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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.
— Thomas P. Doyle, J.C.D., C.A.D.C.
"When the contemporary Catholic clergy sexual abuse crisis first broke in the 1980s, church officials in the United States and Rome pointed to the immorality of secular modernity as its cause. The Corrupter of Boys exposes once and for all the moral and intellectual emptiness of this claim. Elliott's deeply learned and unflinching account of the sexual privileges accorded priests and prelates from antiquity through the later middle ages-enshrined in theology and law and protected by secrets, silence, and lies-is an essential contribution towards a new history of Catholic sexuality. It is also a major step in the dismantling of the Catholic closet."
— Robert A. Orsi, author of History and Presence
"Dyan Elliott, an indefatigable medievalist-muckraker, argues that clerical child abuse is not just a modern issue. Here laid bare is the longue durée of an ecclesiastical culture anxious above all to preserve its power and reputation, rather than to confront its moral failings. Elliott's fearless take on the clergy's romance with pedophilia is certain to inspire both passionate controversy and exciting new research."
— Barbara H. Rosenwein, Loyola University Chicago
"Dyan Elliott's bold book is unflinching in its examination of the long history of clerical pederasty and the ecclesiastical culture of silence about sexual predators. Her argument will provoke important reconsiderations of the history of sexualities, of medieval anti-clericalism, and of conceptions of childhood."
— Martha Newman, University of Texas at Austin
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