Setting out the parameters for Protestant church government in 1559, Elizabeth I of England granted “that the priestes and mynisters of the Church may lawfully, for the aduoyding of fornication, have an honest and sober wyfe.” With that relatively unenthusiastic concession, marriage became a legal and lasting option for all clergy of the Church of England. Surplices and sanctions on economic and martial activity remained as medieval Catholic continuities in early modern Protestant clerical identity. Marriage, on the other hand, was an innovation that brought critical changes. Its effects went far beyond the strategic (and not always successful) containment of illicit clerical sexuality. The end of institutionalized celibacy had essential implications for clerical manhood, clerical spirituality, clerical poverty, the development of clerical professional networks,the administration of clerical discipline, the structure and maintenance of clerical dignity and the dynamics of clerical-lay relations in English parishes. It created an entirely new and distinct group of women in England’s social and gender hierarchy: clerical wives.
Yet the social and cultural history of clerical marriage and clerical families in postreformation England has received insufficient scholarly attention. A handful of works, most notably Eric Carlson’s and Helen Parish’s studies of the clerical marriage debate during the Tudor Reformations, have addressed this revolution in clerical domestic life. The evolution of clerical domesticity during the seventeenth-century period of Protestant conflict and consolidation has been especially understudied.
This dissertation poses several interrelated questions about gender, marriage, family and the clerical vocation in seventeenth-century England. How did the role and realities of being a husband, father and householder shape clerical identity and honor,during a critical period of change and upheaval in the English church? How did clerical dignity and the ascetic pursuits of clerical holiness influence and organize spousal relations and family life? How were the special expectations for clerical conduct officially extended to and imposed upon the members of clerical households? Finally, how did clerical wives and children collaborate in—or sabotage— pastoral performance and the orchestration of clerical dignity and identity? Together these questions explore how clerical honor and identity structured relations within the minister’s household and between the minister’s household and the larger parish or congregation.
Using print sources and ecclesiastical and family records from the northern dioceses of York, Chester, and Lincoln, the four chapters of this dissertation address different types of interaction between vocational and household honor and identity: the collaborative family maintenance of clerical dignity through clerical household honor, the intimate and domestic reproduction of clerical identity through devotional courtship and marital and family piety; the extension of ministers’ domestic role of household patriarch into the parish, through the concept of ‘spiritual fatherhood’, and the role of wives and children in religious politics and parish controversies.