New Religious Movements and Reform

Maureen C. Miller

University of California, Berkeley

            Reform is a recurrent motif in the history of Christianity and it has given rise to dramatic historical narratives in which valiant churchmen combat rampant abuses.  Over the last few decades, however, historians have become much more skeptical that clerical complaints describe real crises, but also more convinced that those calling for reform had significant political and ideological goals.  Reformers sought to achieve particular visions of Christian society and its leadership.  This shift from the empirical study of the condition of the church to the politics of reforming agendas and their consequences has affected interpretation of both the Carolingian reform and the eleventh-century or “Gregorian” reform.  It has also revealed more connections between these two eras of ecclesiastical refashioning.  The rise of the papacy remains a central narrative of medieval reform, but scholars now increasingly recognize the role that lay people played in shaping a new ecclesiology and founding new kinds of institutions.  A key result of eleventh-century reform is that it gave rise to a profusion of new experiments in religious life that opened the pursuit of Christian perfection to all men and women, particularly through the cultivation of the vita apostolica.

I.  The Early Middle Ages

            In the mid-twentieth century, the standard narrative of the religious history of early medieval Europe emphasized a long, messy, but ultimately effective period of missionary work among the “barbarians” followed by a rapid and energetic systematization of ecclesiastical structures in the late eighth and ninth centuries by Carolingian monarchs and the leading clerics gathered at their court.  In this version of early medieval religious history, the conversion of the Merovingian king Clovis (481-511) led to the acceptance of Christianity by the Franks, who in turn evangelized the peoples they conquered.  Through missionaries like the Anglo-Saxon Boniface (d. 754), the Franks were brought into more regular relations with Rome, which eventually yielded an alliance between the Carolingians and the papacy.  Boniface and his co-laborers in the missionary field made these new rulers of the Franks painfully aware of the failings of the clergy, the evils of lay control of bishoprics and monasteries, and the resurgence of pagan superstitions among the people.  An oft-repeated vignette is Boniface’s alarm at a Bavarian priest baptizing people “in the name of the fatherland and the daughter” (in nomine patria et filia).  Such reports prompted the early Carolingian kings – Pippin III (751-768), then Charlemagne (768-814) – to reform the Frankish church by calling numerous councils, most famously a series held in 813, and issuing capitularies, such as the Admonitio Generalis of 789.  The latter required bishops to establish schools; the education of the clergy was a central concern of Carolingian reform.  The movement also clarified church organization, establishing metropolitans over ecclesiastical provinces and subjecting suffragan bishops within those regions to the disciplining authority of their archbishop.  Bishops, in turn, were to discipline their clergy and ensure that pastoral care was offered in their dioceses. The liturgy was progressively Romanized through the dissemination of newly-acquired texts and contact with the papal curia. Order was brought to the empire’s numerous monasteries through the propagation of the Benedictine Rule, and Chrodegang of Metz’s rule for canons reformed cathedral chapters.  As a result of monarchical leadership of reform, the church was integrated into Carolingian structures of power.[i]

            Over the past several decades, historians have been slowly modifying this picture without abandoning its basic framework.  A major impetus for revision has been the work of Peter Brown and the emergence of the field of “late antiquity.” Roughly encompassing the third to the mid-eighth centuries, this post-classical era is characterized by Brown and others in highly positive terms as one of creative synthesis.   This contrasts sharply with the assumptions about the early Middle Ages under-girding the account of Carolingian reform summarized above.  That early Middle Ages began with the collapse of the western Roman Empire and was characterized by barbarian invasions and the destruction or mere embattled survival of Roman cultural institutions.  It ended with the Carolingians restoring order and a new imperial unity.  If the pre-Carolingian era was, instead, a period in which many Roman institutions and ideas survived to be creatively combined with Germanic concepts and practices, what was the Carolingian accomplishment?  Was there really a “crisis” in the eighth-century church that necessitated “reform”?

            Generally, Carolingianists have come to admit many more continuities across the seventh to ninth centuries, but they have also used the model of cultural creativity deployed by Brown to renew claims for a distinctive and highly significant Carolingian contribution.  On the topic of liturgical reform, for example, instead of portraying the Frankish church as all but cut off from Roman influence from the late sixth century, historians acknowledge continuing contact through pilgrims, bishops, and kings.  What was once viewed as a “Romanization” of the liturgy under the Carolingians is now considered a creative adaptation of Roman rites to Frankish circumstances by bishops, such as Chrodegang of Metz.[ii]  The gradualist vision of late antiquity has also modified understandings of evangelization and reform.  Rather than seeing the missionary endeavors of the seventh and eighth centuries as generally successful but followed by backsliding and a resurgence of pagan superstitions demanding “reform,” historians of religion are now deeply skeptical of claims of conversion.  Instead they posit a gradual process of Christianization and an accommodation of the faith to the beliefs, values, and practices of Germanic societies.[iii]  Carolingian reform, in this narrative, is still a systematization of ecclesiastical life and institutions, but one that ordered a distinctively Frankish church.  Peter Brown himself, discussing the accomplishment of Charlemagne in his Rise of Western Christendom, abandons altogether the term “reform” with its connotation of return to an earlier pristine state. He frames the ruler’s interventions in ecclesiastical life as correctio, a contemporary description that leaves open the standard used in correcting or shaping up Christian society.[iv]

