Conclusion

How were the priesthood and diocesan government sustained for centuries as male-only preserves? How did bishops govern such a dispersed institution as the late medieval church? These two questions have been woven together in the foregoing chapters, and the analysis has revealed feedback loops between gender and governance.

Ritual masculine friendship and pretended equality in diocesan governance enabled bishops to sustain the collaboration of their relatively independent agents. It also disqualified women from this sphere of authority by default—they could not participate in its gendered values—without any need for explicit repetitions of misogyny. Engaging the laity in the gendered regulation of the parish clergy made them easier to control, while simultaneously entrenching masculinity as the essential element in clerical identity: whether the clergy succeeded or failed, they did so as men. Again, women were disqualified by default, and gendered assumptions were entrenched. The instrumentalization of nonnormative gender to police the fringes of the clerical estate, where episcopal power barely reached, placed trans people as well as women beyond the pale of the clergy. In each of these processes solutions to the problems of gender (keeping the church male) and of governance (ensuring compliance) were closely linked and mutually reinforcing. The maleness of the clergy persisted because it was a cultural commodity that bishops could use to solve problems of government in a dispersed organization.

The analysis has shown the importance of quotidian discourses of governance above that of legislative acts. Gender roles were not maintained by laws, but by social rules, and language shaped those rules, drawing a horizon of expectation beyond which most people did not ordinarily look. By these means the exclusion of women and the default maleness of the clergy were made to seem natural rather than being the product of contingent historical forces. Furthermore, as a repeated habit of language default maleness did not rely on intention. Governance acts were sometimes imbued with overt misogyny or transmisogyny, but for the most part naturalness was conveyed by assumptions and omissions. In this sense, the maintenance of gendered boundaries can be understood as (partly) a byproduct of other features of institutional history. I say “partly” for two reasons: first, there was sometimes intention to police boundaries, but such conscious effort drew its energy from common repetitions of gendered assumptions; second, the relationship between gender role enforcement and institutional governance was two way, and so each was a byproduct of the other in a reciprocal evolutionary process. Female exclusion persisted in part because it was a useful solution to the principal-agent problems of dispersed government in premodern conditions.

But as we have seen, women were everywhere active in shadowing, pressurizing, usurping, or adopting positions of influence and authority within the church, demonstrating their capacity to undertake roles that were gendered masculine. Heads of female religious houses possessed the skills and experience to take part in extensive church government, many lay women were hugely influential on the operation of parishes and priests’ households, some lay women possessed both the theoretical and pragmatic capacity to step into roles reserved for ordained clergy when circumstances allowed. Gathering together the evidence for women’s stymied authority has painted a picture of a spiritual governance that never was, the society that could have existed. Women’s action in masculine gendered roles was contained, suppressed, denied, and—where possible—ignored. It was a “hidden transcript” of power in James Scott’s terms. What is more, it was not the only one. Chapter 6 shows that the boundaries of church authority were also porous to people of nonnormative gender expression and embodiment, but again—as with women—their presence was troubling and contested. The official transcript of power spoke of a male priesthood and of public power resting in men’s hands.

How, when women everywhere proved themselves capable, the male monopoly lasted so long is a question made all the more interesting by the fact that women’s influence and authority was accepted to some degree. Abbesses and prioresses held recognized forms of power, though they were constrained by male oversight. The presence of women in priests’ households and their sporadic assumption of sacerdotal roles placed them in spheres from which they were prohibited, and yet complaints about concubines and female servants tell us as much about popular toleration as about disapproval. Baptism by women was widely communicated as being effective and necessary. Occasional theoretical articulations of a wider female sacramental authority were made (for example by Walter Brut). Some examples of women usurping clerical or paraclerical roles suggested the possibility that they were supported by members of the laity and the clergy.

If there were such support, it was usually temporary and highly conditional. This may have been because everyone was exposed to a great deal of misogyny in the later Middle Ages and attitudes most easily reverted to the norm. But it may also have been shaped by the strange way in which women’s activities and capacities impinged on public—and especially male—consciousness. Repeatedly we have discovered that women were seen but not seen, known but not known. Priests knew they relied on women and that women could do what priests did, but the male agents of governance could not admit their dependence on that which was not supposed to exist.

In addition, the authentic lives of people expressing or embodying nonnormative gender may have seemed less real to powerful churchmen than the caricatures, idealizations, and denials of administrative texts and the fictions of satire. They too, were seen but not seen, known but not known. The world of governance was written by men, its documents were directed toward men, and it privileged men’s voices. And despite certain cultural spaces being open to the reality of nonnormative gender, church government preferred a binary simplicity.

