M ichelle A rmstrong -P artida . Defiant Priests

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

Aesthetics · Art · Masculinity · Normative · Period (music) · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · Classics · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Medieval and Early Modern Justice · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity