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Introduction

Gendered Bodies and Gendered Identities

In the late twelfth century, the Anglo-Norman archdeacon Gerald of Wales questioned the custom of clerical unions by describing the misfortune that priests suffered through their sexual relationships with women:

For they rob you of your money and property, and you spend on them what should be used to adorn the churches and help the poor…. They rob you also of your good name and honor throughout the country when, because of them, you cannot hold your head high before your superiors, your patrons, or even your parishioners (among whom all your authority becomes worthless)…. To lose heaven because of this shameful part of the body and over a relationship which you possess neither by personal right nor as yours forever.¹

Gerald acknowledged in his Jewel of the Church that nowhere in the Bible or in apostolic tradition was marriage prohibited for the clergy. Yet celibacy was advocated for “the sake of greater purity and integrity.” Throughout this work, he consistently linked priests with sexual temptation, sexual disorder, and the misfortune that resulted from such illicit behavior.

For the medieval clergy of the reform era, there was a growing conflict between the concept of the celibate male body and that of the sexual one. Post-Conquest England and Normandy present a vibrant story of the intense competition between monks and clerics over a redefinition of the religious male body, a competition spurred by the prevailing custom of that region, clerical marriage, and new efforts to impose clerical celibacy. This book examines the changing models of the religious male body from the late eleventh to the thirteenth century at a pivotal, transformative moment in the history of clerical masculinity, a period when celibacy laws were created and enforced. Celibacy decrees were motivated by a need to enforce sacramental purity and to prevent the alienation of church revenues, as others have argued; but the discourse of celibacy that reformers promoted throughout England and Normandy was inspired by a new gender paradigm for the priesthood. The Manly Priest looks at how this norm affected the religious male body, from monastic reformers who elevated the ascetic celibate to married clerics who defended their rights to marry; and also from the perspective of clerical sons, men who followed their cultural tradition and entered their fathers’ occupations, to the lived experience of thirteenth-century parish priests, who, more than one hundred years after the beginning of the reform movement, continued to define their bodies by the local, cultural markers of manliness. This book highlights the complex intersection between celibacy and masculinity.

The monastic view of the male body was inherited from late antiquity, a time when some devout Christians lived lives of self-denial; monastic writers of the reform period likewise characterized the male body as one that required constant discipline and vigilance in order to transcend desires, not only sexual desire but all bodily appetites. But while the monastic body could not engage in sexual intercourse or masturbation, it was still a virile one through sexualized chastity, a set of performances that emphasized the fully intact body’s struggle against sexual desires. Peter Brown has noted that, in the late Roman period, men and women used performances of gender to define their identities, as part of a complex negotiation he called “identity politics.”² Similarly, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, religious writers, both monastic and clerical, used their notions of the body to create their gender identities and to highlight the deficiencies of others who did not conform to their models. Conflicts and defamation provide a means of expressing ideas of masculine identity. Priests, as secular clerics, operated in the world, living alongside laymen who defined manliness by their traditional cultural standards. As clerics resisted the manly celibate model, reformers continued to define and subject the priestly body to further standards of somatic control; by the thirteenth century, a priest’s sexual and nonsexual actions had become the subject of ecclesiastical legislation, all toward the greater goal of a religious male embodiment.

Sacerdotal celibacy became a vital component of this religious male embodiment. In the late Roman era, Christian writers debated clerical celibacy and clerical marriage using scripture, commonly drawing a precedent back to the apostolic age. The Bible offers mixed and inconclusive messages on the issue of a celibate priesthood, providing no degree of certainty that Christ preferred celibate men over married men as his disciples; at times, the scriptures defend the marriage of ministers, but in other key passages encourage their sexual abstinence.³ In the promotion of a celibate priesthood, the Christian Church made ample use of these passages, particularly Paul’s famous injunction in his letter to the Corinthians, which stated, “It is well for a man not to touch a woman,” and “to the unmarried and widows I say that it is well for them to remain single as I do.”⁴ The Hebrew model of priesthood was gradually adopted by the Christian Church during the fourth century, a model that required ritual abstinence because physical purity was necessary in order to offer sacrifices; however, the ritual abstinence required of Hebrew priests was temporary, and they were not barred from marriage or sexual intercourse, in general. Some vocal Christian advocates from the fourth century followed this custom, stressing the necessity for the physical purity of ministers but offered this practice as a permanent state: a life of chaste celibacy.⁵ Despite the contradictory evidence on clerical celibacy drawn from the Bible, it is clear that, in the late Roman era, Christians valued the ascetic life of self-denial, and much praise was bestowed on those who tamed their bodily desires.⁶

