Michelle Armstrong-Partida. Defiant Priests: Domestic Unions, Violence, and Clerical Masculinity in Fourteenth-Century Catalunya.
Roisin Cossar
The cartoonish picture of the parish priest as a promiscuous, ill-educated, greedy figure is common trope in older scholarship premodern period Europe. But recent years growing body work on medieval and early modern England, Italy, France, Iberia has challenged that earlier image through explorations clerical responses to rigid demands Christian church reform measures. Michelle Armstrong-Partida’s new monograph, Defiant Priests, detailed engaging study ecclesiastical responsibilities, household organization, survival strategies clerics fourteenth-century Catalunya, it makes an important contribution this literature. book several aims. One replace notion priests sexually transgressive with portrayal patriarchs husbands. A related aim explore clerics’ performance masculinity within their communities. Finally, Armstrong-Partida argues studies clergy have relied too heavily normative sources for conclusions. Her own analysis based large part extensive more than 2,500 individual records episcopal visitations parishes Catalunyan dioceses from late thirteenth mid-fourteenth centuries. Visitations could include examinations property held by churches, services they offered, conduct clergy; resulted these kinds are among most valuable depictions life at local level.
The American Historical Review