Fionnuala Ennis

Research Topic

Violence against the clergy in northern France, 1450-1490

Supervisor: Hannah Skoda

My thesis explores the phenomenon of laity committing violence against the secular clergy, specifically priests, in fifteenth-century north-eastern France. Using ecclesiastical and secular court records from Paris and northern France, royal pardon letters, and supplications to the papal penitentiary, I aim to understand the motivations of perpetrators, the types of violence committed, and the consequences of such violence. The thesis also draws upon penitential literature, pastoral aids, exempla, and popular literature such as fabliaux and the Cent nouvelles nouvelles to understand cultural and social attitudes towards the concept of committing violence against the clergy.

Despite the theoretically severe canon and secular legal strictures against laity committing violence against the clergy, and the moral and spiritual dangers associated with carrying out an attack on one’s priest, it continued to happen with regularity. My thesis argues that lay violence against the clergy was far from being universally condemned. It was simultaneously marked out as a significant and serious sin/crime, yet apparently tolerated in various situations. Attitudes were characterised by deep ambivalence which reflected the complexities of the relationship between clergy and laity, priestly identity, and the social, legal and religious landscape of late medieval France more broadly.

Prior to the DPhil, I completed my undergraduate degree at the University of Manchester and the MSt in Medieval History at University College, Oxford, which was funded by the Oxford-Swire Graduate Scholarship. My current research is supported by the AHRC, and I am a Clarendon Scholar and the Peter Storey Scholar at Balliol College.