Leaving aside the dispute over its apostolic origins, celibacy as a mandate appeared in the early church councils of the fourth and fifth centuries.⁷ During this formative period of the Church, the idea that an active sexuality and ministry were conflicting values became widespread, despite the reality that deacons, priests, and bishops could marry and often did.⁸ The rise of Christian asceticism and the increasingly negative position regarding human sexuality undoubtedly contributed to the emphasis on clerical chastity but, more importantly, the adoption of the Hebrew model of the priesthood, along with the increasing emphasis on the priest’s role in the Eucharist, prompted calls for clerical continence.⁹ After the third century, church officials increasingly adopted the position that ministers and their wives must abstain from sexual relations and live as siblings. This idea was further summarized in the fourth-century Council of Elvira (c. 305), which ordered that bishops, priests, and deacons must refrain from sex with their wives.¹⁰ Some historians view the Council of Elvira as the watershed moment of the clerical celibacy campaign because it was the first ecclesiastical council to mandate the sexual continence of the married clergy;¹¹ this may be presumptuous since it was a regional council, with little ability to enforce its decrees across the region, much less throughout all of Europe. Elvira had some influence, however, as later councils utilized its ideas to continue to legislate for clerical continence. The Council of Nicea (325) rejected the harsh restrictions of Elvira and instead ordered that no priest could marry after ordination.¹² The Council of Carthage (390) decreed that those ministering at the altar must avoid sex to protect the purity of the sacrament; a second council at Carthage in 401 deprived priests of their offices if they did not obey the vow of chastity.¹³ By the fifth century, the connection between the sexual purity of the priestly body and the purity of the sacrament had already been made and would continue to be emphasized by Carolingian reformers in the ninth and tenth centuries.¹⁴

The pursuit of clerical celibacy by the reformist party in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was indeed part of a larger initiative to elevate and separate the clergy from the laity. The distinction between the laity and the clergy also was tied to issues of the priest’s role in the Eucharist, which became even more significant when transubstantiation developed into a firm, doctrinal component of this sacrament with Lateran IV (1215). In post-Conquest England and Normandy, those who pushed clerical celibacy were generally seen as radicals, promoters of a new form of religious life for the priesthood. Essentially, they took a crucial core value of monastic life, chastity, and promoted it as a strict requirement for the secular clergy. This program of moral reform, based on chastity as well as celibacy, was unsuccessful among the majority of the elite clergy largely due to the nature of the Anglo-Norman Church during the reform period. During the tenures of Lanfranc and Anselm, only a third of bishops in England were monastic. The overwhelming majority were former royal clerics, rewarded with elite ecclesiastical positions by the king. Many had been educated in Norman cathedral chapters and held a position of some kind in the same chapter. The political leadership in this region was not averse to appointing monks to episcopal positions, but generally the king/duke favored his loyal civil servants for such appointments, men who were also proven administrators. The Normans who received these bishoprics traditionally then selected their own Norman colleagues for installation into the English Church, resulting in what one historian called the “normannization” of the elite clergy. In particular, Normans were selected for archdeaconries, positions that would only increase in power and prestige over the course of the reform era.¹⁵ Royal administrators became bishops in great numbers. By 1122, fifteen of the eighteen bishops in England were former civil servants of the king, the highest since the Conquest; in Normandy, nearly all bishops between 1140 and 1230 were seculars who had some connection to royal/ducal authority or to powerful families in the region.¹⁶

