Dyan Elliott’s most recent book is a game changer. In it, she overturns a forty-year-old pattern of writing about medieval sodomy as queer liberation with a new narrative that focuses on coercion, violence, and silence, and above all on the breach of clerical celibacy and the corruption of minors in stories of same-sex sexuality involving clerics and monks. The book is also an indictment of Catholic clergymen and the clerical hierarchy of our own day for the continued adherence to attitudes and practices begun centuries ago, and she defends the right and responsibility of historians to comment meaningfully on the present. Finally, the book is also an implicit criticism of modern historians of homosexuality, who have ignored the abuses of power in our sources for a fiction about individual autonomy amid social oppression. The gay culture of the Middle Ages, insofar as it existed, was not so much the “triumph of Ganymede,” as John Boswell phrased it, but the “triumph of Jupiter,” his rapist, in Elliott’s words (10-11).
The book is divided into two parts. The first part, in five chapters, details a history from the third to the thirteenth century. Chapter 1 examines Christian ideas about clerical and monastic sexual sins from the third to the ninth century, from the canons of church councils, penitentials, and opinions of patristic and Carolingian theologians. The problem, she argues, was how to correct the misdeeds of clerics while preserving the privileges of the clergy. It was preferable for individual clerics or their superiors to leave these sins hidden, many believed, rather than to risk scandal by exposing the sins of the church leadership to public light or by encouraging lay judgment of the clergy. Along the way, a consensus emerged that “the secret sinner was less culpable than the individual who sinned openly” (25), a stance helped along by the principle of the discreet “fraternal correction” of sinners (a practice based on Matthew 18:15: “if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone,” KJV) and by the development of private confession.
Chapter 2, titled “The Trouble with Boys,” begins with the forceful statement that “the culture of pederasty that was customary in the classical world was covertly sustained among the medieval clergy” (37). The many Christian prohibitions of pederasty, Elliott maintains, came not out of concern for children but from anxieties about sexual pollution and abhorrence for same-sex sexuality. In many late Roman and early medieval texts, boys are recognized as sources of sexual temptation and even blamed for it. Notwithstanding, monasticism as it evolved offered regular opportunities for intimacies between adult men and boys, consensual or coerced, especially given the presence of oblates. Only in the seventh-century rule of Fructuosus of Braga, with its harsh punishments for adult monks who prey on boys, does Elliott see real opposition to these dangers, though his perspective was translated into the early canon law compilations of Burchard of Worms and Yves of Chartres.
Chapter 3, titled “The Problem with Women,” sets the opinions established in the previous chapter against the backdrop of the eleventh-century imposition of clerical celibacy. Elliott notes the rare denunciations of clerical sodomy in Odo of Cluny’s Occupatio and Peter Damian’s Liber Gomorrhianus. She also repeats the several charges made against the reformers, that in prohibiting priests from marrying they were encouraging fornication and sodomy. But, she concludes, the preoccupation with clerical marriage left little room for other sexual sins, and the canon collections of Gratian and thereafter left off or obfuscated earlier prohibitions of clerical sodomy. The prohibition of clerical marriage, Elliott argues, could much more forcefully be tied to fears about the polluting impact of women on priests and on the sacraments. Sex between priests and women, moreover, could be linked to the early Christian heresy of Nicolaitism, adding strength to its proscription, but there was no similar heresy that could be connected to sex between priests and boys.
Chapter 4 takes up a thought begun in the previous chapter, that clergymen brought to public notice the sodomitical sins of laymen in an attempt to deflect from the sodomites within their own ranks. Here she reviews a series of figures and events from around the year 1100. She describes the pederastic poetry of Marbod of Rennes and Baudri of Bourgeuil, on the one hand, and the scandals of the sexual misconduct of bishops Manasses of Reims, John of Orleans, and Ralph of Tours, on the other, as a new openness coming in the wake of the prohibition of clerical marriage. Yet much greater attention was given to laymen like William II Rufus, king of England, for permissiveness about sodomy at his court. Elliott suggests that claims about secular sodomites were blatant attempts to divert attention from clerical sodomites: “like illusionists practiced in the art of misdirection” (109), and Rufus was a perfect target because of his opposition to church reform.
Chapter 5 outlines the continued opposition to sodomy in twelfth- and thirteenth-century writings. She provides examples from visionary literature and conciliar canons that condemn it: both the Third and Fourth Lateran Councils, for example, in 1179 and 1215 respectively, ordered sodomite clerics to be defrocked. But intensified language about scandal--which Peter the Chanter called a sin in itself--and the growing notion of the absolute “seal” of the confessional made it difficult to prosecute clerical sinners openly. Even confessional manuals of the era cautioned against asking for too much detail, which helped to hide sodomitical clergymen. It was as if the spirit of the times cautioned priests, in the early fourteenth-century words of Thomas of Cobham with which Elliott concludes this first part of the book, “If you can’t be chaste, be careful” (132).
Elliott has organized Part II of her book differently. It begins with a prologue that documents the proliferation of antisodomy laws in secular codes from the fourteenth century and the harsher penalties against lay offenders. In contrast, she notes, there are only a few documented cases of sodomy by clerics in ecclesiastical courts from the same period. Her explanation: “[clerical and monastic] sodomy was only prosecuted in the event that the scandal could not be contained, in which case failure to prosecute ran the risk of even greater scandal” (146). Four chapters follow that showcase four environments where sexual abuse of boys was likeliest: monasteries, choirs, schools, and episcopal curia.
