RT Book
T1 Bishops and the Politics of Patronage in Merovingian Gaul
A1 Halfond, Gregory I
LA English
PP Ithaca, NY
PB Cornell University Press
YR 2019
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1678152927
AB Following the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire, local Christian leaders were confronted with the problem of how to conceptualize and administer their regional churches. As Gregory Halfond shows, the bishops of post-Roman Gaul oversaw a transformation in the relationship between church and state. He shows that by constituting themselves as a corporate body, the Gallic episcopate was able to wield significant political influence on local, regional, and kingdom-wide scales.Gallo-Frankish bishops were conscious of their corporate membership in an exclusive order, the rights and responsibilities of which were consistently being redefined and subsequently expressed through liturgy, dress, physical space, preaching, and association with cults of sanctity. But as Halfond demonstrates, individual bishops, motivated by the promise of royal patronage to provide various forms of service to the court, often struggled, sometimes unsuccessfully, to balance their competing loyalties. However, even the resulting conflicts between individual bishops did not, he shows, fundamentally undermine the Gallo-Frankish episcopate's corporate identity or integrity. Ultimately, Halfond provides a far more subtle and sophisticated understanding of church-state relations across the early medieval period
AB Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Map -- Introduction -- 1. Episcopal Service to the Court -- 2. Royal Patronage and Its Benefits -- 3. Unity in Disunity: The Limits of Corporate Solidarity -- 4. Disunity in Unity: Territorial Integration and Its Effects -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index
NO restricted access online access with authorization star
CN BX1905
SN 9781501739323
K1 Episcopacy : History
K1 Church and state : Gaul
K1 Bishops : Political activity : Gaul
K1 Bishops : Gaul : Temporal power
K1 Merovingians
K1 France : Politics and government : To 987
K1 HISTORY / Medieval
DO 10.7591/9781501739323