Bishops in the Medieval Empire: New Perspectives on the Church, State and Episcopal Office

Abstract

AbstractThrough the mid‐20th century, most historical research on bishops and the episcopate in early medieval Germany and the Holy Roman Empire was carried out within a conceptual framework known as the Imperial Church System (Reichskirchensystem), a merging of the early medieval church and royal government. The Reichskirchensystem grew out of a tradition of 19th century political history which took as its primary concern the evolution of the modern constitutional state and viewed the church and its personnel – namely bishops – as mostly negative influences on those processes over time. In the post‐war period, new approaches to constitutional and social history in the German academy prompted scholars to recast bishops as aristocratic elites and focus on the way they exercised lordship, or Herrschaft. More recently, studies of the episcopacy in Germany have embraced a variety of interdisciplinary methods and new approaches to medieval sources and begun to explore the ways bishops construed their power as a unique sphere of authority within the political and social worlds of the Middle Ages.