Julia Barrow. The Clergy in the Medieval World

In The Clergy in the Medieval World, Julia Barrow provides an immensely valuable social history of the secular clergy in northern France, England, and the German kingdom. Her central questions focus on the clerical life cycle: When was the decision made that a male should enter into the clergy, and who made it? Did clerics maintain relations with their families; if so, how? What career paths did clerics follow, and how were they trained? Answers to these questions are pursued over nine substantive chapters, devoted to the clerical office and grades of ordination, monastic influence on the secular clergy, clerical family relations, the fostering and education of clerics (with separate chapters on schools, their curricula, and their personnel), and the spaces and institutions of the clergy (households, cathedral and collegiate churches, and local churches and parishes). Two contributions are particularly important. First, Barrow documents and explores the workings of two clerical family systems, the “father-son paradigm,” in which clerics trained their own sons to succeed them in office, and the more enduring “uncle-nephew paradigm.” While historians have long been aware of these tendencies, Barrow’s conceptualization of them as social systems—rather than as moral failings or regrettable but pragmatic solutions (the more common ecclesiastical-history treatments)—is a long-overdue corrective. Indeed, since many if not most medieval livelihoods, from rulership all the way down to artisanal trades and agriculture, were transmitted from parents to children, one might ask whether the church’s peculiar requirements led to the development of broader family networks that had other beneficial results over time. Were families that successfully produced clerical appointees over generations, for example, also more upwardly mobile or more generally associated with professions like commerce in which success depended upon particular social skills and the development of social networks?

Conceptualization · Curriculum · Political science · Sociology · Gender Studies · Historical, Literary, and Cultural Studies · History · Law · Medieval Architecture and Archaeology · Medieval Literature and History