From Priest's Whore to Pastor's Wife: Clerical Marriage and the Process of Reform in the Early German Reformation by Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer (review)

One of the most immediately visible changes brought by the Protestant Reformation was clerical marriage. Some late-medieval priests had concubines or short-term sexual relationships with women—despite all the attempts of the Church at reform—but this was still very different from having a wife. Almost all of the continental Protestant reformers married, and some (such as Luther) married former nuns. Despite this dramatic shift, relatively few studies within the vast outpouring of recent Reformation scholarship have investigated clerical marriage, and most of these have concentrated on the theological debate surrounding it. From Priest's Whore to Pastor's Wife takes this theological debate into account, but focuses primarily on the way in which clerical marriage was experienced on the ground by those who were spouses in such marriages and those who were their neighbors.

In this excellent study, Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer investigates a broad swath of Germany stretching from Swabia through Franconia to Saxony. Her evidentiary base includes manuscript sources from more than thirty city, state, and church archives ranging (alphabetically) from Augsburg to Zwickau and includes city council records, personal letters, visitation reports, court testimonies, and many other types of documents. Along with providing careful qualitative analysis, she also has compiled a database of more than 2500 men who became Lutheran pastors in the first decades of the Reformation; thus when she makes quantitative statements, she has the numbers to back them up. Many of these men had been Catholic priests, but she also studies the experiences of former monks and nuns who married and examines the women and men who married former clerics and nuns. In some places those women had been priests' concubines; Plummer examines the consequences of regularizing their already existing sexual relationships and also the reasons why clerical concubinage continued for decades even when marriage was an option.

The areas that Plummer studies were all within the Archbishoprics of Mainz and Magdeburg, which, during the period under study—1513 to 1545—were under the jurisdiction of Archbishop Albrecht of Brandenburg. Albrecht was a committed pluralist—the debt he had incurred to purchase a papal dispensation allowing him to assume multiple offices led to the indulgence sale that sparked the Reformation—but an opponent of clerical concubinage and even more of clerical marriage. His measures to stop this were ineffective, however, as were those of secular authorities, including the emperor. The story Plummer tells is not primarily one of a change imposed or blocked from above, however, but a process negotiated locally, as communities and individuals wrestled with the spiritual, political, economic, familial, and social consequences of allowing clergy to marry. In this, the book resonates with current debates about same-sex marriage in ways that neither Plummer—nor anyone else—most likely could have anticipated when she began her research.

Plummer examines why it was difficult for people to accept the woman and children living in the pastor's house as his legitimate wife and children, and provides many examples of popular opposition, from people jeering at pastors' wives in the street as "priests' whores" to pamphlets labeling married monks and nuns as "nothing more than common whores and knaves" (p. 131). She notes that some reformers and evangelical political authorities were themselves ambivalent. As Protestant pastors preached and wrote defenses of their new married state, they may have been trying to convince themselves as well as their congregations that it was respectable and godly. Popular support was there as well, of course, expressed most dramatically in the decision to marry a member of the clergy. Plummer's chapter on those who made this choice is especially welcome and effective, noting the wide variety of circumstances and reasons, including religious convictions, family pressure, and...