Project team
Steffen Patzold examines the question of church property during the long tenth century through the lens of local priests and their dealings with the ownership of goods and land. From this angle, he provides a new analysis of the current model in which the possession of property is driven by the economic interest of lay magnates, only to be abolished as a result of the Gregorian reforms when lay control over ecclesiastical holdings was heavily criticised.
Charles is looking into the normative framework for rural priests, with particular attention to the emergence and dissemination of the Admonitio Synodalis, an anonymous but extremely popular and influential set of rules governing clerical conduct, whose earliest manuscripts date from the tenth century. The work effectively replaced the individualised Carolingian episcopal capitularies with a standard template, and was copied in scores of manuscripts across the continent.
Dr Alice Hicklin
(University of Edinburgh)
(University of Edinburgh)
Alice is exploring how ties of kinship between and amongst priests in tenth- and eleventh-century Europe can inform our understanding of local priests, and changing practices.
Alice most recently worked with PI David Natal on Connected Clerics: Building a Universal Church in the Late Antique West (380-640 CE) (2019–2021), and prior to that with PIs Stefan Esders, Maximilian Diesenberger, Sarah Hamilton, Matthias M. Tischler and Simon MacLean on After Empire: Using and Not Using the Past in the Crisis of the Carolingian World, c. 900-1050 (2016–19).
Bastiaan is working on manuscripts made for priests in the tenth and eleventh centuries. He focuses on the knowledge of priests in this period and how it developed between the surges of activity that were the Carolingian ‘reform’ efforts on the one hand, and the Gregorian reforms on the other. Central to his work are pastoral compendia and manuscripts used for the education of clergy, which provide an insight into the knowledge that was present at the level of the local church.
Marlene Wessel (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen)
Marlene is working as a student assistant on the project. She is studying history and French at the University of Tübingen. Her interests lie with medieval source material from France and the different methodological pathways to access them.
