The Routledge History of Medieval Christianity

1050-1500

R. N. Swanson, R. N. Swanson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317508083
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

The Routledge History of Medieval Christianity explores the role of Christianity in European society from the middle of the eleventh-century until the dawning of the Reformation. Arranged in four thematic sections and comprising 23 originally commissioned chapters plus introductory overviews to each part by the editor, this book provides an authoritative survey of a vital element of medieval history.

Comprehensive and cohesive, the volume provides a holistic view of Christianity in medieval Europe, examining not only the church itself but also its role in, influence on, and tensions with, contemporary society. Chapters therefore range from examinations of structures, theology and devotional practices within the church to topics such as gender, violence and holy warfare, the economy, morality, culture, and many more besides, demonstrating the pervasiveness and importance of the church and Christianity in the medieval world.

Despite the transition into an increasingly post-Christian age, the historic role of Christianity in the development of Europe remains essential to the understanding of European history – particularly in the medieval period. This collection will be essential reading for students and scholars of medieval studies across a broad range of disciplines.

Part 1 Structures

By far the most straightforward way to begin a thematic overview of the Christianity of medieval Western Europe is to approach it through its structures, the organisational systems and mechanisms that allowed it to function and gave it a kind of unity and coherence. It is an approach legitimated by a long tradition of historical scholarship, which has indeed underpinned much of what might be considered ‘old-fashioned’ ecclesiastical history – the history that concentrates on the institutional Church rather than the religion’s more social manifestations and impact. Such history is, however, ‘old-fashioned’ only in the sense that it is a long established tradition: it remains a valid and valuable strand of scholarship, augmented and enhanced by integrating recent evolutions, but neither superseded nor replaced.

The structures provide a necessary background and context for much of the subsequent volume. Here, they are addressed in terms of territorial units, personnel, and the validating ideas underpinning some of those components, which might at times be considered an ideology.

While the focus on the structures and personnel of the Church (for the structures could not work without the people) provides an easy starting point, it is also a somewhat risky one. The structures treated here are essentially practical – the concrete components of a functioning Church organised in a hierarchy of territorial units (for the ‘secular’ Church) and coherent networks (for the ‘regulars’); both patterns being united into a single bureaucratic entity under papal direction. In this context, the use of terms such as ‘papal monarchy’, and the much-repeated dictum that ‘The medieval church was a state’ (derived from the eminent legal historian F. W. Maitland),¹ help to build preconceptions often shaped and distorted through a lens affected by equating post-Reformation Roman Catholicism with its medieval precursor, by an overemphasis on expectations of bureaucratic efficiency (heightened by myths of inquisition), and by historiographical traditions that (at least in Anglophone scholarship) often have an inherited anti-Catholic (and specifically anti-papal) bias.

That last element has significantly declined in recent decades, but still shapes some perceptions. The monstrosity has become less monstrous, but its ghost is not yet exorcised. Medieval Christianity was indeed an organised religion, with all that that entailed, but it was also a strikingly and surprisingly disorganised religion, very much a continual experiment in organisation and understanding. The most basic of practical considerations – communications, compliance, people – precluded the centralised bureaucratic monolith sometimes associated with ideas of papal monarchy, but an investigation of structures almost automatically invites a top-down approach, fitting components into an overarching structure dependent – no matter how insecurely – on its earthly head. Investigation of the reality must also incorporate a bottom-up perspective, the relative impotence of the overarching structures forcing them to invite and encourage participation, accept decentralisation and localism, and respond to and accommodate pressures and demands from lower down the system.

That the unified Western Church of these centuries was built around the papacy places that institution at the heart of the history, mainly because it was such a formative influence both on ideas and practice. Nevertheless, its claims to authority were often contested and limited: the papal monarchy could not be an absolute monarchy. Subsidiary units and authorities (most importantly, bishops and priests, bishoprics and parishes) were needed to create the Church in the localities and provide administrative links to the centre, a system that required collaboration and collusion if it was to work. In combination, some kind of unity resulted, but the tensions between centre and locality – whether the centre was Rome or the local cathedral, the locality the diocese or the parish – also introduced a balance of forces and loyalties that played against each other, and in the process shaped the reality of how the Church’s practical authority was perceived and experienced.

