ABSTRACT
Emerging from the central Middle Ages was the provision in the canon law of the Roman Catholic Church that the "defect of birth", or illegitimacy, rendered a man unfit for ordination except by papal dispensation. Inverting the idea of illegitimacy and parentage, Damian identified unchaste priests themselves as "bastards." The council condemned anyone in holy orders who had procreated sons from a "detestable union" with either a maidservant or a free woman and declared that the children "born from such pollution" not only could not inherit but also were to be held in perpetual servitude in their fathers' churches. Papal decretals and other ecclesiastical texts of the postreform era of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries shows a perpetuation of the rhetoric of the reforming era that referred to clerics' children as sources of disorder and inappropriately associated with their fathers' positions.
