Speakers

Dyan Elliott, Department of History, Northwestern University

Dyan Elliott is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor in the Humanities and Professor ofHistory at Northwestern University. 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.

Ruth Mazo Karras, Department of History, Trinty College, Dublin

Ruth Mazo Karras is Lecky Professor of History at Trinity College Dublin. She is the author of five books and numerous articles on various aspects of medieval social and cultural history, gender, and sexuality. Her books Unmarriages: Women, Men, and Sexual Unions in Medieval Europe and From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Later Medieval Europe are available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Details

In the fourth century, clerics began to distinguish themselves from members ofthe 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 TheCorrupter of Boys, she demonstrates how, in conjunction with the requirement of clerical celibacy, scandal-averse policies at every conceivable level of theecclesiastical hierarchy have enabled the widespread sexual abuse of boys and male adolescents within the Church.

Elliott examines over a millennium’s worth of doctrine and practice to uncover the origins of a culture of secrecy and concealment of sin. She charts thecontinuities and changes, from late antiquity into the high Middle Ages, in theuse 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 since Elliott concludes that the same clerical prerogatives and privileges that were formulated in late antiquity and the medieval era—and thesame strategies to cover up the abuses they enable—remain very much in place.

I welcome the opportunity to meet with prospective authors about their book projects on 8th and 9th July between 5pm and 7pm.  Interested individuals should complete the form on the right.

Jerome Singerman is a Senior Humanities Editor at the University of Pennsylvania Press, where he has been acquiring books in medieval studies and allied fields since 1989.

David Aers
James Simpson
Sarah Beckwith