ABSTRACT
This chapter summarises the findings of the book, suggests different ways of expanding upon the present research, and shows its wider relevance for the study of Byzantine and English society in the twelfth century. More specifically, it concludes that attitudes towards clerical continence were different in twelfth-century England and Byzantium because a series of risk factors were perceived in the former but absent in the latter: Byzantine clerics below the episcopate did not have enough access to ecclesiastical resources to put the Church at financial risk; clerical dynasties were understood within a wider framework of desirable friendship allegiances in Byzantium; and sex within clerical marriage was considered not impure but simply distracting.