The structures did not run on automatic. They can be objectified as ‘the papacy’, ‘the diocese’, ‘the parish’, and so on, but each of these terms is, in reality, shorthand for a complex human organism – individual popes and bishops, their fellow administrators and employed officials, and the great body of Christians whose lives were shaped by the structures but who might not be as compliant as desired. For organisational and administrative purposes, the key personnel were the clergy, the men who supervised many of the core spiritual and practical functions of the faith. A division emphasised, reinforced and blurred across the late medieval centuries between the two main groups of clergy – the seculars (‘within the world’) and regulars (‘under a rule’) – requires that each be considered separately. The two groups were often in opposition and competition across the period, but it is also important to recognise their frequent symbiosis and functional overlap, especially significant in their relations with the laity, as guides and governors.

Here, though, there is an obvious absence in the shape of this section: the glaring lack of a chapter specifically on ‘the laity’. To omit the overwhelming majority of the medieval Catholic population from direct attention may seem perverse. Laypeople were, after all, fundamental, essential, to the structures: the whole Church was built on them, and for them. They were the majority of those meant to be ‘the believers’; the majority of those supposedly seeking salvation; and the ones who were being directed, goaded, bullied, enticed into compliance with the religious and social norms established by the clergy in collaboration with the secular rulers. They were also the ones whose compliance was basic to the shape of medieval Catholic practice, and whose concerns for their own salvation helped to shape both doctrine and practice. In a very real sense, medieval Catholicism was a demand-led religion. It was lay anxiety about the afterlife that finally forced the theologians to legitimate the doctrine of purgatory, and which subsequently made it one of the most significant factors in religious practice. It was the laity who were usually the first to recognise a saint, or a holy site. It was mainly the laity who funded the Church, certainly at its lowest level. Such lay activity and initiative was not always approved or encouraged – there were numerous contests about the holiness of a putative saint and the validity of miracles said to occur at supposedly holy sites – but the laity were always a force to the reckoned with, and on occasion irresistible.

The Church and religion that the laity constructed for themselves reflected their own concerns: building from the bottom up, they created structures to meet their own needs, fitting into a general pattern often without fully subscribing to it. In some respects, they created their own Church in parallel with the authorised version, through their own investment and organisations. The Christianity they constructed, in its relationships with the ideas of the faith, and with the clergy and other authorities who administered it, was both local and variable. It rested on local units – mainly parish and guild, sometimes city and lordship – but was in its turn shaped by integration into broader ecclesiastical and social units. It reflected local contexts and opportunities. Itself evolving, and responding to contemporary evolutions within the clericalised Church, such lay involvement becomes increasingly visible over time, in ways that suggest increasing lay religious autonomy and influence within the Church. However, while much is written about ‘lay religion’, of ‘popular religion’ (the latter an especially contested term), the sheer complexity and variety of this lay involvement makes a single chapter-length summary impractical – and if actually limited to a chapter, almost meaningless.² The laity are not in this section explicitly, because implicitly they are everywhere in the volume: as the people whom the administrative and jurisdictional structures were meant to organise and oversee; as the addressees and respondents to the complex of doctrinal and social ideas and expectations built up by theologians, canon lawyers, and other intellectuals; as the ones chiefly engaged in the practices of the religion; as the main actors in the social world that the religion sought to shape and direct.

Notes

1. F. W. Maitland, Roman Canon Law in the Church of England: Six Essays, London: Methuen & Co., 1898, p. 100.
2. The scale and variation in the activity also make it impossible to provide anything like adequate summary bibliography here. As in the present volume, the laity permeate R. N. Swanson, Religion and Devotion in Europe, c.1215–c.1515, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. For the earlier period, S. Hamilton, Church and People in the Medieval West, 900–1200, Harlow: Pearson, 2013. As a minuscule and somewhat random selection of indicative more specialist work from scholarship in English, see essays in Part 1 of A. Vauchez (ed. D. E. Bornstein), The Laity in the Middle Ages: Religious Belief and Devotional Practices, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993; A. Thompson, Cities of God: The Religion of the Italian Communes, 1125–1325, Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005; R. Cossar, The Transformation of the Laity in Bergamo, 1265–c.1400, Leiden: Brill, 2006; E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992, 2nd edn, 2005, Part 1; J. Henderson, Piety and Charity in Late Medieval Florence, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994; D. J. F. Crouch, Piety Fraternity and Power: Religious Gilds in Late Medieval Yorkshire, 1389–1547, Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2000; B. Kümin, The Shaping of a Community: The Rise and Reformation of the English Parish, c.1400–1560, Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996; K. L. French, The People of the Parish: Community Life in a Late Medieval English Diocese, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001; eadem, The Good Women of the Parish: Gender and Religion after the Black Death, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.

