Gender and Authority in the Late Medieval Church

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, the 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 on 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 underpin a rigidly gendered system of religious governance.

Ian Forrest is Head of Humanities at the University of Glasgow. He was previously Professor of Social and Religious History at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Trustworthy Men and The Detection of Heresy in Late Medieval England.

Gender and Authority in the Late Medieval Church is a very welcome, strongly argued, and passionately revisionist history about the frequently overlooked role of gender as a structuring feature of the late medieval English church. Ian Forrest's analysis is deeply grounded in the sources, theoretically astute, and thoroughly thought-provoking.

Ruth Karras, author of Sexuality in Medieval Europe:

Offering a new interpretation of the late medieval church, this concise and accessible book provides important new insights into women's authority in the church and the themes of clerical masculinity, diocesan governance, and the discipline of the parish priests.