The Holy Roman Empire comes to mind
There was never any kind of “rule” like this. There were bishops of common birth and ordinary priests of noble birth who never became bishops.
It was more the other way round–bishops were considered nobility by virtue of being bishops. So the Church had a lot more social mobility than any other part of medieval society.
That’s true. Fascinatingly so. The way society was arranged, you couldn’t even address a member of the nobility in certain ways unless you were his/her “peer”. That wasn’t a Church thing, it was the way feudalism worked. But even bishops weren’t the “peers” of all of the nobility. Cardinals were regarded as the “peers” of the highest level of nobility, which is why they are referred to as “princes of the Church”. They could address princes and even kings; something ordinary bishops couldn’t do unless specifically permitted to do so in advance by the person addressed. The Pope was on the “Emperor” level in all of that. There were definitely times when princes, kings and emperors had to be talked or written to, even chastised, without their specific advance permission.
Well you are definitely putting the most positive spin on this practice.
There was much more social mobility than many people realise. the term “Dark Ages” was retroactively slapped on this area during the protestant rebellion and “enlightenment” to emphasise how horrible things were before they came along.
Feudalism was what it was, and ignorance was ignorance. Learning mattered then, just as it does now. But I think it’s a mistake to think of it as this stark. The breakdown of feudalism was essentaiily complete by the 13th Century, and Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” are, to a degree, about that. Chaucer was a commoner; a member of the merchant class. His very name was derived from “shoemaker”. The English we speak today is derived from a largely mercantile dialect, not the language of the nobility. That’s one of the major reasons why we think of Chaucer’s works as so important. By his time, even the crown was dependent on the “commons” for money, and that source was the mercantile class, not the nobility. St. Francis of Assisi was born in the 12th century. He was not a noble. His father was of the merchant class. It was difficult for a peasant to become a merchant, but not much more then than now, and required the same talents. It was quite common for peasants to become priests. Some were nearly illiterate, though the monasteries had schools for them, and not just for them. Certainly, it was less common for them to become bishops.
There certainly were such ideas–I know more about them in the Renaissance, but I believe that they were present in the Middle Ages as well. The Church’s teaching stood in some tension with this attitude, though.
No, I don’t think there was ever a time when “social stratification was complete.” And urban centers began to emerge in the 12th or even 11th century–much earlier than 1300. The urban middle classes became much more powerful after 1300, true. Also, where did you get the idea that the guilds favored social mobility? I would think that the opposite would be the case, because guilds functioned to prevent newcomers from taking up a certain trade without the permission of the guild members. I would say that if anything they limited social mobility.
True. Of course, social movement is limited to some degree in our own day as well!
Support for this claim? It may depend on what you define as the “Renaissance.” I believe I recall reading in Marc Forster’s book on post-Reformation Catholicism that social mobility became much less in the Catholic clergy after the Reformation. And the best example I can think of illustrating your remark about different social classes being seen as fundamentally different is Thomas Brady’s description of the myth of the “beautiful children of Adam” in one of his books on sixteenth-century Strasbourg.
do you have some reliable source for this assertion?