This generated anxiety. It is sometimes perceptible within individuals and is generally discernible within the habitual processes of church government. Normative moral statements and practical moral regulation, such as in synodal constitutions and visitations, reveal feelings of fear about what would happen if the rules were not respected. Outbursts of anger directed toward the failings of others, such as in direct action against summoners or literary satire against pardoners, hint at more generalized unease about the security and stability of gendered rules.

As such, gender anxiety did not just flow from fears about what women could do, or whether there was gender deception and ambiguity in the church. It also flowed from worries about masculinity itself. All that time spent regulating the parish clergy according to strongly gendered standards is very revealing. Failure on the part of individual men was made likely by the contradictions that defined masculinity. Freedom and hierarchy, discretion and obligation, householder status and celibate self-control were slippery standards in tension with one another. Men could not help but fail. This is one of the paradoxes of patriarchy: as a dominance hierarchy based on gender role fulfilment, how does it remain strong even as individuals fail to live up its standards? In the present book we have seen that moments of failure were in fact integral to the strength of the system, because they provided many different people with opportunities to exert discipline and reassert the gender norms. Authority figures upheld whole disciplinary systems, and individual men used them to assert their own status as priests or parishioners. But women too contributed to the gendered discipline that sustained their own exclusion. When they complained about the failures of priests, women were in one sense disruptive of the gender order, making a particular man or group of men subject to women’s moral authority. However, because they occurred within a system of gendered discipline for men, such moments also affirmed patriarchal norms. While the women who complained took direct action, or stepped into clerical roles knowingly broke certain social rules, they did not always want to replace those rules with others. For instance, for all that their presence undermined clerical standards of masculinity, the de facto wives of priests were likely more concerned to secure their position within the patriarchy than to challenge it. Motivations are difficult to pin down in most instances, but whatever women intended, their every participation in gendered discipline made patriarchy the winner. Sometimes, as with the symbolic and literary moments of discipline discussed in chapter 6, failures of masculinity were invented purely so as to be condemned or corrected. If patriarchal standards seemed impossible to achieve or were mutually incompatible and difficult for individuals to navigate, that was to their advantage. As Judith Butler noted, the strength of governing ideals is guaranteed by the failure of the tasks they command.

However, we should not stop at explaining continuity. As Judith Bennett has counseled, to think of patriarchy as unchanging is to misunderstand it, as well as to admit defeat. The changing bases of its apparent continuity must also be identified. We have, in the preceding chapters, been able to identify circumstances in which gender boundaries were defended more strenuously, moments when the aspirations and experiences of women changed, and times when the fears of men intensified.

Several turning points and overlapping changes have been drawn out of the evidence. From around 1275 onward, parish visitations regulated the social, sexual, and religious behavior of the laity and the clergy. This both opened up and closed down avenues for women’s assumption of authority. On the one hand, women were members of the community of regulation that was encouraged to criticize the morals and manners of the clergy; on the other hand, they were excluded from the formal mechanisms for articulating that criticism. Their claims to moral authority were expressed in some defamation cases and as direct action, but for the most part functioned as an unseen dark matter behind litigation in church courts and complaints at visitation.

This technology of governance was also transformative for the clergy, subjecting them to intrusive supervision that targeted their bodies, dress, social behavior, households, sexuality, ministry, beliefs, and economic management. To be a priest after the late thirteenth century was to be watched and judged in a manner that had not been possible in earlier times. The advent of regular parish visitation came at a time when church governance was conducted partly in councils and synods that formulated and revised comprehensive programs of legislation for dioceses and provinces. That relatively consultative period lasted in England until the first half of the fourteenth century, after which time statutes were issued on single issues and the diocesan clergy very rarely gathered together. This shift meant that the experience of being a priest, particularly a priest commissioned in diocesan government, changed again. While the language of ritual friendship persisted in bishops’ commissions throughout our period, when it was no longer accompanied by socialization in clerical assemblies its affected discourse of masculine equality may have jarred more against the hierarchical reality. We may speculate that the second part of our period was therefore more conducive to male anxiety about clerical status.

The later fourteenth century saw further transformations. Beginning in the 1370s, and lasting until at least the 1520s, England experienced economic challenges that led to abandoned villages and churches. This had huge consequences for the male clergy and the women who surrounded them. There were shortages of clergy in some parishes, arising partly from a decrease in the number of ordinands, a direct consequence of postplague depopulation, but mostly from the difficulty that parishes experienced in resourcing the salaries of additional clergy from the profits of the benefice. Wages outstripped prices for the entirety of this long fifteenth century, and so revenues from agriculture were diminished; the impact was patchy, and it is difficult to draw firm conclusions about particular examples, but this is a useful framework for understanding why there might be a shortage of priests in some parish churches.

