From Priest's Whore to Pastor's Wife: Clerical Marriage and the Process of Reform in the Early German Reformation. By Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer. St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History. Burlington: Ashgate, 2012. viii + 350 pp. $119.95 cloth.

Abstract

1100s-1400s) to the early sixteenth-century (1520s-1540s). Plummer's thesis is quite original: the acceptance of clerical marriage into the Protestant Church was not merely a phenomenon that officials or reformers imposed upon the clergy. Rather, the Protestant Church's official acceptance of clerical marriage evolved from pressures of the laity and priests who opposed clerical celibacy. The author's unique emphasis on the agency of common people (laity and clergy alike) reveals "how the reform movement developed from a theological debate to a social movement" (2). Her study raises important questions regarding marriage (theology, law, and practice), gender, social and religious identity, and the participation of ordinary people in the Reformation. Plummer begins her study with an exploration of late medieval clerical concubinage, specifically, its pervasiveness despite its prohibition by church and state authorities. The high and late Middle Ages saw repeated attempts by both magistrates and church officials to clamp down on clerical concubinage, a problem discussed in synods (and other meetings) and condemned in sermons. Moreover, many priests who had sexual partners were punished by both church and state by excommunication or loss of their benefices. Nevertheless, the policing of concubinage reflected its criminal rather than religious nature. Concubines too were chastised quite rigorously by being precluded from enjoying social and legal rights and participating in religious rituals. Why did the Protestant Church and German state finally condone, permit, and adopt clerical marriage? Plummer argues that the clergy's (and lay persons') clamor for clerical matrimony that began in the late medieval era continued into the sixteenth century as priests and laity argued that clerical celibacy was unfounded scripturally. Priests, they exhorted, should marry their partners and thus set an example to others of the purity of marriage. Clerical marriage would even help priests avoid sexual sin (fornication). It