The Bishop Orders His Womb

Since I will be doing that banned-book thing at the Providence Athenæum tonight, I think it only fitting to provide you with a passage from my work in progress that will most likely feel the teasing tickle of an editor’s shears after the manuscript is delivered to the publisher. I think you’ll understand why: some words are not supposed to be used in histo books.

Ah me, censorship begins at home.

Then again, this attempt at titillation may be a sly marketing ploy on my part, in an effort to cause such a tsunami of interest in the inquisition and such a landslide of Amazon pre-ordering of my Friar of Carcassonne that all will be swept away… Lady Gaga, Sarah Palin, Afghanistan… gone, kaput, deep-sixed, vanished from the headlines, as the masses clamor, plead, squeal, beg for more, more, MORE... oh god yessss!!!… on fourteenth-century France and the inqui –

I think I spend too much time alone.

Anway, here we go. Albi is a town north of Toulouse. The rest is self-explanatory.

“Bernard de Castanet was a theocrat. A native of Montpellier who conducted a distinguished career in coercitive diplomacy for several popes in Italy and Germany, Castanet was awarded the see of Albi in 1276. At that time it had been vacant for five years, and previous bishops had seen their rights and privileges whittled away by the king and the town. Albi was, by long-standing custom and law, ruled by the bishop: he was the lord of the region, with all the temporal regalia and revenue and obligations that such a position entailed. Lax churchmen had let the once-splendid bishopric slip into the moribund margins of power; even the inquisition, after the rowdy reception given it in the 1230s, had not been active there.

“Castanet’s spent his entire tenure clawing back the money and temporal power that he believed was rightfully his. As for pastoral care of the souls in his diocese, one historian has drily termed his approach as “terrorist.” The episcopal prisons at Albi were renowned for their harshness – some inmates died quickly after incarceration, an occurrence unusual in medieval jails. In some instances, the families of these deceased, left in the dark on the fate of their kin, continued to bring food and other comforts to the prison for years, all of which would be quietly confiscated by the bishop’s minions. Castanet declared war on usury, meting out capital punishment to its practitioners. He was known to intervene frequently in the courts, usually stiffening sentences – death, on one occasion, for a woman who had stolen a loaf of bread. In his drive to regain lands and tithes, he showed particular ferocity. He refused Christian burial in consecrated ground to those who had died on lands withheld from him, decreeing instead that the corpses should be hung from trees (funera per arbores) and left to rot for public edification. Even sex fell within his punitive purview. Invoking the specter of his prison, Castanet ordained that sexual congress had to be heterosexual, that only the missionary and sidewise positions were permitted, and that ejaculation must occur in the vagina of one’s wife, and nowhere else. Such spoilsport attention to detail in these matters was extremely rare in medieval France; if anything, it makes Castanet all the odder.”