Gender and Authority in the Late Medieval Church: A New History

Gender and Authority in the Late Medieval Church asks a deceptively simple question: How did the governance of the medieval institutional church remain exclusively male, despite plentiful evidence of women being as capable and devout as men? The remarkable endurance of an all-male clergy is an important element of medieval church government—one that is frequently taken for granted in the historiography—and is connected to another overlooked feature of episcopal authority: the strategies that bishops used to secure the compliance of a relatively autonomous clergy. As Ian Forrest shows, bishops kept their clergy in check through normative standards of masculinity that necessarily disqualified women from leadership roles. Everywhere in the medieval church were women who had the capacity, resources, and often the ambition to take part in governance, from abbesses to priests' servants, mothers, sisters, and unofficial wives. Bringing together evidence of female activity at the margins of the institutional church, Forrest argues that the male monopoly on formal power was haunted by female capability and aspiration at every turn. Drawing case studies from the English diocesan clergy between the mid-thirteenth and early sixteenth centuries, he explores how women's involvement in governance was rendered unthinkable through the very discursive strategies that bishops used to control their male clergy. In doing so, Gender and Authority in the Late Medieval Church tells an integrated history that explains how both the exclusion of women and the inclusion of men underpins a rigidly gendered system of religious governance.