How to use this Page

On 15th June 2015, Magna Carta celebrates its 800th anniversary. More has been written about this document than about virtually any other piece of parchment in world history. A great deal has been wrongly attributed to it: democracy, Habeas Corpus, Parliament, and trial by jury are all supposed somehow to trace their origins to Runnymede and 1215. In reality, if any of these ideas are even touched upon within Magna Carta, they are found there only in embryonic form.

The post The greatest charter? appeared first on OUPblog.

Add a Comment

September 2014 marks the tenth anniversary of the publication of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Over the next month a series of blog posts explore aspects of the Dictionary’s online evolution in the decade since 2004. In this post, Henry Summerson considers how new research in medieval biography is reflected in ODNB updates.

Today’s publication of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography’s September 2014 update—marking the Dictionary’s tenth anniversary—contains a chronological bombshell. The ODNB covers the history of Britons worldwide ‘from the earliest times’, a phrase which until now has meant since the fourth century BC, as represented by Pytheas, the Marseilles merchant whose account of the British Isles is the earliest known to survive. But a new ‘biography’ of the Red Lady of Paviland—whose incomplete skeleton was discovered in 1823 in Wales, and which today resides in Oxford’s Museum of Natural History—takes us back to distant prehistory. As the earliest known site of ceremonial human burial in western Europe, Paviland expands the Dictionary’s range by over 32,000 years.

The Red Lady’s is not the only ODNB biography pieced together from unidentified human remains (Lindow Man and the Sutton Hoo burial are others), while the new update also adds the fifteenth-century ‘Worcester Pilgrim’ whose skeleton and clothing are on display at the city’s cathedral. However, the Red Lady is the only one of these ‘historical bodies’ whose subject has changed sex—the bones having been found to be those of a pre-historical man, and not (as was thought when they were discovered), of a Roman woman.

The process of re-examination and re-interpretation which led to this discovery can serve as a paradigm for the development of the DNB, from its first edition (1885-1900) to its second (2004), and its ongoing programme of online updates. In the case of the Red Lady the moving force was in its broadest sense scientific. In this ‘he’ is not unique in the Dictionary. The bones of the East Frankish queen Eadgyth (d.946), discovered in 2008 provide another example of human remains giving rise to a recent biography. But changes in analysis have more often originated in more conventional forms of historical scholarship. Since 2004 these processes have extended the ODNB’s pre-1600 coverage by 300 men and women, so bringing the Dictionary’s complement for this period to more than 7000 individuals.

In part, these new biographies are an evolution of the Dictionary as it stood in 2004 as we broaden areas of coverage in the light of current scholarship. One example is the 100 new biographies of medieval bishops that, added to the ODNB’s existing selection, now provide a comprehensive survey of every member of the English episcopacy from the Conquest to the Reformation—a project further encouraged by the publication of new sources by the Canterbury and York Society and the Early English Episcopal Acta series.

Taken together these new biographies offer opportunities to explore the medieval church, with reference to incumbents’ background and education, the place of patronage networks, or the shifting influence of royal and papal authority. That William Alnwick (d.1449), ‘a peasant born of a low family’, could become bishop of Norwich and Lincoln is, for example, indicative of the growing complexity of later medieval episcopal administration and its need for talented men. A second ODNB project (still in progress) focuses on late-medieval monasticism. Again, some notable people have come to light, including the redoubtable Elizabeth Cressener, prioress of Dartford, who opposed even Thomas Cromwell with success.

Away from religious life, recent projects to augment the Dictionary’s medieval and early modern coverage have focused on new histories of philanthropy—with men like Thomas Alleyne, a Staffordshire clergyman whose name is preserved by three schools—and of royal courts and courtly life. Hence first-time biographies of Sir George Blage, whom Henry VIII used to address as ‘my pig’, and at a lower social level, John Skut, the tailor who made clothes for most of the king’s wives: ‘while Henry’s queens came and went, John Skut remained.’

Alongside these are many included for remarkable or interesting lives which illuminate the past in sometimes unexpected ways. At the lowest social level, such lives may have been very ordinary, but precisely because they were commonplace they were seldom recorded. Where a full biography is possible, figures of this kind are of considerable interest to historians. One such is Agnes Cowper, a Southwark ‘servant and vagrant’ in the years around 1600; attempts to discover who was responsible for her maintenance shed a fascinating light on a humble and precarious life, and an experience shared by thousands of late-Tudor Londoners. Such light falls only rarely, but the survival of sources, and the readiness of scholars to investigate them, have also led to recent biographies of the Roman officers and their wives at Vindolanda, based on the famous ‘tablets’ found at Chesterholm in Northumberland; the early fourteenth-century anchorite Christina Carpenter, who provoked outrage by leaving her cell (but later returned to it), and whose story has inspired a film, a play and a novel; and trumpeter John Blanke, whose fanfares enlivened the early Tudor court and whose portrait image is the only identifiable likeness of a black person in sixteenth-century British art.

