Medieval Clerical Culture

Amalar of Metz’s On the Liturgy (the Liber officialis, or De ecclesiastico officio) was one of the most widely read and circulated texts of the Carolingian era. The fruit of lifelong reflection and study in the wake of liturgical reform in the early ninth century, Amalar’s commentary inaugurated the Western medieval tradition of allegorical liturgical exegesis and has bequeathed a wealth of information about the contents and conduct of the early medieval Mass and Office. In 158 chapters divided into four books, On the Liturgy addresses the entire phenomenon of Christian worship, from liturgical prayers to clerical vestments to the bodily gestures of the celebrants. For Amalar, this liturgical diversity aimed, above all, to commemorate the life of Christ, to provide the Christian faithful with moral instruction, and to recall Old Testament precursors of Christian rites. To uncover these layers of meaning, Amalar employed interpretive techniques and ideas that he had inherited from the patristic tradition of biblical exegesis—a novel approach that proved both deeply popular and, among his contemporaries, highly controversial.

This volume adapts the text of Jean-Michel Hanssens’s monumental 1948 edition of Amalar’s treatise and provides the first complete translation into a modern language.

This paper examines the prevalence of armsbearing bishops in the Kingdom of Castile during the reign of Alfonso VIII (r.1158-1214). In doing so, it suggests that recent work done by scholars whose research focuses on more traditional medieval centers (i.e. England, France, and the Empire) needs to contextualized within a much broader survey of the phenomenon. To achieve that goal of contextualization, this paper examines the evidence of armsbearing bishops in the frontier kingdom of Castile, and demonstrates the ways in which the frameworks established by some scholars need to be adjusted to fit the larger medieval reality experienced across all of Latin Christendom.

Bibliographical information:  eHumanista 29 (2015): 506-518

Abstract: The image of a typical medieval priest is one of an educated man with an extensive knowledge of Latin. However, proof from the Low Middle Ages exists that demonstrates that in Spain this ideal frequently did not coincide with the reality of the period. This essay will argue from a starting point that the Church, in the text of a fifteenth-century wedding ceremony originating from Seville, knowingly wrote all communicative passages from the Church to the priest and from the priest to the public in Castilian, using the traditional Latin solely for the prayers and the psalms because, even after several centuries of attempting to increase the intellectual level of the clergy, it recognized and accepted that said clergy could still not understand written Latin. This thesis is supported by using various sources of the period that testify to the dismal intellectual training of the lower-level medieval clergy. In addition, the reasons for which these priests had such an inadequate educational level are explored. At the end, this essay will present the complete Castilian text of the ceremony and comment on its cultural implications.

La imagen moderna de un clérigo medieval es una de un hombre culto con un alto conocimiento de latín. Sin embargo, existen pruebas del bajo medioevo que demuestran que en España este ideal no coincidía frecuentemente con la realidad de la época. Este ensayo argüirá como punto de partida que la Iglesia, dentro del texto de una boda del siglo XV procedente de Sevilla, a sabiendas escribió en castellano todos los pasajes comunicativos que iban de la Iglesia al sacerdote y de éste al público reservando el latín para las oraciones y los salmos, porque después de varios siglos intentando aumentar el nivel intelectual de la clerecía reconocía que ésta aún no podía entender el latín escrito. Esta tesis se apoyará utilizando varias fuentes del período que atestiguan el pésimo nivel de formación intelectual del bajo clero medieval. De igual manera se exploran las razones por las que esos sacerdotes tenían una formación tan inadecuada. Al final presentará el texto en castellano completo de la ceremonia y comentará sus implicaciones culturales.


Key words:
illiteracy and the clergy
medieval Spanish clergy
medieval liturgy
medieval wedding ceremony
medieval clergy competency in latin

The Regensburg Rhetorical Letters are fictional letters composed in the 1080s at the Regensburg cathedral school. They imitate Ciceronian texts to fashion a valorized masculine identity based in learning, eloquence, and public service for secular clerics in civil administration who were attacked for idleness and effeminacy by reformers like Peter Damian. Centering textual and rhetorical expertise, the Letters reveal the heterogeneity of clerical society and an early development of a professional rather than spiritual role for the clergy.