The composition of the clergy, drawn from an elite group of civil servants, does not necessarily suggest political cohesion. As Everett Crosby more recently has affirmed, England and Normandy existed in a “fragmented and decentralized regime.”¹⁷ Such states, without mechanisms of strong social control, tend to tolerate more fluid performances of gender and sexuality. Bishops in this regime, drawn from lay society and indebted to royal/ducal authority as well as to family prerogatives, could disseminate reform initiatives or prevent their promulgation; while Roman decrees were read aloud at councils in England and Normandy, enforcement was subject to the whims of the particular bishop or archbishop in office. The Church in Normandy, for example, routinely selected only certain papal canons to disseminate, often neglecting those laws prohibiting lay investiture.¹⁸ Historically, Normandy had a high percentage of lay patronage over parish churches, quite possibly the highest of all of continental Europe.¹⁹ While some scholars have presupposed that monastic patrons selected more morally suitable clerics for parish churches and lay patrons presented ones with more disciplinary problems, there is little evidence to support such arguments.²⁰ To be sure, the extraordinary lay control of parish churches, combined with the Norman practice of ecclesiastical nepotism, did offer a difficult landscape to navigate for those who wished to enforce the celibacy of the secular clergy; but even monastic patrons sometimes presented clerics who would later be accused of sexual misconduct. The reform bishops, like Lanfranc, initiated measures to enforce chastity among the clergy; but oddly enough, it was Lanfranc’s push for more diocesan control, making reform the responsibility of the bishop, that ran counter to his goals. Secular bishops were often supporters of married clerics and their sons. They may have listened patiently while celibacy measures were promulgated, but they did little to enforce those laws. Hereditary transmission of benefices was quite common in England and Normandy, and reform legislation did little to disrupt this pattern, even well into the thirteenth century.

The Anglo-Norman Church was known for its unique “cross-Channel” clergy, men who were educated on one side of the English Channel and were appointed to positions on the other side. After the conquest of 1066, many Norman clerics were trained in English cathedrals, only to return eventually to Normandy. Others were educated in Norman chapters but assumed higher appointments in England. The level of training for elite clerics refutes the idea that clerical resistance to mandated celibacy was due to the lack of education, as many have argued.²¹ This cross-Channel nature of the elite clergy allows the historian to track not only the various ecclesiastical appointments of one cleric but also to connect him to his father, brothers, and sons, along with other relatives, who also served the Church. The Anglo-Norman realm was not exceptional among medieval states in its tradition of married clergy and hereditary benefices, but the extensive prosopographies undertaken on this time period and region allow greater connections to be made than those possible for other regions of Europe.²²

Following Judith Bennett’s lead that scholars should develop long-term historical narratives of gender, I have crossed traditional chronological boundaries in order to highlight the effect of the manly priest model on clergy over two centuries.²³ Thirteenth-century Normandy, part of France since 1204, provides a wealth of evidence for studying the effectiveness of reform legislation, particularly for the parish clergy. Most thirteenth-century Norman dioceses have not been studied in detail; however, the diocese of Rouen offers a unique set of documents for comparing the perspectives of those who opposed clerical celibacy and those who advocated it. Odo Rigaldus’s visitation record amply shows that, as bishops and other elites conformed to the celibate model, the rural parish clergy continued to retain their unions with women, possibly passing benefices to their children while also blurring the boundaries between the laity and the clergy. The case study of the diocese of Rouen also shows another dynamic in play, as a series of reform measures were passed that broadened the regulation of the priestly body beyond celibacy. Following the lead from Lateran IV, the archbishops of Rouen began holding regular councils and synods, delivering papal mandates to the parish clergy, many of which included prohibitions on inappropriate dress, gambling, tavern frequenting, and other forms of errant behavior.