While people like Blanke are included for their distinctiveness, most ODNB subjects can be related to the wider world of their contemporaries. A significant component of the Dictionary since 2004 has been an interest in recreating medieval and early modern networks and associations; they include the sixth-century bringers of Christianity to England, the companions of William I, and the enforcers of Magna Carta. Each establishes connections between historical figures, sets the latter in context, and charts how appreciations of these networks and their participants have developed over time—from the works of early chroniclers to contemporary historians. Indeed, in several instances, notably the Round Table knights or the ‘Merrie Men’, it is this (often imaginative) interpretation and recreation of Britain’s medieval past that is to the fore.

The importance of medieval afterlives returns us to the Red Lady of Paviland. His biography presents what can be known, or plausibly surmised, about its subject, alongside the ways in which his bodily remains (and the resulting life) have been interpreted by successive generations—each perceptibly influenced by the cultural as well as scholarly outlook of the day. Next year sees the 800^th anniversary of the granting of Magna Carta, a centenary which can be confidently expected to bring further medieval subjects into Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. It is unlikely that the historians responsible will be unaffected by considerations of the long-term significance of the Charter. Nor, indeed, should they be—it is the interaction of past and present which does most to bring historical biography to life.

The post The Oxford DNB at 10: new perspectives on medieval biography appeared first on OUPblog.

Add a Comment

A set of related satirical poems, probably written in the early thirteenth century, described an imaginary church council of English priests reacting to the news that they must henceforth be celibate. In this fictional universe the council erupted in outrage as priest after priest stood to denounce the new papal policy. Not surprisingly, the protests of many focused on sex, with one speaker, for instance, indignantly protesting that virile English clerics should be able to sleep with women, not livestock. However, other protests were focused on family. Some speakers appealed to the desire for children, and others noted their attachment to their consorts, such as one who exclaimed: “This is a useless measure, frivolous and vain; he who does not love his companion is not sane!” The poems were created for comical effect, but a little over a century earlier English priests had in fact faced, for the first time, a nationwide, systematic attempt to enforce clerical celibacy. Undoubtedly a major part of the ensuing uproar was about sex, but in reality as in fiction it was also about family.

Rules demanding celibacy first appeared at church councils in the late Roman period but were only sporadically enforced in Western Europe through the early Middle Ages and never had more than a limited impact in what would become the Eastern Orthodox Church. In Anglo-Saxon England moralists sometimes preached against clerical marriage and both king and church occasionally issued prohibitions against it, but to little apparent effect. Indeed, one scribe erased a ban on clerical marriage from a manuscript and wrote instead, “it is right that a cleric (or priest) love a decent woman and bed her.” In the eleventh century, however, a reinvigorated papacy began a sustained drive to enforce clerical celibacy throughout Catholic Europe for clerics of the ranks of priest, deacon, or subdeacon. This effort provoked great controversy, but papal policy prevailed, and over the next couple of centuries increasingly made clerical celibacy the norm.

In England, it was Anselm, the second archbishop of Canterbury appointed after the Norman Conquest, who made the first attempt to systematically impose clerical celibacy in 1102. Anselm’s efforts created a huge challenge to the status quo, for many, perhaps most English priests were married in 1102 and the priesthood was often a hereditary profession. Indeed, Anselm and Pope Paschal II agreed not to attempt in the short term to enforce one part of the program of celibacy, the disbarment of sons of priests from the priesthood, because that would have decimated the ranks of the English clergy. Anselm, moreover, found himself trying to figure out how to allow priests to take care of their former wives, and priests who obediently separated from their wives were apparently sometimes threatened by their angry in-laws. Not surprisingly, Anselm’s efforts were deeply unpopular and faced widespread opposition.

Priests then and in subsequent generations (for Anselm’s efforts had only limited success in the short run) were often deeply attached to their families. A miracle story recorded after Thomas Becket’s death in 1170 describes a grieving priest getting confirmation from the recent martyr that his concubine, who had done good works before her death, had gone to heaven. Other miracle stories show priests and their companions lamenting the illness, misfortune, or death of a child and seeking miraculous aid. It took a long time to fully convince everyone that priestly families were ipso facto immoral. Even late in the twelfth century, the monastic writer John of Ford, in a saint’s life of the hermit Wulfric of Haselbury, could depict the family of a parish priest, Brictric, as perfectly pious, with Brictric’s wife making ecclesiastical vestments and his son and eventual successor as priest, Osbern, serving at mass as a minor cleric. John also depicted a former concubine of another priest as a saintly woman noted for her piety. Proponents of clerical celibacy had a difficult challenge not only in enforcing the rules but in convincing people that they ought to be enforced in the first place.

