In the fourth century, clerics began to distinguish themselves from members of the laity by virtue of their augmented claims to holiness. Because clerical celibacy was key to this distinction, religious authorities of all stripes—patristic authors, popes, theologians, canonists, monastic founders, and commentators—became progressively sensitive to sexual scandals that involved the clergy and developed sophisticated tactics for concealing or dispelling embarrassing lapses. According to Dyan Elliott, the fear of scandal dictated certain lines of action and inaction, the consequences of which are painfully apparent today. In The Corrupter of Boys, she demonstrates how, in conjunction with the requirement of clerical celibacy, scandal-averse policies at every conceivable level of the ecclesiastical hierarchy have enabled the widespread sexual abuse of boys and male adolescents within the Church.
Elliott examines more than a millennium’s worth of doctrine and practice to uncover the origins of a culture of secrecy and concealment of sin. She charts the continuities and changes, from late antiquity into the high Middle Ages, in the use of boys as sexual objects before focusing on four specific milieus in which boys and adolescents would have been especially at risk in the high and later Middle Ages: the monastery, the choir, the schools, and the episcopal court.
The Corrupter of Boys is a work of stunning breadth and discomforting resonance, as Elliott concludes that the same clerical prerogatives and privileges that were formulated in late antiquity and the medieval era—and the same strategies to cover up the abuses they enable—remain very much in place.
Table of Content
Introduction
Part I
Chapter 1. The Scandal of Clerical Sin
Chapter 2. The Trouble with Boys
Chapter 3. The Problem with Women
Chapter 4. Sodomy on the Cusp of the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries
Chapter 5. Confession, Scandal, and the ‘Sin Not Fit to be Named’
Part II
Prologue
Chapter 6. The Monastery
Chapter 7. The Choir
Chapter 8. The Schools
Chapter 9. The Episcopal Curia
Conclusion
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
About the author
Dyan Elliott is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor in the Humanities and Professor of History at Northwestern University and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow. She is author of The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200-1500 and Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages, both available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.
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