Sources

In terms of religious history the timespan covered in this book can be viewed as forming the end of the earlier Middle Ages, a period characterized by ritual, then a phase of transition lasting from the mideleventh to the mid-twelfth centuries, and finally the opening of a more bureaucratic and legalistic period beginning in the later twelfth century. This periodization is helpful provided that one remembers that it is conditioned by the pattern of source survival, and some remarks on sources are necessary at the outset.

The main changes observable in sources for this period are, first, an increase in the numbers of texts, and, secondly, a growing variety of types of text. These developments are especially marked from c. iioo onwards. For the study of the Church in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the principal sources are hagiographical and liturgical. Bishops and their activities, for example, are studied through ‘lives’

(biographies) of bishops and histories of dioceses made up of sequences of lives of bishops. Liturgical sources essentially consist of prayers, but can contain other information, for example, lists of benefactors and inmates in books known as libri vitae or ‘books of life’ (alluding to the great Book of Life in the Book of Revelation in which the names of the souls to be saved were recorded), allowing the historian to recreate the network of patronage of particular major churches. More purely administrative sources such as charters and law codes, though not lacking, are few by contrast with the period after c. iioo, and tend to preserve tradition. The past recorded in charters and legal compilations might often be fictive—Bishop Burchard of Worms (1000-25), for example, in writing his Decretum, a compilation of rulings in ecclesiastical law, invented numerous sources—but the authority of tradition mattered, and perceived gaps in documentation were sometimes filled with forgeries in the belief that this was what earlier generations would have approved.

The most obvious difference between sources for the post - and pre-1100 periods is that far more exist for the latter: whereas, for Pope Gregory VII (1073-85), only about forty-five letters are preserved for each year of his pontificate, nearly 200 a year survive for Pope Alexander III (1159-81), and 730 for Innocent IV (1243-54). Quantity of documentation is not simply a question of survival. Mandates from popes and bishops to their subordinates became ever more numerous; the holding of synods (meetings) at every level in the Church hierarchy became more frequent, and so did the issuing of legislation, in the form of decrees of papal councils and the synodal statutes of thirteenth-century bishops. At the same time, those in authority began to make official copies of outgoing correspondence. More informal copies might also be made: papal mandates were often preserved for their legal content in collections, known as decretal collections, compiled by teachers of ecclesiastical law in the later twelfth century.

The temptation is to see the shift towards legal matters in the surviving sources as a movement away from ritual towards documentation. It was not quite so simple. Ritual continued to matter even while society became more eager to make use of the written word: indeed, the issuing of charters could be marked by ceremonial, and symbolism was built into documentation itself in the designs of the seals used for validation. A significant development was the emergence of professional lawyers in the twelfth century, while a less obvious, But more important, underlying change was the growth in population, which made the closer and more informal contacts of earlier medieval politics harder to maintain.