Canon Law in the Age of Reform, 11th-12th Centuries by John Gilchrist (review)

256 BOOK REVIEWS so much damage as has often been maintained, usually in a radier stereotyped fashion, then one would have to blame not only lay but also clerical owners" (p. 108). The unreflected use of the term "reform" is criticized with particular insistence. "There have always been 'monastic reforms'. What was understood by Ulis varied greatly, and needs to be clarified from case to case" (p. 109). Tellenbach himself does so in exemplary manner with regard to Cluny (p. 11 Iff.), concluding that the Burgundian abbey could not have meant much to the popes of the tendí century whose political and jurisdictional activities focussed essentially on Rome and central Italy. Thus the ecclesiological change after 1046 is attributed almost exclusively to the activity of the popes themselves, and among them especially to Gregory VII. Tellenbach differentiates this change from reforms supported by both Church and monarchy, such as the ancient struggle against simony and clerical marriage. Revolutionary changes were wrought, he argues, by die vision of the papacy as "called to lead Christendom" in a "religious, dogmatic, legal, and political sense" on the basis of the old idea of papal primacy (pp. 187, 308). According to Tellenbach, Gregory VII at one with the radical reformer Humbert of Silva Candida felt primarily compelled to secure the effectiveness of papal authority, to assert its divine origin, and to deny the same to the monarchs of Europe in pursuit of this ideal. The result was a fundamental and permanent change, primarily widiin the Church but also in the relationship between the papacy, Byzantium, and the western monarchies. Not all questions are answered by die volume, and here and there one might disagree with the views presented, but the mosaic so carefully and learnedly constructed by Tellenbach is on the whole most persuasive, stimulating , and richly rewarding. Uta-Renate Blumenthal The Catholic University ofAmerica Canon Law in the Age of Reform, 11th—12th Centuries, By John Gilchrist. [Collected Studies Series, 406.] (Brookfield, Vermont: Variorum, Ashgate Publishing Company. 1993. Pp. xx, 313- Î8995.) It seems impossible to deny that a connection exists between the movement for ecclesiastical reform and developments in the canon law in the mideleventh and early twelfth centuries. While recent historiography has tended to minimize die direct influence of die so-called Gregorian reform by emphasizing the persistence of die canonical tradition of the earlier period, especially diat of Burchard of Worms, it is clear that along with continuity, there was significant innovation. Even if no single personality, group, or cause can, or should, be identified as the principal raison d'être, the diversity of the new appeals to the law, the very different types of canonical collections, the BOOK REVIEWS 257 obvious attempts by disparate people to apply the law to real and pressing problems if only in a polemical sense, demonstrate that the period 1049— 1140 was significantly different from that which had gone before. The twelve studies by the late John Gilchrist collected in this volume support all of these statements. While not easily summarized in a review, the articles reveal both the progressive phases of Gilchrist's ideas and his underlying preoccupation with the sources. Gilchrist was convinced at an early stage of his career of an idea of "reform rooted in diversity." A number of the articles collected here show his attempts to find the antecedents of the "Gregorian reform" in the earlier period. Articles I and II consider the life of Humbert of Silva-Candida and his doctrine of Roman primacy. (Gilchrist would, however, later reject Humbert as a subject for strictly canonistic inquiry .) In Article III, Gilchrist traced the supposed "novel principles" of the Gregorian Reform as represented by the Dictatus papae of Gregory VII in Humbertine writings and in the Diversorumpatrum sententie, finding a much longer tradition for these than had previously been assumed. Gilchrist would later restrict a strictly "Gregorian" program to the decrees of the November synod of 1078 (Article VIII). In Article IV, on the heresy of simony from Leo LX to Gratian, Gilchrist showed that the supposed radicalism of Gregory VII, especially in terms of the issues of simony and clerical chastity, had to be set in context with...