This collaborative collection provides fresh perspectives on Christianity and the conduct of war in medieval East Central Europe and Scandina-via, investigating the intersection between religion, culture, and warfare in territories that were only integrated into Christendom in the Central Middle Ages. The contributors analyze cultures that lay outside Charle-magne's limes and the frontiers of the Byzantine Empire, to consider a region stretching from the Balkans to the south, through Hungary and the Slavic lands (Poland, Bohemia, Rus), to the Baltic coastline with Polabia, Pomerania, Prussia, and Estonia, and reaching into Scandinavia. The volume considers clerics as military leaders and propagandists, the role of Christian ritual and doctrine in warfare, and the adaptation and transformation of indigenous military cultures. It uncovers new information on perceptions of war and analyzes how local practices were incorporated into clerical narratives, enabling the reader to achiev...

This peer reviewed volume contains twenty-three essays by leading scholars exploring the distinctive aspects which the urban environment brought to late-medieval religious life. The essays are gathered in six sections ranging from liturgy, music and fabric, parish politics, the relationships between the religious orders and between them and the laity, the life of the church in smaller towns (different from the life in the cities and the villages), the role of the church in charity, and aspects of clerical devotion expressed in monumental sculpture and literature. The essays bring together a wide range of experts on the English Church to reflect on these subjects and to celebrate the influence of the scholarship of Clive Burgess who, for over thirty years, has changed our understanding of religion, religious culture and the men and women whose lives were shaped by belief.

Contents: Eamon Duffy, Clive Burgess: An Appreciation; A Bibliography of the Published Works of Clive Burgess; Peter Fleming, Foreword; David Harry, Introduction: The Church and City in Late Medieval England; Magnus Williamson, Revisiting the Soundscape of the Medieval Parish; Nigel Morgan, The Diocese of London, the Sarum Calendar in the 15th Century, and Urban Production of Sarum Books c.1400-1480; T. A. Heslop, Size Matters: Norwich Churches and their Parishioners before the Reformation; Anna Eavis, Urbs in rure: A Metropolitan Elite at Holy Trinity, Long Melford, Suffolk; Robert A. Wood, London Rectors and their Parishes 1375-1490; Gabriel Byng, Recreating a Parish Polity: the Masters and Stores of Chagford, 1480-1600; Justin Colson,Late Medieval London Parish Administrators and the Cursus Honorum: Oligarchy or Community?; Martin Heale , Urban Guilds and the Religious Orders in Late Medieval England; Nick Holder, Founding and Building Religious Houses in London and its Suburbs; Elizabeth A. New, Speaking from the Art: a Reconsideration of Mendicant Seals in Medieval England; Vincent Gillespie, The Permeable Cloister? Charterhouse, Contemplation and Urban Piety in Later Medieval England: The Case of London; Julian Luxford, Sir Robert Rede and Religion; James G. Clark, The Small-town Friaries of Later Medieval England; R. N. Swanson, Town and Gown, Nave and Chancel: Parochial Experience in Late Medieval Oxford; Anne F. Sutton, The Bishop of Norwich and His ‘Ghostly Children’: Lynn in the Second Reign of Edward IV; Caroline M. Barron, The People of the Parish: The Close of St Bartholomew’s Hospital in Fifteenth-Century London; Katherine L. French and Gary G. Gibbs, The Poor, the Pious and the Privileged: Towards a Social and Cultural Topography of Parish Participation in Late Medieval London; David Lepine, Nunc Vermibus Eso: Bishop Fleming’s Tomb and Chapel in Lincoln Cathedral; Julia Boffey, William Lichfield’s Remorse of Conscience: Contexts and Transmission; Amy Appleford, Singing Dirige: Lyric and Vernacular Liturgy in Fifteenth-Century England; Christian Steer,‘To syng and do dommeservyce’: The Chantry Chaplains of St Nicholas Shambles.

