Introduction

This book considers how gender animated the governing system of one of world history’s most important institutions: the late medieval church. It takes England as a case study but proposes a more far-reaching model of historical interpretation. During the period between 1200 and 1500, the church was powerful in a multitude of distinctive ways. It was a fulcrum of social continuity and change, a significant cultural force. So extensive and intensive was its influence that without reference to it, no experience or process of change in those centuries can be fully understood. What is more, the church’s institutional culture set parameters for historical developments for centuries to come and across large parts of the world. Understanding how the church was governed is therefore a matter of world historical importance. Asking how that governance was animated by gender reveals the deep structures connecting such an institution to the people over and through whom it ruled.

A single well-known and inescapable fact demonstrates both the analytical promise of this inquiry and the limitations to our current historical imaginations. The church was ruled by men. What should historians do with this fact? It needs no empirical investigation and would be underwhelming as the conclusion of a longish book. But the maleness of the Christian clergy was a dominant feature of the late medieval centuries, and something whose significance is amplified by its subsequent history as a blueprint for the maleness of all governing and professional cadres in Western history.1 It demands our attention. It may even be that by understanding its history we contribute in a small way to dismantling the enduring damage that such systems of domination wreak on our political, professional, social, and psychological lives to this day.

And yet history writing takes the fact of medieval clerical maleness for granted. Being an undisputed fact has allowed it to evade scrutiny. Constructions of clerical masculinity have been a notable object of study for some time, but maleness itself has not. The present book pauses where others have sped past and takes time to survey the landscape of medieval clerical maleness: what effect did it have on the church, how did the male monopoly persist over time, and what effect did it have on women and trans people?

While women possessed acknowledged authority in some areas of the institutional church, such as in female religious houses (the topic of chapter 2) and in the relationship between clerical men and visionary or charismatic women, female authority was for the most part heavily circumscribed or completely ruled out.2 Women could not govern dioceses as bishops, could not participate in the dispersed administrative procedures of diocesan government, and could not be ordained as priests. The smallest unit of church authority—the parish—was thus as much determined by male action as was the diocese. Such was the political orthodoxy.

Nevertheless, everywhere that women were excluded or denied they were in fact active in challenging, contributing to, participating in, shadowing, or usurping the male monopoly on authority. This book sets side by side these two facts about gender and authority—the male monopoly and female action—and examines how each affected the other. How did the male monopoly on authority respond to the existence of female activity that seemed to threaten its claims? In chapter 6, I add to this some compelling evidence about responses to the nonnormative gender of some functionaries in the church. The object of study also broadens to consider how the hegemony of men continued when women and trans people demonstrated their capacity to inhabit its roles. How did people excluded by constructions of gender find outlets for their innate capacities and conscious desires in a system that sought to remove their influence?

In order to answer these questions the present book brings together a range of approaches to the historical study of gender. It draws out explicit and implicit constructions of masculinity, femininity and nonnormative gender from literary, religious, legal, and, above all, administrative texts. It looks at the ways in which people of all genders were held to normative standards in moral and disciplinary contexts, and how people negotiated a space for their individuality in relation to behavioral norms. It examines the ways in which gender ambiguity was instrumentalized in social and institutional politics. It considers the way in which all talk about gender was a component of institutional power and a constituent part of male claims to authority; it reflects on the historical implications of inequality between men and women, and it opens up a space for the consideration of trans lives where nonnormative gender was weaponized on the frontiers of institutional politics.3

Much of the evidence is fragmentary and occludes female and trans experiences. The particular categories of evidence are discussed in detail in the chapters that follow, but at the outset I beg readers’ willingness to allow the fragment to point toward the whole and to entertain the creative readings necessary for recovering that which has been excluded. Where fragmentary evidence is all that we have—for example concerning women who stepped into priestly roles—I extrapolate from often short and challenging texts to general conclusions by way of the simplest interpretations available. This involves adding social and cultural context from analogous situations, grouping fragments together to discover patterns, and assessing whether unusual evidence indicates a rare situation or reveals something more common. A degree of speculation is involved in such an exercise, but I acknowledge this so that readers can weigh the evidence for themselves and researchers can refine, improve, or reject my conclusions on the basis of other evidence. Where the evidence is more plentiful—for example concerning diocesan organization and clerical discipline—interpretation is equally necessary and disagreement equally possible. My broad approach is to use written language and recorded actions as evidence for the social logic of the systems under investigation. Repeated habits of speech and writing, and the actions and reactions they point to, illuminate structural features of the past that were not necessarily apparent to contemporaries. The logic of the male monopoly on church authority is not, therefore, assumed to have been always consciously articulated.

