Clerical concubinage was one of the late medieval church’s most intractable disciplinary problems. Although censured with relentless regularity, neither bishops nor secular governments were able to make much headway against it. Bishops could ill afford to remove priests who refused to put aside their women; concubines were routinely tolerated in parishes if they were single and stayed out of the way. That context informs Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer’s superb study of clerical marriage to 1545. Roughly half of the book approaches the topic chronologically, starting in 1521. By shifting the focus away from the magisterial reformers, Plummer shows that clerical marriage had a pronounced grassroots character, as obscure and isolated parish clergy chose to marry, attempted to build local support for their actions, and formulated defenses when challenged. By 1525, marriage had emerged as the primary way in which clergy signaled their allegiance to Lutheran reform. Marriages also took place more openly, and were occasions both to normalize and to teach about clerical marriage. Meanwhile, bishops who initially treated it as an extension of concubinage finally began to see it as heresy and act accordingly.
A strength of these initial chapters also makes them hard to summarize: Plummer eschews simplifying or generalizing and shows the absence of any uniform development either of clerical marriage or local responses. As time passed, positions hardened on both sides. Lutherans advocated marriage as the norm for all Christians, marriage became a requirement for many clerical posts, and authorities protected married clergy. Catholics argued that tolerating these marriages, which in their eyes weren’t marriages at all, undermined marriage itself. Ironically, bishops found themselves having to tolerate concubinage in an effort to prevent priests from defecting to the Lutherans in order to marry.
In the first of three thematic chapters, Plummer shows that the marriages of monks and nuns need to be treated as a completely different category because their vows and life in community raised very different issues. The ways in which they defended marriage, the opposition they faced, and the problems they dealt with once out of conventual life mitigated against lumping their marriages into the same category as those of parish clergy. This is a brilliant chapter full of revelations. Another chapter shows how concubines came to be seen less as quasiwives and more as prostitutes, and how secular authority took more responsibility for punishing sexual misconduct even of the clergy. Finally, Plummer looks at the wives themselves. In the first decade, most clergy married down socially because respectable women were reluctant to entangle themselves with such risky relationships. The largest category of wives was former concubines. In the 1530s, as things became settled, more middle-class wives were found. The well-known Katherina Schütz Zell turns out to be atypical of early clergy wives.
Plummer clearly intends this as a scholarly monograph on her topic. But she can’t resist subtle interventions in the same-sex marriage debate, showing that the same language used now against gay marriage was used then (word-for-word) to disparage clerical marriage. In so doing, she gives us an outstanding example of the ways in which historical scholarship undertaken primarily for its own sake may unintentionally serve the cause of social transformation. Thus, what are typically presented as two contrasting and exclusive approaches to historical research should perhaps not be seen that way. Plummer writes with great clarity and often repeats her main points several times to keep them in focus, but the wide variety of experiences she includes and the subtlety of her case make this a difficult text for most readers below the graduate student level. Still, undergraduates writing senior papers should be encouraged to use it. This book is a great success. It sheds much light on an important subject that has not received the attention it deserves from Anglophone scholars. Although the archival research is focused on the archbishoprics of Magdeburg and Mainz, there is much material here from beyond their borders. Anyone interested in the effects of the Reformation on the clergy anywhere in Europe should read this book and will find it stimulating. It has certainly helped me to think in new ways about clerical marriage in England. This is the one-hundredth volume of the St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History, and it is fitting that the series should mark this milestone with such a superb contribution to Reformation studies. This must-read work deserves to be one of their most successful titles for decades to come.
