Description
About the Author
Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer is Recording Officer, Society for Reformation Research and Susan C. Karant-Nunn Chair in Reformation and Early Modern European History, Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies at the University of Arizona.
Reviews
Reviews: Winner of the Gerald Strauss Prize in Reformation History, awarded by the Sixteenth Century Studies Association
"Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer has written a fascinating, richly documented, and methodologically innovative book on clerical marriage in the first decades of the Reformation."
- American Historical Review
"Anyone interested in the effects of the Reformation on the clergy anywhere in Europe should read this book and will find it stimulating. It has certainly helped me to think in new ways about clerical marriage in England. This is the one-hundredth volume of the St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History, and it is fitting that the series should mark this milestone with such a superb contribution to Reformation studies. This must-read work deserves to be one of their most successful titles for decades to come."
- Renaissance Quarterly
"In this excellent study, Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer investigates a broad swath of Germany stretching from Swabia through Franconia to Saxony... As other new studies have also emphasized, the Reformation was a process, not an event. From Priest's Whore to Pastor's Wife makes very clear why marriage was at the heart of this process."
- Catholic Historical Review
'The strength of the book is that by returning the theological debate over clerical marriage to its social and cultural context, Plummer has significantly deepened our understanding of both its origins and impact."
- Lutheran Quarterly
"Ultimately ... [Plummer] has produced a strong regional study that fits well into the current historiography, especially the debates surrounding social control, gender, and popular culture. Refreshingly, it serves to increase focus on the practicalities and realities of clerical marriage, which, as Plummer shows, did not always have the desired results at the local level."
- Sixteenth Century Journal
'The scope of her analysis is impressive; the debates of the Reformation are set against the backdrop of earlier controversy and attempts at regulation, individual case studies are located within the experience of some 2,500 Lutheran pastors, attitudes to clerical marriage and clerical concubinage are explored side by side, and the experience of former monastic clergy receives thoughtful analysis. Clerical marriage, as Plummer contends, may provide a useful lens through which to view the process of reform in practice, but, as this volume shows, it is a subject that also warrants a thoughtful analysis in its own right."
- Journal of Ecclesiastical History
"Plummer's contribution combines an astounding volume of archival research with a critical re-examination of published materials into a nuanced explication of the social process of reform in actual practice, leaving few stones unturned. Her book... is history at its best."
- German History
Book Information
ISBN 9781138118492
Author Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer
Format Paperback
Page Count 368
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 521g