About

Fiona Griffiths is a historian of medieval Western Europe, focusing on intellectual and religious life from the ninth to the thirteenth century. Her work explores the possibilities for social experimentation and cultural production inherent in medieval religious reform movements, addressing questions of gender, spirituality, and authority, particularly as they pertain to the experiences and interactions of religious men (priests or monks) with women (nuns and clerical wives). She is the author of several books, including Nuns' Priests' Tales: Men and Salvation in Medieval Women's Monastic Life and The Garden of Delights: Reform and Renaissance for Women in the Twelfth Century. Griffiths is also a co-editor of works on medieval artifacts and religious life in Germany. Her essays have been published in various scholarly journals, and she has held fellowships from notable institutions such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London.

Research topics

• History
• Art
• Political Science
• Theology
• Religious studies
• Philosophy
• Ancient history
• Sociology
• Law
• Social psychology
• Classics
• Literature
• Genealogy
• Archaeology
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Le mariage des prêtres, une hérésie? Genèse du nicolaïsme (Ier–XIe siècle). By IsabelleRosé. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. 2023. 409 pp. €28. ISBN 978 2 13 085326 8.

  Early Medieval Europe · 2025-02-05

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  ‘Nicolaitism’, as a specifically clerical heresy associated with the marriages of ordained men, made a brief but powerful appearance in textual sources at the middle of the eleventh century, before largely disappearing again – only to be revived in historical scholarship during the nineteenth century by German Protestants who identified it as a trademark of the so-called ‘Gregorian’ reform. Together with simony (understood as the purchase of church office), nicolaitism subsequently became enshrined in scholarly accounts of eleventh-century church reform as one of the twin evils that reformers targeted as they purportedly sought to cleanse the church of secular influence in the form of both sex (with women) and money. In Le mariage des prêtres, Isabelle Rosé re-examines this narrative of reform, focusing her attention on nicolaitism, the less textually prevalent of the twin evils. Rosé’s concern is less to chart late antique and medieval attitudes towards clerical marriage (or, significantly, its practitioners) than it is to highlight the variable meanings assigned to the term ‘nicolaite’ and therefore to identify its specific utility to reformers – and above all to the monk, papal legate, and cardinal bishop of Ostia, Peter Damian. It was Peter who first identified the ‘heresy of the nicolaites’ as a universal clerical phenomenon, manifested through clerical marriage and associated with the ‘heresy’ of simony. What, precisely, it meant for Peter to target clerical marriage as a heresy (rather than as a vice or sin) is the question at the heart of Le mariage des prêtres. Part I of the book focuses on 1059 as what Rosé calls an ‘année hérétique’. It was in this year, amid the Patarine upheavals in Milan, that Peter Damian invoked the ‘heresy of the nicolaites’ in two letters (Ep. 61, addressed to Pope Nicholas II, and Ep. 65, addressed to Hildebrand, later Pope Gregory VII), and also in 1059 that this heresy appeared as a subject of papal concern. Pope Nicholas II (1058–61) addressed the ‘heresy of the nicolaites’ at his Rome council in the spring, forbidding any cleric in major orders who publicly kept a ‘concubine’ from singing the mass, reading the gospel or the epistle at mass, or remaining in the community of priests for the divine office. In the second part of the book, Rosé charts the evolution of ideas concerning the nicolaites from the first to the eleventh century. Drawing on digital tools to trace the word ‘nicolaite’ and its variants across the digitized corpus of late antique and medieval texts, Rosé attends to the changing manifestations and meanings of the term, noting its various associations with heterodoxy, deviant sexuality, and gradually also with the clergy. Part III places the 1059 emergence of the ‘heresy of the nicolaites’ within the context of recent events, notably the epistolary conflict (1053–4) between Rome and the Greek church. This featured, among other things, differences between the two traditions regarding married clerics, with papal legates characterizing the eastern practice of clerical marriage as a specifically Greek ‘heresy of the nicolaites’. Rosé argues that this epistolary conflict functioned as a laboratory for Latin reformers, allowing them to develop strategies for Roman supremacy that would later be put into practice against Latin churches. These strategies, which initially involved undermining the authority of local archbishops, required the identification of a clerical heresy in need of papal correction. As Rosé suggests, clerical heresy proved useful to the centralization of authority in the hands of the pope. Exerting control over the clergy (particularly through the procedures and requirements for ordination) and over the processes of enquiry into clerical misbehaviour provided a framework for the dramatic escalation of papal power now generally associated with church reform. Le mariage des prêtres makes a compelling argument for the reconsideration of the heresy of the ‘nicolaites’ as a key element in the construction of papal power and for the integration of this heresy within the historiography of medieval heresy more broadly. Anyone interested in the history of the nicolaites (and the construction of nicolaitism) will be grateful for the extensive treatment Rosé offers. Yet, her method, informed by word searches through digitized texts, results in a certain narrowness of focus, and her desire to emphasize 1059 as a pivotal year forces certain leaps, which may not stand up to closer scrutiny. Peter Damian may have been the first of the reformers to refer to a ‘heresy of the nicolaites’ as a clerical heresy (something that other scholars have remarked), yet Rosé’s insinuation that Nicholas II was also the first pope seriously to address the marriage of clerics is misleading. To establish Nicholas II as a key figure of papal concern with clerical continence and 1059 as a critical year, Rosé glides over the council of Pavia (c.1022), held under the authority of Benedict VIII (1012–24), and dismisses the legacy of Leo IX (1049–54), effectively post-dating papal interest in this topic to Nicholas’s reign. The fact that neither Leo IX’s vita nor the 1054 letters invoke Leo’s concern with papal marriage Rosé takes as evidence that he could not have taken action – although Peter Damian reports that he did, and Nicholas invoked ‘Leo’s’ rulings as a context for his own. She ignores Leo IX’s letter to the canons of Lucca (1051), in which he inveighed against married priests, and claims without evidence that Adam of Bremen’s reference to Leo IX’s synod at Mainz (1049) at which the ‘abomination of clerical marriage (was) forever condemned’ must have been derived from Peter Damian. More strikingly, Rosé may have missed the significance of the Pavia council, since the long papal preface from Pavia appears only in a heavily truncated form in the digitally searchable MGH edition, which she cites. A work that aims to cover some eleven centuries is bound to have certain gaps in coverage, and some leaps and generalizations in the argument. Le mariage des prêtres focuses on certain moments and glides over others, while often knitting pieces of evidence together with acknowledged supposition and hypothesis (and often sparse footnotes). Taken as an account of heresy, ‘nicolaitism’, and the growth of papal power, rather than of legislation concerning clerical marriage or of conjugal relationships between women and ordained men, Le mariage des prêtres nevertheless makes a helpful contribution.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• :<i>The Corrupter of Boys: Sodomy, Scandal, and the Medieval Clergy</i>

