Dyan Elliott

This is a difficult, disturbing, and important read. Dyan Elliott traces how the ideas of the medieval Western Church concerning celibacy, misogyny, and sodomy both enabled clerical sexual abuse of boys and young men during the Middle Ages, and also laid the foundation for institutional attitudes about child sexual abuse that persist to this day. A belief that hearing about scandal was something that could tempt people to sin, and a desire to promote general notions of clerical purity, were coupled with ideas about young children not as innocents but as unbridled fonts of temptation who were lacking in self-control.

As you can expect from a monograph by Elliott, The Corrupter of Boys is both provocative and grounded in a careful reading of a wide range of fascinating case studies. Reading this helped me make better sense of some of the Catholic Church's actions in Ireland over the past several decades—not that they're any less grotesque to me, but I do have a better sense of why the church's hierarchy thought it was justified in what it was doing. Highly recommended for those with an interest in the history of institutionalized violence, but this is definitely not a book to enter into lightly.… (more)

The world has been scandalized throughout the 21st century by the revelations regarding persistent clerical sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church along with all of its actions attempting to cover it up. Many try to claim the problem is a modern phenomenon; many more wonder how the organization could do such things and make such decisions. This book thoroughly demonstrates the long-running nature of the difficulty of clerical sexual abuse and all of the late antique and medieval decisions which have led to the current institutional crisis.

The author covers the period from late antiquity through the medieval period and relies on primary source data to explore how clerical sexual abuse became so prevalent and how it was so often covered up. The reasoning for clerical celibacy is explored: the defilement and denigration of sex and the exaltation of the virtue of celibacy. The author also explores attitudes toward pederasty in late antiquity and shows convincingly how the practice was not frowned upon as much as might be imagined. The ability to receive and maintain sinners in the church in the Augustine vs. Donatists disputation is explored, and its unfortunate consequences of emphasizing the sanctity of the position over the quality of the character. The author speaks of the authors of canon law and their concern about scandal - the desire to not cause greater difficulty by having iniquity exposed and thus cause other souls to be scandalized, and thus the desire for discretion. The final piece involves priests getting absolution from Confession and the inability of the Confessor to expose any sin confessed in that context.

All of this comes together and is shown to cause all kinds of issues in the medieval church: canon law very strongly emphasized and focused on the scandal of clerical concubinage since such often led to pregnancies and thus public scandal. So much emphasis was made on keeping women away from the clerics that what clerics did among one another, and with younger boys in their care, is comparatively passed over with lesser concern. A few voices, like Peter Damian, did attack and go after the sodomitical practices among the clerics; the author does well at showing how many authors projected sodomitical concerns on the secular rulers. On the whole, however, the goal was to keep it as silent as possible, and to move people around if they started causing problems. The goal was to eliminate causes of scandal; charges of sodomy tended to arise only to help reinforce other charges and to indict someone in trouble for other reasons, and rarely was addressed in its own right.

The author does the best job possible in light of how little evidence remains, and how much of the evidence that remains relies on obfuscation and a desire to not be explicit in order to, again, not cause scandal. That kind of "discretion" allows others to cast aspersions and doubt on what is being discussed.

But this work does an extremely good job of showing that the current challenges of the Roman Catholic Church are not new, and the institutional failure all but guaranteed based upon all of these ancient and medieval precedents in how the church thinks it should run itself.

The sharpest possible indictment of the Roman Catholic Church's historical impetus to preserve its own reputation over the well being of those victimized by its agents, and the best possible argument for releasing clerics from celibacy.

**--galley received as part of early review program… (more)

In Fallen Bodies, Dyan Elliott looks at issues of ritual purity, demonic presence, sexuality and gender in light of the Gregorian reform movement and thirteenth-century scholasticism. She argues that clerical fears about ritual purity/pollution were at the heart of many of their misogynist views, and that ultimately those fears gave rise to the witch crazes of the late medieval/early modern period. Elliot sifts through a wealth of information to produce a synthesis impressive in its breadth, and scholars will find the lengthy endnotes well worth mining. As a whole, the book interesting, and mostly well-written, but Mr Bingley would tell Elliott she has at times a tendency to study too much for words of four syllables, and the reliance on Freud as a framework for psychoanalysing medieval people just struck me as weird. Elliott writes, in defense of her methodology, that an attempt by historians to avoid all anachronisms of concepts/terminology when writing about medieval people is misguided as "it ultimately leads to flattening out the medieval psychic landscape by confining its description to the vocabulary in which medieval thinkers were accustomed to describe themselves" (7), but while that may arguably be true, that still doesn't explain to me why she thought Freud's theories were the best lens to use.… (more)

Elliott examines changes in how female spirituality was perceived in the later Middle Ages. It's pretty much a given among scholars nowadays that the respect accorded to female mystics, saints and religious declined from about the mid-thirteenth century onwards. Elliott finds something new to say about this shift, by finding some of its origins in the parallels in rhetoric used by both inquisitors into heresy and scholars attempting to prove sanctity. She argues that debates as to what constitutes proof amongst these churchmen served only to create more doubt, especially when dealing with the physicality that characterised—or was seen to characterise—female sanctity in particular. Elliott writes well, enough to keep me interested in extended discussions of scholastic theology and canon law, which is no easy task. She also provides an interesting contrast to the kinds of history of religious women pioneered by Caroline Walker Bynum—she is not writing about female agency or rebellion, but rather about restriction, constraint, and the male-dominated contexts within which these women lived.… (more)