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Speaker(s): Fiona Griffiths (èצӰÏñ)

No church doctrine requires that priests remain celibate, yet within the Catholic Church priests have been barred from marriage since the eleventh century, when ecclesiastical reformers first identified clerical marriage as a moral scourge and financial drain. In this talk, Fiona Griffiths examines the celibacy movement in medieval Germany from a gendered standpoint, examining the effects on medieval communities and families of the removal of wives from the homes of priests. Exploring the implications of priestly celibacy for clerical wives, Griffiths works to recapture a history of these women, whose erasure was fundamental to the emergence of the Latin Church as a triumphantly single-sex hierarchy during the central Middle Ages.
 
Fiona Griffiths is a historian of medieval Western Europe, focusing on intellectual and religious life from the ninth to the thirteenth century.  She is the author of Nuns' Priests' Tales: Men and Salvation in Medieval Women's Monastic Life (The University of Pennsylvania Press: 2018) and The Garden of Delights: Reform and Renaissance for Women in the Twelfth Century (The University of Pennsylvania Press: 2007).