These are big questions and themes. My field of study is England between about 1200 and about 1500, but I do not believe the questions or my answers are applicable only to this context. One could apply the questions to many historical situations: other regions of the late medieval church, other periods of church history, other governing systems or instances of institutional power the world over. Empirical aspects of the answers would of course be different. Constructions of gender shift in kaleidoscopic variation across time and space, and the cultural expressions of authority in late medieval Christianity were unique in many ways. But it seems likely to me that male monopoly systems of government should be always characterized by some of the core structures and relationships uncovered in this book. In being open to this high level of historical abstraction, the present book is intended as an empirically based interpretative model whose essential elements could be used to interrogate the interplay between government and gender anywhere at any time.

The principal conundrum to be resolved with respect to the male monopoly is continuity. How did it last so long? The maleness of the Christian clergy was assumed from its inception, became a legal requirement from the twelfth century, and persisted until the present day within Catholicism and until the late twentieth century within the English province of the Anglican church.4 One effect of continuity is to make aspects of human history seem like facts of nature, the default masculinity of the church’s governing systems being a very good example. This might explain its evasion of historical scrutiny, but of course, no apparent continuity should be assumed to lack a meaningful history. My inquiry into continuity pursues a trail laid in 1988 by the historian of modern France Joan Scott and further signposted in 2006 by the medievalist Judith Bennett. Reflecting on the mechanisms by which gender has contributed to social and political hierarchies, Scott observed that it had often been made to seem “part of the natural or divine order,” while Bennett, in her classic argument for a more historical understanding of patriarchy, noted the mutually reinforcing character of “its mechanisms, its changes, its endurance.”5 Such continuity as exists alongside change incubates a sense of unchanging “normality,” while that sense in turn facilitates continuity.

The remarkable endurance of an all-male clergy is connected to another important and unexamined element of medieval church government: the deceptively simple problem of how bishops were able to exercise rule through other people. Why did many hundreds of clerics play their small parts in the government of the church: collecting money, gathering information, preparing for episcopal visitations, disciplining laypeople and fellow clergy, and amplifying the bishop’s message to his flock?

One could, of course, answer this question from the traditional perspectives of ecclesiastical history, by describing administrative procedures and structures or focusing on the person of the bishop.6 However, there are two problems with these ways of thinking about the institutional church. First, they pay insufficient regard to the fact that bishops had relatively little coercive power over the men who carried out diocesan business. Officers who were part of the bishop’s household owed their appointment, though not always their income, to him, but in some dioceses, figures such as archdeacons were largely independent and difficult to challenge.7 Working with them involved more diplomatic negotiation than command and control. Among the wider pool of parish clergy who carried out diocesan duties, bishops possessed uncontested authority only over those occupying benefices under episcopal patronage. For the most part the clergy were appointed by lay and institutional patrons, severely narrowing bishops’ means to sanction them.8 Even though ecclesiastical messaging portrayed the church as a hierarchical structure, clerical independence meant that for practical purposes the institution was much flatter, something like a commonwealth of clergy. Second, traditional administrative history is very mechanistic, assuming that men receiving orders would carry them out simply because they occupied a particular position within the system. Such descriptions of structure and hierarchy do little to explain how the living social organism of the medieval church actually functioned.9 But if hierarchy and organizational structures do not—or do not fully—explain how the church was governed, where are we to look? The contention of this book is that the problem of governing through a multitude of more-or-less independent agents can be addressed only by looking at the interactions between the parties involved. This approach has been theorized in several branches of the social sciences as the “principal-agent problem”: how does an owner or authority figure (the principal) ensure that the person acting on their behalf (the agent) does so in their interests? The potential for misunderstanding or malfeasance, the distances involved and the passage of time, and a host of other factors enter into the principal’s calculations. Meanwhile, the agent contemplates their relationship to the principal: to what extent do I rely on them for income, security, or advancement; what degree of compliance is required to meet their expectations?

Framed in such a way the issue becomes one of communication, monitoring, and sanctions, all of which we find prominently in the records of episcopal administration. I do not wish to take the language of econometrics or management science too much to heart, as it reduces human beings to individualistic cost-benefit calculators and sweeps aside cultural and social differences. Values also matter. The substance of the beliefs held by any given set of principals and agents may be very important, especially if it describes characteristics expected of the participants or symbolizes the way in which they should relate to one another. Additionally, the extent to which values are shared and the means of their communication are significant variables. This book takes three instances of governance by bishops and their households and looks at the actions of the parties as attempts to reach workable principal-agent dynamics. I examine how bishops secured the cooperation of the officers and commissioners with whom they governed their dioceses (the focus of chapter 1), the ways in which bishops sought to regulate and reform the parish clergy (discussed in chapter 4), and how they engaged with itinerant court personnel and charitable fundraisers (the subject of chapter 6). The challenges involved were historically specific, but this history of the medieval church will also resonate with students of many other forms of government and institutional power, a common feature of which has been the restriction of public authority and delegated action to men.

