Patterns of Episcopal Power: Bishops in Tenth and Eleventh Century Western Europe/Strukturen bischöflicher Herrschaftsgewalt im westlichen Europa des 10. und 11. Jahrhunderts (review)

This collection of essays opens with a now classic piece by Timothy Reuter, warmly canonized by the editors as a “patron saint of research on bishops, power and kingship in the tenth and eleventh centuries” (p. 12). Reuter published “Ein Europa der Bischöfe: Das Zeitalter Burchards von Worms” shortly before his untimely death in 2002, and it has become a standard point of reference for scholars of medieval ecclesiastical and political history in the central Middle Ages. Ludger Körntgen and Dominik Waßenhoven have made available Reuter’s own English translation of his essay (pp. 17–38), updating it with additional references to recent scholarship. Anglophone readers will surely welcome their effort.

Körntgen and Waßenhoven’s inclusion of “A Europe of Bishops” reminds us how effortlessly Reuter’s work bridged England and the Continent. Reuter’s spirit infuses this volume in another respect. Influenced by Benedict Anderson, several of Reuter’s late essays urged scholars to think of medieval dioceses as “imagined communities,” polities having both an institutional and, still more important, a conceptual existence that centered on the bishop’s person and rituals connected with the episcopal office. Reuter argued that bishops across Europe’s continental core shared by the year 1000 a standard range of experiences; they were rather like chess pieces possessing similar powers but operating independently of one another and of the other pieces on the board.

The editors’ stated intention (p. 13) is to “compare political situations, actions, communications, individual protagonists, specific resources, rules of behavior and so on in order to get a better understanding of the practice and the construction of [episcopal] power” in the Anglo-Saxon and Ottonian kingdoms. Essays by Ernst-Dieter Hehl, Dominik Waßenhoven, and Catherine Cubitt do this by examining bishops’ actions during monarchic succession crises—namely, that of 1035–42 in England, and those of 983/84, 1002, and 1024 in the Ottonian-Salian reichs. A fourth essay, by Pauline Stafford, explores the interventions of the royal women Emma and Ælfgifu following the death of Cnut in 1035. These essays read best as pairs. Hehl’s “Bedrängte und belohnte Bischöfe. Recht und Politik als Parameter bischöflichen Handelns bei Willigis von Mainz und anderen” (pp. 63–87), perhaps the most detailed study here, argues persuasively that succession crises, rather than providing opportunities for episcopal agency, entailed a great amount of risk that could just as easily limit bishops’ options for action. This was certainly the case in 1002, when individual bishops’ tolerance for risk was a crucial determinant of their actions in an uncertain political environment. Conditions in 1024 differed; here, the electoral assembly at Kamba permitted episcopal solidarities to emerge that led to their taking a more direct role in elevating Conrad II. Waßenhoven, “Swaying Bishops and the Succession of Kings” (pp. 89–109), is cautious not to extrapolate from the very meager evidence patterns of episcopal intervention during such crises.

Cubitt’s “Bishops and Succession Crises in Tenth- and Eleventh-Century England” (pp. 111–26) and Stafford’s “Royal Women and Transitions. Emma and Ælfgifu in 1035–1042/1043” (pp. 127–44) work hard to keep their essays from overlapping, and it comes at a cost. Stafford reduces her treatment of bishops’ roles to two paragraphs (pp. 139–40), and Cubitt combines her discussion of the bishop’s influence in royal successions with loosely connected overviews of the episcopal cursus honorum and the politics of monarchic succession (pp. 118–26) in Anglo-Saxon history.

Given the volume’s gravitational center around the role of bishops in royal succession crises, the remaining essays feel like orbital outliers...