The Church Reform Movement, Canon Law, and Sexual Behavior

Church reform represented in essence a reaction against the involvement of Church officials and ecclesiastical institutions in the affairs of feudal govern­ment and society. Reflective Christians, both clerics and laymen, felt that feudal institutions jeopardized the orderly functioning and administration of the Latin Church.

By the mid-eleventh century those who feared and distrusted the power of feudal authorities had begun to take steps to combat control of Church prop­erty by laymen. In 1049, the reformers secured the appointment of one of their own number as bishop of Rome. Pope Leo IX (1048-54), the earliest of the re­forming popes, gained the Chair of St. Peter through the intervention of the German emperor, Henry III (1039-56), a staunch supporter of reform. Once in power, Leo IX commenced to reorganize and strengthen the papal administra­tion with a view to transforming the papacy into a center for the dissemination and implementation of reform policies. During the pontificates of Leo IX and his successors, especially Pope Gregory VII (1073-85), the reform papacy appealed to dedicated Christians to subscribe to the ideal of a Church organization free from secular interference. Independent of political ties to monarchs, the Church, according to the reformers, ought to be economically self-supporting, relying on the income from its own properties, Church taxes, and contributions from the faithful.^[706]

The partisans of reform emphasized as a key element in their program the renewal of canon law, which they believed must play a key role in the gover­nance of Christian society.

Such an organized system would require a comprehensible body of law to enforce. One characteristic product of the reform movement, therefore, was a stream of canonical compilations that stressed the new jurisdictional claims re­formers made for canonical tribunals.

The earliest major canonical collection to respond clearly to the goals of the reform movement was the Decretum, compiled shortly after the turn of the millennium by Bishop Burchard of Worms (1000-1025). Burchard’s vast work, which comprised 1785 chapters distributed among twenty books, drew upon earlier compilations, such as those of Regino of Priim and the Anselmo dedi­cata, as well as penitentials, capitularies of the Carolingian monarchs, and some scraps of Roman law.¹⁰ Burchard’s Decretum was so huge, however, that few ca­thedrals, monasteries, and other centers of ecclesiastical learning and admin­istration could afford to have copies made.

Everyday needs and humbler users required shorter, more succinct hand­books, and the reformers were not slow to supply them, cheerfully pillaging Burchard’s work in the process. An early example of these manuals was the Col­lection in Five Books, written between 1014 and 1023, in central Italy, probably at the Benedictine monastery of Faria.¹¹ An important smaller handbook was the Collection in Seventy-Four Titles, drawn up (at least in an early form) in Italy before 1076, probably by someone closely connected with the circle of Pope Gregory VII.¹² Among other notable canonistic handbooks of the era were the collection drawn up about 1083 by Anselm of Lucca, a nephew of Pope Al­exander II (1061-73) and an ardent supporter of Gregory VII;¹³ the Collection of Cardinal Deusdedit, compiled between 1083 and 1086 by another eminent supporter of Gregory VII;¹⁴ and the Liber de vita Christiana written by Bishop

¹⁰Burchard of Worms, Decretorum libri XX, in PL 140:557-1058; Fournier and Le Bras, Histoire des collections Canoniques 1:364-421; Stickler, Historia, pp.

"Collectio canonum in V Iibris (cited hereafter as Coll. 5L), cd. M. Fornasari, in CCL, continuatio medievalis, vol. 6- (Turnhout: Brepols, 1970- ; in progress; 1 vol. to date).

¹² Diuersorum patrum Sententie siue collectio in LXXIV titulos digesta (cited hereafter as Coll. 74T), ed. John Gilchrist, Monumenta iuris canonici (hereafter MIC), Corpus collectionum, vol. 1 (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1973). Gilchrist has also published an English translation of his edition of Coll. 74T under the title The Col­lection in Seventy-four Titles: A Canon Law Manual of the Gregorian Reform, Medi­aeval Studies in Translation, vol. 22 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980). See also Gilchrists “The Collection in Four Books (4L)—The Source of the Col­lection in Seventy-four Titles (Coll. 74T)?” BMCL, n.s. 11 (1981) 77-80.

"Anselm of Lucca, Collectio canonum una cum collectione minore, ed. Fricdrich Thaner, 2 vols. in 1 (Vienna: Wagner, 1906-15; repr. Aalcn: Scientia, 1965); this edition is incomplete, for it includes only the first eleven books of Anselm s work. See also Four­nier and Le Bras, Histoire des collections canoniques 2:25-37, Stickler, Historia, pp. 170-72, and John Gilchrist, “The Erdmann Thesis and the Canon Law,” in Crusade and Settlement, ed.

