Download PDF | (Manchester Medieval Studies_ 36) Kathleen G. Cushing - Reform and the papacy in the eleventh century_ Spirituality and social change-Manchester University Press (2020).
189 Pages
Introduction
Historians have long recognized that it is unwise to try to find a secular definition of European society for the period we know as the ‘middle ages’. As Richard Southern pointed out, ‘the identification of the Church with the whole of organized society is the fundamental feature which distinguishes the Middle Ages from earlier and later periods of history’.1 While it is useful, often even necessary, to consider them separately, the medieval Church and medieval society were intertwined, and membership of the Church was crucial in determining an individual’s place in society.2 Although the equation of Church and society can by and large be used to describe the condition of earlier medieval Europe as well, it is the argument of this book that during the course of the eleventh century the symbiosis of Church and society became more pronounced.
This, of course, was a consequence of the movement for ecclesiastical reform. Indeed, as it will be argued, the attempt to improve standards in religious life had a revolutionary impact on eleventh-century European society. Although these efforts emerged initially at local levels in the later tenth century, and were promoted by local clergy and lay powers, they increasingly were directed in the eleventh century by a newly-ascendant Church hierarchy, and especially a reinvigorated Roman papacy, that sought to promote reform both in an attempt to return to the apostolic ideals of the early Church and as a reaction to far-ranging political, economic and social changes. Yet in the process of promoting reform, the Church would ultimately begin both to delineate and impress a unique identity for the Latin West, that of the societas christiana.
The attempt to both define and understand reform in the later tenth and eleventh centuries is thus the chief ambition of this book. This endeavour, however, is especially complicated by the fact that when eleventh-century contemporaries wrote about the aspirations, changes and improvements that they sought to effect in religious life – and within the personnel and institutional frameworks through which those objectives were to be pursued – they seldom used words like ‘reform’ (reformare). They thought instead in terms of renewal, renovation (renovatio) and restoration (restauratio).3 Defining and understanding reform, thus, is made difficult not just by the distance of that world from our own, but also by the different cultural and even linguistic assumptions of later tenth- and eleventh-century writers compared to those of modern historians.
At the same time, as Dominique Iogna-Prat has recently cautioned, it is important that historians working on medieval topics, especially the Church, recognize that our task is not ‘religious history’ but rather ‘social history’.4 Inasmuch as it is important, where possible, to try to gauge medieval society’s attachment to religious values, we can often do little more than assess how these intersected with the enactment of belief in accordance with prescriptive rules of an institution, that is, the Church. Moreover, our specific time-frame and place – the Latin West during the later tenth and eleventh centuries – offers an additional challenge. This was, after all, a time when the production and dissemination of ideas was the exclusive province of a very small elite – educated clerics and monks – and their writings and accounts inevitably leave us with only one side of the story. Even more important, the changes in religious life described in such accounts may often be evidence merely of aspirations to effect change rather than real change.
This book looks to address what some historians have called ‘the religious revolution of the eleventh century’. It does so by exploring how reform and the papacy developed in the eleventh century, and how these changes affected the rules by which medieval society functioned. On the one hand, it examines the papacy as an institution within the context of the society of which it was a part. On the other, it considers the reform movement against the backdrop of other critical developments in eleventhcentury Europe: the so-called castellan revolution and the rise of seigniorial or banal lordship, the move from a gift to a profit economy with incipient urbanization, the ‘peace’ movement and the emergence of the crowd as a force in Western society. Particular attention will be paid to the question of whether the ‘peace of God’ movement was a social revolution that progressively blurred into and merged with the papal-sponsored movement for reform, which was gathering pace from the middle of the century, or whether these forces were deliberately compacted by the reformers in their efforts to promote their vision for Christian society.
Throughout the eleventh century, there was increasing emphasis in contemporary sources on ideas of purity and pollution, of cleansing the sacred from contamination by the secular – images and rhetoric which had the function of delineating and thereby more sharply enforcing spheres of human activity. By exploring such changes, this book considers the role of the papacy as a social institution that not only articulated a distinctive ordering on earth but also, in themidst of its attempts to reform itself, sanctioned the hegemony of the powerful over the poor while protesting against it. Assessing reform and the papacy from the perspectives of social and religious change must inevitably take account of recent and even ongoing debates about how to characterize the eleventh century as a whole. Although chapter 2 will be devoted to a survey of the historiography, it is useful here briefly to discuss what is perhaps the most contentious historiographical debate: that surrounding the ‘feudal revolution’ and the by now almost synonymous mutation de l’an mil or ‘transformation of the year 1000’.
