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.
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