Turbulent priests: the problem of royal jurisdiction over the religious, 743-1215

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As Christian societies in lands that had formed part of the Western Roman Empire began to re-organise and restructure in the early Middle Ages, their leaders were faced with a persistent and important problem: what kind of power could kings and emperors exercise over those entrusted with formal roles within the Church? This research project explores this question by examining the issue of jurisdiction. Rulership was closely associated with providing justice in the Middle Ages, exemplified by the tradition of producing codes of law, but bishops, priests and monks all claimed various degrees of equally well-established exemption from royal (secular) justice. Given the importance of the Church in medieval European society, and the centrality of law to ideas of authority, much hung on the resolution of the issue.Beginning with the rise of the Carolingian family in the eighth century, a rise closely associated with the reforming ideology promoted by figures such as the Englishman Saint Boniface (d. 755), and continuing through to the emergence in the thirteenth century of a papacy that could plausibly claim a degree of control over Latin Christendom, I shall chart how contemporaries argued about the issue of the jurisdiction of kings and their secular agents over clerics and monks, both on the European mainland, from Francia to Italy, and in England. I shall also use surviving documentary records, published and archival, to investigate how those theoretical arguments related to what actually happened in practice (and vice versa), in order to improve our comprehension of a still poorly-understood topic.At stake is the potential to contribute towards the resolution of some pressing historical problems. To what extent did the Gregorian Reform, associated with Pope Gregory VII, mark the emergence of the Church as an independent historical force, and so represent a sharp break in western Christian history? Studying the practices of and arguments around royal jurisdiction over clerics before, during and after that reforming moment will provide a means of assessing historical claims of this nature. Can the history of western Christianity be told as one of subtly, steadily increasing secularisation, a process inherent to the religion that laid the foundations for a secular modernity, as some historians and others have recently argued (e.g. Gauchet)? Investigating how boundaries were produced between those classed as formally part of the church and those classed as for these purposes outside it will offer a means of assessing this influential narrative from an empirical angle. Did the limits placed upon royal authority in this period by ecclesiastical restrictions on jurisdiction over ordained clerics and monks contribute meaningfully to the remarkably enduring political fragmentation of the Latin West, a fragmentation that persisted despite the strong bonds of shared culture, history and religion, and prestigious Roman traditions of wide-ranging rule? These are questions of significant scope and importance, whose answers, rooted at least partially in the early Middle Ages, this project will help to uncover.