  Speculum · 2023-03-31

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Materializing history: Objects and women's lives in medieval Germany

  The German Quarterly · 2023-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Canonesses

  2022-10-31

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  Canonesses, like nuns, were religious women who lived in community; sources often refer to both as 'sanctimoniales'. Yet there were differences: unlike nuns, canonesses made no permanent vows, did not relinquish private property, wore secular clothing, and performed various public duties. During the early 9th century, reforms aimed at bringing the lives of canonesses more in line with monastic observance. The 'Institutio Sanctimonialium', a rule for canonesses, was instituted at the Council of Aachen (816). Communities of canonesses reached their apogee in Germany during the 9th and 10th centuries, with several houses of canonesses closely tied to the imperial court; many canonesses were powerful and educated women. Yet, by the middle of the 11th century, reformers once again turned their attention to houses of canonesses, denouncing the canonical way of life as degenerate and urging that canonesses adopt a recognised rule.

  PublisherDOI

• Wives, concubines, or slaves? Peter Damian and clerics’ women

  Early Medieval Europe · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • History
  • Ancient history

  From the mid‐eleventh century, the reformed papacy launched a campaign against clerical marriage that, within a hundred years or so, would largely succeed in establishing the priesthood as a celibate (if not always chaste) caste. According to the reforming monk Peter Damian, women who associated with priests formed a particular target of papal discipline: Peter reports that Pope Leo IX ruled in 1049 that such women should be made slaves of the Roman church. This paper revisits sources concerning the reported enslavement of clerics’ women, arguing that it was Peter (and not the pope) who promoted enslavement and, moreover, that Peter’s ideas were never broadly adopted .

  PublisherDOI

• 2 Noble Fathers and Low-Status Daughters in the Eleventh Century: Rilint, libera, and Hiltigund, presbyterissa

  Boydell and Brewer eBooks · 2021-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  2 Noble Fathers and Low-Status Daughters in the Eleventh Century: Rilint, libera, and Hiltigund, presbyterissa was published in The Haskins Society Journal 32: 2020. Studies in Medieval History on page 23.

  PublisherDOI

• Noble Fathers and Low-Status Daughters in the Eleventh Century: Rilint, libera, and Hiltigund, presbyterissa

  2021-12-17

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Prayer for the Dead:

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2021 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Religious studies
  • Sociology

  This chapter highlights women’s roles in medieval death practice, arguing that women’s traditional care for the dying and dead and their social role as mourners were consistent with, and in fact fundamental to, the spiritual role of nuns as valued intercessors. As custodians of family memory, women were central to medieval remembering; however, nuns have typically been seen as marginal to the monastic practices of liturgical memoria – the ritualized prayer for the dead that is generally thought to have become the specialised work of ordained monks by the Central Middle Ages. Focusing on the commemorative and intercessory roles of women as wives and mothers, the place of women in biblical narratives of the Passion and Resurrection and the social and spiritual contributions of female monasticism, this chapter argues that women’s ties to death, as both a practical and a spiritual matter, provided nuns with a central and valued role in medieval memorial practice and intercessory prayer.

  PublisherDOI

• Froibirg Gives a Gift: The Priest’s Wife in Eleventh-Century Bavaria

  Speculum · 2021-09-24

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This paper focuses on a priest’s wife, Froibirg, who donated a manuscript to the Bavarian monastery of Benediktbeuern in 1055 and was remembered by the monks as an “uxor presbiteri” until the eighteenth century. Although Froibirg appears in the historical record only once during her lifetime, the broader social and religious contexts of her donation were richly documented by the communities with which she was associated: the monastery of Benediktbeuern, the cathedral community of Augsburg, and the eleventh-century church, which was deeply concerned with the “problem” of clerical marriage around the time of her gift. By focusing on Froibirg and on her social role as a priest’s wife at the mid-eleventh century, the paper considers the celibacy movement from the standpoint of individuals and communities, rather than clerical denunciations or restrictive papal legislation.

  PublisherDOI

• Noble Fathers and Low-Status Daughters in the Eleventh Century:

  2021-12-08

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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Frequent coauthors

• Jesse Harrington

  Carleton College

  25 shared

• Laura L. Gathagan

  SUNY Cortland

  25 shared

• William North

  Carleton College

  25 shared

• C Hollister

  Durham University

  25 shared

• Charles C. Rozier

  25 shared

• Kathryn Starkey

  Stanford University

  3 shared

• Julie Hotchin

  3 shared

• Paul Van Royen

  University of Antwerp

  1 shared