            In part related to the rise of the concept of Christianization, scholars have broadened their descriptions of what constituted reform in the Carolingian era.  Ecclesiastical organization and clerical education are still central, but they are now joined by an appreciation of Carolingian interest in preaching, pastoral care, vernacular instruction of the laity, and liturgy as a means of Christianization.  The goal of reform was not so much the correction of specific abuses, but the creation of a Christian society.[v]  This richer picture of Carolingian reform has reinforced emphasis on the Carolingian symbiosis of church and state.  “In the preface of the Admonitio Generalis, or General Exhortation, of 789,” Pierre Riché noted, “Charlemagne compared himself to Josiah, the biblical king who sought ‘to restore to God’s service, by inspecting, correcting, and exhorting, the kingdom that God had committed to him.’ . . . Like a new Moses, he was a religious lawgiver; like a new David triumphing over the foes of Israel, the Frankish king led a new chosen people to its salvation.”[vi]  This vision of Christian kingship empowered the monarch to intervene in ecclesiastical life, selecting bishops and legislating reforms.  But it also led bishops to elaborate the idea of kingship as a ministry, making royal power conditional upon the righteous exercise of the office. 

            While adopting the notion of a gradual transformation and Christianization of Europe, the significance of the Carolingian reform has been reconceived.  Rather than rectifying a crisis in ecclesiastical order, it created a new vision of order:  that of a Christian society led by monarchs and bishops working together for the salvation of God’s chosen people.  In this new formulation, the extent or reality of abuses and the effectiveness of reform efforts are less important than the ideological work accomplished by Carolingian monarchs and bishops.  By issuing capitularies and calling reform councils, the Carolingians articulated claims to authority over not only the church, but over all of Christian society.  Kings were not the only ones, however, to use reform to bolster their power.  As Makye de Jong has pointed out, “more and more the church transformed its religious authority into political authority based on the superiority of episcopal auctoritas over royal potestas.”[vii]

            Indeed, greater attention to developments beyond the reign of Charlemagne has made historians aware of a shift in the dynamic of reform from monarch to bishops.  By 844, Rosamond McKitterick has observed, “the bishops not only assumed the initiative and defined their own role in their society, they now took it upon themselves to define the role of the king, rather than have the king by his own legislative action defining his role in the community.”[viii]  This shift is highly significant as it foreshadows the independent action and prerogatives of ecclesiastical leaders that were championed in the eleventh-century, or “Gregorian,” reforms.  Recent work on Carolingian reform has found other connections to these later reforms.  Makye de Jong, for example, has underscored a new emphasis on clerical chastity and priestly purity in the ninth century, while McKitterick has documented an increasing preoccupation with the exaltation of the priestly and episcopal office.[ix]  Continuities have also been suggested between the Carolingian monastic reforms of Benedict of Aniane and the tenth-century wave of monastic reform usually seen as the presaging the “Gregorian” era.[x]

II.  “Gregorian Reform”

            The classic work that established the traditional narrative of eleventh-century religious change is Augustin Fliche’s La réforme grégorienne.  In three learned and richly-annotated volumes published from 1924 to 1937, Fliche crafted a narrative so compelling that it still informs accounts today.  His story begins in the late ninth and tenth centuries, when political disorder allowed lay people to invade church lands, take over ecclesiastical institutions, and found their own “proprietary” churches.  The “church in the power of the laity” was plagued by abuses: incompetent and immoral priests, monasteries of lax discipline where true religious could not pursue their vocations in peace, and corrupt bishops who were often the relatives of rich and powerful local lords.  The first heroic efforts at reform came in monasteries, particularly Cluny which was the founded in 909.  This Burgundian house was dedicated to reviving a strict interpretation of the Benedictine Rule; its foundation charter explicitly exempted it from the control of local lords, its lands placed under the direct protection of Saint Peter.  Cluny became a beacon of reform, its abbots and monks helping to rekindle discipline at other monasteries until it was the center of an expansive network of reformed institutions extending throughout France and into Iberia, the German empire, and northern Italy.  By the late tenth century, calls for more general reform of the church begin to be heard.  In northern Italy, bishops such as Atto of Vercelli (r. 924-961) and Ratherius of Verona (c. 887-974) decried the number of clerics who were ignorant or poorly educated, and who had wives and concubines.  In Lotharingia the precocious study of canon law produced a new awareness of the trampled rights of the church and calls for an end to lay meddling in ecclesiastical affairs.  Simony, the “heresy” of paying for spiritual things (administration of sacraments, appointment to church offices) and “nicolaitism” or clerical unchastity emerged as critical abuses demanding reform.

