Rethinking Medieval Margins and Marginality (Studies in Medieval History and Culture) by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2020-03-01T23:00:00+00:00

8 The marginality of clerics’ concubines in the Middle Ages

A reappraisal

Roisin Cossar

The women who lived as “concubines” with supposedly celibate clerics in medieval Western Europe have long been considered marginal, reflecting both their social and legal vulnerability and their obscurity in the historical record.1 From the eleventh century onward, such women did not have the legal standing of wives within the Latin Christian church. Ecclesiastical commentators also treated the women with increasing contempt in that period. Furthermore, records of episcopal visitations and priests’ testaments from the later Middle Ages tend to conceal the women’s individual identities, often labeling them simply “the priest’s concubine.” But scholars have too often enabled the marginalization of clerics’ concubines by ignoring or downplaying their significance in the clerical household. Critical engagement with descriptions of the women in medieval ecclesiastical records, along with careful reading of both scholarship and historical sources in which the women appear, suggests that they were both less vulnerable and more visible within their communities than has been assumed. Questioning conventional narratives about the marginality of clerical concubines in Latin Christendom rehabilitates the women as historical subjects, denaturalizes the concept of marginality, and underlines the role of archives as active participants in shaping scholarly understandings of the past.

This chapter has two parts. In the first, I examine and evaluate how medieval ecclesiastical authorities drew on marginalizing language to break intimate ties between clerics and women, and I explore how modern scholarship has contributed to a view of clerical concubines as marginal. In the second part, I model an alternative view of concubines as active members of their households and communities, drawing on research from northern and central Italy to trace the complex roles for women living in clerics’ households during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

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