The Bishop Reformed

Studies of Episcopal Power and Culture in the Central Middle Ages

Anna Trumbore Jones, John S. Ott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351893923
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Histoire des religions

In the period following the collapse of the Carolingian Empire up to the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), the episcopate everywhere in Europe experienced substantial and important change, brought about by a variety of factors: the pressures of ecclesiastical reform; the devolution and recovery of royal authority; the growth of papal involvement in regional matters and in diocesan administration; the emergence of the "crowd" onto the European stage around 1000 and the proliferation of autonomous municipal governments; the explosion of new devotional and religious energies; the expansion of Christendom's borders; and the proliferation of new monastic orders and new forms of religious life, among other changes. This socio-political, religious, economic, and cultural ferment challenged bishops, often in unaccustomed ways. How did the medieval bishop, unquestionably one of the most powerful figures of the Middle Ages, respond to these and other historical changes? Somewhat surprisingly, this question has seldom been answered from the bishop's perspective. This volume of interdisciplinary studies, drawn from literary scholarship, art history, canon law, and history, seeks to break scholarship of the medieval episcopacy free from the ideological stasis imposed by the study of church reform and episcopal lordship. The editors and contributors propose less a conventional socio-political reading of the episcopate and more of a cultural reading of bishops that is particularly concerned with issues such as episcopal (self-)representation, conceptualization of office and authority, cultural production (images, texts, material objects, space) and ecclesiology/ideology. They contend that ideas about episcopal office and conduct were conditioned by and contingent upon time, place and pastoral constituency. What made a "good" bishop in one time and place may not have sufficed for another time and place and imposing the absolute standards of prescriptive ideologies, medieval and modern, obfuscates rather than clarifies our understanding of the medieval bishop and his world.

Chapter 1

Introduction: The Bishop Reformed

John S. Ott and Anna Trumbore Jones

The bishop was unquestionably one of the most important individuals of the European Middle Ages. It is hard to think of an area of daily life, at any time, where his influence was not felt to some degree. From the summits of worldly power to the most remote rural pastures, in cities and on battlefields, men and women of every rank and station felt his presence in their lives. The bishop was directly responsible for every soul in his diocese, mighty and meek. His church, the cathedral, was typically the largest structure for miles around, looming over town walls, dwarfing all but the grandest abbeys in its precincts. He administered the wealthiest land-holding institution of the medieval period, overseeing its fields and streams, its produce, its free and unfree residents and servants, and its armed men. The bishop communed with God and his saints. He judged and corrected his fellow man. He did not simply stand at the center of things—he was the center.

In the period from c. 900 to 1200, medieval people generally recognized that only an individual of high social standing could be entrusted to occupy so vital a position. The few cases of men elevated to the bishop’s throne from non-elite ranks furnish the exception that proves the rule: the bishop was a nobleman. His bloodline and aristocratic origins endowed him with the requisite authority to defend and intercede on behalf of the bodies and souls of his fellow men. With his familial connections and accumulated wealth, the bishop could also support his church and its clergy in a fitting manner. If powerful connections and nobility were episcopal prerequisites, ideally it was necessary that he should also embody the range of virtues outlined for pastors in 1 Timothy 3.1–7. The bishop should be “above reproach,” a man of high principle.¹ Church law demanded that he be educated, litteratus—Timothy uses the adjective doctorem—and so able to instruct his flock in the word of God.

Two early eleventh-century documents written shortly after the death of Harduin of Crouy, the bishop of Noyon-Tournai, illuminate how the twin ideals of noble resourcefulness and pastoral solicitude combined in the figure of the bishop.² The first, a letter written on behalf of the people and cathedral chapters of Noyon and Tournai, transmitted the news of the bishop’s death in July 1030 to the archbishop and bishops of the province of Reims. The missive details the sorrow of both communities and explains their reasons for electing Hugh, Harduin’s successor.

We elected him just as apostolic and canonical authority commands: [he is] catholic in faith, by nature wise, teachable, patient, temperate of mores, of chaste life, sober, humble, expressive, merciful, lettered, educated in God’s law, circumspect in the meanings of the scriptures, trained in ecclesiastical doctrines, and orthodox according to the ways and tradition of scriptures …, hospitable, modest, a good manager of his household, not a neophyte, a man of good character, one who has followed ecclesiastical tradition at every step, who has administered good works to all and right reason to the satisfaction of all who have asked for it….³

The letter notes in closing that the pastor should possess these virtues because his integrity was “the salvation of those subject to him” (integritas praesidentium salus est subditorum). The chapter portrayed Hugh as a bishop cut directly from the cloth of 1 Timothy’s model, one who possessed the qualities to lead through example rather than command.