            Fliche’s story was above all, however, one of popes.  For this French Catholic scholar, it was the reform and revival of the papacy in the mid-11^th century that led to real change.  Although he gives credit to Emperor Henry III for settling a messy three-way papal schism at the Synod of Sutri in 1046 and bringing reform-minded leaders to Rome, it was Pope Leo IX (r. 1049-1054) who established a cadre of reformers, many from his native Lotharingia, and set the papacy on a new course.  In this entourage was Hildebrand, who would become Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073-1085).  Fliche dedicated an entire volume to Gregory and credited this pope with reforming the church.  Central to his narrative was Gregory’s dramatic clash with the German king Henry IV (r. 1056-1106) over royal appointment of bishops, or “lay investiture.”  The investiture conflict continued after Gregory’s stormy pontificate, but Fliche credits this uncompromising figure with turning the tide.  His courageous championing of the liberty for the church accomplished reform and revived Christianity, which would reach new heights in the twelfth and thirteenth-centuries, Europe’s great “age of faith.”[xi]

            Fliche’s Catholic polemic was apparent and, predictably, provoked a response.  In 1936 a young German scholar, Gerd Tellenbach, published a slim volume that has had an enduring impact: Libertas: Kirche und Weltordnung in Zeitalter des Investiturstreites.  Translated into English in 1940 under the title Church, State and Christian Society at the Time of the Investiture Contest, this work has remained in print and had a formative influence on the field.  Tellenbach recast the story, shifting emphasis from reform to the investiture conflict and from abuses to ideas about authority:  “The Investiture Controversy,” the author begins, “was a struggle for right order in the world.”  Three notions of hierarchy coexisted in eleventh-century Europe, according to Tellenbach.  One was an ascetic, monastic hierarchy in which the only truly meritorious status was achieved in the next world by effectively renouncing this world while in it.  This Christian conceptualization of world order coexisted with another that Tellenbach labeled “sacramental” or “priestly.”  This schema ranked individuals through their sacramental functions, their ability to save souls by administering grace, and – in contrast to the ascetic hierarchy – was aimed at conquering and converting the world rather than fleeing it.  Finally, the “royal theocracy” worldview allotted a special superior place to kings as God’s appointed representatives on earth with the “duty of leading the people towards God.”  Before the mid-eleventh century, the ascetic worldview had predominated within the church and, thus, conflict had not arisen with the royal theocratic perspective.  From the late 1050s, however, debates among reformers, reflected in the third book of Humbert of Silva Candida’s Libri adversus simoniacos, launched a frontal assault on the position of the laymen, particularly kings, within the church.  The clash between Gregory VII and Henry IV over investiture was the result of the sacramental-priestly worldview challenging the royal-theocratic.  “The superiority of the Church over the State derives,” Tellenbach concluded, “ from Catholic belief in the Church and its vocation...[h]ence Protestant Christianity immediately reoriented its attitude towards the state.”[xii]  Tellenbach’s was a German Lutheran response to Fliche’s French Catholic interpretation.

            Scholarship over the rest of the twentieth century has been content to explore details of these two, broad paradigms.  The Catholic periodical Studi Gregoriani, for example, published from 1947 on in Rome, dedicated itself to “the history of ‘Libertas ecclesiae,’ the freedom of the church.”  The polemical literature the investiture conflict sparked, so central to Tellenbach’s narrative of the clash of ideas, was extensively studied, and Fliche’s insight that canon law was a central tool and inspiration in reform generated abundant and productive research.[xiii]  But by the 1960s, scholars were still awaiting Tellenbach’s revision and expansion of his initial, stunning foray into the field while criticism of Fliche’s papal-centric interpretation was accumulating, both within Catholicism and without.  The slender, idea-packed volume of Libertas offered less fodder to critics than the three tomes of La réforme grégorienne.   Fliche’s emphasis on Gregory VII was easily questioned, and generally historians have moved away from the using the term “Gregorian reform.”  Scholarly appreciation of the reforming achievements of other popes in the second half of the eleventh-century, and other non-papal actors, increased.  Indeed, criticism of the role Fliche accorded Lotharingian reformers and his emphasis on Cluny helped produce a much richer picture of reform efforts.[xiv] Tellenbach’s reliance on Humbert of Silva Candida and the inherent teleology of his account have been criticized, but generally German and Anglophone scholarship has been sympathetic to his interpretation. Norman F. Cantor and Brian Tierney, in particular, have done much to enshrine Tellenbach’s interpretation in American curricula.[xv] 

            The great majority of medieval historians, however, turned to social and economic history in the 1970s and 1980s, leaving the entire topic of reform and the investiture conflict relatively moribund.  The actors, its true, were all elites: popes, kings, cardinals, princes, bishops, and monks.  The sources, for sure, were the very essence of the old history: legal collections, letters, diplomas, theological and political treatises. The few, derivative studies appearing prompted Karl Morrison in 1987 to lament an “immobilization of interpretative discourse” on this “central theme in European history.”[xvi]  To a large degree, he is correct.  Pursuant to mobilizing discourse, let us summarize where current interpretation stands on the broad issues and consider promising new directions.

