Beschreibung
While monasticism is often seen as the definitive expression of early
medieval Christendom, it was in fact the episcopacy that served as the
cultic and political backbone of European society in the first millennium.
Despite their central role, however, bishops as a group have received far
less attention from modern scholars than other contemporary social and
religious institutions, such as monarchy, lay lordship, or reformed
monasticism. This book, therefore, is intended as an open invitation to a
more comparative, synthetic history of early medieval bishops and the
early medieval episcopacy. Written by scholars from a variety of
regional, theoretical, and disciplinary perspectives, it provides a rich
portrait of the political, religious, intellectual, and artistic
dimensions of the episcopacy around the year 1000, revealing the many ways
in which all roads led through the bishops, their churches, and their
institutions.
