“On Account of Scandal...”: Priests, their Children and the Ecclesiastical Demand for Celebacy

Abstract

By the late Middle Ages canon law demanded that the higher orders of clerics lead a celibate life. In reality, however, throughout the medieval period and into the early modern era a significant minority fell far from this ideal. Children, born after their fathers had taken vows to the higher orders, were visible evidence of their fathers’ failure to uphold these ecclesiastical standards. The anthropologist Mary Douglas argues that cultural systems need to be able to control or restrict anomalous or ambiguous events that might overturn their organizing principles and threaten their integrity. Through an examination of French synodal legislation from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, I will display how the ecclesiastical cultural system worked to maintain the principle of celibacy and its own integrity by turning these children into moral and legal outsiders whose very existence is a source of scandal and moral contagion to be avoided or contained. In this context medieval ecclesiastical officials situated these offspring, particularly the sons of priests, as the source of all cultural contradictions inherent in ideas about clerical celibacy, marriage, and the control of ecclesiastical resources. Furthermore, by delegitimizing these sons and then granting them access back into the ecclesiastical system through the mechanism of the dispensation, the advocates of clerical celibacy were able to triumph culturally in spite of the challenges to their ideals that the existence of these children presented.