III.  The Origins of the Eleventh-century Reform Movements

            While Carolingianists are now less inclined to ventriloquize uncritically the lamentations of ecclesiastical leaders like Boniface in order to explain royal efforts at reform, most historians are more confident that a real crisis in the tenth century provoked the next great effort at church reform.  This was, after all, the era of viking, Arab, and Magyar invasions.  Opinions have changed, however, on the proximate causes of the perceived crisis in ecclesiastical life.  In the early twentieth century, Catholic authors such as Fliche blamed lay people: it was the laity’s domination of the church that befouled it with abuses.  It was not hard, of course, to find tenth-century examples of lay elites sequestering church lands and appointing unfit priests to parishes and derelict abbots to monasteries.  A new explanation emerged with Tellenbach’s Libertas.  Influenced by German idealism, but in some ways paralleling the early Annales interest in mentalité, Tellenbach found the origins of reform and the investiture crisis in people’s heads:  it was two conflicting worldviews that led to calls for change and to conflict.  One worldview was essentially Carolingian:  that anointed kings ordered and directed all of Christian society, including the church.  The other placed priests at the top of the hierarchy since they were responsible for souls, even those of kings.  These two incompatible notions of right order in the world resulted in a movement for reform led by the papacy that came to a clamorous crescendo in Pope Gregory VII’s struggle with Emperor Henry IV.

            Tellenbach himself considered the ultimate causes of the conflict beyond discernment,[xvii] but his interpretation constituted the first step toward contemporary “no fault” explanations.  Disorder was the fundamental cause of ecclesiastical disarray and in the tenth century, well, disorder happens.  Instead of trying to assess who behaved most badly in the midst of disorder, historians now take the more positive tack of assigning credit for actively working toward or accomplishing reform.  In doing so they have turned Fliche’s interpretation upside-down.  Instead of the papacy rescuing the church from the domination of the laity, scholars now champion lay people as the makers of reform.  In a now classic article in The American Historical Review, John Howe brought together overwhelming evidence of the lay nobility’s role in founding reformed monasteries and supporting episcopal, monastic, and papal reform efforts.[xviii]  Other scholars emphasized the impact common lay people had through their participation in peace councils and in movements against married and simoniacal priests such as the Milanese pataria.[xix]

            Although the exact relationship of monastic reform to the late eleventh-century papal reforms has been debated, there is broad consensus that tenth-century monastic reformed prepared the way for more general calls for reform of the entire church in the eleventh.  Fliche highlighted the role of Cluny in reforming other monasteries and building a powerful network of affiliated houses dedicated to a strict observance of the Benedictine rule.  His linkage of Cluny to the “Gregorian” reform of the late eleventh century was firmly rejected by Tellenbach, who saw monastic and papal reform as two separate movements with different ends.[xx] H. E. J. Cowdrey and others, however, have countered by abandoning emphasis on causation and instead demonstrating the close collaboration of Cluny with papal reform efforts and the common ideas and beliefs that animated both movements.[xxi]  The prominence of Cluny within narratives of monastic reform was challenged by Kassius Hallinger, however, in his monumental two-volume study of the Lotharingian monastery of Gorze and its affiliated houses.  Hallinger successfully demonstrated that monastic reform was a broader phenomenon in the tenth century than Cluny-centered narratives suggested and that the reform of Gorze and other German monasteries occurred independently.[xxii]  But the importance of Cluny has been reasserted by Joachim Wollasch.  He argued that other movements in monastic reform were more dependent for their impetus upon local lords, both lay and ecclesiastical, with the result that reform waned when the support of patrons diminished.  Gorze itself, Wollasch points out, had to be reformed again in the early eleventh century.  Cluny, on the other hand, with its unique freedom from all secular and ecclesiastical lordship, became a more independent and enduring source of reform.[xxiii]

IV. Characterizations and Evaluations of Eleventh-century Reform

            The reigning interpretations of eleventh-century reform are currently those of Gerd Tellenbach and I. S. Robinson.    Fifty years after the publication of Libertas, Tellenbach completed a lengthier study of the same historical events that largely restates, with some modifications, his earlier thesis.  It has achieved wide diffusion both in Germany, where it was published as a “handbook” of church history, and in Anglophone scholarship through its inclusion in the Cambridge Medieval Textbooks series.  Whereas Libertas focused on the investiture conflict, Tellenbach’s mature consideration is framed differently: its focus, as the title clearly indicates, is The church in western Europe from the tenth to the early twelfth century.  This shift is important and reflects a broader trend away from the investiture conflict as the narrative frame of accounts of ecclesiastical change in late eleventh-century Europe.  Chiefly, it is a response to the work of Rudolf Schieffer, whose 1981 monograph Die Entstehung des päpstlichen Investiturverbots für den deutschen König sundered historical confidence that the issue of lay investiture was at the root of the war between emperor and pope.  In a meticulous examination of the evidence, Schieffer demonstrated that there was no mention of investiture in the correspondence leading up to Gregory’s excommunication of Henry in 1076 and no definite prohibition of lay investiture until 1078.  With this direct link between reform initiatives and the open breach between papacy and empire eliminated, historians had to reconsider their master narrative.  Most now see the investiture conflict as the result of Gregory’s war with Henry, not its cause.[xxiv]

