Nuns’ Priests’ Tales: Men and Salvation in Medieval Women’s Monastic Life. By Fiona J. Griffiths
The nuns’ priests of Fiona J. Griffiths’s new monograph are ideally figures who can come and go into the convents in their care without arousing comment or suspicion, much as the postman of one of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown Stories, by virtue of his uniform and regular appearance, is the invisi...
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| Format: | Electronic Review |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
2020
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| In: |
The journal of theological studies
Year: 2020, Volume: 71, Issue: 2, Pages: 932-934 |
| Further subjects: | B
Book review
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| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | The nuns’ priests of Fiona J. Griffiths’s new monograph are ideally figures who can come and go into the convents in their care without arousing comment or suspicion, much as the postman of one of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown Stories, by virtue of his uniform and regular appearance, is the invisible figure no one notices. It transpires, of course, that the postman is in fact the crook whereas the priests in Griffiths’s study are on the whole an exemplary lot whom for that very reason historians have often overlooked. How then has Griffiths been able to write their history?Griffiths’s approach is chronological. She starts with the biblical models Christ himself set through the company he kept and through the injunction which in his dying hours he laid on John to look after his mother. The care thereafter which any priest might give a nun was interpreted in the light of this injunction; equally powerful was the belief that since every nun became ‘a bride of Christ’ then any priest who supported her could rightly claim to be a ‘friend of the bridegroom’ (p. 51). In the early church the most notable such friend was St Jerome, to whom Griffiths dedicates a chapter, and indeed it is Jerome’s lasting influence, not least on Abelard, that provides some continuity across the centuries under examination here. But Jerome and Abelard were, of course, by any standards, exceptional characters; how, if at all, did their attitude and their example shape the experience of men such as the nuns’ priest of Griffiths’s prologue (pp. 1-7), the ‘everyday’ priest of Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims? And in the twelfth century did the shrill rhetoric of reform with its insistence on the value of celibacy for all clergy adversely affect the relationships between holy women and their priests? The answer, it seems, is barely. Priests continued to minister to women, to value the power of their prayers, and to collaborate with their projects. The relationship between Christina of Markyate and Geoffrey, abbot of St Albans, is one such case study which, as Griffiths shows, amply supports her argument. |
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| ISSN: | 1477-4607 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: The journal of theological studies
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/jts/flaa057 |