Promiscuous Priests and Vicarage Children: Clerical Sexuality and Masculinity in Late Medieval England

Abstract

In 1501, a vicar named Roger Homme was summoned to appear before the church court of the diocese of Hereford. The judge charged him with sexual incontinence, alleging that he had had sex with Isabel Herford, a married woman from a neighboring village. Despite Roger’s vow of chastity and Isabel’s marital status, theirs was no casual relationship. According to the charge, the two lovers behaved as husband and wife: ‘Sir Roger Homme, vicar of Canon Frome, is incontinent with Isabel Herford, wife of James Herford of Munsley, whom he holds [and] from whom he produced a child, as if he has married her.’ 1 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 8 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.