Family, Community and Cult on the Eve of the Gregorian Reform

Abstract

One of the most obvious novelties of the eleventh century is the appearance of the crowd on the stage of public events. It would not claim to rival its counterparts in Antiquity or the Renaissance in the permanence of its presence or the scale of its activity, still less in the vividness with which it can be portrayed, or the wonders of analysis that can be performed upon it by its historians. Some of them, indeed, might hesitate to distinguish categorically between thepopuluswhich attacked the clergy of Milan in 1056 or formed an army for Peter the Hermit and that which surrounded the tomb of a Merovingian saint or attended the court of a Carolingian lord. But to indulge that hesitation to the point of silence would be to grant to semantics priority over common sense. It is impossible to contemplate the events of the eleventh century, to observe the turbulence of Florence in the 1060s or the Flemish and Rhineland cities in the 1070s, to hear a Gregory VII appealing to the people to boycott their priests and spurn their bishops, a Sigebert of Gembloux lamenting ‘sudden unrest among the populace, new treacheries of servants against their masters and masters’ mistrust of their servants', or a Marbod of Rennes protesting that to denounce the errors of the clergy before the people was ‘not to preach but to undermine’, without conceding not only that a new fear of social upheaval had been generated, but that in some manner it was founded in reality, that the course of events had been changed, and changed significantly on occasion, by the availability of the force of popular indignation to those who knew how to raise it. And quite clearly ‘knowing how to raise it’ was, for the greater part of the century, a religious matter, at least in the sense that the language that stirred the passions of the mob was religious language: the cry that brought out the crowds was that priests were unchaste, or simoniacal or corrupt, a whole generation and more before it became effective to raise the shout for a commune, or against the Jews, or towards the holy places.

The Birth of Heresy: A Millennial Phenomenon

“…38 The peace thus, even if for only a brief moment of years, but twice in four decades, transformed what had been a site of social contest -the prime divider between elites and commoners -into one that became a site of social cooperation. In the formula "social peace, freedom, and abundance" so eloquently articulated by Glaber about 1033 and seconded in his own clumsy way by Ademar, we find the nurseries of the communes, rural and urban, 39 the essarts, the new towns and markets, the papal reform and legal revolution, 40 the universities, the mass pilgrimages. And in the authoritarian and paranoid abreactions of an apocalyptically insecure leadership (new or old), threatened by the advance of a culture that clipped their wings, we find the hysterical anti-semitism, the crusading rages, the inquisi-torial nightmare.…”

“The Economics of Reform in the Middle Ages”

“…Fliche further argues that the ideas essential to Gregory VII's program cannot be found in Cluniac literature. Monastic reform never included a plan for widespread ''religious regeneration'' developed under Gregory VII (42). Fliche describes Cluny's contribution to the formation of Gregorian ideas as two-fold: first, the Cluniac congregation put forth the question of moral reform, which brought to the forefront the practices of simony and nicolaitism; second, the Cluniac model with its strong centralized organization served as an example for Gregory VII when he sought to reassert the connections between the secular Church and the Holy See (60).…”

“…John Howe,38 Maureen Miller,39 Greta Austin,40 and Kathleen Cushing 41 have all made similar claims. There are a number of recent articles and monographs on the initiatives of local bishops, and R. I. Moore has shown how the mobilization of the populus directly influenced reform as well, 42 as do studies on the Pataria, a later eleventh-century movement based in Milan and directed toward the misuse of ecclesiastical resources caused by clerical marriage and simony. 43 This perspective particularly benefits the study of economics and reform because only on the ground can we see the economic repercussions of episcopal initiatives and papal legislation.…”

Untitled

“…73 How did this effect the view of the local Christian community who faithfully gave tithes, alms, and gifts to the church, but which were diverted to sustain a priest's family? 74 Even though canons and ecclesiastical laws decreed by church authorities directly influenced the decisions and rights of clerical offspring, they also affected the influences of the mothers of these children. Therefore, by stemming the rights of clerical offspring, church authorities were also stemming the influences of women involved with clergy, because these children, born out of unlawful, condemned relationships between women and clergy, directly contested the authority of church hierarchy.…”