Understanding reform in the eleventh century

Abstract

One of the chief factors in the seeming omnipresence of concerns about reform in the eleventh century on the part of modern historians is the increasing abundance of documentation, at least as compared with the earlier middle ages. Interpretations of the nature of the movement for Church reform, the success and failure of its objectives, and even its desirability have had a long and chequered history, beginning even as the reform movement itself was developing in the eleventh century. Various accounts of reform in the eleventh century follow the 'church-versus-state' model and focus on the power politics of the later eleventh-century papacy, the clash with Henry IV and the traditional 'political' concerns of investitures. Much reform initiatives may have been promulgated as proscriptive or normative measures, that is, as establishing uniformly binding and enforceable laws, in reality they were prescriptive measures, advocating certain standards of practice.