Historically, the secular clergy defined their gender identity differently because of the nature of their occupation, but they were not a homogeneous group. The analysis presented here highlights the social positions of clerics in major orders, those of priest, deacon, and subdeacon, along with those who held secular canonries, typically cathedral clerics. These men were the targets of clerical celibacy laws. While clerics in minor orders were allowed to marry, they were generally discouraged from doing so, particularly if they desired to ascend to Holy Orders. Men in monastic orders, to the contrary, followed ascetic practices, with celibacy at its core; in this way, they held themselves as distinct from the secular clergy. Many historians of gender do not consider these distinctions, or even the varied experiences of clerics in minor and major orders. If it is true that manliness is defined by a particular culture, time, and region, it must also be considered within the complexities of a growing and diverse medieval Church.

Ecclesiastical reform in the Middle Ages was eclectic, and my use of the terms “reform” and “reformers” is for the sake of stylistic simplicity and is not meant to describe a unified movement. Clerical celibacy laws, while uniformly directed at one goal, the separation (physical or sexual) of priests from their wives, actually reflect different motives on the part of any one group of reformers. In the fourth century, sexual continence was first mandated for clerics out of the desire for cultic purity. While cultic purity was also the motive behind the Carolingian reform of clerical sexuality, by the time of the Councils of Pavia (1022) and Bourges (1031), economic concerns prompted a renewed effort at clerical chastity, as local reformers feared the despoliation of churches. While the secondary literature on clerical celibacy is rich, there is no scholarly consensus on how large a role celibacy played in the minds of ecclesiastical reformers. Gerd Tellenbach asserted that clerical celibacy was not at the heart of the papal reform movement;²⁴ and there is some dispute over whether cultic purity or moral suitability was the key motive behind Pope Gregory VII’s legislation on the matter.²⁵ No matter the goals and motives of papal reform during the mid-eleventh century, the discourse from England and Normandy after 1066 was more concerned with the effects of impurity on the priestly body and the masculinization of that body. Clerical celibacy became part of a larger agenda, as I show by including the pastoral revolution of the thirteenth century, a movement spurred by the canons of Lateran IV. The celibate ideal was built over the course of centuries, by reformers who installed an ascetic model of manliness as the dominant paradigm for the clergy. The discourse promoted from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries emphasized a different form of manliness, one that not only defined a code of sexual purity for the secular clergy but one that would also eventually encompass their bodily appearance and comportment.

The body, then, becomes a new model for historicizing clerical celibacy and, more broadly, clerical reform. The anthropologist Mary Douglas theorized that the body is a reflection of society and that societies use “different degrees of disembodiment to express the social hierarchy.” Within these social structures, there are varying means in which “the social system seeks progressively to disembody or etherealize the forms of expression.”²⁶ Bodies that leak, that produce substances, are believed by many societies to cause pollution; in the Middle Ages, many religious men equated leaking bodies with feminized bodies. Thus, bodies that produced nocturnal emissions, menstruated, ejaculated, or bled after childbirth were seen as contaminating and feminine. Dyan Elliott, Conrad Leyser, and Jacqueline Murray have all studied how religious men wrote about pollution by involuntary ejaculations and how they addressed solutions to this “problem of male embodiment.”²⁷ Drawing on diverse works on the body in history, Lynda Coon has examined the Carolingian monastic body as a “sign of the rift between civilized and barbaric” and theorized a “massive continuity” between classical definitions of gender and those of the early Middle Ages. The “bounded body” of the monk became a symbol of the cloister, both impenetrable and controlled, while the bodies of laymen were viewed as closer to feminine, due to their “bodily fluxes and the all-consuming libido.”²⁸