While the bar to women exercising church authority has been too little studied, the same cannot be said about the masculinity of the men in power. Historians have devoted a great deal of attention to how the gender of holy men was constructed as an element in their sanctity, how popes and polemicists built models of masculine leadership to rival those of the military landholding elite, how young men were socialized into the celibacy of monasticism, and how that celibacy came to be demanded of the parish clergy.10 The intensity and breadth of medieval masculinity studies has marked a clear shift away from gender history’s origins in the history of women.11 The two foremost theoretical influences on this shift have come from Judith Butler and Raewyn Connell. Butler’s observation that gender is a performance of cultural roles opened up many avenues for the study of how such roles were constructed and contested in various historical circumstances, while Connell’s contention that masculinity comes in many forms has stimulated their historical enumeration and analysis.12 The work of these two scholars is much debated, but they have shaped a paradigm in medieval church history wherein identity more than social or institutional power is the focus of analysis, thereby unmooring the study of masculinity from analysis of structural inequalities between the genders. In this sense, historians of gender in the medieval church have drifted away from Joan Scott’s vision of a women’s history grounded in the analysis of gender relations and the mutually constitutive entanglement of gender and power. It is particularly striking that Connell’s concept of “multiple masculinities” has been taken to heart by historians, while her definition of “hegemonic masculinity” as that which “guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women” seems to have been less influential. This is generally true despite its use by Ruth Mazo Karras in her 2003 book From Boys to Men.13 Notable exceptions aside, the history of medieval masculinity has given itself permission to disregard women’s experiences and the power relations between genders.

Alongside this, the development of medieval gender studies has been marked by increasing specialization and compartmentalization. General histories of gender that link together its constituent parts are rare. For these reasons, I believe that medieval gender history is in trouble. Increased specialization now means that studies of female religious, saints, writers and visionaries, and ordinary Christians can appear to be locked in different scholarly rooms, while consideration of masculinity in the medieval church occupies an altogether separate house. The starting point for the present book is that this situation is unhelpful for medieval gender history. Power, hierarchy, the social history of institutions, and inequalities between genders as well as among men need to be brought together.

I am not the only person to be perturbed at this situation. For almost two decades now, there have been signs of dissatisfaction among gender historians. In 2005, Karen Harvey and Alexandra Shepard surveyed historical work on masculinity in the early modern and modern periods, observing that there was “a considerable breach” between the study of subjective male experiences and hierarchies among men, on the one hand, and the analysis of power relations between men and women on the other. While acknowledging the significant effect of “hegemonic masculinity” on men, they nevertheless point out that the greatest impact from patriarchy has been felt by women. Harvey and Shepard wrote this around the same time Toby L. Ditz observed that although the history of masculinity had grown out of feminist models of relational and constructed gender roles, in practice it tended to ignore male power over women.14 Kathryn Gleadle noted in 2013 that just as the study of masculinity can sometimes efface the presence of women, histories of the body and sexuality may drift far away from the agency and experience of women. Ben Griffin has likewise reflected with dismay on histories that are little more than a “parade of types of masculinity,” instead of which, he writes, historians ought to give more attention to “the relationship between the history of masculinity and the history of patriarchy.”15 Historians are not alone in their concern that the study of masculinity has forgotten its origins in feminist critiques of patriarchy. The critical theorist Michael Schwalbe has, for instance, castigated a scholarship “devoted mainly to the endless description of masculinities” while neglecting power relations, and the sociologist Jeff Hearn has argued that given recent scholarly blindness to male domination of women, “it is time to go back from masculinity to men, to examine the hegemony of men” over women.16

Medievalists are also beginning to ask where the study of power relations, and of women, has gone.17 But this growing call for a reinvigorated history of gendered power relations has not been much heeded in the study of the medieval church. Echoing the programmatic ambition of Harvey and Shepard’s survey, the medievalist Derek Neal appears to call for the opposite approach, a withdrawal from the study of power into subjectivity: “we have to think about masculinity as something that mattered to individuals—as an aspect of identity, in other words not just as a set of metaphorical meanings that cultural powers could manipulate to serve rhetorical or disciplinary ends.”18 While subjectivity is a vital object of inquiry in its own right, the implied unimportance of power and discipline denudes the historical landscape that one is seeking to understand.

