Search Results

The concluding chapter speculates on some of the reasons why the definition of ordination changed in the 11th and 12th centuries, and, more importantly, why women were no longer considered either ordained or able to be ordained. Four factors contributed to the change. The Gregorian Reform Movement with its insistence on celibacy introduced a new and more virulent form of misogyny into Western Christianity. Roman law was read selectively to enforce the idea that women were incapable of leadership roles in the church. The biology and politics of Aristotle, newly introduced in the West, asserted that women were biologically and intellectually inferior to men. Theologians read scripture as supporting the assumptions of Roman law and Aristotle concerning the inferiority women and Eve in particular become the scapegoat for the Fall. No one cause seemed determinative in relegating women to an inferior status, but rather a concatenation of several mutually reinforcing factors.

This chapter presents evidence in support of a novel explanation of the origins of courtly love. It discusses three features of twelfth-century social life that combined to shape the courtly love ideal: a specific form of aristocratic speech; a related approach to kinship reckoning, gender identities, and “sexual” relationships; and the impact of the Gregorian Reform.

This book explores ecclesiastical history and the history of Western civilization more generally by focusing on the tenth-and early eleventh-century Latin Church, or more precisely the millennial Church. It challenges the narrative linking ecclesiastical revival to the Gregorian Reform and argues that the rise of the West began well before the mid-eleventh century. It presents ecclesiastical reform as a central part of the post-Carolingian, postinvasion revival and suggests that the Church embodied and defined a rising Europe. It shows that the achievements associated with Gregorian Reform in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries rested on earlier ones. The book offers insights into the Christendom that was inherited by the mid-eleventh-century Latin reformers and puts the millennial Church as well as the resurgence of the Latin West in their appropriate contexts.

An apparently unique feature of the later medieval Church's marriage system in a world-historical comparative perspective is that it permitted neither divorce nor polygamy. This system was rooted in marriage symbolism, and especially in ideas synthesized out of biblical elements by Augustine of Hippo, whose thought on the matter was a time-bomb which did not go off until the central medieval period. The key idea was that the union of man and woman should be not less inseparable than the union of Christ and the Church. While the idea was accepted by churchmen in theory, it was largely ignored in practice in the early medieval period. From the Carolingian period on it began to have an impact on lay society, but powerful laymen could still easily get out of a marriage. The Gregorian Reform started a wind of change. Previously, it had been common even for senior churchmen to have wives or partners, but when celibacy began to become a reality in the higher echelons of Church government, sympathy for the ‘needs’ of patriarchal males could no longer be assumed or expected. It was however Innocent III who really turned indissolubility into a social reality, by an intransigent attitude and changes in Canon Law that closed the loopholes that had allowed easy annulments.

This epilogue explains the connection between Pope Leo IX's last days and the history of ecclesiastical revival. Leo was captured by the Normans of southern Italy in the Battle of Civitate that took place on June 18, 1053. He was freed in March 1054 and died a month later. According to the traditional narrative, Leo was a transitional figure, ruling at the end of imperial reform and at the beginning of the real Gregorian Reform that would free the Latin Church from its feudal ties and pave the way for the canon-law-centered, Rome-centered Church of the High Middle Ages. This chapter uses Leo's captivity as a vantage point to trace the progress that the Latin Church had made since the chaotic decades of the late ninth and early tenth centuries. It argues that, long before the high drama of papal and imperial conflict over investitures, a renewed, powerful, and self-confident Latin Church was already occupying center stage.

This chapter details changes engendered in the eleventh century by the pontificates of Popes Leo IX (1048–54) and Gregory VII (1073–85), when papal reformers argued that the papacy’s divine mandate required recognition of the pope’s complete authority over all ecclesial and secular powers. Yet even after the excommunications of 1054 the debate was not about the primacy itself, except to ask how the pope could maintain that position while embracing “heretical” teachings (e.g., the filioque and use of azymes). It was not until the crusades that this changed and a series of Byzantine authors brought forward the arguments against the primacy that would characterize Orthodox polemics for the next several centuries. For this reason this period marks, perhaps better than the definitions of 1870, the real “point of no return” vis-à-vis the East’s attitude toward the papacy, when diverse understandings of the Roman primacy truly became ecclesiologically incompatible.

Wracked by nearly two centuries of political chaos, the Kingdom of Poland managed to survive into the fourteenth century. The Catholic Church served as an important source of stability and autonomy in this difficult period. The Metropolitanate of Gniezno reinforced the kingdom’s territorial footprint. Church personnel and institutions helped maintain order and systems of governance. In keeping with the agenda of the Gregorian Reform, Catholic officials took advantage of Piast divisions to strengthen their own privileges and autonomy. Diocesan hierarchies grew more elaborate, and bishops managed to exert more control over clergy and laity in their jurisdictions. Christianity set down deeper roots in the hearts and minds of the faithful.

This chapter discusses how the world into which Saint Bernard of Clairvaux was born in 1090 was full of hope and promise. The search for intimacy would come to characterize Bernard's life and helps explain why he joined a monastery. At the same time, however, he benefited from other factors in creating his life. A few decades before Bernard was born, the Western Church had experienced the upheaval of what many history books call the Gregorian Reform. This movement can be called the first medieval reformation, for it brought about a genuine reformation or restructuring of the Christian Church. Bernard came to the monastery as an adult, and the new monasticism that he joined insisted on individual choice. In this sense, Bernard and his contemporaries would discover the meaning of Christianity as manifested in the words of Jesus, emphasizing the consent that comes from the heart instead of the gesture's symbolic assent.