Cathedral of words
Subtitle: bishops and the deeds of their predecessors in Lotharingia, 950-1100
By: by Jeffrey Robert Webb
Published: 2008
Language: eng
Number of pages: 445
Description: By the late tenth century, bishops had accumulated powers which enabled them to combine spiritual and secular leadership in a unique fashion. Whereas the bulk of scholarship has focused on the secular aspects of the bishop's power, this dissertation explores the bishop's role in promoting the cults of his saintly predecessors and instigating writings about them. It considers the circumstances that led to local historical writing in the western border-region of the German empire known as Lotharingia, with special attention to the diocese of Liège and its traditions of the genre of Deeds of the bishops ( Gesta episcoporum ). Liège is compared to its fellow Lotharingian bishoprics: Trier, Metz, Verdun, Toul, Cambrai, Cologne, and Utrecht. Although most bishop-saints lived long before the tenth and eleventh centuries, their legends offer rich testimony of the times that produced them. This study demonstrates how bishops and major diocesan ecclesiastical institutions--not always in concert--manipulated earlier hagiographic sources to create narratives of the past which served their contemporary political and religious aims. Around the year 1000, the imperial bishops of Lotharingia were the main catalysts for episcopal hagiography. Over the course of the eleventh century, bishops lost their control over the diocesan past. By the mid-eleventh century, the canons of the cathedral of Liège were using the deeds of bishop-saints to criticize the current state of affairs. The canons of Maastricht chose the peak of the Investiture Conflict in the 1080s to revamp the legend of their patron.

How churchmen of the tenth and eleventh centuries imagined the history of their dioceses proved crucial for the ideological struggle between popes and emperors at the end of the eleventh century, where the office of bishop took center stage and arguments about sacred and secular power were based on historical precedent. This exploration of the relationship between bishops and bishop-saints sheds new light not only on the many facets of episcopal power in the middle ages, but also on the role played by the dynamic region of Lotharingia in larger intellectual, cultural, and political developments.
Notes: "May 2008."

Thesis (Ph.D., Dept. of History)--Harvard University, 2008.

Includes bibliographical references.