The narration of the Master Vincentius dedicated to Alexander of Malonne (Chronica Polonorum, bk. III, chaps. 8–9), the bishop of Płock (1129–1156) is undoubtedly the most intriguing evidence addressing the commitment of the Polish medieval bishop in military action. Although such information goes well with other evidence indicating the aristocratic style of this bishop’s ministry resembling those of “courtier” Reichsbischof, Michał Tomaszek has already pointed out that motives as well as the entire construction of Vincentius’s story are the evidence of the chronicler’s reference to some early medieval literary patterns. This analysis makes it even clearer, highlighting however, that the chronicler while creating the portrait of Alexander of Malonne entered the more contemporary discourse on the admissibility limits of bishop’s military activity. The analysis shows that the starting point for the chronicler’s writing were the views of Bernard of Clairvaux stigmatizing all the possibilities of combining the attitudes appropriate for a warrior and a cleric. Vincentius, however, benefited from the “loophole” left by Clairvaux abbot and some canonists, which granted the permission to combine these two responsibilities with the restriction that actions taken by bishop would not cause the destruction of his spiritual perfection or pastoral function, and hence they would not change him into a chimera-monster. Being influenced by the idea of bishop as a persona mixta or gemina persona, the theory assuming the possibility of using two kinds of weapon (two swords) by the Church or even some views of St Bernard stated in his Liber ad Milites Templi de laude novae militiae, Vincentius advocated clearly for the possibility of getting the diocesan involved in the military sphere. The applied strategy aiming at the legitimization of Alexander’s actions, reveals Vincentius’s broad knowledge of arguments defending military prerogatives attributed to episcopacy, and says a lot about the chronicler itself, who did not have to be so ardent supporter of the Church reform as it is quite commonly believed.

Dans le Liber miraculorum sancte Fidis (début du XIe siècle), Bernard d'Angers décrit le physique d'un clerc, dont il livre un portrait topique correspondant à un idéal de mesure et de proportion. Or, le même auteur célèbre la beauté d'un chevalier, à propos duquel il insiste sur sa haute stature et sa puissance physique. Nous avons donc affaire à deux canons esthétiques masculins antagonistes. Pour comprendre ce constraste, il faut remettre en perspective le texte de Bernard en le replaçant à la fois dans la tradition littéraire dont il est l'héritier et dans son contexte théologique chrétien. On aboutit ainsi à la conclusion que l'idéal de juste mesure est propre au monde des clercs, pour qui le corps reflète l'âme. Au contraire, un rapprochement avec la Vita Karoli et la Chanson de Roland permet de montrer que ce sont les laïcs qui associent haute taille et puissante musculature à l'idée de beauté masculine.

Michelle ARMSTRONG-PARTIDA, "Clerical Marriage and Priestly Masculinity in Fourteenth-Century Catalunya".

In fourteenth-century Catalunya, Catalan priests formed domestic unions with women that were marriage all but in name. Episcopal visitation records from the diocese of Girona, Barcelona, Vic, and Urgell show that parish clergy were able to meld a family and a household with their profession in spite of the Church’s prohibition against clerical marriage. The fact that so many clergymen were promoted through the holy orders to become parish priests and still managed to form de facto marriages and support their children indicates that although the standards of the medieval Church had changed since the Gregorian period, the customs of parish clergy had not. Countless clergymen defied orders to expel their women and set aside their families, regardless of the threats of excommunication and repeated episcopal fines that were inconsistently applied to the clerical population. Judging from the number of priests who persisted in these de facto marriages, the financial burden was ultimately tolerable not only because clergymen were emotionally attached to their families, but also since the role of a paterfamilias, who ruled a household with a wife and children, was central to their masculinity. It was not merely proof of sexual activity or evidence of offspring that conferred masculine status in the parishes of late medieval Catalunya. Priests established marital households because medieval society defined adult male masculinity as one in which a man advanced to take on the role of husband and father.
.

Michelle ARMSTRONG-PARTIDA, "Mariage clérical et masculinité sacerdotale dans la Catalogne du XIVe siècle".

