Sex, Gender, and Episcopal Authority in an Age of Reform, 1000-11

Sobre el libro Sex, Gender, and Episcopal Authority in an Age of Reform, 1000-11 de Megan Mclaughlin publicado por Cambridge UP al 2014:

he eleventh and early twelfth centuries were a period of intense debate over ecclesiastical reform in western Europe.
This book examines the debates from a new perspective, exploring the ways in which contemporary political writers conveyed messages about ´public´ life through textual and sometimes visual images of the ´private´ life of the Church. It argues that the images they used - of bishops as husbands of their sees, of the laity as the sons of Mother Church, and of the pope as father of bishops - were shaped not only by intellectual and ritual traditions, but also by contemporary ideas about sexuality and gender. Megan McLaughlin reveals that the boundaries between the ´public´ and the ´private´ were extremely fluid in the central Middle Ages - because of both the realities of political life in that period and the changing nature of life within European households.