Spiritual Incest: Consent and Clerical Abuse in Early Modern France
The Catholic Church identified clerical sexual abuse as a crime: spiritual incest. “Spiritual incest” indicated how the liaison between a priest and the laity, especially women, was defined by authority on the one side and obedience on the other. Early modern communities and families accepted this power relations, which allowed clerics access to individuals’ bodies and souls. Ecclesiastical court documents throughout France reveal how practices of grooming, seduction and sexual violence took place within such relations. The sources also suggest that notions of consent and agency fail to account for the experience of victims, in effect making them invisible. At the same time, Choudhury’s research asks if there were more subtle ways in which victims asserted themselves? Do our assumptions about individual consent and autonomy privilege certain kinds of agency and affect how we write history?