-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Kathleen Crowther, Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer. From Priest's Whore to Pastor's Wife: Clerical Marriage and the Process of Reform in the Early German Reformation., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 2, April 2013, Pages 601–602, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.2.601
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer has written a fascinating, richly documented, and methodologically innovative book on clerical marriage in the first decades of the Reformation. Plummer devotes careful attention to both Lutheran and Catholic teachings and practices regarding marriage and celibacy. She shows that Catholic and Lutheran positions developed in tandem, each in response to the other. Further, she beautifully integrates an account of the teachings of Lutheran leaders on the subject of clerical marriage with the lived experience of priests, monks, nuns, concubines, priests' wives, monks' wives, and nuns' husbands. Not only does she integrate theology and lived experience, but she demonstrates that clerical marriage was not something imposed on priests “from above” by the leaders of the Reformation movement. Rather it was driven “from below” by priests acting on their personal understanding of Martin Luther's teachings and the dictates of their own consciences.
Plummer begins by detailing the history of clerical concubinage from the early twelfth century to the eve of the Reformation. She shows that, despite official prohibitions, there was a high degree of toleration for clerical concubinage on the part of both laity and ecclesiastical authorities. The first Lutheran clerical marriages, between 1521 and 1523, were public acts of defiance and signaled adherence to Reformed teachings. However, Plummer argues that Reformation leaders, including Luther himself, were generally ambivalent about clerical marriage. While Luther asserted that vows of celibacy should not be forced on priests, he was unsure that those who had already taken such vows should break them to marry. The first clerics to marry in the early 1520s asserted that they were following their consciences and Luther's teachings. They pushed evangelical leaders into a more carefully defined—and more radical—position in support of clerical marriage.