Inevitably, priests’ families suffered heavily from the drive for celibacy. The sons of priests lost the chance to routinely follow in their father’s professional footsteps, as most medieval men did. After priestly marriage was legally eliminated, sons and daughters both were automatically illegitimate, bringing severe legal disadvantages. However, it was the female companions of priests who suffered most. Partly this was because one of the key motives behind clerical celibacy was the belief that sexual contact with women polluted priests who then physically touched God by touching the sacrament as they performed the Eucharist. Moralists constantly preached that this was irreligious, even blasphemous, and disgusting. However, the female partners of priests also suffered because preachers constantly denigrated them as whores and used misogynistic stereotypes to try to convince priests that they should avoid taking partners. Thus preachers repeatedly attacked priests for wasting money on adorning their “whores” or for arising from having sex with their “whores” to go perform the Eucharist. It is hard to know the precise position of priests’ wives in the eleventh century but it is quite likely that most were perfectly respectable. Nonetheless, the attacks of reformers had a powerful impact. In 1137 King Stephen decided to do his part to encourage clerical celibacy, and raise money in the process, by rounding up clerical concubines and holding them in the Tower of London for ransom. Some of these were probably partners of canons of St Paul’s cathedral, who were rich and powerful men, but even so, while in the tower they were subject to physical mockery and abuse. Increasingly, it was impossible to be both the partner of a priest and a respectable member of society.

Many of the proponents of clerical celibacy were fiercely idealistic in their efforts to prevent what they saw as widespread pollution of the Eucharist, to remove the costs of families from the financial burdens of churches, to make the priesthood more distinctive from the laity, and simply to enforce church law. As the historian Christopher Brooke suggested nearly six decades ago, however, and as subsequent research has clearly demonstrated, one result of their efforts was a social revolution that resulted in broken homes and personal tragedies.

Headline image: 12th Century painters, from the Web Gallery of Art. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Clerical celibacy appeared first on OUPblog.

Add a Comment

By Natalia Nowakowska

As the Catholic Church embarked upon its observance of Lent last week, many congregations will be holding in their hands brand new, bright red liturgical books — copies of the new English translation of the Roman Missal (the service book for Catholic Mass), introduced throughout the English-speaking world at the end of 2011 on the instructions of the Vatican.

This is not a new experience for Catholic congregations and clergy. The rare book collections of the world’s research libraries are full of the ‘new’ liturgical books produced for European dioceses between 1478 and 1500, on the orders of bishops making enthusiastic use of the recently developed printing press. Some of these books, missals printed on vellum in full folio size, are too heavy for me to pick up. Others, tiny breviaries with heavily-thumbed pages, would fit in your pocket, or that of a late medieval priest. In their prefaces, bishops explained that the point of printing these new liturgical books was to reform the church. Their aim was to provide parishes with new liturgies which were an improvement upon the service-books already in use, both the “crumbling” liturgical manuscripts from which communities had been praying for centuries, and recent, pirated printed editions. This fifteenth-century initiative was reprised during the Counter Reformation; echoing the actions of late medieval North European bishops, Pope Pius V’s Breviarium Romanum (1568) and Missale Romanum (1570) provided the entire Catholic world with new liturgical editions in Europe and beyond. The printing of improved liturgical books was therefore at the forefront of many high clerical minds in Renaissance Europe, just as it is a priority for the Vatican today.

The links between these Renaissance-era projects and what is currently happening in English-speaking Catholic churches go beyond a general impulse by high clergy to roll out improved worship-books, however. I’ve been struck by how similar the language used by fifteenth-century bishops, Pius V, and the current Roman Catholic hierarchy is. Late medieval bishops, in their neatly printed prefaces, complained bitterly at the “corruption,” “distortion,” and “manifest errors” of old liturgical books. The provision of the 2011 Roman missal is, meanwhile, justified with reference to the oversimplified, “plain,” and possibly inauthentic words of the earlier translation. Fifteenth-century prelates stressed that an authorised, printed liturgy would ensure a “unanimity” in worship which symbolised the essential unity of the church; the modern Congregation of Rites states that the new missal translations will function as “an outstanding sign and instrument of… integrity and unity.” Late medieval bishops took care to stress the academic credentials of the clergy-scholars who had prepared the new editions; Benedict XVI has thanked the “expert assistants” who worked on the new missal, “offering the fruits of their scholarship.” The language of liturgical reform, corruption and renewal, unity and authenticity, which we hear today is also that of the sixteenth and fifteenth-century church, which had in turn inherited it from the early medieval church.

New books, same story. Yet the introduction of new books for worship is about power and authori

Add a Comment