Memory, 'Corruption', and Reform: The Roman Church, 860-960

我寻求资助的这个项目看起来是为了改变我们对中世纪教会的看法，尤其是对它的牧师的看法。在大众的想象中，中世纪是一个信仰的时代，同样，也是一个虚伪的时代。我们认为，教会的等级制度，尤其是教皇职位，对人民施加了一种高大而亲密的权力，一种被系统性地滥用的道德权威，它经常用来腐败它的持有者。这里的经典当代见证者是克雷莫纳的柳德普兰(公元前972年)，他对罗马教会的非凡描述为随后的所有讨论奠定了基础。他的故事始于罗马(897年)所谓的“身体会议”，在那里，教皇福尔摩苏斯的身体受到审判，并被扔进台伯河。在柳德普兰看来，这一可怕的猜字游戏开启了“色情统治”，在这一时期，罗马教会被一个家族，尤其是神学院，特别是其女性王朝的欲望所支配，政治和身体上的欲望。教皇诞生了教皇，拉特兰宫变成了一个妓院：在教皇两千年的历史中，只有博尔贾被认为施加了更恶劣的影响。然而，事实并非如此。尽管利德普兰的丑闻故事具有吸引力，但不能让他们不受质疑，特别是在目前关于牧师的性取向的不知情但事关重大的辩论的背景下。事实上，人们很早就认识到，利德普兰的描述是不全面的，但我们还没有弄清楚它有什么用。正如一位学者简洁地指出的那样，柳德普兰是一个叛徒：在20世纪50年代末，他抛弃了当地的赞助人，转而依附于撒克逊国王奥托一世，奥托一世很快就成为意大利和罗马的新领主，成为神圣罗马皇帝的头衔。柳德普兰对教皇罪恶的耸人听闻的描述必须被理解为试图使奥托的接管和他自己的效忠转变合法化。尽管如此，我们不应该完全抛弃他的证词：我认为，仔细研究一下，他确实揭示了更多关于罗马教会的信息，而不是毫无根据的谣言。如果我们回到对教皇福尔摩苏斯的死后审判，我们会发现指控他的人(即使在刘德普兰有倾向性的描述中)有一个严肃的观点要提出。对福尔摩苏斯的指控是，他不能成为教皇，因为他已经是另一个地方教廷(波尔图)的主教。正如他的敌人指出的那样，尼该亚(325年)议会禁止主教们从一个地方走到另一个地方。然而，他的捍卫者用其他先例进行了反驳，引用了教皇格雷戈里大帝(公元604年)的信件来支持他们的论点。他们输掉了政治斗争，但在身体会议后的大约20年里继续发表他们的观点；然后他们的事业被柳德普兰接手。我的论点是，关于圣公会调职的辩论是这一时期神职人员潜在转变的迹象。部分得益于查理曼和他的继任者统治下的拉丁美洲欧洲的稳定，然后又是在奥托的统治下，作为一名主教是一种日益专业化的责任。圣公会的就业市场发展起来了，雄心勃勃的教士试图吸引那些有能力将他们从默默无闻带到欧洲舞台上的人的注意(刘德普兰就是一个典型的例子)。但这种流动性，以及背后赞助人的力量，威胁到了当地社区，他们不希望被视为职业主教的中转站。我认为，对独身神职人员的要求，是这些社区表达他们对“制度性滥交”和滥用圣公会权威的担忧的一种象征性方式。对一些人来说，神职人员的独身似乎可以为“全球化教区”带来的危险提供一个解决方案。独身本身可能成为问题的一部分/正如许多现代观众所清楚的那样-则是另一回事。

The project for which I seek funding looks to change the way we think about the medieval Church, and about its priests in particular. In the popular imagination, the Middle Ages are an age of faith, and by the same token, an age of hypocrisy. We assume that the church hierarchy, and above all the papacy, exerted a towering and intimate power over the people, a moral authority systematically abused, which regularly served to corrupt its holders. The canonical contemporary witness here is Liudprand of Cremona (d. ca. 972), whose extraordinary account of the Roman Church has set the terms of all subsequent discussion. His story begins with the so-called 'Synod of the Corpse' in Rome (897), at which the body of Pope Formosus was put on trial and thrown into the River Tiber. This ghastly charade is seen by Liudprand to have initiated the 'Pornocracy', a period in which the Roman Church was dominated by the lusts, political and physical, of one family, the House of Theophylact, and its female dynasts in particular. Popes begat popes, and the Lateran Palace became little more than a brothel: in the two millennia of papal history, only the Borgias are seen to have exerted a more malign influence. It was not, however, so. For all their magnetic allure, Liudprand's tales of scandal cannot be allowed to stand unquestioned, especially in the current context of the ill-informed but high-stakes debates about the sexuality of the clergy.It has in fact long been recognized that Liudprand's account is a partial one, but we have yet to understand what use to make of it. As one scholar has succinctly put it, Liudprand was a traitor: in the late 950s, he abandoned his local patron to attach himself to the Saxon king Otto I, who was soon to make himself new lord of Italy and of Rome, taking the title of Holy Roman Emperor. Liudprand's lurid account of papal vice must be understood as an attempt to legitimate Otto's takeover and his own switch of allegiance. For all that, we should not discard his testimony altogether: on closer examination, I argue, he does reveal more about the Roman church than unfounded rumour. If we return to the posthumous trial of Pope Formosus, we find that his accusers (even in Liudprand's tendentious account) had a serious point to make. The charge against Formosus was that he could not become pope because he was already a bishop of another local see (Porto). As his enemies pointed out, the council of Nicaea (325) had forbidden bishops to move from see to see. His defenders, however, countered with other precedents, citing letters of Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604) to support their arguments. They lost the political battle, but continued to make their views known for some two decades after the Synod of the Corpse; and then their cause was taken up by Liudprand. My argument is that the debate over episcopal transfer is a sign of an underlying transformation of the clergy in this period. Thanks in part to the stabilization of Latin Europe under the rule of Charlemagne and his successors, and then again under Otto, being a bishop was an increasingly professionalized responsibility. An episcopal job market developed, in which ambitious churchmen sought to attract the attentions of those with the power to pull them from obscurity onto a European stage (Liudprand being a classic example). But such mobility, and the might of the patrons behind it, threatened local communities, who did not wish to be treated as staging posts for career bishops. The demand for a celibate priesthood, I argue, was a symbolic way for these communities to express their concern about 'institutional promiscuity' and the abuse of episcopal authority. To some, clerical celibacy seemed as though it might provide a solution to the dangers of a 'globalized episcopate'. That celibacy might itself become part of the problem/as is so clear tomany modern audiences - is another story.