¹⁴Die Kanonessamlung des Kardinals Deusdedit, ed. Victor Wolf von Glanvell (Pader­born: F. Schbningh, 1905); Fournier and Le Bras, Histoire des collections canoniques 2:37-54; Stickler, Historia, ρρ. 172-74.

Bonizo of Sutri and Piacenza around 1090.¹⁵ In the middle of the last decade of the eleventh century, yet another major reformer, this time from France, turned his hand to canonistic scholarship and produced not one but three influ­ential collections. The writer was Bishop Ivo of Chartres (1091-1116), whose canonistic works included the relatively brief Collectio tripartita, the enor­mous Decretum, and a popular, middle-sized book called the Panormia.¹⁶

The canon law collections from Burchard to Ivo were major tools for achiev­ing the reformers’ goals; they are for the historian one of the principal sources for understanding the thought of the reformers and the competing interpreta­tions of the law current among the different reform groups.¹⁷

In general, the canonical compilations demonstrate that the reformers fa­vored moral rigorism: as a group they considered sex and other pleasurable ex­periences tainted by evil and a potent source of sin. They were not merely sus­picious of sex, but hostile to any sexual activity at all, save for marital relations undertaken expressly and consciously to conceive a child. The reformers, even more than the penitential authors and earlier patristic authorities, were intent

¹⁵Bonizo of Sutri, Liber de vita Christiana, cd. E. PereIs, Texte zur Gcschichte des rδmischen und kanonischen Rechts im Mittelalter, vol. 1 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1930); Stickler, Historia, ρρ. 174-75; θ∙ Miccoli, “Un nuovo manoscritto de Liber de vita Christiana di Bonizone di Sutri,” Studi medievali 7 (1966) 390-98; W. Berschin, Bonizo von Sutri, Leben und Werk, Beitrage zur Geschichte und Quellenkunde des Mittel- alters, vol.

¹⁶Ivo of Chartres, Decretum, in PL 161:47-1036, and Panormia, in PL 161:1045­1344. The serious shortcomings of the Migne edition of Ivo’s work are detailed by Peter Landau, “Die Rubriken und Inskriptionen von Ivos Panormie: Die Ausgabe Sebastian Brandts im Vergleich zur Lowener Edition des Melchior de Vosmedian und der Ausgabe von Migne,” BMCL, n.s. 12 (1982) 31-49, and “Das Dekret des Ivo von Chartres: Die handschriftliche Uberlieferung im Vergleich zum Text in den Editionen des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts," ZRG, KA 70 (1984) 1-44. The Tripartita remains unpublished, save for its preface, which was edited by Augustin Theiner in his Disquisitiones criticae in praecipuas canonum et decretalium collectiones (Rome: In Collegio Urbano, 1836), p. 154. See also Fournier and Le Bras, Histoire des collections canoniques 2:55-114; Fuhrmann, Einfluss und Verbreitung 2:544-45, 554^-57; Stickler, Historia, pp. 179­84; Garcia y Garcfa, Historia del derecho canonico 1:318-20; Rolf SprandeI₁ Ivo von Chartres und seine Stellung in der Kirchengeschichte, Pariser historische Studien, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1962); Jacqueline Rambaud-Buhot, “Les sommaires de la Panormie et !’edition de Melchior de Vosmedian," Traditio 23 (1967) 534-36. Older but still useful are the studies by Alexandre Abry, Yves de Chartres, sa vie et ses ouvrages (Strasbourg: G. L. Schuler, 1841); Paul Fournier, Les collections canoniques attribues a Yves de Chartres (Paris: Alphonse Picard et fils, 1897), and Yves de Chartres et Ie droit canonique (Paris: Alphonse Picard et fils, 1898).

¹⁷J. Joseph Ryan, Saint Peter Damiani and His Canonical Sources: A Preliminary Study in the Antecedents of the Gregorian Reform, Studies and Texts, vol. 2 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1956), pp.