            Tellenbach still devotes a third of his book to a narrative of the conflict between Gregory VII and Henry IV and is clearly reluctant to let go of investiture: he declares Schieffer’s arguments “convincing” but contends that gradual “change in the conception of the laity’s role in the church” led to growing concern about the practice. But the major change he charts in the book is the rise of papal monarchy and a new ecclesiology.  The “revolution” is in the church: the papacy’s new ability to challenge lay power and promote its view of “right order in the world” – one in which the authority of priests is superior to the power of princes – was the central development of the era.[xxv]  Tellenbach is skeptical of the extent of abuses such as clerical concubinage and simony; he sees opposition to lay influence in the church as the key preoccupation of reformers. Reform in the eleventh century was about driving lay people out of the positions of power they held over church offices and lands.  He also argues that their “radical principles” were never realized and that Gregory’s pontificate was a “tragedy.” Tellenbach’s sympathies are clearly with the emperors, whose “traditional” notions of right order endured: rulers in western Europe continued to care for the church and foster Christianity within their kingdoms. But in the end Tellenbach admits that if Gregory’s radical principles “were hardly ever realised...even the compromises which were achieved transformed the Christian world.” The transformation, in Tellenbach’s view, was largely negative:  the “idea of a church of the clergy” replaced the older notion of ecclesia as a unity of all Christians, and “the church took on conceptually the new form of a closed spiritual hierarchy.”[xxvi]

            Some scholars, most notably Dominque Iogna-Pratt, have echoed Tellenbach’s negative judgment, linking this more restrictive ecclesiology with a persecuting sociology. At the same time that the church was being defined as a hierarchy of clerics, society was conceived as Christian so as to exclude, and ultimately persecute, Jews and heretics.[xxvii]  R. I. Moore has also posited connections between the Gregorian reform and the emergence of a “persecuting society” in the central Middle Ages.  Papal reform’s “struggle to impose Roman authority over local tradition” played a part in turning dissent into heresy.[xxviii]

            More positive characterizations and evaluations of reform have been articulated, but they tend to shift emphases rather than to confront Tellenbach head-on.  The quandary here is how to launch a positive interpretation of eleventh-century reform without returning to Catholic apologetics.  The least restrained by this qualm is H. E. J. Cowdrey, whose massive biography of Pope Gregory VII unabashedly proclaims him “one of the very greatest of popes” and is principally dedicated to proving that he was driven by “an inner spirituality that has been insufficiently appreciated.” This scholarly work is a corrective to a tendency to evaluate Gregory and the reform movements as chiefly political – about power and property rather than religious beliefs.  But Cowdrey’s refusal to “present Gregory comprehensively against the background of his times or to establish his place in the longer development of the medieval church or of Latin Christendom”[xxix] leaves Tellenbach’s interpretation unchallenged.

            I. S. Robinson achieves a more objective tone and even-handed erudition in addressing both reform and the investiture struggle.  After writing both a history of the eleventh- and twelfth-century papacy and a biography of Emperor Henry IV, he was invited to write the chapter of the New Cambridge Medieval History on “Reform and the Church, 1073-1122.”   Robinson differs from Tellenbach on several points.  First, without trying to adjudicate the empirical problem of gauging the severity of abuses, Robinson urges us to take seriously the fact that both pro-imperial and pro-papal observers unanimously condemned simony and clerical unchastity. All agreed on the need for reform; they differed as to the definition of abuses and the best means to rectify them.  Second, Robinson underscores different idealized notions of the past as central to eleventh-century views of reform.  The “golden age” papal supporters wanted to revive was the fourth to sixth centuries, the era of Constantine and Gregory the Great, when emperors obeyed popes.  Imperial supporters idealized a more recent past, the Ottonian era, when kings and bishops worked together to bring peace and reform to church and society.[xxx] 

            Robinson would agree with Tellenbach that notions of hierarchy and the role of the laity were central themes of eleventh-century reform.  He also shares Tellenbach’s emphasis on questions of property as fundamental to both the perception of abuses and plans for reform.  Most importantly, Robinson too sees the emergence of papal monarchy and a new ecclesiology as the most significant results of eleventh-century reform and the investiture struggle.  He concludes,

   In Gregory VII’s calls for obedience from bishops and in his opponents’ accusations of

   ‘tyranny’ we can identify a clash between two rival ecclesiologies: the centralising,

   monarchical ecclesiology of the reform papacy and the ecclesiology which the

   eleventh-century episcopate had inherited from the Carolingian and Ottonian ages. 