Douglas’s formulations have been further applied by scholars like Peter Brown and others who have focused on the body and its relation to society, primarily with how groups that are threatened by external forces express anxiety about bodily purity. England and Normandy between 1066 and 1300 provide an excellent case study of how monastic anxiety about ritual purity created a drive to claim the priestly body and assimilate it to a greater masculinity. Monastic discourse focused on depicting the monastic body as superior to the priestly, and its superiority was expressed by its greater degree of manliness. In this regard, priests had to assimilate to this model of manliness, not only to ensure the purity of the sacraments but also to embody a religious masculinity. This discourse appeared at a time when elite laymen entered Church service, and when there were few monastic bishops in England and Normandy. Nonetheless, monastic reformers pushed laws mandating clerical celibacy, focusing on the bodily impurity and effeminacy of priests. Clerical defenders of marriage pushed back, emphasizing the integrity of their priestly bodies within marriage. The pastoral revolution of the thirteenth century brought councils and synods along with reforming archbishops who were concerned not only with sexual continence among the clergy, but also with their bodily comportment, gesture, and appearance. Lateran IV had given reformers an administrative system to enforce their standards of priestly masculinity; armed with these legal procedures, reform bishops sought to eradicate among the clergy the practices of gambling (which corrupted the body through the love of wealth), tavern frequenting and excessive drinking (which threatened somatic control on many levels), scurrilous speech (which violated the boundaries of vocal control), and violent behavior (which brought pollution on the most basic level by bloodshed).

How might the adoption of a chaste body affect the masculine identity of religious men, especially priests, in the Middle Ages? The answers depend on whom you ask. Work on medieval masculinity and religious men has produced numerous answers to this question, and the only reasonable conclusion is that time period, region, and even ecclesiastical rank matter.²⁹ To be sure, locating sexuality as a central component of medieval manliness poses difficulties for defining the clerical, celibate body, particularly if one accepts Vern Bullough’s assertion that masculinity is dependent on “impregnating women, protecting dependents, and serving as provider to one’s family.”³⁰ Indeed, a medieval man who failed to perform these three criteria might have his manliness questioned, but not if he was able to demonstrate the struggle and resulting conquest over his own body. R. N. Swanson proposed that celibate clergy constitute a category between male and female, an “emasculinity” or third gender; others have followed suit.³¹ Yet medieval people recognized a gender system of binaries, male and female; and while there were manly women who transcended their bodies to become spiritually male and womanly men who failed to transcend their bodies and were viewed as softened, there is no evidence to suggest that a third gender existed.³²

Recent work on clerical masculinity, clerical marriage, and clerical concubinage has all produced different answers to the question of manliness and embodiment. In contrast to Swanson’s assertions about “emasculinity,” scholars such as Patricia Cullum, Derek Neal, and Janelle Werner have presented studies of the clergy, sexuality, and celibacy based on the assertion that clerics saw themselves as masculine. Cullum has suggested that in late medieval England factors such as acquisition of a benefice and clerical rank were large determinants in clerical gender identity. Benefices provided clerics with householder status, and often minor clerics lived under the same roof with senior clergymen, who might act as surrogate fathers. For others, acquisition of a clerical, celibate identity was more fragile and resulted in lay-like masculine behavior.³³ Derek Neal countered these conclusions in his examination of late medieval England, suggesting that lay masculinity and clerical masculinity were essentially the same, and that priests who broke their vows of chastity effectively became “false thieves.” By the late fourteenth century, “failure to maintain a clerical ideal could diminish one’s masculine social self in the lay world.”³⁴ Janelle Werner’s research on concubinous priests probes the rural context of the late medieval diocese of Hereford. Werner concludes that, given the sizeable proportion of unchaste priests, historians should consider “a more flexible definition of clerical masculinity” since the existence of such men “might help elucidate what was quint-essentially masculine in late medieval society.”³⁵ What all these studies have in common is that they are focused on the later Middle Ages, when celibacy was the rule and had been for over two hundred years. Any clerical unions that did exist had no claims to legitimacy, and the cleric and his parish community were well aware of this fact.³⁶ My book examines gender identity, particularly masculine identity, from moments of conflict in the reform period, when two sides battled over the institution of clerical celibacy, the eradication of clerical marriage, and eventually, control over the entire priestly body.