Dans la Catalogne du XIVe siècle, les prêtres de paroisse formaient avec des femmes des unions qui avaient tout du mariage, sauf le nom. Les archives des visites épiscopales des diocèses de Gérone, Barcelone, Vic et Urgell montrent qu’ils étaient en mesure de concilier leurs familles et leurs maisonnées avec leur profession, en dépit des prohibitions édictées par l’Église à l’encontre du mariage clérical. Le fait que tant d’ecclésiastiques reçus dans les ordres sacrés pour devenir prêtres de paroisse aient cependant pu s’engager dans des mariages de facto et entretenir leurs enfants indique que même si les normes de l’Église avaient changé depuis la réforme grégorienne, tel n’était pas le cas des coutumes du bas-clergé. D’innombrables hommes d’Église passaient outre aux ordres de se défaire de leurs femmes et de leur familles, malgré les menaces d’excommunication et les amendes épiscopales répétées qui s’appliquaient, sans régularité toutefois, à la population cléricale. À en juger par la grande quantité de prêtres qui persistaient dans ces mariages de facto, la charge financière des amendes était en définitive tolérable, non seulement parce que ces hommes d’Église étaient émotionnellement attachés à leurs familles, mais aussi parce que le rôle de paterfamilias placé à la tête d’un foyer avec femme et enfants avait une importance centrale du point de vue de leur masculinité. Ce n’étaient pas simplement la preuve d’une activité sexuelle et l’existence d’une progéniture qui conféraient le statut masculin dans les paroisses de Catalogne à la fin du Moyen Âge. Les prêtres fondaient des foyers parce que la masculinité adulte, telle que la société médiévale la définissait, impliquait d’endosser les rôles de mari et de père.

The aim of this article is to identify the political, social, and economic anxieties that prompted East-Anglian secular elites —at the dawn of the fourteenth century— in the commission of private devotional books whose marginalia included, as new and recurrent themes, the monstrous cleric and the monstrous bishop. Establishing a dialogue between documentary sources produced during the period and the close relationship that weaves the texts of the psalter and the visual periphery that used to accompany them, this work suggests that monstrous bishops and clerics expressed the discomfort of East-Anglian lords towards the Avignon Papacy and the disciplinary crisis that faced the English clergy during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Este artículo se propone identificar las ansiedades políticas, sociales y económicas que animaron a las élites seculares de Anglia Oriental —en los albores del siglo XIV— en la comisión de libros devocionales privados cuya marginalia incluía los novedosos y recurrentes temas del clérigo y el obispo monstruosos. Poniendo en diálogo las fuentes documentales producidas durante el período con la estrecha relación que se teje entre el texto de los salterios y la periferia visual que suele acompañarlos, este trabajo sugiere que el obispo y el clérigo monstruosos representaban el malestar de los señores de Anglia Oriental frente al Papado de Aviñón y las crisis disciplinares que enfrentó el clero inglés en los siglos XIII y XIV.

Please contact me for a PDF of this article.
In this contribution I describe the historical and cultural context, in which Hrabanus Maurus wrote his "Instruction for Clerics" in 819. I compare its contents and purposes with those of the "Institutio Canonicorum", a document issued in the wake of the Aachen Council of 816, and reflect on the ideal of clergy these texts promote.

Throughout the early middle ages, the bishops of Italy, like their counterparts in much of Western Europe, played a pivotal role in the secular affairs of their kingdom. They acted as governors, judges and generals. During the conflict between the Pope and Emperor in the second half of the eleventh century and early decades of the twelfth century the political, administrative and military roles of the Italian bishops changed substantially. Many bishops were involved in the conduct of warfare during this period but in many cases they lost much of their secular power to the emerging city communes. This development is often associated with the Gregorian Reform movement’s attempts to remove the Church from secular influence. The removal of bishops from military roles can also be associated with a broader drive to climate clerical violence.
This article will address three connected issues. 1) How did the Investiture Contest change the military role of the bishops of Italy? 2) What were the causes of these  changes? 3) How were bishops in military roles represented in the sources for the period?

The Regensburg Rhetorical Letters are fictional letters composed in the 1080s at the Regensburg cathedral school. They imitate Ciceronian texts to fashion a valorized masculine identity based in learning, eloquence, and public service for secular clerics in civil administration who were attacked for idleness and effeminacy by reformers like Peter Damian. Centering textual and rhetorical expertise, the Letters reveal the heterogeneity of clerical society and an early development of a professional rather than spiritual role for the clergy.

