Sex, Gender, and Episcopal Authority in an Age of Reform, 1000–1122

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)As McLaughlin demonstrates in this impressive study, brides, mothers, and fathers were frequent topics in the writings of churchmen during the ecclesiastical reform movement of the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Seeking to reform social institutions, clerics frequently wrote about marriage, condemning promiscuity, and praising chaste purity. And in even more emotional language, they defended a metaphorical marriage to the archetype of brides and mothers, the Church herself. Reformers claimed the Church was being prostituted when a simoniac bought and sold church offices; that the Church was being raped when one bishop ousted another; that an antipope was guilty of incest. Clerics used sexualized and gendered language in reforming the private life of families and the public life of the Church: they often had sexuality, gender, and kinship on their minds.McLaughlin's close study of polemical writing, theological treatises, canon law, and iconography should make book appealing to historians of medieval Christianity; she pays careful attention to differences between regions, over decades, among political parties. Although many of the reformers she cites are familiar figures--Humbert, Peter Damian, Gregory VII--she considers some of their rarely used writing, located through effective use of recent digital indexing. The theoretical issue that shapes study--the interplay between religious metaphor and social reality--should draw a larger readership. Without explicitly entering the conversation about the link between image and reality, McLaughlin clearly shows that discourse about the Bride of Christ, Mother of the Faithful, both shaped and reflected social norms.McLaughlin divides book into three sections--on brides, mothers, and fathers--with two chapters in each, one on what reformers said about actual practices, and the other on their metaphorical discourse about the Church, whom they considered the supernatural prototype for human brides and mothers.The section on brides is particularly informative. Attempting to reform the sexual behavior of the faithful, churchmen commented extensively on the conditions of betrothal, the need for consent, and the dower as well as on violations of the marital codes in divorce, incest, concubinage, and other sexual relationships outside of marriage (including sex between men). McLaughlin notes that actual women were rarely the focus of attention, as if the clerical writers were avoiding thinking about real women, discussing instead rules and the purity of the marital union. But when the clerics turned to the Bride of Christ, her mystical marriage was described in far greater detail than any earthly marriage, and often in highly erotic terms (49). In part this was simply effective polemics: simony and clerical marriage sounded worse if, in addition to being against church law, they defiled the Church's chastity. But the rhetoric also shows how seriously the reformers took the metaphor: men married the Church, betrayed her, even violated her. (Women did not, at least not in the polemics of these reformers. …

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