The sexual agenda of the reformers also included a strong commitment, not only to deny marriage to the clergy, but to reorganize marriage among the laity as well. The reformers were anxious, for one thing, to bring marriage under the exclusive control of Church courts and in so doing to replace customary mar­riage law with ecclesiastical law. The ecclesiastical model of marriage that the reformers so vigorously—and successfully—championed rested upon seven fundamental principles. First, marriage must be monogamous; second, mar­riage should be indissoluble; third, marital unions should be contracted freely by the parties themselves, not by their parents or families; fourth, marriage represents the only legally protected type of sexual relationship, and therefore concubinage must be eliminated, even among the laity; fifth, and as a corollary of the fourth principle, all sexual activity outside of marriage must be punished by legal sanctions; sixth, all sexual activity, marital and nonmarital, falls solely under ecclesiastical jurisdiction; and seventh, marriage must become exoga­mous, and intermarriage within related groups of families should therefore be eliminated.^[710]

Laymen of all types resisted attempts to implement these propositions. Mo­nogamy and indissolubility limited the capacity of families to repudiate existing marriages and to arrange new ones in response to changes in political and social circumstances. Noble families adamantly maintained that they must be free to shift alliances, including those sealed by marriage, in order to promote family interests. The reformers’ drive to eliminate concubinage met opposition from many quarters. Laymen preferred to retain the option of contracting informal unions; Iaywomen feared (correctly, it turned out) that abolishing concubinage would intensify competition for marriageable men and thus decrease their own bargaining power in negotiating alliances; and clerics, seeing that the Church’s leaders were intent on depriving them of their wives, stoutly withstood these endeavors, sometimes by violent means. Monarchs were reluctant to forego their jurisdiction over marriage, since this would deprive them of both the revenues generated by marriage litigation and the right to enforce their own matrimonial policies among their subjects. And families, at every level of so­ciety, found it difficult, impossible, or impolitic in many situations to observe the reformers’ rules on exogamy.^[711]

In view of the objections raised against their marriage policies, it is remark­able that the reformers succeeded as quickly as they did in securing a fairly high degree of conformity to their unpopular principles. They achieved this success in the face of countless matrimonial scandals in high places—the sordid marital troubles of monarchs and eminent noblemen enliven the pages of eleventh- and twelfth-century chronicles, much as similar reports about the domestic tangles of wealthy notables abound in the popular press today. The two marriages of King Philip I of France (1059-1108), the amorous intrigues of his son, Louis the Fat (1108-37), ^or the well-publicized sexual adventures of Count William IX of Poitou (1071-1127), to mention only three notorious examples, provided ample material for gossip and spectacular scandals for reformers to denounce. It is clear, nonetheless, that by the early twelfth century the ecclesiastical model of marriage was achieving acceptance. Indeed the sexual cavortings of these mag­nates achieved notoriety, not because they were unprecedented or even par­ticularly unusual, but rather because people had begun to accept the Church’s marital norms.^[712]

Gradual acquiescence in the Church’s doctrine on marriage and sex was ac­companied by a change in popular beliefs about conventional standards of sex­ual behavior for men and women. It is probably no accident that the ideal of romantic love was born in the same generations that gradually accepted the rigid rules of marriage advocated by Church reformers. Early twelfth-century poetry enunciated attitudes about sexual behavior and personal feelings that were foreign to beliefs current, say, a century-and-a-half earlier. The poetic ty­pology of romance took shape in opposition to, and as escape from, a bleak mar­riage ideology that canonists and theologians championed.^[713] Twelfth-century poets differed pointedly from the ecclesiastical establishment in regard to the nature of human sexuality and its role both within marriage and outside of it. Provengal poets, such as Count William IX of Poitiers (1071-1127), Macabru (fl. 1129-50), and Bernart de Ventadorn (fl. 1150-80) idealized sensuality and carnal relationships, while canonists and theologians deplored them.

The views on sexuality that canonists and reform leaders adopted had their roots firmly planted in ideas expressed by St. Jerome and the author of the Re­sponsa Gregorii. The sources of those ideas were ultimately to be found, as we have seen, in late ancient philosophical schools, particularly the Stoics.^[714] Many eleventh century reformers propagated these gloomy views of sex. St. Peter Damian (ca. 1007-72), in particular, made the reform of sexual mores a major theme of his writing.^[715]

Damian, although important, was scarcely alone in adopting a dismal out­look on human sexuality. His torrid denunciations of the dangers of sexual temp­tation and the sinfulness of intercourse, marital or nonmarital, found echoes in other writers of the period—Honorius of Autun (ca. 1080-ca. 1156), for ex­ample, and members of the school of Gilbert de la Poree (ca. 1075-1154).^[716] No­table among these writers was Abbot Guibert of Nogcnt (ca. 1064-ca. 1125), who, like Peter Damian, seems obsessed with the filthiness of sex, returned time and again to the theme that the brush of lust has tarred us all. We are burdened and doomed, according to Guibert, by sexual fantasies that spring un­bidden to our minds, even in sleep; sordid desires subvert our efforts to attain chastity and plunge us into ever deeper despair. Scx is a vice and a disease, Guibert believed; it taints and befouls every living person. Even when death finally delivers us from the grasp of lust, it is likely to pitch us into hell.^[717]

