RT Book
T1 Clerical households in late medieval Italy
T2 I Tatti studies in Italian renaissance history
T2 I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History
T2 De Gruyter eBook-Paket Geschichte
A1 Cossar, Roisin
LA English
PP Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England
PB Harvard University Press
YR 2017
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/893552658
AB Roisin Cossar brings a new perspective to the history of the Christian church in fourteenth century Italy by examining how clerics managed efforts to reform their domestic lives in the decades after the arrival of the Black Death. Priests at the end of the Middle Ages resembled their lay contemporaries as they entered into domestic relationships with women, fathered children, and took responsibility for managing households, or familiae. Cossar limns a complex portrait of daily life in the medieval clerical familia that traces the phases of its development. Many priests began their vocation as apprentices in the households of older clerics. In middle age, priests fully embraced the traditional role of paterfamilias—patriarchs with authority over their households, including servants and, especially in Venice, slaves. As fathers they endeavored to establish their illegitimate sons in a clerical family trade. They also used their legal knowledge to protect their female companions and children against a church that frowned on such domestic arrangements and actively sought to stamp them out. Clerical Households in Late Medieval Italy refutes the longstanding charge that the late medieval clergy were corrupt, living licentious lives that failed to uphold priestly obligations. In fashioning a domestic culture that responded flexibly to their own needs, priests tempered the often unrealistic expectations of their superiors. Their response to the rigid demands of church reform allowed the church to maintain itself during a period of crisis and transition in European history.
CN BV4396
SN 9780674978683
K1 Households : Italy, Northern : Religious aspects : Christianity : History
K1 Church renewal : Italy, Northern : Catholic Church : History : To 1500
K1 Households : Italy, Northern : History : To 1500
K1 Clergy : Family relationships : Italy, Northern : History : To 1500
K1 Church renewal
K1 Clergy
K1 Households
K1 HISTORY / Medieval
DO 10.4159/9780674978683