Jennifer Thibodeaux's engaging book, The Manly Priest: Clerical Celibacy, Masculinity, and Reform in England and Normandy, 1066–1300, investigates the important issue of clerical marriage in the Anglo-Norman world from the late eleventh to the thirteenth century. Thibodeaux focuses on shifting attitudes regarding the religious male body expressed (and recorded) by church reformers and opponents alike in the context of the church's insistence on clerical celibacy. In the late eleventh century the Catholic Church began to urge and impose clerical celibacy among the priesthood, as monks had long been accustomed, in order to prevent church revenues from being alienated as well as to promote “a new gender paradigm for the priesthood” (2). Thibodeaux highlights the central role that masculinity played in clerical discourse on sacramental purity and sexual abstinence, which emerged and changed alongside church reformers’ exhortations for a celibate clergy throughout Normandy and England during the later Middle Ages.
Thibodeaux focuses on the well-documented area of Normandy—relying on the extensive prosopographies and later episcopal records—in order to emphasize the multilayered connections between clerical celibacy and issues of masculinity. She examines how this new focus on a celibate priesthood served as an intersection at which competing notions of masculinity met. These included monastic reformers who wished to impose their own celibate lifestyle upon secular clerics, married priests who wished to continue to practice a monogamous sexual relationship and who defended their right to do so, and clerical sons who fought to continue in their fathers’ footsteps and become priests. By the end of this period, when clerical celibacy had become the norm, Anglo-Norman clerics continued to define their own physicality within this discourse of clerical celibacy and masculinity by living manfully (viriliter) without the distraction of sex and other corporeal diversions—unlike their inferior lay counterparts.
Thibodeaux's introduction is centered on the concept of gendered bodies and gendered identities in medieval Europe, beginning with Peter Brown's work on monastic politics and identity during late antiquity, the issue of celibacy in early church councils, and Lynda Coon's work on the ongoing connection between the priestly body, sexual abstinence, and the purity of the sacrament during the Carolingian period, which church reformers were eager to highlight and maintain. Thibodeaux reminds us that by the twelfth century the issue of clerical celibacy was only part of the broader movement on the part of the church to assert its clerics’ separation from—and superiority over—the laity. This attempt was complicated by the fact that the elite clergy of the Anglo-Norman world were often royal administrators, sometimes more interested in proclaiming matters of church reform—including clerical celibacy—than enforcing them in their dioceses and parishes. Moreover, evidence from episcopal records demonstrates that while ecclesiastical elites came to embrace the new model of celibacy, clerics in the rural parishes often remained in illicit unions with women and may have continued to pass their remote benefices on to their sons. Thibodeaux underscores her contribution by including some examples of recent work on clerical masculinity, marriage, and concubinage that have focused on the later Middle Ages; her own examination begins in the latter half of the eleventh century.
In chapter 1 she examines how ecclesiastical authors framed the act of asceticism—like depriving the flesh of sex—as embodying manliness in monastic bodies. Anglo-Norman writers employed the language of spiritual virility and self-control found in these older hagiographies for their own purpose of promoting a celibate lifestyle among contemporary churchmen. The section she devotes to the perceived dangers of effeminacy among the clergy, especially with regards to clerics’ dress and deportment that emulated laymen, could have benefitted from engagement with more current scholarship (26–32). In chapter 2 Thibodeaux returns to the issue of clerical marriage, focusing on how churchmen employed canon law to impose celibacy upon the clergy. Because Anglo-Norman bishops and other elite clergy had been accustomed to marrying and embracing traditional lay forms of masculinity, contemporary legislation regarding celibacy helped to transform understandings of both clerical marriage and clerical masculinity. In chapter 3 she explores the implications of celibacy legislation for the sons of priests, in particular the young men who wished to maintain their familial benefices. As the culture of a celibate priesthood took root and grew, the legal state of these bastards became increasingly precarious. In chapter 4 Thibodeaux looks at how married priests’ sons and supporters responded to the imposition of celibacy and how they framed it in terms of lay masculinity. Flipping the legislation on its head, they accused the reformers of being sodomites who wished to impose a new, sinful lifestyle upon their already virtuous and morally upright existence. In chapter 5 she discusses the proliferation of the ideology of the manly celibate within the province of Normandy during the thirteenth century (Normandy was conquered by France in 1204). It was during this period that several reform-minded archbishops expanded the promotion and enforcement of celibacy legislation and proper clerical dress and deportment. Finally, in chapter 6, she shows how, by the end of the thirteenth century, the priestly body was personified as the manly body, that is, one of self-control, tempered bearing, and proper appearance. The reality, however, can be found in the visitation records of Archbishop Odo Rigaldus (1248–1275), which record Norman clerics often emulating lay behavior by frequenting taverns, gambling, dressing fashionably, hunting, riding a horse in an open cape, and fighting.
Instead of engaging these renowned sources with current scholarship on violence, masculinity, and infamy in medieval Europe, however, Thibodeaux instead relies on work from the 1990s, in one case employing scholarship focused on classical Greece when discussing how, “in certain medieval contexts” violence could be acceptable when the situation involved alcohol and sexual rivalries (145). Thibodeaux concludes that the true struggle over masculine identity was between monastic reformers and the secular clergy rather than priests and laymen, though greater nuance may have been gleaned by integrating more recent scholarship dealing with the intersection between clerical and lay identities in medieval England and France.
