Francis G. Gentry offers one of the few literary perspectives in this volume, in "Owe armiu phaffheite: Heinrich's von Melk Views on the Clerical Life." Heinrich voices sharp criticism of the laxity of the clergy, from the perspective of a lay brother at Melk. Chastity provided a way of questioning clerical authority if it was not seen to leave up to the ideals it preached.

It was perhaps unfortunate that the only essay in the volume to explore the ramifications of monastic and religious reform for gender categories is that of Jane Tibbetts Schulenberg, "Gender, Celibacy, and Proscriptions of Sacred Space: Symbol and Practice." She points out what is obvious in all the legislation enforcing cultic purity, that it served to exclude women from sacred space, and thus from centers of power and influence. Schulenberg picks out some unusual cases from the late eleventh and early twelfth century in which these gender prohibitions are broken down. In the great majority of cases, these prohibitions are reported in resulting in divine punishment. There are exceptional situations like the visit to Cluny of Ava, abbess of St. Maur of Verdun, or Robert of Arbrissel's rebuke to the monks of Menelay for not allowing women to enter their church. From an institutional point of view, however, these are exceptions. Even if it was a major theme of certain currents of religious reform in the twelfth century that women should share with men in the fruits of the spirit, women were never allowed to share equal rights with those who held power. In this respect, it is an illusion to call advocates of clerical celibacy proponents of reform.

While this volume does not look at the uphill task faced by the authorities between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries to maintain celibacy on clergy in higher orders, it certainly helps us understanding why ideals of chastity were so important in the formative centuries in which the Latin Church established its identity.