   Theirs was a Christendom composed of autonomous ‘territorial churches’

   (Landeskirchen), governed by bishops meeting frequently in provincial or national

   synods, collaborating closely with kings in the regulation of ecclesiastical affairs.  The

   ecclesiology which inspired the reforming activities of Gregory VII envisaged the

   universal church as a single unified institution directed by Rome.  The central fact of

   the church’s life, according to this vision, was the papal primacy, ‘which embraced the

   whole church like a single diocese, gathering to itself the fullness of power of the whole

   hierarchy, for the power of binding and loosing to the pastoral duty of preaching.’[xxxi]

What was most shocking and divisive to contemporaries were the violent means Gregory used to pursue his reform agenda: his use of military force to compel obedience, his appeals to social inferiors to rise up against their lords, and his sanction of direct lay action against unchaste priests.  Tellenbach also depicted papal “style” and methods as new, but Robinson would define Gregory VII’s  improvised “emergency measures” as distinguishing reform in his era and warranting use of the term “Gregorian reform.”[xxxii]  In the end, Robinson’s evaluation of the emergence of a monarchical papacy and its attendant ecclesiology is more even-handed.  He acknowledges both the institutional creativity of eleventh-century papal reformers as well as the legitimate criticisms of their excesses. 

            It merits underscoring at this point that although the field has moved far from Fliche’s confessional perspective, his emphasis on the papacy has certainly carried the day: whether for it or against it, historians agree that the most significant result of the eleventh-century reform movements and the investiture conflict was the emergence of papal monarchy.  Real interpretative differences occur mainly in judging how or why this is significant.  Tellenbach and his followers see it negatively, as hindering the development of the state and the establishing of a more “modern” restriction of religion to the private sphere.  Those who disagree with this teleology toward the “modern” and the nation state emphasize the institutional creativity of the papacy, pointing out how the church’s institutional practices fostered the development of bureaucratic techniques and the rule of law.

            Robinson deserves credit for rising above the confessional and nationalistic polemics of the French Catholic interpretation of Augustin Fliche and the German Lutheran stance of Gerd Tellenbach.  He has achieved this relative equanimity to a certain extent by abandoning hope of empirical resolution of central questions and concentrating instead on listening attentively and critically to the rhetoric of the sources.  The highly polemical character of those sources to a certain degree warrants such an approach.  Robinson began his career studying the propagandistic tracts of the investiture conflict and in his biography of Henry IV grappled extensively with the problem of distilling empirical “truth” from rabidly partisan accounts.  The concentration on discourse, however, ignores the possibilities offered by decades of local studies in sources extensively mined for social and economic history.  It also misses the opportunity to engage with newer narratives of medieval history emerging from Annales-inspired “total history.”  Steps have been taken on both these fronts.

            The salutary convergence of the turn to social and economic history and the tendency toward systematic regional coverage in European scholarship has yielded a great deal of data on ecclesiastical institutions and life in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.  In Italy, for example, over the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, the “Settimane di studio” held at Mendola organized and presented research in documentary sources from regions throughout the peninsula on basic institutions of medieval Christianity (dioceses, parishes, monasteries, hermitages, canons).[xxxiii]  French scholars, following the lead and model of Georges Duby’s thèse on the Maconnaise have reconstructed regional societies on the basis of charters throughout France and in Italy, and conferences on specific themes have gathered regional evidence on key reform topics, such as the secular clergy.[xxxiv]  Specific studies of reform in local communities have also been accomplished and reveal that reform initiatives are evident from the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, that they occur in regions that remained staunchly pro-imperial, and that papal reforming initiatives often had a very limited impact.[xxxv] The role of lay people as the makers of reform, in founding and supporting reform institutions (discussed above), was revealed in local documentary sources, such as charters.  In sum, research in different sources, particularly local socio-economic documents, calls into question the importance to reform of the papal-imperial struggle that still dominates accounts.  More concerted systematic analysis of the empirical work done on local communities is necessary: this is a harvest awaiting the gathering.   

            The most productive recent work on eleventh-century reform has been engaging with newer narratives of the transformation of Europe over the central Middle Ages.   These narratives still focus on explaining how more powerful monarchies and a more unified European culture emerged in the thirteenth century, but their explanations emphasize demographic, social, and economic developments (e.g., the expansion of settlement, the rise of banal lordship).  Did religious reform figure in these processes?  R. I. Moore has suggested that the establishment of new communities and the social tensions engendered by rapid change made more important the priest’s role as mediator, not just in a sacramental sense between parishioners and God, but in the terrestrial realm as peacemaker.  Communities also increasingly wanted their priestly mediators to be impartial, not beholden to the local lord.  Moore thus links opposition to simony and to clerical marriage to the terrestrial ties their priestly mediators had with local families and rulers.  The concerns of the reform movement, in sum, grew out of new social conditions.[xxxvi]  Other scholars have connected support for reform with the rise of new elite lineages and with the rapid multiplication of ecclesiastical institutions as Europe’s population surged.[xxxvii]  Kathleen G. Cushing has also argued that the reform movement had a decisive social impact: it helped define some of the new values that transformed the rough milites of the eleventh century into a more stable and educated aristocracy.[xxxviii]

            A significant factor in the consolidation of that aristocracy was the disinheritance of women.  Georges Duby pointed out that the enforcement of clerical celibacy and the church’s more restrictive definition of marriage contributed significantly to both lay and ecclesiastical efforts to protect property.  Moore too has drawn attention to a confluence of interests among secular and ecclesiastical lords in this regard.[xxxix]  The significance of this attention to gender and property has been underscored by Conrad Leyser, who noted,

    ...it inverts conventional assumptions about the meaning of Reform.  The famous and

   violent conflict between popes and kings, and between Pope Gregory VII and King

   Henry IV in particular, leads us instinctively to cast Reform as a battle between Church

   and State, clergy and laity.  In Duby’s perspective, however, the clash between Pope

   and King which dominates the media in fact conceals a fundamental collusion between

   clerical and lay interestes, or at least a negotiated settlement, over the distribution of

   property.