In these conditions, priests could not always manage the tasks that were allotted to their role. Chapter 4 showed how all those tasks were heavily gendered masculine, whether they arose from the priest’s status as a householder, his role as the manager of a benefice, or his obligations as an ordained minister responsible for divine services, pastoral care, moral example, and the conferral of sacraments. Against that backdrop of masculine expectations, chapters 3 and 5 have shown that women were everywhere active in and around the work of the priest. There were women who kept house for priests, managed aspects of his benefice, shared his bed and board, raised funds for his church; many women knew the business of the parish and its church and cared deeply when that suffered for want of priests or clerks. When there were shortages of clergy, these women might step into proscribed roles and carry out tasks that were reserved for men, whether those were parish clerks of indeterminate status or ordained deacons and priests. Late medieval economics meant that these situations came about more commonly than they had from the thirteenth to the later fourteenth centuries. The long fifteenth century also saw trends for servants to be live-in more often than paid a wage and for female labor to be cast as a moral problem, which together may have made the women in priests’ households a more prominent target in church and parish politics.

The relationship between parish economics and social change, including gender relations, is still an underresearched topic in medieval history. There is potential for innovative analysis to generate new knowledge and interpretations, and to contest the conclusions or reject the questions that have shaped this book. Despite the fragmentary character of the evidence, the present book has proposed the importance of general—and in some cases specific—economic conditions for creating moments when women felt they needed to step in. But economics is not all, and in identifying the later-fourteenth century as a turning point, we need also to think about the conjunction between material conditions and developments in politics and religion: specifically, the rise of popular heresy and the reaction to it in the church. The Brut trial has here been treated as a litmus test for the acidity of ecclesiastical attitudes toward women. It marked the flaring of a latent anxiety into an open fear: that women everywhere shored up the work of churches, were everywhere capable of stepping into masculine roles, and might harbor aspirations to be priests.

Despite lower numbers of ordinands, the shortage of economically viable benefices and the difficulties in paying additional clergy meant that there were more unbeneficed clergy looking for work than had hitherto been the case; contemporaries were concerned about this unsettling and mobile group. This fear occasioned another conjunction of phenomena that characterized the long fifteenth century. Worries about uncertain clerical status at the fringes of the church collided with attitudes to nonnormative gender, shaping how difficult-to-govern pardoners and summoners were regarded in public opinion, literary satire, and bishop’s households. This led to the paradoxical situation whereby greater emphasis was laid on binary gender norms while revealing awareness of authentic trans lives—configured in the sources as the presentation of deceptive or ambiguous gender—within or at the fringes of the clergy. As with women’s tacit and explicit roles in the parish, this trans reality was held in abeyance by defending the gendered boundary of the clergy. But there were differences in how the institutional church treated women and trans people in clerical or semiclerical roles. Because trans lives were less visible than women’s, and because fear about nonnormative gender focused on the fringes of the clerical estate, the defense was more sporadic and more virulent. One of its notable characteristics was a tendency for the documentation of governance to force observable reality into simplified categories. Women could confer some sacraments, but they ought not to; “hermaphrodites” were able to receive holy orders but ought not to. Such tortured formulations speak of the effort expended in keeping unwelcome people out of the church, ensuring they remained a mere ghostly appearance of power, held in abeyance, seen but not seen.

The approach to gender history in this book has been integrative, in the hope of stimulating further research into the operation of gender in the social and institutional church. The history of clerical masculinity has been brought into conversation with the history of women and the history of patriarchy. The hegemony of men has been reinstated as the salient fact ordering the gender politics of the time. Enumeration of multiple subjectivities has been redirected toward a history of power and inequality. Such integration has also involved forming historical questions about facts thought too obvious to mention, let alone to explain. The maleness—as opposed to the masculinity—of the Christian clergy has had its historiographical free pass revoked and has here been analyzed as a world historical phenomenon of the first order of importance, demanding our attention for its ramifications across time and space. One might suggest that it was possible for historians to ignore the mechanisms of women’s exclusion only by accepting medieval assertions that this situation was natural.

Crafting this integrated gender history of authority in the late medieval church has involved the unusual approach of setting the story of what did happen against the background of what did not happen: abbesses did not take part in diocesan government, women did not become priests. This has been important to making sense of the interplay between action and language, where something that was made to seem natural—the exclusion of women from influence and authority in the church—was not entirely real. True, women did not become priests, but women did act in almost every aspect of the priestly role, stepping in where men failed. When the null history and the partial history are set side by side, we are able to advance our interpretation of the gendered character of church administration and discipline. Ecclesiastical attention to the masculinity of the clergy did not—as has been assumed in some of the recent scholarship—solely or even mainly have the effect of differentiating clergy from laity but, rather, of guarding the remarkably porous (and yet natural-seeming) boundary that kept women away from church authority.