Confessor, Traitor or Prosecutor: On the Ritualized Relationships between Kings and Bishops through the Prism of Ottonian Historiography

Abstract

This paper is devoted to the analysis of the episcopal behavior and the interpretive frameworks that writers of the Ottonian age used to describe their actions. The focus of the research are various narrative representations, which were attached to the relationships between bishops and kings in the medieval historiography. The saintly bishop, the spiritual instructor of a king, the prosecutor of a ruler, and the bishop-traitor were the most prominent literary models, or modes of description, used in texts from the tenth and eleventh centuries. These modes of episcopal representations, in their relation to royal power, are perceived as parts of the coherent narrative strategies utilized by the medieval historiographers to meet their own aims. These aims included increasing the prestige of a community represented by a bishop, criticizing royal policies, condemning political rivals or justifying their own position. It is argued that all these various literary roles, thrusted upon bishops by chroniclers, hagiographers or polemicists, were realizations of the milestone concepts of episcopal power and medieval political theology: admonition and familiarity. These literary roles thus allowed Ottonian writers to imagine a bishop as being an intimate friend, a loyal lord, a prophet and a pastor to the ruling king and his realm.