Leyser and others have called attention to the rhetoric of gender: the ways in which reformers attack other men as being unduly influenced by women or contaminated by contact with them.  He argues, rightly I think, that assessing the historically specific aims of such gendered discourses is more useful than interpreting them psychologically as male neurosis and misogyny motivating demands for priestly celibacy.[xl]  Indeed, Leyser’s insight that the deployment of these gendered accusations reveals competition between monks and bishops suggests new ways to understand reform: were reform efforts in the tenth and eleventh centuries aimed at overturning the dominance that bishops had achieved in the Carolingian era and restructuring the church to give greater weight to monastic institutions and values? Whether through the study of gender or local sources, the challenge before historians is to get beyond the dramatic story of Gregory VII’s conflict with Henry IV and understand better the chronological and geographical contours of reform on a European-wide scale.

IV: New Religious Movements

            In 1935, Herbert Grundmann used the term Religiöse Bewegungen or “religious movements” to characterize a new interest in the “apostolic life” and in Christian poverty that emerged in the twelfth century and ultimately flowered in the thirteenth with the mendicants.  A key insight Grundmann had was that medieval Christians trying to cultivate the vita apostolica could end up either as heretics or saints: the “religious movement” encompassed both the Humiliati, whose way of life was ultimately sanctioned by Pope Innocent III, and the Waldensians, who were condemned as heterodox and persecuted.  Grundmann also posited a connection between reform and the twelfth-century religious movement that he described: the early seekers of the apostolic life had their religious desires “awakened” by the Gregorian reform.   Reform and this twelfth-century religious movement, however, were distinct.  This was chiefly because Grundmann defined ecclesiastical reform in the era of Gregory VII narrowly as completing “the structure or ordo of the hierarchical Church, which rested on the idea of apostolic succession, reserving the execution of Christian salvation to those who had been ordained to it either directly or indirectly by the successors of Peter and the apostles.”[xli]  Historians today have a more capacious understanding of reform as including and generating varied religious movements. The eleventh and twelfth centuries were marked by a plethora of religious experiments, only some of which developed into enduring institutions or “orders.”  But certainly one of the most significant and lasting results of eleventh-century reform was this new variety in the forms and organization of religious life.  In the early Middle Ages, to lead a religious life meant to leave the world and enter a monastery.  From the eleventh century, not only did interpretations of monastic life change – with the emergence of reforming congregations like Cluny and eremitical orders like the Carthusians – but new models of what it meant to live a religious life, many pursued “in the world,” emerged. [xlii]  Since other contributions to this volume are devoted to monasticism, the mendicants, popular religion, and poverty, I will limit myself to pointing out the connections between reform and these new religious movements.

            A comparison of the careers of Dominic of Sora (c. 960-1032) and Robert of Arbrissel (c. 1045-1116) is a good place to start.  Both were ordained to the priesthood, but fled to the wilderness to become hermits.  Dominic spent years as a monk before retreating to a mountaintop with his abbot’s permission; Robert was archpriest in the diocese of Rennes and then studied in Angers before he embarked upon an eremitic life in the forest of Craon.  Both, however, traveled a great deal over the rest of their lives, preaching, attracting followers, and founding religious communities.  Dominic littered southern Umbria, Lazio, and the Abruzzi with small monasteries.  Robert first founded a community of regular canons at La Roë, and then a mixed encampment of male and female followers that ultimately became the monastery of Fontrevaud and several daughter houses.  Both were remembered as charismatic preachers and as ascetics; both cultivated chastity and exhorted fellow clerics to follow their example.  Dominic has a stronger liturgical profile: his preaching is always depicted in the context of the mass and his priestly virtues highlighted.  He drove out married priests and their wives.  Poverty is a stronger theme in Robert’s vitae, but he too worked for reform.  As archpriest, Baudri of Dol recounts, “[w]hile restoring peace among those at odds, freeing the church from shameful servitude to lay people, and putting a stop to the sinful fornications of clergy and laity, he utterly abhorred simony, and manfully opposed all vices.”[xliii]  Although Grundmann included only Robert in his religious movement, these religious seekers followed similar paths and worked for reform.

