Defiant Priests: Domestic Unions, Violence, and Clerical Masculinity in Fourteenth-Century Catalunya - Softcover

Armstrong-Partida, Michelle

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1501748424 ISBN 13: 9781501748424

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2020

Synopsis

Two hundred years after canon law prohibited clerical marriage, parish priests in the late medieval period continued to form unions with women that were marriage all but in name. In Defiant Priests, Michelle Armstrong-Partida uses evidence from extraordinary archives in four Catalan dioceses to show that maintaining a family with a domestic partner was not only a custom entrenched in Catalan clerical culture but also an essential component of priestly masculine identity.

From unpublished episcopal visitation records and internal diocesan documents (including notarial registers, bishops' letters, dispensations for illegitimate birth, and episcopal court records), Armstrong-Partida reconstructs the personal lives and careers of Catalan parish priests to better understand the professional identity and masculinity of churchmen who made up the proletariat of the largest institution across Europe. These untapped sources reveal the extent to which parish clergy were embedded in their communities, particularly their kinship ties to villagers and their often contentious interactions with male parishioners and clerical colleagues. Defiant Priests highlights a clerical culture that embraced violence to resolve disputes and seek revenge, to intimidate other men, and to maintain their status and authority in the community.

About this title

About the Author

Michelle Armstrong-Partida is Assistant Professor of History at Emory University.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1501748424
• ISBN 13: 9781501748424
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 366