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3. Priests and Their Partners
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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C h a p t e r 3 Priests and Their Partners When I told people that I was working on a book on couples who lived together without being married, most non-medievalists (and many medievalists ) immediately said, “Oh, priests.” The idea that some churchmen keep their vows of celibacy in the technical sense of being unmarried, but not in the more common sense of abstaining from sexual activity, surprises no one, whether we are talking about the Middle Ages or today, when a majority of Christians in the world belong to denominations in which the clergy may marry. The fact that “celibacy” developed to mean “chastity” as well as “the unmarried state” reflects the fact that the vast majority of Christian thinkers , across denominations and right up to the twenty-first century, have held that marriage is the only proper venue for sexual relations and therefore that anyone who is celibate in the sense of unmarried should also be celibate in the sense of abstinent. It made a good deal of difference to medieval European attitudes toward a particular union whether the given couple had the possibility of marrying. As I have argued, the way a particular union between laypeople was regarded often depended on the woman’s status and respectability. For priests’ partners , this was not the case because from the twelfth century on, they could not be considered fully married under any circumstances. Some women may have been driven into such unions by economic necessity, but some women may have had other reasons to choose them, ranging from personal affection to social advantage to involvement in the church. Despite repeated and concerted campaigns to brand priests’ partners as unclean, many lived undisturbed in their partnerships, unless and until either a local wave of reform or a disgruntled neighbor forced authorities to take notice. Nevertheless, the fact that these circumstances could disrupt the partnerships, the lack of legal 116 Chapter 3 protection for the woman and her children, and the fact that everyone knew it was not a legal marriage tended to make the woman’s honor as well as her economic standing precarious. Among laypeople, a union between people of roughly similar standing had a good chance of being recognized as a marriage. In a sense, no woman could ever be of equal standing as a priest and therefore could never enter into an entirely respectable relationship with him. But the idea that no woman—indeed, no layperson—could ever be of equal standing with a priest changed dramatically over the course of the Middle Ages. The church reformers of the eleventh and early twelfth centuries made an argument for the church’s superiority over lay society on the grounds of ritual as well as moral purity. Before that time, clerical celibacy was mainly a more perfect form of an asceticism that was an unenforceable ideal for both clergy and laity.1 In the reform era, it became part of a general effort to separate the clergy from the laity and increase the power and superiority of the church. New monastic movements emphasized asceticism as part of this separation . By the later Middle Ages, the separation, to the extent that it had ever existed in practice, had broken down. The secular clergy were not monks, and they were not very separate. The argument for celibacy became one for social order: the clergy should set a good example by not leading a disordered life. Echoes of the purity argument remained, especially in the literary treatment of priests’ partners; but by the end of the Middle Ages, the church’s treatment of clerical celibacy, both theoretically and in practice, was essentially about how to keep up the appearance of the greater holiness of churchmen. The degree of acceptance of priests’ partners varied, not just across different times and places within medieval western Europe but within a given community. Priests’ unions were common enough that many people must have lived alongside such couples and taken them for granted; yet women who lived with priests could also be labeled “whores” by their neighbors. A partial analogy might be the way same-sex couples are regarded in the United States in the early twenty-first century. Like priests and their partners in the Middle Ages, these couples cannot legally marry in most U.S. states as of this writing (although in the United States, they can no longer be hauled into court merely for engaging in sex, whereas medieval priests could...