            If hermit-preachers were one trend in religious life related to reform, regular canons were another.  From the ninth century, communal living arrangements had been urged on the secular clergy to help them live chaste and virtuous lives.  The formation of clerical communities at parish churches can be documented across the tenth century; they served as training centers for the schooling and formation of priests.  But many rural communities and urban parishes were fortunate to have one priest, and bishops realized the formidable financial obstacles to gathering all their clergy into communal living arrangements.  Attempts to achieve the ideal, however, led not only to the founding of communities of secular clerics but also to the composition of customs or institutes to order their communal religious life, the most popular of which were those of the canons regular of Saint John Lateran, Saint Victor in Paris, Saint Ruf in Avignon, and Saint Mary in Porto (Ravenna).  Called “regular” because they lived under a rule (usually that of Saint Augustine, supplemented by a set of customs), these clerics cultivated the apostolic life, many dedicating themselves to pastoral care.  Bishops are chiefly responsible for fostering the establishment of communities of regular canons, but Hildebrand (later Gregory VII) promoted them as a means for reforming the secular clergy at the Lateran Synod of 1059 and later popes continued these efforts.[xliv]

            Although the model of the apostolic life was initially urged on the secular clergy by reformers as a valorizing ideal, lay people were also inspired by it. Their enthusiasm begins in the eleventh century with popular reforming movements such as the pataria.  Best documented in Milan, but also evident in other Italian cities, this grass-roots pressure group had clerical leaders – such as the Ariald of Carimate and Landulf “Cotta” – but the mass of its supporters were lay men and women.  Reform issues are most prominent in the pataria, particularly the “strike” organized against married and simoniacal priests in Milan in which lay people refused the sacraments from impure clerics.  But the defining aspects of the vita apostolica are already evident.  Popular preaching figures prominently in accounts of the pataria and would become the most contested aspect of lay movements: the Waldensians and Humiliati were forbidden to preach publicly without episcopal sanction and were condemned as heretical when they failed to heed such strictures.  Andrea of Strumi’s life of Ariald also extols how the patarene leader’s “every effort and action was directed toward putting into practice what he read in Sacred Scripture,” particularly in giving to the poor and to beggars.[xlv] 

            Relieving the suffering of the poor became the central mission in lay cultivation of the apostolic life, and it found more ready acceptance and support from ecclesiastical leaders than did lay enthusiasm for preaching.  From the twelfth century lay foundation of hospitals soared.  Intensely local institutions, these places for the care of the poor and infirm were often established and run by lay people.  In Catalonia, for example, Bishop Deodat of Barcelona built a hospital in 1024, a layman named Arnau founded one next to the cathedral at Urgell in 1024, and Arsendis, wife of Arnau Mir, in 1068 asked her spouse  to establish four shelters for the infirm in local communities.  Verona had so many hospitals by the early thirteenth century that the bishop attempted to consolidate them.[xlvi]

            In sum, eleventh century reform was a key catalyst in transforming religious life in medieval Europe.  Monastic reform and new monastic congregations were supported by the reformed papacy, which also fostered lay groups galvanized by reform issues such as simony and clerical unchastity.  Lay activism, once awakened, supported and created new kinds of institutions and orders, from hospitals to confraternities to the Mendicants.  This accomplished a radical democratization of the religious life in Western Europe.

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Further Reading

            The essential work on Carolingian reform is still McKitterick, The Frankish Church; see Sullivan, “The Carolingian Age,” on the place of ecclesiastical history in the broader historiography of Carolingian Europe.

            For eleventh-century reform and the investiture conflict, the best point of entry into the subject is Blumenthal, The Investiture Controversy, but the key works are still Fliche, La réforme grégorienne; Tellenbach, Church, State and Christian Society and The church in western Europe; and Robinson, “Reform and the Church.”  Useful collections of sources with introductions are Tierney, Crisis of Church and State and Miller, Power and the Holy.  On Gregory VII, Robinson’s “Pope Gregory VII” is a masterful bibliographical survey of work on Gregory from 1947-1985; an encyclopedic biography has been provided by Cowdrey, Pope Gregory VII, who has also translated the main corpus of Gregory’s letters: Cowdrey, The register of Pope Gregory VII.  Paul of Bernreid’s life of Pope Gregory VII, along with the life of Pope Leo IX and Bonizo of Sutri’s Liber ad amicum, has been translated by I. S. Robinson in The Papal reform of the Eleventh Century.  On Henry IV, Robinson’s Henry IV of Germany is an excellent detailed political biography; Weinfurter, The Salian Century provides a cogent analysis of the investiture conflict in the broad context of changing concepts of lordship in the eleventh-century empire.  The anonymous life of Henry IV in addition to his letters are still available in English in Imperial Lives and Letters of the Eleventh Century, trans. Theodor E. Mommsen, Karl F. Morrison (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962; rptd. 2000).   Moore’s “Family, Community and Cult” and Iogna-Pratt’s Order and Exclusion are the best introductions to recent perspectives.

            Constable’s Reformation of the Twelfth Century beautifully describes the new variety of religious life and its relation to reform, although the first two chapters of Grundmann’s Religious Movements is still a wonderfully readable introduction to the vita apostolica.  The historiography of medieval Christianity is still best treated in Van Engen, “The Christian Middle Ages.”