Series editor’s foreword

Abstract

The eleventh century was a period of revolutionary developments in western European history which together made a Europe still recognisable today. Religious changes are particularly well-documented – in fact the explosion of partisan literature they evoked is something itself quite new in European history – yet they have proved particularly difficult to contextualise and explain. They were made possible by growing wealth in all sectors of the economy but there was nothing inevitable in their form or ultimate impact. Their most striking unifying feature, a focus on the papacy, was very definitely man-made. I. S. Robinson has devoted his scholarly career to analysing the aims and methods, the idealism and group-interest, of the papal reformers, the reactions they provoked, and the consequences their reform propelled. In this volume, he makes available to anglophone students, for the first time, the three central texts in which papal reformers represented critical phases of a contemporary history that they saw as growing out of the past: first the upbeat and ‘dynamic’ account of Pope Leo IX given by his biographer c.1060; then, from Lombardy, the cockpit of ideological and factional conflicts, Bishop Bonizo’s rallying-cry in 1085/6 to supporters of the just-deceased and apparentlydefeated Pope Gregory VII – a polemic framed in universal history; and third, in the relatively tranquil 1120s, Paul of Bernried’s Life of Gregory, which provided the reformed papacy with its martyr and patron-saint. Two shorter pieces fill out the picture in very different ways: extracts from Benzo’s diatribe against Gregory show what Bonizo was up against, while Bruno of Segni’s retrospective on Leo IX as remembered by Gregory shows the construction of a coherent and necessarily historical defence of the two key protagonists of papal reform. I. S. Robinson is uniquely well-placed to present and clarify these sources: himself a leading expert, he also distils the wisdom of recent inter-national scholarship, most of it in German. The subject has long since been removed from the sterile confessional conflicts of the nineteenth century, but anglophone students have too often been denied the benefit of perspective. Now, thanks to Robinson, they have access to current interpretations, and, most important of all, they have the texts that record the authentic, passionate voices of papal reformers fashioning their case through the critical period from the 1060s to the 1120s. There is no better way to get inside these revolutionary decades: that authenticity, those interested passions, throw vivid light on why papal reform took hold, and why papal monarchy could change western Christendom. Janet L. Nelson King’s College London