Faculty Research Fellows Talk with Fiona Griffiths

Fiona Griffiths: "Invisible Women: Priests’ Wives in Medieval Europe"

In the early eleventh century, bishops across Europe embarked on a campaign to rid the church of a particular abomination: the married priest, a man whom the reforming monk Peter Damian imagined was enflamed with “the fire of hellish lust.”  Local church councils limited the access of clerical husbands to their wives and encouraged both to embrace chastity.  While the Latin church emerged from this period of reform as a triumphantly single-sex hierarchy, cathedral precincts and priestly residences had once thronged with clerical wives and families.  What can now be known of these clerical wives, whose lives were redefined as illicit and corrupt by medieval church reformers?

Fiona Griffiths is Professor of Humanities and Professor of History, by courtesy, of Religious Studies and of German Studies.

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