The essay takes as its starting point the complaint with which Henry of Langenstein (c. 1325-1397) opened his treatise known as the Secreta sacerdotum: contemporary priests’ flawed methods of celebrating mass differ from what they teach (or perhaps learn) because they have “learned hardly anything from their manuals.” The essay is divided into two parts. The first section considers what Henry might have meant by the term “manualia”, exploring admonitions for the avoidance of and coping with errors in ritual performance in liturgical manuals such as the Sarum Manual, the Manuale parochalium sacerdotum, the Cautelae missae, Guido of Monte Rochon’s Manipulus curatorum, and Hermannus de Scildis’s Speculum manuale. The section draws particular attention to the way in which manual literature digests scholastic sacramental theology and canon law. The second section turns to Henry’s own proposal to a different method of celebrating, based on “true reason”. Henry’s treatise is found to differ from the adduced manuals in basis, scope, and detail. Further, the author’s appeal to a kind of practitioner’s common-sense as an interior guiding principal is interpreted as a strategy for the apparently inherent ineffectiveness of the written manual.

Review of:
Pablo Ancos. Transmisión y recepción primarias de la poesía del mester de clerecía. València: Publicacions de la Universitat de València, 2012.
Amaia Arizaleta. Les clercs au palais. Chancellerie et écriture du pouvoir royal (Castille, 1157–1230). Paris: SEMH-Sorbonne, 2010.
Elena González-Blanco García. La cuaderna vía en su marco panrománico. Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 2010.

The purpose of this chapter is to shed light on epistolary culture as it had developed in the ecclesiastical milieu surrounding the Hólar diocese by the close of the fourteenth century. Additionally, it further aims to establish whether connections to other kinds of administrative literacy, such as the exchange of written communications from the Niðarós archdiocese, influenced this practice. The article seeks to achieve these aims through the comparative treatment of four works by Einarr Hafliðason (c. 1307-1393), a priest, steward and officialis of Hólar who produced diverse administrative, historical, and narrative writings throughout his scribal career. The fact that we may attribute the authorship of these four works to Einarr with a fair degree of certainty allows for a unique investigation of attitudes to and anxieties about charter practice as they appear in his authorship. Einarr’s narrative voice has revealed itself as preoccupied with what he deems proper conduct within epistolary culture. He seems to advocate for a higher level of respect for the physical charter while remaining aware of the limitations of the written word, both when it comes to its judicial power and its communicative potential.

In the thirteenth century, profound changes in Spanish society drove the invention of fresh poetic forms by the new clerical class. The term mester de clerecía (clerical ministry or service) applies to a group of narrativepoems (epics, hagiography, romances) composed by university-trained clerics for the edification and entertainment of the predominantly illiterate laity. These clerics, like Gonzalo de Berceo, understood themselves as cultural intermediaries, transmitting wisdom and values from the past; at the same time, they were deeply involved in some of the most contentious and far-reaching changes in lay piety, and in economic and social structures. The author challenges the predominantly didactic approach to the verse, in an attempt to historicize the category of the intellectual, as someone caught in the duality of the worlds of contingency and absolute values.
The book will have a broad appeal to medievalists, in part because of the topics covered (feudalism, gender, nationhood, and religion), in part because many poems are either adaptations from French and Latin or have counterparts in other literatures (e.g., the romances or Alexander and Apollonius, the miracles of the Virgin Mary).

La imagen moderna de un clerigo medieval es una de un hombre culto con un alto conocimiento de latin. Sin embargo, existen pruebas del bajo medioevo que demuestran que en Espana este ideal no coincidia frecuentemente con la realidad de la epoca. Este ensayo arguira como punto de partida que la Iglesia, dentro del texto de una boda del siglo XV procedente de Sevilla, a sabiendas escribio en castellano todos los pasajes comunicativos que iban de la Iglesia al sacerdote y de este al publico reservando el latin para las oraciones y los salmos, porque despues de varios siglos intentando aumentar el nivel intelectual de la clerecia reconocia que esta aun no podia entender el latin escrito. Esta tesis se apoyara utilizando varias fuentes del periodo que atestiguan el pesimo nivel de formacion intelectual del bajo clero medieval. De igual manera se exploran las razones por las que esos sacerdotes tenian una formacion tan inadecuada. Al final presentara el texto en castellano completo de la ...

