Smith Review TMP Catholic Historical Review20200122 99592 1rbbx26

The Manly Priest: Clerical Celibacy, Masculinity, and Reform in England and Normandy, 1066-1300 by Jennifer d. Thibodeaux (review) Katherine Allen Smith The Catholic Historical Review, Volume 103, Number 4, Autumn 2017, pp. 797-798 (Review) Published by The Catholic University of America Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cat.2017.0166 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/680796 Access provided at 22 Jan 2020 15:14 GMT from University of Wisconsin-Whitewater BOOK REVIEWS 797 Christianity does not get off the hook in Angenendt’s account. He recognizes problems and inconsistencies, which he puts forward even in his chapters on the Bible and early Christianity, maintaining a disparity between the Old Testament’s Edenic portrayal of the equality of the sexes and a notion of male headship to which women must be submissive. His account of the medieval period unveils numerous ambiguities and tensions. On the one hand, the period affirmed consent as the basis of marriage, thus making the woman an equal partner in agreeing to a marriage; on the other, women were often subject to familial economic concerns. On the one hand, the Church denounced spousal abuse and protected women from brutality; on the other, many husbands treated their wives poorly. The point for Angenendt, however, is that Christianity did affirm the equality the sexes and conceived of marriage as a partnership; the point is that, when given the chance, the Christian Church did protect women from savage husbands. What Angenendt wants his readers to understand is how unusual such a situation is in the history of the world. While historians expert in each era will undoubtedly find things to criticize (I found some in his treatment of the high medieval period), overall this book offers a historically-grounded work to appreciate Christianity’s contribution to gender equality and a notion of marriage as a partnership with the relationship of the spouses at its core. It also offers Catholics a historical perspective to think through difficult questions in the Roman Church today, such as celibate priests, birth control, and the participation of those in second marriages in communion. ATRIA A. LARSON Saint Louis University MEDIEVAL The Manly Priest: Clerical Celibacy, Masculinity, and Reform in England and Normandy, 1066-1300. By Jennifer D. Thibodeaux. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2016. Pp. viii, 230. $59.95. IBSN 978-0-8122-4752-7.) This important study refocuses the scholarly discussion of medieval church reform on issues of gender, convincingly arguing that in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries “the language of manliness was used to enforce an ascetic standard of the male body as the emblem of clerical life” (p. 151). Building on recent scholarship on medieval masculinity, the book’s first three chapters reconstruct the origins of this reformist discourse and explore its impact on elite clerics and their families, particularly their sons. Here, Thibodeaux weaves together evidence from polemic and law with an abundance of case-studies that illustrate, often quite poignantly, the difficult choices facing married clerics in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Turning in Chapter 4 to the married clergy’s discursive counterattack on the reformers, she shows how such men mined the same body of scriptural and theological texts to justify their “natural right as men” (p. 86) to marry and father children, and to cast celibate ascetics as unmanly sodomites. Chapters 5 and 6 move us forward into the thirteenth century, showing how the reformers’ assault 798 BOOK REVIEWS on clerical marriage and fatherhood affected the parish clergy. Thibodeaux’s work on the Norman episcopate demonstrates the importance of local support for reforming agendas; whereas bishops unsympathetic to the war on Nicolaitism often turned a blind eye to married clergy in their dioceses, reformist prelates—notably, the archbishop of Rouen Odo Rigaldus (r. 1248–75)—used legal and pastoral means to apply pressure to unchaste priests. But even the most reform-minded bishops needed to tread with care in this area, given the persistent staffing problems of the later medieval parish system. Further, Thibodeaux makes it clear that not only were many thirteenth-century priests still living— unrepentantly so—in quasimarital unions, but that their parishioners often cared little about such arrangements, provided the priests did their spiritual work well. Thibodeaux marshals an impressive amount of evidence in support of her thesis, presents her evidence clearly and accessibly, and carefully supports her historiographical interventions. She has a knack for putting a human face on historical discourse, as well as an eye for memorable detail: thus, we learn that more than half of the twelfth-century canons of St. Paul’s, London were the sons of priests (p. 71) and that priests’ sons defended their right to ordination by pointing to what they termed the “adulterous union” (p. 107) of the Virgin Mary and Joseph. Whereas most previous studies of ecclesiastical reform have focused on the eleventh and twelfth centuries, her coverage of a longer period enables Thibodeaux to appraise the reform movement’s strategies and relative success over time. While the relatively narrow geographical focus allows for a more richly contextualized study, however, the book falls short of being truly comparative in the last three chapters, due simply to the unevenness of surviving evidence for England and Normandy. Latinists may also wish for more consistent incorporation of the original sources’ language into the main text’s discussions, especially given the use of endnotes rather than footnotes. But this is not to detract from this study’s significance as a contribution to the history not only of clerical masculinity, but of ecclesiastical reform, family, and parish life in the central Middle Ages. The Manly Priest deserves a wide readership among medievalists, and would be an excellent addition to courses focused on the history of gender and sexuality, marriage, or medieval Christianity. University of Puget Sound KATHERINE ALLEN SMITH Cross and Culture in Anglo-Norman England: Theology, Imagery, Devotion. By John Munns. [Bristol Studies in Medieval Culture.] (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: The Boydell Press. 2016. Pp. xviii, 333. £60.00; $99.00. ISBN 9781783271269.) John Munns describes his book as a “cultural history of an image, in which a period of English religious culture and society will be explored through one particular imaginative lens” (p. 5). The result is a truly impressive interdisciplinary study of a period of art history that has long merited more scholarly attention. As the title suggests, the book is divided into three interdependent parts: the theology of the cross, the image of the cross, and the way of the cross. It takes as its starting point