Taking their cue from Marc Bloch’s Feudal Society, this interpretation was developed by French medievalists such as JeanFrançois Lemarignier, Georges Duby, Pierre Bonnassie, Jean-Paul Poly, Eric Bournazel and Guy Bois, who characterized the eleventh century as the time when European civilization was created. 5 In broad terms, the mutationnistes hold that, around the year 1000, European society – and especially French society – suddenly experienced a far-reaching transformation that included the proliferation of castles, banal lordship and ‘evil customs’ (malae consuetudines), the progressive reduction of a free peasantry to serfdom, major changes in class structure, the reorganization of noble kin groups and familial strategies, changes in the character of the nobility, and corresponding shifts in marriage patterns and cultural outlooks. More recently, this interpretation has been underpinned by work on the ‘peace of God’ movement, which, according to historians such as Richard Landes, Johannes Fried and Thomas Head, not only provides evidence of wide-ranging ‘transformation’ around the year 1000, but also serves as both ‘a testimony to violence and a reaction against it’.6 This overall view, however, is far from universally accepted.
Indeed, the issue of mutation has become so embroiled in debate that participants may never agree precisely what it is, much less what constitutes a convincing defence or refutation of it. Dominique Barthelémy, in particular, has challenged the claims made by Duby, Bois, Landes and others for the complete collapse of Carolingian institutions at the end of the tenth century and the breakdown of all public order. He suggests, through an analysis of the sources chiefly for the Vendôme, that rather than abrupt transformation, there was much continuity from the ninth to the early twelfth centuries and that those changes that did take place were extremely gradual.7 This view is in many ways supported by Stephen White, whose work on the processes of dispute settlement draws attention to the need to focus on horizontal relations between individuals of roughly the same social status as a better measure of social change than vertical relationships.8 Other historians such as Thomas Bisson, however, continue to see the viability of the thesis of transformation especially for c.980–c.1030, arguing that historians have failed to understand the nature of lordship or appreciate the problem of violence in this period. Bisson in particular offers a useful conceptual framework for furthering the whole debate by suggesting that ‘revolution’ – which he argues is by implication seldom finished – may in the end be a better word than mutation, which, at least in scientific usage, implies an instantaneous transformation.9
Furthermore, the entire ‘transformation–feudal revolution’ debate, unsurprisingly, has continued to focus attention on the appropriateness of using the construct of ‘feudalism’ to describe patterns of land tenure, lordship and social relations around the turn of the millennium.10 For all the loose ends surrounding the mutation/revolution debates, they have nonetheless immeasurably helped us to understand what was happening in the eleventh century. Yet, the debates about the nature, the timing and even the existence of ‘transformation’ or ‘revolution’ can be taken much further because, somewhat surprisingly, apart from the important work of Robert I. Moore, very little account has been taken of the eleventh-century reform movement.11
It is the ambition of this book to do just that. While the book is chronologically structured, it also proceeds thematically. Chapter 1 provides the historical background and context, addressing the state of the Latin Church and western Europe around the year 1000, the social functions of religion, and the beginnings of localized reform initiatives. Chapter 2 focuses on the issue of how we are to understand reform in the eleventh century, its implications and the past historiography of the subject. Chapter 3 looks at the late tenth- and earlier eleventh-century movement known as the ‘peace of God’, a movement that has often been characterized as a precursor to the papal-sponsored movement that developed strength especially after 1049, but whose intrinsic reformist nature has to date perhaps been insufficiently emphasized. Chapter 4 focuses on the Roman papacy itself, and explores the development both of papal authority and the institutional apparatus through which reform objectives were increasingly pursued. At the same time, it addresses the transformation of the papacy throughout the eleventh century from a venerated if often somewhat powerless institution into one capable both of defining the societas christiana and maintaining its outlines. Chapter 5 returns to the explicit topic of reform, analysing its context and the evolution of tactics for eradicating what came to be the three critical issues: simony (the practice of buying or selling church office), married priests and concubinage, and control of the Church by laymen. Chapter 6 focuses on the rhetoric used by the reformers in order to persuade the clergy to accept their dicta. Chapter 7 then explores the role of reform in redefining the behaviour and cultural traditions of the lay aristocracy. These issues are then drawn together in the conclusion.
In the end, by placing both the papacy and reform in their social contexts, this book looks to achieve two fundamental objectives: on the one hand, a deeper understanding of why the papacy developed in the way that it did during the eleventh century; and, on the other, why the vision of reform that was adopted by popes from Leo IX onwards came to be articulated in the specific way that it was. Understanding and defining reform in the eleventh century will thus enable us to appreciate better the transformation of western European society into the societas christiana.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق