Defiant Priests: Domestic Unions, Violence, and Clerical Masculinity in Fourteenth-Century Catalunya by Michelle Armstrong-Partida

Abstract

Reviewed by: Defiant Priests: Domestic Unions, Violence, and Clerical Masculinity in Fourteenth-Century Catalunya by Michelle Armstrong-Partida Richard Ibarra Michelle Armstrong-Partida, Defiant Priests: Domestic Unions, Violence, and Clerical Masculinity in Fourteenth-Century Catalunya (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2017) xvi + 392 pp. The medieval clergy, especially the local village priests, are often described by scholars and students as ignorant, promiscuous, and corrupt. This view is largely based on two assumptions: the first is a general acceptance of the medieval and Protestant rhetoric about clerical deviancy that can be found throughout the literature, synodal decrees, and sermons of the period, and the second is the acceptance of the rhetoric separating the clergy from the laity, particularly through celibacy. Any divergent action is simply brushed off as deviant, with no interest in trying to understand and more fully explain the "errant behavior." Michelle Armstrong-Partida's Defiant Priests: Domestic Unions, Violence, and Clerical Masculinity in Fourteenth-Century Catalunya tackles these assumptions through a gender-sensitive reading of the sources, providing a very fruitful explanation of the mental world of the average village priest—at the very least in Catalunya, if not elsewhere in the Mediterranean and Central Europe—that explains their behavior as something beyond lack of continence. Looking at these priests as fundamentally enmeshed in their local communities, Armstrong-Partida argues that their proclivity to enter into domestic unions, called clerical concubinage by ecclesiastical authorities, and to use violence and intimidation to solve disputes can be explained as a statement about their masculinity in the terms that the lay society around them would understand. Scholarship on the issue of clerical concubinage has generally only tried to understand the position of these priests with a kind of [End Page 222] sympathy in the transition period surrounding the First and Second Lateran Councils, when it was officially banned in canon law. Moreover, most readings of the sources tend to conflate reports of clerical sexuality with the more passing sexual relations common among the clergy in France, England, and the Low Countries, ignoring their distinction from long-term, marriage-like unions. These long-term relationships were viewed differently by the laity in other parts of Europe, like Catalunya, where their prevalence and general acceptance among the parish community in most cases suggests that celibacy was not universally identified as the defining feature of the clergy, despite the efforts of reformers. It has also been argued in previous scholarship that a crisis in clerical masculinity was exacerbated by the Gregorian Reform, only to be resolved by the promulgation of a separate kind of clerical masculinity focusing on celibacy, eschewing any contact with women, the display of intellectual prowess, or the identification of clergy as spiritual fathers, warriors, or bridegrooms. However, Armstrong-Partida argues that much of this scholarship focused on the redefinition of clerical masculinity among the clerical elite, who often only engaged with others who shared similar views. For the majority of the secular clergy living in a village community from which they often originated, these alternative forms of proving clerical masculinity did not necessarily suffice. It is Armstrong-Partida's attention to this difference and her careful reading of the sources, revealing the underlying issue of masculinity where others saw only incontinency, that are the two greatest strengths of the book. With this new perspective, she combs the visitation records of the dioceses of Gerona, Vic, Urgell, and Barcelona over a sixty-year period showing not only the prevalence of clerical concubinage, especially the marriage-like unions which account for eighty percent of the charges related to clerical sexuality, but also the unexpected acceptance shown by the diocesan authorities and the parish communities in their dealings with clerical families. For example, Armstrong-Partida argues that the naming practices of a priest's female partner in Catalunya, usually referred to as "muller, dona, or fembra," were more neutral than the terms "vilis mulier, bagassa, and puta [used] to indicate a woman's sexual promiscuity in Catalan society," which were generally absent from visitation records concerning clerical families (47). This differed from practice in northern Europe, where clerical families were much less prominent and the attitudes of reformers had enjoyed greater success in changing...