Priests in a post-imperial age, c. 900-1050

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Steffen Patzold
• Subject Area: Medieval History
• Term: from 2020 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 448253067

• Final Report Year: 2025

Final Report Abstract

The history of Latin Europe in the long tenth century (c. 900 – c. 1050) is shaped by the history of the Church. Until recently this was framed as a narrative of decline: a trough between the two peaks of ‘Carolingian’ and ‘Gregorian reform’, as the Church either struggled against secular lords or else compromised itself by working too closely with them, depending on historiographical perspective. In recent years, historians have begun to challenge this picture, whether by nuancing inherited historiographical concepts of church reform or simply through taking more critical attitudes to the surviving sources. There has been much revisionist work on monasteries and on bishops in this period; indeed Timothy Reuter influentially wrote of Europe around 1000 as a ‘Europe of bishops’. But very little attention has been paid to rural priests. This project intended to remedy that: not as an exercise in marginal gap-filling, but rather as a means of recalibrating the narrative. For all the unquestionable importance of bishops, canons and monasteries, it was local priests who were the mainstay of the institutional Church in the localities of medieval Europe, and the key means of delivering the Latin Church’s pastoral duties. It follows that if we wish to understand the nature of the ‘transformation of the Carolingian world’, and the relation of Carolingian correctio to Gregorian reform, we must understand what happened to the life-worlds of these rural priests.

Publications

• Bishops, power and local churches in the Frankish countryside, in: I Franchi: Spoleto, 21–27 aprile 2022 (Settimane di studio della Fondazione Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo 69), Spoleto 2023, S. 651–684.
  Steffen Patzold
  
• Bishops, Priests and Ecclesiastical Discipline in Tenth and Eleventh-Century Lotharingia. Frühmittelalterliche Studien, 57(1), 315-346.
  Waagmeester, Bastiaan
  
• Local Priests and their Siblings c. 900–c. 1100. Frühmittelalterliche Studien, 57(1), 267-294.
  Hicklin, Alice
  
• The Earliest Form and Function of the ‘Admonitio synodalis’ *. Frühmittelalterliche Studien, 57(1), 347-380.
  West, Charles
  
• Tithes in the Long 10th Century. Frühmittelalterliche Studien, 57(1), 295-314.
  Patzold, Steffen
  
• Local Priests in the Latin West, 900–1050. Cambridge University Press.
  Hicklin, Alice; Patzold, Steffen; Waagmeester, Bastiaan & West, Charles