Were there no consequences to expressing anti-clerical sentiments in the Middle Ages?

by Maus_Sveti

Many great works of literature (I'm thinking of the Canterbury Tales, Piers Plowman, the Decameron...) in the Middle Ages contain quite strong veins of anticlericalism. I'm not aware of their authors facing any consequences for this, either from the church or in civil society. Were they privileged, or could anyone get away with attacking the church?

arivederlestelle

It's really interesting that all the examples you mention here are written in vernacular languages (i.e., not in Latin). I'm most familiar with this question from the perspective of Italian literature, so I might be able to give some helpful context through this lens.

First of all, what exactly are these texts saying? I can think of two major ways a text can be 'anticlerical': first, in the sense of calling for serious changes to the church's hierarchical structure, or in the sense of 'lol look at this illiterate/womanizing/alcoholic priest.' Certainly these two senses can coexist in the same text, and I don't mean to suggest that there were no medieval challenges to church hierarchy. (I'm more familiar with Byzantium, where there's no official comparable to the Pope, and so things are always a little more anarchical -- but that's a different question entirely.) But who is the audience of these vernacular texts? Educating someone to read Latin involved not only teaching them to read but also to understand and really think in a completely different language (especially in non-Romance language areas like Germany and England), as well as to absorb and internalize the contents of the curriculum -- maybe some classical stuff, but more likely a lot more Scripture, and ultimately, if you were serious, theology. But if you're just learning to read and write your native language, you only need to learn how to read and write. Especially in the earliest vernacular period (13-14th c., in Italy), even as vernacular education was certainly still a mark of wealth, it was much more available than a serious clerical education. So suddenly you have many more literate people who are nevertheless not planning to use that literacy for clerical purposes. Not to say that vernacular literature can't express very complex theological ideas -- one of the earliest (Umbrian) Italian works of literature is St. Francis' Canticle of the Sun, which is very much about Franciscan theology, not to mention, like, the entire Divine Comedy -- but entertainment is a focus of the earliest Italian vernacular literature in a way that is not true, at least not to the same extent, for most secular Latin literature at the time (cf. the Prologue of the Decameron: the book's entire conceit is that telling stories is meant to be a distraction from the plague). Medievals absolutely knew how to joke, and they were very good at it; clerics were a big enough part of daily life, especially urban life, that they're simply one of many relatable topics.

That said: did expressing these views have consequences? Yes and no. On the one hand, it's important to remember that most if not all of the people who are criticizing clerics in the vein of the Decameron are doing so at least superficially in the sense of 'hate the sin, not the sinner.' Dante can put his archnemesis Boniface VIII in one of the deepest circles of Hell because he's not explicitly condemning the papacy as an institution, but rather only a particularly awful pope. Boccaccio can make fun of superstitious peasants and fraudulent relic salesmen, but he's also (at least eventually) ordained -- the humor presumably lies not in the ideas underlying these practices but in their faulty execution. How genuine this defense might be at any given place and time may of course vary. Your fellow parishioners -- wealthy or not -- might absolutely laugh along with you, even if your pastor doesn't (though who knows -- he might laugh too). Anyone wealthy enough to get the kind of education necessary to write one of these works is also almost by default a member of the privileged elite. Dante was minor nobility, with an ancestor who fought in the Crusades; Boccaccio's father was from one of the wealthiest families in Florence. These critiques, however tongue-in-cheek they might be, are produced by people (at least in this case) who are still, at least, the product of a clerical education. They're not anything like "the average peasant"; Dante and Boccaccio and other authors like them can play this game only because they know exactly how much they can bend the rules. Anyone else wouldn't have made it to that kind of fame.

Anyway, that's more or less the extent of my knowledge on the subject, but I would welcome any insight on the more serious side of medieval anticlerical thought (especially in non-vernacular literature!). Some sources for Dante and Boccaccio, if you'd be interested further:

  • Danteworlds' commentary on Inferno 19, the circle of the Simoniacs -- and the appearance of Boniface VIII, along with Clement V and Nicholas III. The Digital Dante Edition also offers a little more context, especially if you don't have a copy of the text handy (kind of necessary for Danteworlds, IMO).
  • Joy Hambuechen Potter, "God, Church, and Society in the Decameron," in Five Frames for the Decameron: Communication and Social Systems in the Cornice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982): 41-68. Here is also an article by Janet Levarie Smarr ("Clergy in the Decameron: Another Look?," Heliotropia 11.1-2, 2014: 55-64) that seems to summarize the state of the question for Boccaccio, with a pretty sizable bibliography that might be of interest to you.