The word ‘hierarchy’ can mean both status hierarchy and a hierarchy of command. The managerial hierarchy of a modern company is instrumental, not embedded in a system of meaning and values. Late Antique hierarchies of command were on the other hand integrated in the value system, but even so this hierarchy of power should be distinguished from status hierarchy, though the two were intertwined. Some societies have more hierarchy of the status sort than others. The Church of late Antiquity was on the high end of the hierarchy scale. There was a multiplicity of gradations of status within the clergy, as well as a sharp differentiation between clergy and laity.

‘Bigamy’ – the ban on twice-married men or husbands of widows becoming clerics – was another way of marking out the clergy from ordinary people. For the latter, remarriage after the death of a spouse was unproblematic, but it was an absolute bar to a clerical career. The underlying rationale takes one deep into the realm of symbolism.

Religious life in late medieval Latin Christendom was intense. A turn toward pastoral theology and increasing lay literacy and activism led to criticism of and rising expectations for clergy (more preaching, better morals), multiplication of devotions (e.g., prayer books promising indulgences, elaborate church decoration, new saints’ shrines, and pilgrimages), and anxieties about means of salvation and good works (e.g., chantries and Mass foundations, practices of charity in face of the “undeserving poor”). Among the responses were reformulations of the understanding and practice of worship and the roles and characters of ministries.