Gender identity is not always obvious, especially in the Middle Ages. The actors under scrutiny do not always proclaim explicitly what they believed to be the proper role and function of a man in their time, and the vast majority of writers during this period were men in religious orders. Thus, historians, especially historians of gender, must look at the ways that masculinity was understood and expressed implicitly. The conflicts and struggles over celibacy and the reform of the clergy provide these very opportunities to examine the discourse of sexuality and the male body, particularly at the beginning of the reform period. Since masculinity is always tied to a struggle of some kind (manliness is proven by a defense and reinforcement of that particular masculinity), the religious tracts and laws mandating celibacy offer insights into how celibate men defended their manliness. I point to some common ideas presented by diverse voices who sought to change or simply chronicle the events and people of the Anglo-Norman Church. Orderic Vitalis and William of Malmesbury were not church reformers, but they absorbed and presented the ideas of that initiative in their chronicles and religious histories. Not all monastic reformers believed that chastity should be a requirement for the secular clergy; some, like the Cistercian John of Forde, were little bothered by married priests and their sons and believed in their moral suitability for the ministry.³⁷ Yet the monastic voices that survive from this period overwhelmingly urge clerical continence, and they do so in a particularly gendered fashion. Similarly, the treatises authored by advocates of clerical marriage illustrate their own conceptions of male identity. Women were subjects in the conversation on clerical marriage and clerical celibacy, but they had marginal roles, their voices obscured through misogynist discourse.³⁸

The Manly Priest offers a revisionist approach to the study of clerical celibacy, by illustrating the complex system of gender ideology that affected the creation, negotiation, and acceptance of the celibate ideal. Medieval scholars have written many books and articles on the subject of clerical celibacy, and they have largely concluded that increasing concerns over sacramental purity and the economic alienation of parish wealth and property led the Church to mandate a celibate priesthood. This is precisely the direction of the edited volume Medieval Purity and Piety, by Michael Frassetto, and the monograph Married Priests and the Reforming Papacy, by Anne Barstow.³⁹ Sacramental purity and the economic alienation of ecclesiastical property were certainly factors in the drive for celibacy; what has been overlooked is how the discourse of this debate was gendered as part of a specific, masculine model. When contextualized, celibacy laws become a part of a larger initiative to reconceive the religious male body and, in doing so, elevate and separate the priesthood from the laity. Celibacy was only the first objective in the re-creation of a manly priesthood, however; reformers of the thirteenth century would continue this work by passing laws to control and regulate a full spectrum of behavior. What follows is not a case for Norman exceptionality in terms of manliness or clerical marriage; instead, this region provides rich and exciting evidence that offers, at times, a first-hand account of how the conflict over clerical celibacy laws played out.

In Chapter 1, I show how religious writers ascribed manliness to ascetic bodies, elevating the struggle against the flesh as the pivotal one in defining gender identity. By masculinizing monastic bodies, writers created an anti-norm of clerical behavior, one that rendered priestly bodies and elite bodies unmanly, through appearance, actions, and especially sexual behavior. Sexualized chastity emerged as the reform model for priestly bodies, a model that rendered chaste bodies virile as they fought sexual desire. This model was not an innovative creation of Anglo-Norman bishops and reformers, but it was disseminated in their hagiography, chronicles, histories, letters, theological tracts, laws, and conciliar decrees.

Social control plays out through the control of the body. Revised ideas on gender and masculinity can only become effective if deployed through a legal system. Chapter 2 depicts the social context of clerical marriage and underscores the legal maneuvers of those who sought to impose the manly celibate ideal on the priesthood. Both in England and Normandy, lay manliness was strongly connected to marriage and kinship, and the inability to procreate removed one from the primacy of the social network built on these values. Marriage was so entrenched among the elite clergy that even bishops had wives and cathedral canons placed their sons into prominent positions. Secular clerics drew their gender identity from lay society, participating in the same cultural framework that connected manliness to sexual prowess. Celibacy legislation directed at the clergy may not have been wholly successful in enforcing chastity, but it did begin to shape a new social understanding of clerical marriage, as these marriages were eventually legally invalidated.

