Masculinizing Religious Life: Sexual Prowess, the Battle for Chastity and Monastic Identity

Author:

Murray Jacqueline12

Affiliation:

1. University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada

2. Past President, Canadian Society of Medievalists/ Ancienne présidente, Société canadienne des médiévistes

Abstract

With the increasing turn to celibacy for monks and priests over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, one avenue for performing masculinity – sexual prowess and the engendering of children – closed for monks and priests. Jacqueline Murray explores the ways in which the myth of uncontrollable male lust became deployed to enable clerics to redefine masculinity: instead of actual battle, these second sons of the military aristocracy displayed strength and prowess through fighting lust; instead of actual sexual prowess, “real men” could demonstrate masculinity through rationally controlling sexual desires.

Publisher

University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress)

Subject

General Engineering

Reference74 articles.

1. See, for example, the introduction to Clare A. Lees (ed.), Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages (Minneapolis, 1994), pp. xv–xxv.

2. See Odo of Cluny, Vita s. Geraldi Comitis Aurillac, PL 133, 1. 8, cols 646–7; 1. 9, cols 647–9; 1. 34, cols 662–3.

3. A useful discussion of the tension between the cloister and the world is found in Stuart Airlie, “The anxiety of sanctity: St Gerald of Aurillac and his maker,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 43 (1992), 372–95.

4. The tensions between the twin pillars of secular masculinity and religious values have been explored, for an earlier period, in J. L. Nelson, “Monks, secular men and masculinity, c.900,” in D. M. Hadley (ed.), Masculinity in Medieval Europe (London, 1999), pp. 121–42.

5. The process began c.1050 when married priests were prohibited from serving at the altar. It was extended and rendered more rigorous when the Second Lateran Council (1139) rejected the legitimacy of clerical marriage. Nevertheless, clerics continued to form enduring domestic relationships with women well into the thirteenth century. See the important work by Anne Llewellyn Barstow, Married Priests and the Reforming Papacy: The Eleventh-Century Debates (Lewiston, NY, 1982). The masculinity of secular clergy at the end of the Middle Ages is discussed in P. H. Cullum, “Clergy, masculinity and transgression in late medieval England,” in Hadley (ed.), Masculinity in Medieval Europe, pp. 178–96.

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