The present book is a “new history” of gender and authority in the later Middle Ages precisely because it reconnects the study of masculinity with the history of male subordination of women and trans people, in other words patriarchy. I follow Gerda Lerner’s simple definition of patriarchy as a hierarchical form of social organization in which “resources, property, status and privileges are allocated to persons in accordance with culturally defined gender roles.” That means looking for the ways in which women were excluded from office and authority because of their imagined attributes, how men—but not all men—were included because of theirs, and how the boundaries between such roles were policed. As a generation of historians and theorists in the later twentieth century pointed out, the relationship between gender and power has never been simple. It has always been entangled with other axes of inequality, such as race, class, status, age, and so on, with which it “intersects” in various “matrices of domination.” For Lerner and Connell, race, class, and gender are locked in processes of “co-formation.”19

Entangled with the three-part analysis of governance (dioceses, parishes, and the clergy) in the present book, I present a three-part analysis of gender, power, and inequality in thematically paired chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 consider the ties that bound bishops to the men with whom they collaborated in diocesan administration, namely, the members of their households, officeholders like archdeacons and commissaries, and select members of the parish clergy; those gendered bonds traversing a steep status hierarchy are then compared with the way that bishops kept at arm’s length a pool of high-status women able to take part in the administration of dioceses and the means by which their involvement was rendered unthinkable. Both the exclusion of women and the inclusion of men were heavily gendered and closely entwined with status and wealth hierarchies; looking sequentially at the two processes contributes to a reintegration of the multiple strands of gender history. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the women who ran priests’ households and contributed to their rule of parishes, juxtaposing their presence with the gendered discipline to which parish priests were subjected. The women who come into the foreground here were the de facto wives of priests, usually referred to by the derogatory term concubines, as well as clerics’ female relatives, rectory servants, and the female patrons of churches. This is a socially heterogeneous set of identities. Apart from the patrons of churches, all these women—whatever their family background—were excluded from formal positions of authority within the parish while nonetheless exercising a great deal of influence over it. This strongly affected how the all-male clergy were treated by their superiors and their parishioners. Chapters 5 and 6 gather the available evidence for gendered pressure on the office of priesthood itself, looking first at women who stepped into sacerdotal roles (again a varied group, ranging from members of locally wealthy families to poor servants), and second at the fringes of the clerical estate, where the church hierarchy feared its agents might be not quite priests and not quite men. By examining how the boundaries of the priesthood were policed not just against women but also against the nonordained and people of allegedly ambiguous or deceptive gender, the value of an integrated gender history becomes even more apparent. Men, women, and trans people—as living persons as well as symbolized in rhetorical constructions—were all part of the medieval system of gender relations, and the institutional church was founded on the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that attempted to keep them apart.

As an analysis of gender and governance, this book builds on some important studies of ruling masculinity in the medieval church. To date this work has been focused on how individuals like bishops and priests experienced their bodies and gendered expectations, while my subject is somewhat broader: the role of gender in animating entire governing systems, in particular the relations between “principals” and “agents.”20 How did gender condition the interaction of bishops’ households with diocesan administrators, with parish priests, and with those at the fringes of the clerical estate? How it felt to be a man is a relevant consideration, but one that is low in my interpretative priorities. It is much more important to me to establish the role of church government and of constructions of masculinity in sustaining male hegemony over women and the marginalization of trans people. The grounds for an integrated history of governance and patriarchy are well-established for other times and places. For instance, Amanda McVitty has drawn links between sexual violence against women and the professional socialization of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century English common lawyers, Mary Laven has brought questions about gender to bear on our understanding of Jesuit organization within early European colonialism, Mrinalini Sinha has excavated the gendered construction of power and resistance in British India, and John Tosh has argued that nineteenth-century “manly” identities were locked in a mutually causal relationship with specific forms of state growth.21

Readers with some knowledge of church history will be aware that one part of the Middle Ages has been a particular focus for discussions of gender and the clergy. That is the so-called reform period between the mid-eleventh and the early-thirteenth centuries, which is often regarded as formative for the history of European gender systems.22 For some contemporaries it was an age of possibility, when people renounced sex so they could transcend the body and when the “fluid relationship between women and men enabled women to take the lead” in the experimental spiritual communities that blossomed across western Europe.23 But it was also a moment of closure, division, and the start of a new chapter in binary gender norms, the subordination of women, and the exploitation of sexuality and identity to renew spiritual and secular hierarchies.24 The values of celibate monasticism were used as a yardstick by which to measure the rectitude of the secular clergy and their suitability to administer church property.25 Following several generations of campaigning by celibacy militants and attempts to legislate against a sexually active clergy, in 1123 canon seven of the First Lateran Council provided the definitive prohibition against priests, deacons, and subdeacons cohabiting with wives or concubines. This was in one sense a definitive change in the status quo. Priests and bishops had been used to marriage in all but name, to father-son inheritance, and to active sexuality, despite many local statutes against these things. Some embraced the new world, joining the promotion of a celibate masculinity and even encouraging it as a model for all men; others resisted giving up their wives and heritable property.26 But for all clerical males in the later Middle Ages, whether or not they accepted the new norms, the touchstone for identity and discipline had changed irrevocably. The private and the public self now had to navigate an intense gendering of virtue: chaste priests were celebrated as manly and stable—which meant being in control of their bodies and emotions—while unchaste priests were condemned as feminine, meaning they were unstable and had failed in the struggle against concupiscence.27