Clerical sons were the most glaring reminders of their father’s virile bodies. In Chapter 3, I show how the manly celibate ideology had implications for clerical children, especially sons who intended to inherit their fathers’ benefices. Clerical sons first had liminal and then marginal bodies; while they were once assured of a career path, the passage of reform legislation ensured that they faced an existence in between cultural acceptance and legal bastardization. Certain communities in England and Normandy supported the training and education of clerical sons, and many clerical fathers passed their occupations to their sons, just as the sons of the laity did. Clerical sons faced an uncertain future and a marginal status, not through any actions of their own but because they were visible signs of priestly sexuality. Laws against ordination of clerical sons and inheritance of benefices reflected not only the desire of reformers to prevent this system but also to eliminate procreation completely as a model of manliness for the secular clergy. The legal state of clerical sons became more precarious as clerical marriage, in law and practice, was gradually extinguished.

While Chapters 2 and 3 describe the reformers’ perspective behind the manly celibate ideology, Chapter 4 presents the view of this concept from married priests, their sons, and their advocates and shows how this response was based on a model of lay manliness. A large number of pro-clerical marriage treatises appeared in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Clerical writers, presumably married ones, confronted ascetic discourse by using the scriptures and medieval theology to defend the righteousness of marriage, the very sources used by advocates of celibacy. These tracts illustrate how married clerics perceived the chaste bodies of their opponents. Clerical marriage, they argued, was a natural right, and mastery of the male body depended on marital sex. Their arguments rested on the presumed vulnerability of the male body, along with the concept of a heteronormative sexuality. Married clerics perceived celibacy decrees as a new tradition, one directed at them by sodomites (monastic reformers) and one which went against the laws of God. The tracts defending the ordination of clerical sons used similar rhetoric as the tracts for clerical marriage.

Chapter 5 shows the expansion of the manly celibate ideology by examining the thirteenth-century province of Normandy after its separation from England. The pastoral revolution of the thirteenth century brought an expanded model of religious manliness to Normandy, disseminated through councils and synods and enforced by a series of reforming archbishops. Once closed off to papal reform initiatives, Normandy opened the door to these reform canons as they originated in Lateran IV and were reissued throughout the province. Bishops now had more legal control over priestly behavior and also more means of effective enforcement. They expanded their reach to control not only clerical sexuality but also priestly conduct and appearance. The apex of reform was reached with the episcopacy of archbishop Odo Rigaldus of Rouen, whose sermons preached the very ideals embodied in pastoral reform.

Chapter 6 illustrates the state of the priestly body in the thirteenth century, when reform was extended beyond the chaste body, to a new clerical manliness built on appearance, behavior, and comportment. By the mid-thirteenth century, reform was successful for the elite clergy in Normandy; they were largely celibate, and they embraced, for the most part, the ideology of the manly celibate. This chapter shows the contrast between the “monasticized” elite and the rank-and-file parish clergy by focusing on the reform efforts of Odo Rigaldus. Thirteenth-century Norman priests exhibited inappropriate behavior beyond sexual activity and clerical marriage; they gambled, frequented taverns, engaged in violent behavior, and wore inappropriate secular clothing, all aspects of lay manliness in rural Normandy. Parish clerics were caught between the social status of a cleric and acceptance into a community of their peers. New legal maneuvers were used to eradicate scandal but also to serve as a mechanism to control priestly behavior and appearance.

During the period of ecclesiastical reform in England and Normandy, the real struggle of masculinity occurred not between the clergy and laity but between monastic reformers and the secular clergy. Celibacy was the crucial issue of this period, but it was not the only conflict that would emerge between these groups. Monastics and seculars would compete in a gendered arena, one in which women did not have an explicit role. As the seeds of reform sprouted, the radical changes in religious life clashed with traditional clerical culture. As these reforming ideals took root, the upper clergy began the transformation from householder to celibate elite. By the middle of the thirteenth century, when virtually all the bishops of England and Normandy were chaste and lived and supported the ideal of the manly celibate, the lower clergy were still unreformed. The extension of the manly priest model to include behavior and appearance made it even more difficult for the parish clergy to embrace their religious status as priests, to function in a social sphere that isolated them from the very deeds that equated manliness to them.