“A Woman of Good Character and Reputation”: The Clerical Concubine in the Parish Community

This talk will use the fourteenth-century visitations records from the small Tuscan diocese of Cortona as a starting point for reflections on the uses and limitations of visitation records, the evident approval of clerical concubinage at the village level, and the frictions (and some surprising areas of agreement) between this cultural preference for a domesticated clergy and the norms articulated in canon law.  Evidence from the Cortona visitation records will be supplemented with visitation records from other Italian dioceses and with diocesan legislation.  An effort will be made to compare the disciplinary decrees issued by diocesan synods in fourteenth-century Italy with those enacted elsewhere in Mediterranean Europe.  Time permitting, I hope to add a few words on northern Europe, addressing the question of whether the theory and practice of clerical concubinage as it emerges from these sources constitutes a Mediterranean model, or whether it should be considered characteristic of pre-Reformation Europe in general.