A concurrent process of legal change concerned the status of women within the clergy. In the early Middle Ages it had been relatively common for women to be called deaconesses in “house churches” and for abbesses to hear confessions and to preach. It was sometimes said that they were “ordained” to their positions.28 Between the late eleventh and the early thirteenth centuries, however, the verb ordinare became part of the discourse that separated the clergy more definitively from the laity, describing the process by which a layperson became a priest in seven stages: porter, lector, exorcist, acolyte, subdeacon, deacon, and priest (candidates were typically ordained to several “orders” on one occasion). The emergence of this more technical meaning of ordination was associated with a hardening of gender boundaries: each explanation of the process identified the candidates as male, silently but definitively excluding women and anyone of nonnormative gender embodiment or expression. Gary Macy has described the changing attitudes to ordination held by high-medieval canon lawyers in the following way: “teaching on the ordination of women had been dramatically transformed . . . canonists moved from conceding that women were once ordained, to teaching that women never were ordained, to teaching, finally, that women never could and never would be ordained. This final position is what canon law students would be taught for the rest of the Middle Ages.”29

By the mid-twelfth century when Gratian was composing his law textbook, known as the Decretum, the ordination of women was already something of a dead letter. Gratian’s pronouncement that “women may proceed neither to the priesthood nor to the diaconate” simply reflected contemporary opinion and reality.30 This was axiomatic in thirteenth century jurisprudence. When Pope Gregory IX issued the definitive collection of papal “decretals,” compiled at his command by Raymond of Peñyafort in 1234, female ordination was a decidedly minor issue in canon legal thought. It was not addressed directly in any decretal letter, but popes assumed its prohibition when answering queries about the powers of abbesses: despite possessing considerable authority within their own convents (discussed at length in chapter 2) lack of ordination severely restricted their jurisdictional and liturgical competencies in the world at large. In 1210, Innocent III judged that abbesses hearing confessions and preaching even to their nuns was scandalous to the church.31 Furthermore, in the commentary traditions by which the Decretum and Decretals were elaborated and interpreted in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, women’s disqualification was increasingly tied to their sex as well as to legal enactments: “by impediment of sex and the law of the church.” The standard or “ordinary” gloss on the Decretals, by Bernard of Botone, even parsed ordination as the “office of males [viri officium]” which is “forbidden to women.”32 It was coming to seem that law in this area arose simply from nature, and in the anthropology of twelfth century scholasticism, women’s nature was deemed a flawed version of male perfection.33

While historians have inquired with great energy into the late medieval clergy’s adherence to celibacy, we have not asked how, once firmly established, the rule that clergy should be men stayed in place for so long. It is a remarkable historiographical silence that implies the acceptance of a simple answer: that the clergy were male because this is what canon law required. Lack of explanation suggests that the new gender order that prevailed from the eleventh to the twentieth century was accepted as natural not only by many contemporaries but also by historians. If we are now to address this awesome continuity, how should we go about it? The approach taken in this book is to ask how continuity interacted with historical change, and how rules related to culture and sociology.

A few words are necessary about historical change: it is striking how abruptly the historiography of women and ordination halts with the changes to canon law outlined, to be picked up as a question of interest only in relation to the very recent admission of women to the priesthood in certain Christian denominations. Studies of both moments, separated though they are by around nine hundred years, have focused on ideas about whether women could be priests. The intervening silence has suppressed the question of how female exclusion lasted so long. In this sense, change over time has barely impinged on the discussion of women and governance in the late medieval church, except with respect to abbesses and prioresses, as discussed in chapter 2. Some historicity is thus overdue. Following the example of Judith Bennett, I aim in the present book to give apparent continuity a history, to confront its seeming naturalness by examining its changing bases.34

