RT Article
T1 The Simony Crisis of the Eleventh Century and the ‘Letter of Guido’
JF The journal of ecclesiastical history
VO 73
IS 2
SP 229
OP 253
A1 West, Charles
LA English
PB Cambridge Univ. Press
YR 2022
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1806555662
AB The Epistola Widonis, or ‘Letter of Guido’, is a key source for the simony debates of the eleventh century, since it is usually considered the first major text to cast doubt on the validity of simoniacal ordinations. After examining the grounds for the letter's conventional dating to c. 1031 and attribution to Guido of Arezzo, this article makes the case for instead locating the letter's origins in the 1060s, and explores the implications of a re-dating for the dynamics of the eleventh-century ‘moral panic’ about simony.
DO 10.1017/S0022046921000063