Before the Gregorian Reform

John Howe’s avowed aim is to ‘reinsert the history of the Church into the story of the rise of the West’ (p. 6). He presents a history of the tenth- and eleventh-century Church (in his phrase, ‘the millennial church’), starting with the decline of Carolingian rule and the destruction of churches and religious houses by pagan invaders in particular, at the end of the ninth century, and ending with the pontificate of Leo IX—although he also includes material from the second half of the eleventh century. His argument is that ‘the destruction the Latin West experienced turned out to have been creative destruction’ (p. 3), followed as it was by a ‘great medieval revival’ (p. 5) manifest in both the re-invigoration in the physical estates and spiritual lives of churches across the medieval West in the years before 1050. But he goes beyond this to suggest that the monastic reforms, spiritual asceticism and growth in scholastic education in the years 1050–1200, which Giles Constable described as the ‘twelfth-century reformation’, also have origins in this period. In doing so he builds on a good deal of recent research which emphasises the deep roots of later developments, and draws attention to the diversity and vitality of religious life at this time. Here ecclesiastical research in fact follows that of political and socio-economic historians who similarly recognise the developments of the long twelfth century as having earlier origins. Howe has thus erected something of a straw man. Nevertheless, there is as yet no study which brings together the different developments in church history in the long tenth century in quite the way he has done, combining conventional textual with material history

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