Chapter 6 describes the monasteries between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. Elliott notes the presence of pederastic themes in monastic art, including the famous Ganymede capital at Vézelay and the growing restrictions on oblates: she wonders, for example, whether the reluctance to admit boys to Cistercian monasteries stemmed from concerns about sexual temptation. Cluniac regulations excommunicated forced “vice against nature”--though first only in 1292--but any charges had to be supported by two or three witnesses, and if guilt were unproved an accuser could be charged with malice, both of which made prosecutions difficult. Indeed, there were only four such cases between 1259 and 1408, including one against a Brother Jordan, who simply moved from one monastery to another to avoid punishment.
Chapter 7 presents the cathedral boys’ choirs popular in the later Middle Ages, whose members, often drafted from poor families, lived together under clerical supervision. She begins with the writings of Jean Gerson, including a 1411 rule he wrote for choristers. Gerson complained of the physical mistreatment of these boys, including beatings by choir masters and bullying at each other’s hands, and of their sexual misconduct, though he named only the rape or seduction of younger boys by older ones. Elliott then provides two lengthy examples of clerics charged with sex with choir boys: the first, of John Day, a canon of Leicester, in 1440, and the second, of John Stocker, a chaplain of Basel, in 1475. The overwhelming evidence against both men and the numbers of their victims, she believes, “made it impossible...to look away” (184).
Chapter 8 outlines the abuse of boys in the cathedral schools and universities of the later Middle Ages. Again, Elliott notes the commonplace physical mistreatment of schoolboys, which set the tone for their sexual abuse. She reminds us that boys often read erotic literature such as Ovid’s poetry as part of their education, and schoolmasters condemned sodomy in pedagogical texts, most famously Alan of Lille in his De planctu naturae. Yet there are only a few vague references to sexual sins in sources about the schools. So again she uses two of the rare examples to draw out possible scenarios. The first involved Arnold of Verniolle, brought before an inquisition into heresy in Pamiers in 1323, who described his own seduction as a schoolboy and then his sexual conquest of schoolboys later in life. The second implicated Richard Edmund, a fellow of Merton College, charged in 1492 with “nocturnal prowling” and “visiting suspect spots within the university” as part of his “inciting and provoking various and different youths to the sin against nature” (208).
Chapter 9 turns to evidence for sodomy within the episcopal curia, that is, among the staff of a bishop’s household. Here Elliott uses the evidence provided by Florence’s Office of the Night, which hunted and charged sodomites of all sorts between 1432 and 1502, and whose members complained of lack of cooperation from ecclesiastical officials whenever clerics were charged. Elliott uses one detailed example, that of Donato Piermaria Bocco, the vicar-general to the bishop of Pistoia, who was accused in 1507 of the rape of several male underlings or of their male relatives dating back many years, and who confessed to the crimes but was permitted to remain in his position.
In her conclusion, Elliott draws contrasts between clerical sex with boys and clerical concubinage. Concubinage did not bring the unwelcome consequences for inheritance of marriage, and could be tacitly tolerated, even if visible: as several recent studies have shown, local populations did not seem to mind much if their parish priests cohabited with women. But there was not the same tolerance for clerical pederasty, intensifying the need for hiding and silence. Elliott does not attempt to continue her narrative to the present, though she does speculate about the continued silence about clerical sodomy even in moments of reform from the late sixteenth-century Council of Trent to the 1917 Code of Canon Law and its 1983 revision. She mocks the blame placed recently by some conservative Catholics on the sexual revolution and LGBTQ+ rights as responsible for the abuse of children by Catholic clergymen: her book has demonstrated that the problem of clerical pedophilia existed throughout the Middle Ages.
Elliott has put so many and varied texts to use, always with thoughtful analysis: some familiar to historians of medieval sexuality, others newly brought into the conversation, together with archival sources from varied locations. She is attempting a difficult task, because she must at times argue from silence. She admits at one point that the limited evidence might lead some scholars to conclude clerical sodomy was not much of a problem (170). Yet she builds a strong case that, regardless of actual numbers--and she believes them to be larger than the evidence admits--the protection of silence and the wish to avoid scandal made it nearly impossible to bring offenders to justice, however many there were.
Throughout her book, Elliott treats us to clear and elegant prose, and occasional humor. Referring to the scarcity of evidence for sodomy among Cluniac monks, for instance, she writes that apparently “what happened at Cluny, stayed at Cluny” (167). A few pages later, she refers to the Cluniac sodomite-monk Brother Jordan as “Peter Damian’s worst nightmare” (169). I found only one typographical error of substance: Richard Edmund is said to have been expelled from Merton College after Christmas 1492, but then said to have been still listed as a faculty member “a month and a half later” in February 1483, which should obviously be 1493 (209).
Again, this book will be a game changer. Elliott says that historians of sexuality have “lingered over” the silence of “the men who were unable to express their sexuality openly,” and she says she wants only “to draw attention to another set of silences,” that is, those surrounding “the clergy’s predation on the young and ensuing efforts to silence the victims” (230). But she is giving us a new paradigm with which to understand medieval sexuality and its fraught relationship with religion.