1 The Papacy

Brett Edward Whalen

DOI: 10.4324/9781315716800-1

Writing several years after the conclusion of World War I, the American medievalist A. C. Krey responded to recent conjecture and debate over the League of Nations and the extent of its sovereignty by identifying what he saw as a more or less similar example of international order in the past: that of medieval Christendom. By the era of Pope Innocent III (1198–1216), Krey observed,

the Church with the papacy at its head had become an international state. It had everything that a state has – and more. It could raise funds by direct taxation and raise armies equally directly. It could bring offenders to the courts of justice, and it had the means of executing its judgments. It applied its laws equally to peasant and king and it executed judgments against both. It controlled education, controlled the agencies of publicity, and controlled the courts. The social cares of charity and public health were in its hands. And on top of all this, it wielded the awful power of eternal life or death. Never in history have the moral forces of so vast a society been so thoroughly concentrated and so effective. As an experiment in practical idealism, it is still without equal.¹

Krey’s vision of what historians call the ‘papal monarchy’ probably tells us more about his own moment in time than the days of Innocent III, about early twentieth-century hopes for peace following the trauma of the First World War than papal governance in the thirteenth century. Yet the idea of Christendom continued and still continues to resonate among scholars of the Middle Ages, not to mention philosophers, social scientists, politicians, and anyone else seeking the premodern roots of modern European civilization. To simplify an argument made many times over, before Europe, there was Latin or Western Christendom, a community of Christian kingdoms and peoples with a shared religious tradition. And Christendom could not be imagined without the unifying ideals and bureaucratic mechanisms of the Roman papacy.²

There are good reasons for such evaluations of papal leadership over the medieval societies of Western European; above all during the so-called central or high Middle Ages.³ Popes vied with emperors, sometimes successfully, for supremacy over the Christian world and also to assert their rights of direct lordship over the Papal States on the Italian peninsula. To a considerable extent, they determined norms of religious belief and practice for women and men, the rich and poor, the mighty and humble. They oversaw the targeting and suppression of heresy, and set crusading armies in motion. Canon lawyers pushed at the limits of papal jurisdiction, including the pope’s position as the ‘ordinary judge’ for ecclesiastical disputes and his ‘fullness of power’ (plenitudo potestatis) over the Church and its offices. As a source of clerical privileges and a court of final appeals, the Roman curia formed an irresistible center of gravity for ecclesiastical business. Once again, all roads led to Rome (or wherever the popes happened to be at any given time), bringing litigants seeking papal intervention, clerics petitioning for benefices, and favor-seekers asking for special consideration from the Apostolic See.

Much like Krey, however, historians sometimes inflate the level of ideological influence and direct institutional power wielded by the medieval popes of Rome, who did not necessarily possess the governmental means to ‘control’ the legal, political, social, and spiritual life of Western Europe, even if they had wanted to do so. As we will see, applying the Church’s laws to emperors, kings, and other secular rulers proved especially difficult. With regard to the pope’s direct oversight of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the term ‘papal monarchy’ is somewhat misleading.⁴ Although the bishop of Rome held a unique position, his office did not represent the sole source of authority in the Church. Other bishops, after all, possessed a ‘part of the responsibility’ (pars sollicitudinis) for the governing of the Church, complementing the pope’s ‘fullness of power’. The papacy frequently acted in deliberation with others, as seen during the First (1123), Second (1139), Third (1179), and Fourth (1215) Lateran Councils. In addition, the College of Cardinals – responsible for electing popes after the mid-eleventh century – functioned as an important legislative body of sorts, complementing and sometimes contesting papal authority. The papal monarchy largely worked not because popes unilaterally controlled others, but because Christian Europeans looked to the papacy for spiritual guidance, privileges, and protections when it suited their needs. As the other essays in this volume make amply clear, the popes of Rome represented only one force among many shaping Western Christianity during the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries.⁵

With that caveat in mind, this essay examines the significance of the medieval papacy in Western Christianity, highlighting the fact that the Roman popes possessed a unique claim not just over Christendom, but also over meaning in history itself. That is to say, the articulation of papal sovereignty involved a pa...