Whatever it was that sustained the exclusion of women from positions of authority in the governance of dioceses and parishes must have altered in some respects between 1200 and 1500, for this was a period of momentous developments.35 Broadly speaking, diocesan government became more institutionalized and less reliant on individual leadership, but this occurred in distinctive phases. Although, across the period, English bishops remained commissioners of governance acts rather than large-scale employers of bureaucrats, the framework for their authority shifted. An era of making law in councils and synods, which lasted in England from around 1200 to the 1340s, gave way to a more specialized and less consultative form of household governance thereafter, with bishops issuing statutes ad hoc on particular matters. The only major fifteenth-century collection of episcopal constitutions comprised Archbishop Arundel’s highly focused attack on academic and popular heresy in 1407; this was inseparable from fears about women and authority, as we shall see in chapter 5. At the level of the parish there was a significant step change in the 1270s and 1280s with the advent of widespread and frequent visitations to regulate the clergy and the laity; this happened at the same time that the respective spheres of competence for church and secular courts were being thrashed out, a settlement that lasted around 150 years before church prerogatives were chipped away in the 50 years leading up to the Reformation. Meanwhile, the practical definition of the parish clergy underwent something of an unintentional reversal. First, over the course of the twelfth century, there were major efforts to distinguish priests more sharply from the laity, but from the later fourteenth to the early sixteenth century a series of developments undermined this demarcation: the legal rights of the clergy were extended to an increasingly ill-defined group, and the shortage of economically viable parishes after the plague meant that “unbeneficed” priests jostled for position with people whose roles and status were often in doubt.36

The chapters ahead ask how these developments affected the standing of women in relation to the exercise of authority in dioceses and parishes. Can we identify conditions in which the bar against women was defended more strenuously, moments when the aspirations and experiences of women changed or the fears of men intensified? Can we place any chronology on ideas about nonnormative gender? Above all, can we extrapolate from the answers to these questions any conclusions about the changing politics of gender in the church across the three centuries under study?

Besides historical change, I also give close attention to the relationship between rules, culture, and sociology. I suggested previously that the tacit answer to the historiographical nonquestion about the persistence of the male monopoly in church governance would be that law determined practice. How credible is this? Numerous historians and criminologists would answer not very. The legal philosopher Herbert Hart made one of the most influential statements skeptical of legal formalism. Hart saw laws as the expression of a wider phenomenon of behavior cleaving to rules. He recommended shifting attention from law itself to the conditions that underpin it, the “social rules” that make written law almost superfluous. A social rule is, in Hart’s words, a “regular mode of behavior” that the majority of people accept as a “standard for criticism” and that they have internalized to the extent that they do not even need to see it being generally observed in order to think it the right thing to do.37 For Hart, the continuity of legislative authority—which in our case would be the endurance of the ban on female ordination—is to be explained not by the mere existence of legislation, or even by widespread knowledge of it, but by its entanglement with such socially embedded rules that people experience as common ideas, shared practices, and internalized standards. If we wish to explain how the prohibition of women priests lasted so long, we therefore need to understand how the “social rules” surrounding it were communicated, what practices sustained them, and the extent to which they were internalized by all sorts of people.

When it comes to an integrated history of gender and authority, we find some doors already open to this way of thinking about rules. Besides attention to reigning queens and aristocratic widows, women’s history has been especially concerned with the informal operation of power, conscious that a move away from studying men in official positions means a rejection of certain forms of institutional history.38 However, this historiographical trend was part of a broader recognition that the study of power and institutions had to account for agency at every level of a society, in phenomena such as collaboration with lawful authorities or the co-option of state power to personal goals.39 Power was not exercised only formally and “top-down” but, as Michel Foucault characterized it, in a dispersed and asymmetric fashion by many actors simultaneously and multidirectionally.40 If women’s power was often informal, so too was much of that exercised by men. One consequence for feminists of Foucault’s observation has been a challenge to the idea that women were gradually excluded from power through the march of bureaucratization alone. If all power operates through informal as well as formal means, we need to understand who has been able to hold power by those different means and how some people have been excluded.41 This demands an understanding of how governance was articulated and conducted.

