Councils in Germany and Italy during the Pontificate of Gregors VII (1073-1085)

• Applicant: Dr. Beate Schilling (†)
• Subject Area: Medieval History
• Term: from 2020 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 442998621

The planned book will study 27 provincial, national, legatine and papal synods of the epoch of Gregory VII in Germany and Italy with the aim of editing the texts these councils produced: invitation letters, synodal protocols and charters, decrees and canons. As these texts generally don't cover all the themes and decisions and rarely give lists of participants, historiographical sources, letters and charters have to be consulted for additional information. This "indirect evidence" will be presented in annotated extracts and will precede the edition. The edited texts and the indirect evidence will be the basis for the short introduction to each council. Two of the papal synods and six of the non-papal ones are attested only by historiographical sources; the chapters for these councils will thus consist of introduction and indirect evidence alone. The focus will be on the synods of Gregory VII that produced the bulk of the conciliar texts of the epoch. Moreover, the transmission of these conciliar texts is privileged as most of them have been entered into the pope's still extant epistolary register. For these texts, the book will replace the edition that Erich Caspar published in 1920-1923 for the Monumenta Germaniae Historica series. The added value will result from the new and extensive commentary, from further manuscripts taken into account and from the inclusion of extra texts, not transmitted by the register. As to the texts of the non-papal synods, here also older prints and editions with little or no commentary at all will be superseded. With the help of the introductions and the "indirect evidence" the conciliar texts can be presented and assessed in their historical context. In its conception and aim the planned book is modelled on the Concilia series of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica whose last volume (2010) has reached the epoch of the early reforming popes (1023-1059). It wants to fill in part of the gap between the Monumenta series and Robert Somerville's editions of the conciliar texts of Urban II (1972, 1996, 2011). As a primary source study, the edition intends to provide and present reliable texts in order to enable and facilitate future research in many fields. Such future research might concern the role of the conciliar texts in Gregory VII's register, the ways the decrees and canons were promulgated and disseminated, the attendance of the councils and the scope of their themes and discussions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants