Saxo Grammaticus’s Heroic Chastity: A Model of Clerical Celibacy and Masculinity in Medieval Scandinavia

Abstract

Absalon’s problems began shortly after taking up his new position as archbishop of Lund, the metropolitan center of the Danish ecclesiastical province. In 1180, as the prelate was away from his see, a popular revolt flared up.¹ When he returned to establish peace, the violence instead raged further out of control, resulting in the death of one of the knights in his retinue and sending Absalon fleeing to the ‘castle that he had in Sjælland’, that is, Copenhagen. On his next visit to Skåne, on the heels of King Valdemar the Great, the locals, ‘mad with the most wicked rage’, threw stones at the archbishop, once more forcing him to retreat and prompting him to order the closure of all the churches in the archdiocese. Only when the full force of royal and archiepiscopal arms was unleashed, killing many of the rebels was an agreement reached. The issues in ‘det skånske oprør’ were many. Prominent among them, however, was the archbishop’s insistence on a celibate clergy. Absalon would later be celebrated by Arnold of Lübeck as one who ‘blossomed with the splendor of chastity’, to which he ‘called others by reproving, beseeching, upbraiding’.² The people of Skåne were not so favorably disposed to this ascetic virtue, and it was perhaps they whom Arnold had in mind when he noted that Absalon suffered ‘many grave objections’ in his fight against nicolaitism. According to Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum, our chief source for the uprising, the ‘thankless race of the Scanians’ denied that episcopal power was itself a necessary part of the church (asserting that their priests were subject to the people, not the prelate) and ‘decreed marriages for the sacerdotes’.