Célibat, mariage et réforme : le problème dans le Midi

Abstract

Celibacy, Marriage and Reform : the problem in the Midi. Hermits and holy men and women were present and influential everywhere in eleventh-and twelfth-century Europe, but treated as heretics only rarely, and in exceptional circumstances. Yet comparison between (for example) those of Anglo-Norman England in the 1130s and ‘40s and the «good men » and «good women » of the Midi in the later twelfth and early thirteenth centuries suggests that their spirituality and social demeanour were in essence very similar, though very differently perceived and recorded. It is argued here that the difference in their fates is to be accounted for not by the religiosity of the ‘Cathars’ but by the diverging social and governmental trajectories of the midi and northern Europe in the twelfth century, and especially in the failure of the church to forge an alliance with the nobility of the region through the new structures of marriage and sexuality on which the success of the Gregorian reforms elsewhere were founded.