The Proprietary Church in the Medieval West (review)

One does not have to think of the Middle Ages as an “Age of Faith” to be aware that the Church in all of its forms constituted an integral part of every aspect of political, economic, cultural, and last not least religious life. For more than forty years the author investigated the grand scheme laid out by the great German historian Ulrich Stutz. Stutz had argued that the proprietary church was a Germanic concept that came to dominate Roman ideas, creating the supposedly typical medieval Eigenkirchenwesen, a system that allowed founders and subsequent owners to trade in churches, their income, their possessions, and their offices, as they traded in other types of income-producing rights and properties, such as mills or vineyards. At the time of the Gregorian church reform in the eleventh century, it is generally assumed, the papacy firmly put an end to this intolerable state of affairs, described in well-known terms by Augustin Fliche as “L’Église au Pouvoir des Laïques.” Susan Wood ably demonstrates that Stutz’s basic concept is indeed applicable to lesser and intermediate churches, as well as to monasteries throughout the western Church. She denies, however, first of all that we are dealing with a system, and second, that Stutz’s model also applied to the great churches and ancient monasteries. These “were not normally subject to any outsider’s property right, but to a lordship (typically the ruler’s) nearer to the ‘authority’ scale, its proprietary traits limited”(pp. 3–4), and more focused and intermittent, yet still distinct from the ruler’s overall “protective charge of the Church.” Not the least of the many merits of the book is that the author can show that the legislation of the reform papacy never specifically rejected the concept of a church as property, but merely prohibited ownership of churches or monasteries by the laity, after the time of Pope Gregory VII also including emperors and kings.

The book is divided into four parts: (1) Beginnings; (2) Lordship over Higher Churches, Ninth to Eleventh Century; (3) Lower Churches as Property, Ninth to Twelfth Century; and (4) Ideas, Opinion, Change. The parts encompass twenty-six chapters with numerous subdivisions. A reader will be very grateful for these, for the chronologically arranged book covers almost a thousand years of history pertaining to cathedrals, churches, chapels, monasteries, daughter houses, and cells, not excluding the story of founders, heirs, and other types of owners and part owners or of the clergy. This wealth of information is fortunately very well annotated, providing detailed cross-references, and is accessible through an excellent index. The book is intended as a broad survey from the late-Roman period to the thirteenth century. Still, the word survey seems only applicable in a geographical sense, not when survey is interpreted as meaning “general” and without depth. It covers mainly the Carolingian Empire and its successor states, especially France, but also Italy, Spain, and England, reflecting the availability of printed sources. Wood’s sources consist overwhelmingly of charter evidence preserved in cartularies and narrative chronicles, ruler privileges and papal letters, conciliar records, and canon law collections from the handbook of Regino of Prüm to Gratian who was essential for the development of the ius patronatus. By this time, c. 1140, the ius patronatus replaced the founders’ dominium that had become extinct (p. 888). The many details might induce the reader to overlook the keen insights Wood brings to the table and her polite and well-founded disagreements with other historians—for example, in dealing with the interpretation of the charter with its “sweeping assertion of absolute liberty and lordlessness” (p. 840) for Fruttuaria, the foundation of William of Volpiano, by Neithard Bulst. Bulst had argued that William had at one point conveyed Fruttuaria into the ownership of King Henry II of Germany (p. 841 n. 26). Medievalists will also appreciate Wood’s precision when it comes to the language of...