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A detailed study of the relationship between England and the papacy across its first five centuries, from the times of Bede up to the Norman Conquest. It reassesses that relationship through a detailed study of a hitherto understudied corpus of papal documentary sources. It sets developments in England within a wider comparative European context.
List of contents
- Maps
- Table
- Figures
- Abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- 1: Introduction
- PART I. Understanding The Corpus
- 2: Getting to grips with papal privileges in the early middle ages
- 3: An annotated handlist of papal privileges in early medieval England
- PART II. Papal Privileges In England: Four Studies
- 4: Papal privileges in the 'Age of Bede' (c. 680-c. 730)
- 5: Papal privileges and the 'Mercian Supremacy' (c. 770-c. 830)
- 6: Papal privileges and the English Benedictine movement (c. 960-c. 1000)
- 7: Papal privileges and the coming of the 'Papal Revolution' (1049-73)
- 8: Coda: Remembering, inventing, and forgetting
- 9: Conclusions
- Bibliography
- Appendix: A note on some items excluded from the handlist
About the author
Benjamin Savill is an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin (Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut). He studied at University College London and Oxford.
Summary
England and the Papacy in the Early Middle Ages: Papal Privileges in European Perspective, c. 680-1073 provides the first dedicated, book-length study of interactions between England and the papacy throughout the early middle ages. It takes as its lens the extant English record of papal privileges: legal diplomas drawn-up on metres-long scrolls of Egyptian papyrus, acquired by pilgrim-petitioners within the city of Rome, and then brought back to Britain to negotiate local claims and conflicts. How, why, and when did English petitioners choose to invoke the distant authority of Rome in this way, and how did this compare to what was taking place elsewhere in Europe? How successful were these efforts, and how were they remembered in later centuries? By using these still-understudied papal documents to reassess what we know of the worlds of Bede, the Mercian Supremacy, the West Saxon 'Kingdom of the English', and the Norman Conquest--locating them in the process within a comparative, Europe-wide setting--this book offers important new contributions to Anglo-Saxon studies, legal and documentary history, papal history, and the study of early medieval Europe more widely. It also includes an annotated handlist of the corpus of English papal privileges up to 1073--a critical reference work for future research in the field.
