Mariage clérical et masculinité sacerdotale dans la Catalogne du XIVe siècle

Abstract

Clerical Marriage and Priestly Masculinity in Fourteenth-Century Catalunya. In fourteenth-century Catalunya, Catalan priests formed domestic unions with women that were marriage all but in name. Episcopal visitation records from the diocese of Girona, Barcelona, Vic, and Urgell show that parish clergy were able to meld a family and a household with their profession in spite of the Church’s prohibition against clerical marriage. The fact that so many clergymen were promoted through the holy orders to become parish priests and still managed to form de facto marriages and support their children indicates that although the standards of the medieval Church had changed since the Gregorian period, the customs of parish clergy had not. Countless clergymen defied orders to expel their women and set aside their families, regardless of the threats of excommunication and repeated episcopal fines that were inconsistently applied to the clerical population. Judging from the number of priests who persisted in these de facto marriages, the financial burden was ultimately tolerable not only because clergymen were emotionally attached to their families, but also since the role of a paterfamilias, who ruled a household with a wife and children, was central to the masculinity of priests. It was not merely proof of sexual activity or evidence of offspring that conferred masculine status in the parishes of late medieval Catalunya. Priests established marital households because medieval society defined adult male masculinity as one in which a man advanced to take on the role of husband and father.