Clergy and Criminal Violence in Later Medieval England and Wales

Erscheinungsjahr 2026
ISBN: 978-1-108-84380-5
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 392 Seiten

Reihe: Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought: Fourth Series

Clergy formed a distinct and privileged group in later medieval society as regarded violent crime. Church law was intended to protect them from it, induce them to avoid it, and exempt them from secular justice following it. But in practice, were the clergy so separate from the violent culture around them and different from the laymen who dominated it? In the first full-length study of this subject in the later medieval period, Peter Clarke shows that clergy accused of violent and other crimes increasingly submitted to secular justice like laymen, seeking clerical immunity only as a last resort. It reveals that church authorities, in providing legal redress for clerical victims of lay violence, sought to heal divisions between laity and clergy, not to deepen them. Additionally, it explores the motives and contexts behind clerical involvement in violent crime, both as perpetrators and victims, revealing that clergy often acted similarly to laymen.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Clarke, Peter D

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of tables; Preface; List of abbreviations; Introduction; 1. Jurisdiction over violent clergy; 2. Protecting clergy from violence; 3. Clergy and contexts of criminal violence; 4. Clergy as killers; Conclusion; Appendix 1. The Richard Atte Halle case; Appendix 2. Penances imposed by English church courts in Si quis suadente cases; Bibliography; Index.

Über Autor(innen)

Clarke, Peter D
Peter D. Clarke is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Southampton and President of the International Society of Medieval Canon Law. His publications include The Interdict in the Thirteenth Century: A Question of Collective Guilt (2007) and Supplications from England and Wales in the Registers of the Apostolic Penitentiary, 1410-1503 in three volumes (co-edited with Patrick N R Zutshi, 2013-15).