Jennifer Mcdonald

Project Title:
The Pathway to an Ecclesiastical Career: Scottish and Norwegian Clergy in the Registra Supplicationum and the Sacra Penitenzieria Apostolica, 1449-1531

The project will analyse supplications from Scottish and Norwegian clerics who applied to the Papal Chancery, Datary and Penitentiary for dispensation from the impediments of illegitimacy, disability, and minority of age to enter an ecclesiastical career. It will address these impediments within a legal and theological framework, examining the Church’s attitudes towards defects, as well as the legal and theological justifications for establishing them as impediments to holy orders. This will serve to highlight whether diocesan authorities in later medieval Norway and Scotland were strict, or lenient, in their interpretation and enforcement of canonical stipulations. The project also aims to involve an analysis of practical approaches to these impediments, and, especially, how the Church, both locally and internationally, circumvented its own legal conventions by allowing men who received dispensation to enter an ecclesiastical career. Comparative analysis of supplications in these registers will establish whether Norwegian and Scottish clerics affected by illegitimacy, disability or minority were frequently (or infrequently) recruited into the clergy. This will enable identification of regional and cultural variation, as well as provide an opportunity to assess the application of canon law in different geographical contexts. The project will also trace the careers of Norwegian and Scottish supplicants who received dispensation to determine whether Norwegian and/or Scottish clerics affected by impediments secured (or were prevented from securing) lucrative preferment and/or emoluments.

Publications

The Application of Canon Law within Medieval Scotland, in light of the Evidence of the Registers of the Sacra Penitenzieria Apostolica’, N. Linder, ed., Rechtstransfer in der Geschicte (Lucerne, 2006).

'Illegitimate Scots in the Registers of Supplications and the registers of the Sacra Penitenziera Apostlica during the pontificate of Sixtus IV, 1471-1484', in Torstein Jørgensen, Gerhard Jaritz and Kirsi Salonen, eds., Et Usque ad Ultimam Terrae: The Penitentiary in Local Context (Budapest, 2007)

'Illegitimacy and the Papal Penitentiary', The Atlas of Medieval History, eds., David Ditchburn, Simon Maclean and Angus Mackay, (Abingdon, 2007)

'The Requests of Scottish Clergy in the Registers of the Sacra Apostolica Penitenzieria, 1449-1542', in Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 37 (2007), 1-50.

Publications registered in FRIDA