A History of Celibacy.

Reese, Alan W. ; Colwill, Elizabeth

A History of Celibacy, by Elizabeth Abbot. Toronto, Ontario, Harper Collins Publishers, 1999. 559 pp. $32.00 Cdn.

"[W]hat didn't happen in the bedrooms of history, and why?" is the thread that links together this lively, wide-ranging but seriously flawed popular history. The author presents a survey of celibacy and related topics that range from the chaste goddesses of remote antiquity to the "Born-Again Virgins of America" of today. For the reader interested in the history of celibacy as an area of historical scholarship, the book fails to satisfy even as a survey. While a bibliography is provided, it contains many typographical errors. In the notes direct documentation is, in too many cases, limited to secondary or even tertiary sources. References to the primary sources, where included, are most often lumped together for an entire section. For some chapters no primary sources appear in either the notes or bibliography. This incomplete documentation is particularly frustrating for academic readers given the novelty of some of the author's assertions. We read, for example, "[t]he Apostles' Creed, developed at the end of the fourth century and actually formalized in the eighth, had the Holy Ghost implanting the Child fully formed rather than as a seed nourished by Mary's body" (p. 49). This ambiguous statement appears without a note and is followed by another, equally ambiguous, where one reads that many folk "searched their hearts and could believe only that Christ was the blood son of Mary and Joseph ... Muslims, for example -- to this day revere Christ as a flesh-and-blood prophet" (pp. 49-50). Here the Islamic denial of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation seems to be equated with a denial of the virgin birth of Christ (a doctrine which Muslims do accept as an article of faith derived from the nineteenth chapter of the Koran).

Other ambiguities and problems of accuracy abound especially in the discussion of celibacy and asceticism in the medieval Christian period. Almost at the outset of the book admiration is expressed for "the courageous women who braved the harsh and desolate desert to devote their lives to God." Voluntary celibacy among women is depicted as "a liberating lifestyle" (p. 96). On the other hand, early Christian male celibates come in for rough treatment for their hatred of the body and "misogyny." Medieval monks fare not much better but provide the book with some sensational passages. Closely following allegations of "rampant" homosexuality in the male cloisters, we are told that bathing for monks "was permitted only as a complicated procedure in which concealing garments were never removed all at the same time, so that various body parts were never exposed, even to their owner, in one enticing expanse of moistly glistening flesh" (p. 102). Books and articles by the most prominent scholars in the area of medieval Christian celibacy such as David Knowles, Jean Leclercq, or Daniel Callam do not appear in the notes or bibliography. Even in the relatively balanced discussion of Christian women's celibacy there are some problems of chronology. After noting that an English abbess of the seventeenth century "allegedly had twelve children," the author notes, "double monasteries were notorious for sexual liaisons" (p. 155). Given that mention was just made of the seventeenth century, the reference to double monasteries is confusing. Double monasteries (i.e. a monastic foundation with separate houses for men and women on the same property and under a common administration) were to be found among the Celts and Anglo-Saxons in the period before the Viking devastation of the late eighth and near ninth centuries. While the reference might be to the Gilbertine Order in England (which had some thriving double monasteries in the high Middle Ages), this order was never "notorious." Moreover, Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century precluded the existence of any double monasteries in England in the seventeenth century. Again, if the seventeenth century English abbess referred to were to be thought of as residing on the continent, any reference to double monasteries in relation to her would still be an anachronism. The lack of a note for the reference to the abbess is typical.

While I have concentrated on the author's treatment of medieval Christianity, the book also looks at celibacy in other religions and cultures. Such diverse matters as Hindu semen retention, chastity belts, eunuchs, the impotent -- "limp as yesterday's lettuce" (p. 393) -- celibacy in literature, female genital mutilation, and "the new celibacy" are discussed and illustrated by colourful anecdotes. The treatment of the Hindu traditions of religious celibacy is rather sensationalized and one looks in vain for primary source references to Hindu sacred texts in either the notes or bibliography. Mahatma Ghandhi's deeply personal experiments with sexual continence are distressingly illustrated in tabloid style gossip while credited for being the birth of his political movement (p.251). The author's historical training is more in evidence in the most recent history of celibacy, especially in the treatment of AIDS-induced celibacy. I do not recommend this book to historians or serious students.

Alan W. Reese

University of Saskatchewan