Some writers have located male hegemony firmly in the sphere of political thought, be it a medieval and Renaissance res publica that equated civic action with manhood, an Enlightenment social contract that rested on the exclusion of women, or a Weberian concept of political charisma defined in culturally specific masculine terms.42 In each of these paradigms one may find implicit and explicit links between political action and masculinity, such that anything deemed feminine came to seem inappropriate in the public sphere. While political thought is undoubtedly important, like legislation it does not on its own set the terms by which a society understands itself. Instead, in this book, I look for the repeated articulations of gendered power in the everyday business of governance, where formal and informal power are difficult to disentangle. I am looking for Hart’s “social rules” in things like instructions, requests, and orders (most notably in chapter 1), discipline (chapter 4), and troubleshooting (chapter 6). This seems a promising line of inquiry because such utterances were likely to have formed habits of mind, possibly not often reflected on but very much part of the scaffolding for pervasive ideas about the self, society, and power. Besides Herbert Hart, who had little interest in gender, sociologists and historians have often noted the importance of routines for the maintenance of patriarchy. This was an important aspect of Foucault’s concept of discipline, of Pierre Bourdieu’s contention that patriarchy rests on the habits formed by living within a hierarchical social system, and of Sandra Bartky’s important discussion of how women may internalize disciplinary habits.43 We find echoes of this among historians in, for instance, Julie Hardwick’s description of how in early modern France patriarchy survived as a “cultural practice in daily life.”44 It is important, however, not to get too distracted by the world of language: discourse alone cannot explain the endurance of patriarchy.45 Judith Bennett’s discussion of how women were edged out of the brewing trade in late medieval England is, for example, a notable study of how ideas and material conditions together formed the routines that structured life and saw it changed by a thousand incremental steps.46 This is an example I hold before me as I investigate a very different subject; while I stress the importance of language I try always to remain alert to the bodily and social experiences of hierarchy in the medieval church.

The everyday routines or social rules of governance and discipline in the medieval church were formed out of fragments of formulaic language and of actions, bodies, relationships, and identity. Their study helps us understand how ideas about gender contributed to the formation of the medieval church and, vice versa, how the institutional medieval church contributed to the persistence and evolution of patriarchy. Their cumulative effect was to make female involvement in government seem ridiculous and unnatural; it was a language that rendered women “unqualified by default” for participation in government.47 And I do not mean just individual women. As the feminist philosopher Amy Allen has argued, the cumulative effect or macrolevel impact should be thought of as present in every microlevel interaction and vice versa.48 Here I pursue the ways in which women as a whole and as individuals were made to seem unqualified by default to hold authority in dioceses, in parishes, and as priests. My analysis also broadens from women to anyone capable of being excluded by “feminization,” anyone deemed to have failed by the standards of patriarchy. I simultaneously ask what effect the routines of patriarchy had on individuals and how they were connected with the challenge of governing the church.

“Made to seem unqualified” is a careful and crucial phrase that points toward two suppositions that underpin the present book. First, I assume that women were not in fact unqualified for governance. Illiteracy disqualified many, but so too were many men ruled out of certain roles by lack of skill in reading and writing. In fact, as we shall see in chapter 2, some women were highly skilled in the field of literate administration. But in terms of character, intellect, and social instincts, women had just the same capacity for political action—and thereby for authority—as men. That they were but rarely permitted to occupy positions of authority was a function of a cultural system—patriarchy—that gave no acknowledgment to women’s exercise of those capacities. Second, I assume that in a certain way, men in the later Middle Ages knew that women possessed the capacity for rule.

Sometimes this is admitted in our sources, as for example when women’s ordination was discussed as a distinct possibility. Chapter 5 explores the lengths to which churchmen would go to explain how something they deemed feasible was nonetheless undesirable. Almost always the medieval ideals of clerical masculinity were, as John Arnold writes, “fictions of authority and stability” told and retold half in awareness, half in denial.49 But more often men’s knowledge of female capacities was felt as a sort of dark matter: invisible but perceptible in its visible effects. I take the rhetorical and habitual efforts to maintain male exclusivity to be evidence that such work was felt necessary. As Zillah Eisenstein once wrote, the effort that goes into sustaining patriarchy exists “because a nonpatriarchal sex-gender system could exist if allowed to.”50 Alternatives are never all that far beneath the surface.

The phrase with which I have repeatedly thought about this in relation to gender and authority in the medieval church comes from an unlikely source: a book about fungi and late capitalism that has become something of a cult classic in several academic fields. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s Mushroom at the End of the World is not primarily concerned with gender, but she writes very movingly about how the world is shaped by capacities and relations of dependence whose importance we dare not admit. In her study this was the reliance of luxury consumption on marginalized labor. For me, it is the dependence of masculine authority on women. Tsing identifies the hidden human sources of wealth as a “ghostly appearance of power,” something that must be “held in abeyance” if we consumers are to maintain the fiction that we are the sole authors of our own lives.51 In the present book the question will recur of whether women were a “ghostly appearance of power” in the medieval church—possessing innate capacities, full of potential, and in certain situations playing authoritative roles—but always denied and “held in abeyance” by men and by masculine structures that could not admit their dependence on that which was not supposed to exist.