Guibert was a bit peculiar, but even sober and well-balanced men of this age shared many of his notions. A chapter in the Decretum of Burchard of Worms, for example, listed the consequences of lust: it causes spiritual blindness, in­considerateness, shiftiness of the eyes, hatred of God’s commandments, attach­ment to worldly things, misery in this life, and despair for the future.^[718] Even so ascetic a man as the philosopher-archbishop, Anselm of Canterbury (1033/34­1109) lamented in one of his prayers:

There is one evil, an evil above all other evils, that I am aware is always with me, that grievously and piteously lacerates and afflicts my soul. It was with me from the cradle, it grew with me in child­hood, in adolescence, in my youth it always stuck to me, and it does not desert me even now that my limbs are failing because of my old age. This evil is sexual desire, carnal delight, the storm of lust that has smashed and battered my unhappy soul, emptied it of all strength, and left it weak and empty.²⁹

Fear and loathing of sex was common among the reformers and more gener­ally among the Church’s leaders during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but condemnation of marriage because of its sexual implications was not. Indeed those who denounced marriage and advised laymen to abstain from it were con­sidered heretics. A number of heretical sects during this period did, in fact, teach that no Christian could in good conscience contract marriage.³⁰ One sec­tarian group at Orleans in 1122 adopted the view that marriage was profane because it dealt with sex. The Church should therefore have nothing to do with it, they taught, and should leave marital matters entirely in the hands of the laity. This was not a view that Church authorities were prepared to tolerate— they made that point clear by burning fourteen heretics alive.³¹

²⁹Anselm, Oratio IV, in PL 159:870: “Est et praeter haec, unum malum super omnia mala malum, quo tanto gravius et miserabilius laceratum et afflictum animum meum sentio, quanto et ab ipsis cunabulis semper mecum fuit, mecum crevit, in infantia, in adolescentia, in juventute mihi semper adhaesit, nec adhuc jam prae senectute membris deficientibus me deserit. Est autem hoc malum, desiderium voluptatis, delectatio car­nis, tempestas libidinis, quae multis et variis modis infelicem animam meam maceravit, dissolvit et omni virtute destitutam inanem et debilem redidit. ” AnseIm s account of his own sexual yearnings in childhood seems to contradict his assertion in De nuptiis con­sanguineorum (PL 158:559) that small children experience no sexual feelings.

³⁰Radulphus Ardens, Homeliae in epistolas et evangelia dominicalia 2.19, in PL 155:2011, refers to such a sect at Agen and describes them as Manichaeans. There were similar groups at Orleans and at Monteforte in Piedmont during the 1120s; Huguette Taviani, “Le manage dans Theresie de Tan mil,” Annales e.s.c. 32 (1977) 1074-78; Duby, Knight, Lady, and Priest, pp. 109-16.

³¹Andrew of Fleury, Vita Gauzlini 56a, ed. and trans. R.H. Bautier and Gillette Labory, Sources d’histoire medie vale, vol. 2 (Paris: Editions du Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, 1969), ρρ. 96-98 and 180-82; Radulfus Glaber, Historiae 3.8.26-31, ed. Marcel Prou, Collection de textes pour servir a Tetude et ⅛ Ienseigne- ment d’histoire, no. 1 (Paris: A. Picard, 1886), pp. 74-81; Adhemar de Chabannes, Chronicon 3.59, ed. Jules Chavanon, Collection de textes..., no. 20 (Paris: A. Picard et fils, 1897), pp. 184-85. See also Raoul Manselli, “11 monaco Enrico e la sua eresia,” Bullettino dell’Istituto Storico Italiano per U medio evo 65 (1953) 1-63, and Duby, Medi­eval Marriage, ρρ. 51-52.

A few atypical writers adopted more naturalistic views of human sexuality than were common among Catholic leaders. The late eleventh-century Bene­dictine monk and physician, Constantinus Africanus, for example, commended sexual intercourse not merely as natural, but even as necessary for good health, along with exercise, regular bathing, adequate diet, and sufficient sleep.³² Folk medicine also prescribed sexual intercourse as a remedy for various ailments and afflictions, including snake bite, on the theory, apparently, that orgasm drained poisonous substances from the body.³³ Among the philosophers and theologians of the period, however, Peter Abelard was almost alone in denying the intrinsic sinfulness of sexual relations and in maintaining that sexual inter­course is both natural and beneficial.³⁴