The present paper is an attempt at presenting the evolution of papal legislative efforts which aimed at providing the clergy with special legal protection against violence referred in the sources as "laying violent hands" against the clergy. The basic role in this process was played by Innocent II who at the Second Lateran Council in 1139 issued the canon, commonly known from as "Si quis suadente", being the milestone towards the creation of personal immunity of the clergy (or the "Privilege of the Canon"). This regulation stated that anyone who laid violent hands upon a clergy or monk incurred an sentence o anathema ipso facto, and no bishop could absolve such a person (unless he is in immediate danger of death) until he has been presented before the Pope and submits to his decision. However, because of the imprecise phrasing of the regulation made the Holy See introduce some modifications. First the persons who breached physical immunity of the clergy by accident or were justified by reasonable cause or ignorance of the fact were released from excommunication. Besides the Holy See with the power of papal decretals lifted the obligation of peregrination to Rome for absolution for some groups of people incapable of traveling long-distance, especially monks, women, children, the elderly and crippled or living far away from Rome as well as those who laid violent hand on the clergy in self-defense. Such persons could be granted absolution by diocesan bishop. The condition of reconciliation was always compensation to the victim and to the Church by satisfaction and taking up an effort of expiation. Resistant aggressors whose names were announced to the public were facing social ostracism and no perspective for eternal life as a result of excommunication latae sententiae. The Privilege of the Canon being the act of the 12th century canonists, especially outstanding Popes legislators was a basic instrument providing the clergy with physical security and thus much affected the relationships between the the clergy and the lay people in the Middle Ages.

Tra le fonti tardomedievali e rinascimentali della storia del rito romano il corpus meno studiato in ambito ispano è probabilmente quello costituito dagli statuti dei sinodi diocesani. Questo ricco filone documentale, caratterizzato da un multiforme interesse scientifico, offre al ricercatore una vasta e preziosa informazione liturgica. L'obiettivo di questo lavoro è stato quello di strutturare e studiare sistematicamente la vasta informazione riguardante l’Ufficio divino, contenuta negli atti sinodali ispani dei secoli XII-XVI. L’argomentazione principale si mantiene invariata lungo tutto lo studio: osservare come questa preghiera liturgica si concepisce e si integra nella vita del clero secolare. In queste pagine ci limitiamo a presentare tre dei temi maggiormente rilevanti: i riferimenti biblico-cristologici delle Ore canoniche, la ricerca dell’unità liturgica intradiocesana e le sue argomentazioni al rispetto, e da ultimo, le chiavi spirituali proposte per una celebrazione esemplare.

Los años finales del Medievo se caracterizaron, entre otros aspectos, por el vigor de una religiosidad que impregnaba las relaciones sociales y la vida diaria de las gentes. La recepción de los sacramentos marcaba la existencia de los cristianos, los ritmos anuales seguían las pautas de las festividades y celebraciones litúrgicas, las actividades económicas se desarrollaron bajo el patrocinio religioso y cualquier situación que alterase el devenir cotidiano (hambrunas, enfermedades, inundaciones, sequías, heladas, epidemias) desencadenaba la ejecución de una serie de ritos religiosos de carácter propiciatorio, expiatorio y, una vez vuelta la normalidad, de acción de gracias. A pesar de la influencia de las corrientes humanistas, la religión siguió rigiendo la vida de los individuos y no había actividad o situación que no fuese puesta en relación con la fe y con Dios. Por imperativos impuestos desde el momento del nacimiento, los cristianos estaban adscritos a una determinada parroquia, eran instruidos en la fe y confiaban la salud de su alma al clero parroquial. Ello había sido posible gracias al empeño de la Iglesia por consolidar en el Occidente medieval una red de instituciones religiosas capaz de englobar, adoctrinar y controlar, a través de la acción de monjes y curas, los comportamientos de la mayor parte de la población. Es obvio, por tanto, que la formación espiritual y la actitud moral de los eclesiásticos resultaba decisiva a la hora de ejercer su magisterio y de servir como ejemplo de virtud y honestidad a los fieles que tenían encomendados. Sin embargo, al igual que la literatura medieval, la documentación archivística no alude tan apenas a comportamientos virtuosos y ejemplares; por el contrario, tanto las visitas pastorales como las constituciones sinodales y conciliares, las disposiciones municipales, los procesos judiciales e inquisitoriales y las actas notariales describen o, en su caso, denuncian y tratan de frenar y corregir los defectos, vicios y delitos que, al parecer, habían calado hondo en las formas de vida del clero. Dentro del ámbito aragonés, la riqueza documental de los archivos permite, una vez más, profundizar en esta realidad centrando la investigación en un ámbito geográfico representativo: la ciudad de Daroca y sus aldeas.