The second document, a letter composed by Gui, treasurer of Notre-Dame of Noyon, is of uncertain date but probably belongs to the period from 1045–1068.⁴ In it, Gui lists the various episcopal bequests received by the cathedral chapter since the early tenth century. The largesse of Bishop Harduin—who was described as a “lover of the clergy and defender of the people committed to him”—is painstakingly detailed.⁵

In addition to numerous altars, churches, and lands in the regions of Vermandois and Amiens, he bequeathed a gold chalice and paten, a gold cross studded with pearls and a copious number of precious gems, and clerical vestments of high quality. Much of this came from his own inheritance and was offered in memory of his parents and sister; Gui noted the annual dates on which the chapter recited prayers for all their souls. Harduin’s family connection to Noyon was established physically as well as memorially. The bishop was buried between the tombs of his mother and sister in the cathedral chapter house.⁶ There, Harduin and his blood relatives would continue to witness and attend the daily life of the cathedral clergy until the Day of Judgment, when the bishop and his kindred would arise in the company of his spiritual brethren to face their God. In every respect, Harduin’s care for his church was a family concern, one that did not cease with his final breath.

Social status also meant that the bishop had the ability to defend the churches and populations under his care, and authors of the central Middle Ages often included the bishop’s military capabilities—when used for proper ends—among his worthy qualities. A near contemporary of Harduin and Hugh, the chronicler Ademar of Chabannes, when describing the “good pastor” Ebles of Limoges (944–c. 977), emphasized his activities in fortifying towns and monasteries as well as his membership in the powerful ruling family of Aquitaine.⁷ Building walls and fighting when necessary were therefore also part of the bishop’s mandate.⁸

Their contemporaries lauded prelates such as Harduin, Hugh, and Ebles for precisely those characteristics esteemed of bishops everywhere in Europe: their generosity toward the church, their quality of mind and training, their willingness to defend their flocks. Scholars have long understood these aspects of the medieval bishop; together with the papacy and monastic institutions, the episcopacy and its tenants have been the subject of countless specialized studies over the past two centuries.⁹ The sheer volume of research disguises some surprising absences, however. Apart from a few essays and book chapters, no general survey of the medieval episcopate exists.¹⁰ Only a modest handful of collected studies or anthologies have been published, and these are often confined within limited chronological or thematic frameworks.¹¹ With some notable exceptions, the central Middle Ages, which we consider here to be the period stretching from the fragmentation of the Carolingian Empire to the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), has been especially underrepresented.¹² Significantly, a recently published collection of fifteen articles exemplifying “new approaches” to the study of medieval religion contains no contribution devoted exclusively, or even primarily, to the episcopate.¹³ The central figure of the bishop, by virtue of his absence in general studies, has become in some ways a marginal entity in modern scholarship covering the church and religion in the period from 900 to 1200.¹⁴ How then might this curious paradox be explained?

The bishop’s vanishing act is a by-product of the historiography of the medieval church and medieval religion of the past four decades.¹⁵ That historiography has, on the one hand, explored episcopal office in light of prevailing social, economic, political, or cultural structures. Here, two related trends have dominated the field. The decline of the centralized power of the Carolingian state and the proliferation and expansion of territorial lordships after the year 900 has constituted one primary framework for assessing the bishop’s interests and activities, especially his role in the rise to power of family and kin-networks and their political and military ambitions. The increasing organization of the papacy and the extension of its authority into the governance of local churches in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries has established another. Interest in the bishop as landed lord and in the bishop’s place within the process of ecclesiastical reform has decisively influenced the course of scholarship devoted to this figure. Indeed, these two historiographical trends are intertwined: the growth of the institutional church has often been measured against the resistance of local religious cultures, especially local traditions of episcopal administrative, political, and cultic autonomy. Meanwhile, scholars considering the tenth century in light of the coming reform have long emphasized examples of the “abuses” that reformers would condemn, such as the deep involvement of the bishops in lay power structures. We examine each of these broader interpretive frameworks, and their implications for the representation of the episcopate, below.

Concurrently, soaring scholarly interest in the experiences and identities of religious minorities, such as heretics and dissenters, and social minorities, above all women and non-elites, appears to have fostered a general disinterest in the study of bishops and secular clergy, in part because they are frequently viewed as the exemplars of an institution that sought to silence those minorities. Obviously, bishops were likely to come face-to-face with religious dissenters when they appeared in their dioceses. Bishop Gerard I of Cambrai’s (1012–1051) famous confrontation with heretics at Arras in 1025, treated in Theo Riches’s essay (Chapter 7), gave him the opportunity to expound before a captive audience his theology of the church as a material and spiritual signifier of the Christian community. Where, Gerard asked the members of the heretical sect, did they think the spirit of eternal life would come to them, if not in the churchyard where the penitent are properly buried? In that very place the faithful come together to await judgment with the spiritual community of their fellow Christians. Gerard of Cambrai’s altogether traditional associations between the material aspects of the church and the community of faithful came to be rejected by a growing number of people in the twelfth century, for whom religious community was created through access to sacred texts, visions, or charismatic leaders, not in the physical church or through the figure of the bishop.