The knowledge that women could do what men did, and that women were essential to church institutions despite legislation that these remain free from female influence, haunted the male imagination at the collective and individual levels. It created a political dynamic that feminists have identified in other contexts. The philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain memorably observed that “politics is in part an elaborate defense against the tug of the private, against the lure of the familial, against evocations of female power,” while the scholar of international relations Cynthia Enloe explained that such an urge to deny women’s capacities arises because “states are more dependent on women and particular ideas about femininity than they admit.”52 This refusal to admit is often a deafening silence emanating from the historical sources, but sometimes, it is broken by moments when that which is repressed returns or bursts out. For states and institutions, that repressed nemesis—disorder, anarchy—is often symbolized as female.53 It was also often located in the home, a space beyond the reach of public authority. Early modern historians have done much to unravel the contradictions of patriarchy in the home, reaching conclusions that we can profitably apply to the study of the medieval church. Susan Amussen, Kathleen Brown, and Scott Hendrix in particular point out that in being required to exert authority over wives, servants, and other members of their households, the psyches of married and propertied men were exposed to a devastating contradiction. They were supposed to rule these “dependents,” but they were in fact dependent on them. Wives often brought money and status to a marriage; their work was the bedrock of the household economy. Men needed the care provided by women; they could not manage without it. This placed not just a contradiction but also a vulnerability at the heart of male authority. It made them, in Brown’s words, “anxious patriarchs”: powerful and dominant yet assailed by the fear of losing their status. Male authority over wives, children, employees, and enslaved persons was never “tranquil” and required effort, often leading to violence.54 Paradoxically, male authority was everywhere dependent on women. Admitting that was difficult, contributing to status anxiety among men.

Identifying anxieties in historical individuals and cultures always means making inferences from written evidence, something at which social historians of gender have become adept. For instance Alexandra Cuffel, following the anthropologist Mary Douglas, reads medieval references to impurity and bodily disorder as “expressions of anxiety about maintaining the hierarchy and the divisions” of religious life; Merridee Bailey has argued that written articulations of moral standards in the later Middle Ages ought to be read as responses to “emotional states related to fear and anxiety”; Bronach Kane does something similar in seeing late medieval insults, reported in defamation litigation, as embodying anxieties about reputation.55 Such approaches involve making psychological extrapolations from the words in our sources, being attentive to the context in which they appear, and noting patterns of repetition and use. A normative moral statement might reveal the writer’s feelings about what would happen if that rule were not respected, while outbursts of anger directed toward the failings of others may have involved some transference of the speaker’s own anxieties. In a similar way, my approach to the records of church government is to consider the emotional states implied by moral judgments and to listen for the anxiety in expressions of anger. I do this with respect to episcopal letters (in chapter 1), court and visitation records (in chapter 4), and a wide variety of texts constituting the sphere of public debate in late medieval England (in chapter 6).

Discussion of male anxiety, awareness of female capacities, and the slender lines of ecclesiastical power sharpen the question of how an all-male institution survived for so long. Many scholars have noted how in other contexts the fragility or “crisis tendencies” of masculinity did not lead to the collapse of patriarchy. Male hegemony appears to be something that is always falling yet never falls. Many moments of masculine crisis, failure, and weakness appear in the following chapters, but this is a book about the continuity and indeed strengthening of male domination. How can we square this circle? Another early modernist, Mark Breitenberg, provides a useful model that applies generally to this problem. He argues that when its “fissures and contradictions” are identified by contemporaries, whether that is women embarrassing the status quo or men failing to live up to it, these moments “paradoxically enable and drive patriarchy’s reproduction” by creating opportunities for the reassertion of the norm or the rule.56 Where there were threats to male hegemony in the medieval church, occasions to assert masculine superiority and feminine weakness or danger emerged. When some men failed to live up to the masculine ideal they could be rebuked in such a way that the male pecking order was reinforced. In these ways gender norms could become tools of governance. Sometimes they went unquestioned and became axioms or habits or routines, disqualifying women and trans people by default and without comment. At other times overt challenges to male domination of church office could, if successfully stage-managed by the episcopal hierarchy, occasion a very public reassertion of the gender order: patriarchy.

By pursuing the twin problems of how church government was kept male for so long and how government through independent agents was made to work, this book pursues a hunch that each might be solved by its entanglement with the other. Both government and patriarchy are, after all, systems of domination, and we know such phenomena to be matrices coformed of many intersecting strands. The strands may not be irrevocably entwined—change is possible—but they have formed a succession of dense knots at different points in time. If the historian can identify some of the means by which those knots tighten and allow domination to become stronger, then we may also be able to learn how to loosen them, making change easier to bring about. Ultimately, this book argues that the challenges of church government were addressed by strengthening gendered boundaries and discipline; the clergy remained male because this “patriarchal dividend” benefited them as individuals and the church as an institution.