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Book Review
| Elizabeth M. Makowski, "A Pernicious Sort of Woman": Quasi-Religious Women and Canon Lawyers in the Later Middle Ages, Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 2005. Pp. 208. $44.95 (ISBN 0-8132-1392-4).
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| The term "quasi-religious" in this book's title refers to a formal status rather than degree of spiritual intensity. It means a status close to, but not identical with, membership in an officially approved religious order. Christian history has always known men and women who banded together to embrace a life different from (and often away from) that of the world. Most were monks and nuns, but the status of some other groups was unclear. Examples from the later Middle Ages include secular canons, hermits, members of military orders, conversi, beguines and beghards, and the tertiary Order of St. Francis. How should they be treated in the law? Should they be lumped together with monks and nuns, to be accorded the privileges and saddled with the disabilities that attended monastic status in the medieval law? Or should they be placed with the laity? Very few of them were ordained and many were not cloistered. Some of their customs deviated from monastic standards, even while they followed a semi-monastic life. Indeed their behavior and beliefs became suspect to some conservative authorities. Canon lawyers had inevitably to find a place for them in the law's scheme of things. Whether they could claim the privilegium fori, for example, depended on the category in which they were placed. How the canonists dealt with this question is the subject of this book. Its coverage is by no means limited to the "quasi-religious" women, the beguines, referred to ironically in its title. |
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The tools at the disposal of the canonists were not promising. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) had forbidden the creation of new religious orders, but it did not define exactly what a religious order was. Neither did the Corpus iuris canonici. Decretals on the subject were sporadic or unclear, and no title devoted to "quasi-religious" was ever produced. It was therefore hard to know how the categorization was to be made. Vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience provided an obvious test, one that many of the "quasi-religious" groups did not pass. However, other possible tests were suggested. Did members of the group wear identical habits? Did they live together in one house? Were they governed by a written rule? How did they address each other? According to these tests, they might be treated as members of a religious order, or at any rate subordinate parts of the vast medieval clerical army. This book explores the answers given by many canonists in a variety of circumstances. To the author's credit, she has explored relevant works of otherwise obscure canonists—Guilelmus de Monte Laudano, Jesselin de Cassagnes, Bonifacius Ammannati, and Paulus de Liazariis for instance. She has also examined the works of better known figures, whom she describes as "bickering luminaries" (62). She has interesting comments to make about common characteristics of the medieval jurists; for example, that they "waged a noble, if losing, battle against legal ambiguity" (111). On the showing of this book, this comment seems all too correct. The work the canonists does seem to have been less than a victory. No fully satisfactory approach to the question of classification of the "quasi-religious" emerged from their efforts. More argument than agreement was the result. It all makes for a disorderly, though informative, account of an intractable problem. |
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| R. H. Helmholz
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| University of Chicago |
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