As representatives of the church hierarchy, bishops are frequently alleged to have sought firm control over expressions of religiosity among the flocks under their care. In a limited sense, this is a fair assertion. In an ongoing attempt to maintain the boundaries of orthodoxy—and to keep the Muslim, heretic, or Jew safely distinct and outside the community of the faithful—bishops led crusades, presided over inquisitorial inquiries into heterodox beliefs and behaviors, and looked with suspicion or disdain on the affective mysticism and communal lifestyles of pious men and women.¹⁶ Bishops sometimes waged this fight by channeling kinetic religious enthusiasms into “safe” environments, above all monasteries. Scholars have shown that bishops were frequently avid supporters of new religious communities and orders in the twelfth century, and that they fostered the reform of countless individual religious houses. They also tolerated—far more than is generally allowed—the presence of charismatic itinerant preachers in their midst, whom they often saw as living spectacles of spiritual devotion worthy of emulation by their parishioners. After all, was not the bishop a spectacle himself? Gregory the Great’s foundational Rule of Pastoral Care (Regula pastoralis) certainly held so.¹⁷ The willingness of some bishops to welcome the presence of preachers and hermits at their courts was even satirized quite pointedly in a poem of about 1130, penned by an archdeacon of Chartres and widely read by contemporaries.¹⁸ The extent to which bishops sought to control expressions of religiosity in their provinces must remain open to question and close scrutiny. The reality is that most bishops walked a tightrope between fostering the salutary example of those who had rejected the world or its institutions in the name of leading an apostolic life, and trying to ensure that rejection of the world did not mean rejection of its proper authorities. This was no easy task.

Episcopal office was, as its medieval commentators knew, an almost impossible balancing act, and the occupants of that office negotiated between competing ideals or behavior that resulted in a position best described—to borrow from the title of Thomas Head’s Postscript (chapter 14)—as ambiguous. “The governance of souls” alone—let alone juggling it with secular administration—“was the art of arts.”¹⁹ The conscientious pastor negotiated countless demands: demands of parishioners and subordinate clergy, family and kin, pope and king, the powerful and the powerless, zealous believers and the religiously aloof. Gregory’s Rule of Pastoral Care, the closest thing to a standardized text on episcopal conduct the Middle Ages possessed, likened the pastor’s need to weigh his secular and spiritual obligations to the length of the hair on his head: overly long locks signified preoccupation with things external to the spirit, whereas a fastidiously shaved head signaled its bearer’s attention to spiritual needs to the exclusion of quotidian demands. In contrast to both, the bishop’s hair should be neither shaved nor luxurious, but sufficiently shorn to reveal his eyes, the seat of his discernment and the gaze which penetrated the souls of men.²⁰ If scholars are increasingly sensitive to the multiplicity of demands on bishops and the variability of regional clerical cultures, they have nevertheless directed their own eyes toward theoretical ideals (medieval and modern) or interpretive frameworks of episcopal conduct imposed from outside the bishop’s immediate so...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: The Bishop Reformed
• 2 Lay Magnates, Religious Houses, and the Role of the Bishop in Aquitaine (877–1050)
• 3 Bishops and Religious Law, 900–1050
• 4 Sovereignty and Social Order: Archbishop Wulfstan and the Institutes of Polity
• 5 The Image of the Bishop in the Middle Ages
• 6 Building the Body of the Church: A Bishop’s Blessing in the Benedictional of Engilmar of Parenzo
• 7 Bishop Gerard I of Cambrai-Arras, the Three Orders, and the Problem of Human Weakness
• 8 ‘Both Mary and Martha’: Bishop Lietbert of Cambrai and the Construction of Episcopal Sanctity in a Border Diocese around 1100
• 9 Driving the Chariot of the Lord: Siegfried I of Mainz (1060–1084) and Episcopal Identity in an Age of Transition
• 10 Pastoral Care as Military Action: The Ecclesiology of Archbishop Alfanus I of Salerno (1058–1085)
• 11 What Made Ivo Mad? Reflections on a Medieval Bishop’s Anger
• 12 The Bishops of Piacenza, Their Cathedral, and the Reform of the Church
• 13 Urban Space, Sacred Topography, and Ritual Meanings in Florence: The Route of the Bishop’s Entry, c.1200–1600
• 14 Postscript: The Ambiguous Bishop
• Index