Giving Birth in Eighteenth-Century England

Abstract

death), and some people felt their sentences were unjust or ignorable, at least for a time. The second section addresses the consequences of excommunication for social life. It focuses on the idea that excommunicants were to be shunned by those in their communities—not speaking, eating, or doing business with them—the theory being that this would help convince excommunicants to correct their ways and seek absolution. Those who continued to associate with excommunicants themselves faced excommunication. Hill suggests that this type of ostracism was difficult and often not practiced, not least because excommunicants were not permanently to be shunned but only until they (presumably) sought absolution. Hill also relates this to canon law limitations on how excommunication could spread through such interactions, such as the well-known quoiniam multos provision (1078), that limited how far and in what circumstances excommunication could be contagious. These chapters also explore the social and legal consequences that excommunication placed on individuals, which could be particularly painful for prominent members of society. These included exclusion from church and from conducting legal business in the courts. Hill also emphasizes that excommunication could damage one’s reputation, particularly for prominent figures whose excommunications might be well publicized through large areas. This could have many consequences, not least in a legal culture where most evidence and arguments were based on oral testimony from witnesses and neighbors, who might reasonably have been influenced by rumors and publicized narratives of offenses of the type that might be publicized with excommunications. At the same time, Hill suggests the ways that general sentences of excommunication could be interpreted differently by different parties. The third section is the most innovative in the book and considers how excommunication served as kind of mass media broadcasting that could influence public opinion. Hill discusses cases in which prominent people sought to prevent the publication of sentences of excommunication, not excommunications themselves, as when Montfort prevented a papal legate from publishing sentences of excommunication against him (225–228). This section also includes a case study (in chapter 6) of a years-long dispute over the prebend of Thame in the 1290s, a conflict that involved excommunications on both sides of the conflict, whose different players had powerful friends within the church on the one hand and with the king on the other. The final chapter in section three (chapter 7) discusses the development of what was sometimes known as the “Great curse” in medieval England. Hill presents this as a particular formalization of the regular publication of offenses that led to automatic excommunication (latae sententiae). These sentences needed to be wellpublicized at regular intervals so that potential offenders would reasonably be aware that they were committing an action that would, in itself, excommunicate them. Details of what was published and how varied, and Hill emphasizes that churchmen could not control exactly how such publications were interpreted by those who witnessed them. This book is quite different from many of the existing studies on excommunication, focusing as it does on practices and the effects of excommunication within a society, such that it is difficult to compare directly with other works, many of which have focused on the development of the sanction within canon law. Hill herself suggests that her approach is somewhat similar to V eronique Beaulande’s in Le malheur d‘être exclu? (Beaulande 2006). It might also be compared with L ara Magn ussard ottir’s work Bannfæring og kirkjuvald a Islandi (Magn usard ottir 2007), which also finds, for example, the frequent appearance of latae sententiae excommunications in Icelandic sources, contrary to what some previous researchers have suggested about the contexts in which this type of excommunication was used. The book deals with so many different approaches to excommunication, itself a complex sanction, that some things are bound to remain less clear than others. Further discussion of the rituals associated with absolution, which are referred to briefly (i.e. at page 213), would have been helpful. Were these rituals as common as those for excommunication itself? This reader also found the references to specific types of latae sententiae excommunications by short incipits linked to a glossary a hinderance more than a help—a brief mention of why an automatic excommunication occurred might have been clearer, especially because most of the cases involve the types of offenses against ecclesiastical persons or property at the core of automatic excommunication. These are a few minor quibbles with what is an excellent and innovative book based on extensive primary source research and careful analysis that is much to be recommended.