Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Aus dem Klappentext

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Two Churches: England and Italy in the Thirteenth Century, With an additional essay by the Author.

University of California Press

In November 1237, as heavy winds blew and black tower-like clouds formed and the planets were said to be gathering together under the sign of Capricorn, the cardinal legate Otto sat on a high seat raised in the west end of Saint Paul's in London and presided over a council of the church in England. The prelates of England, tired and peeved by the winter roads and the legate's insistence, gathered together around and beneath the cardinal's throne.1 It was, in the long run of the century, a remarkably, a surprisingly, successful council. The legate preached from the text "And in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts, full of eyes before and behind."2 And to this text succeeding English prelates were as a sea of glass. The English bishops of the later thirteenth century were—as close as their political humanity could come to it—the ideally vigilant bishops of the reformed Roman church of Innocent III's Lateran Council of 1215, reasserted and made pointedly local by Otto's London council with its flaming text.

Otto was one of a series of thirteenth-century Roman legates who, in their persons, brought the elevating connection of Rome to England.3 Otto's most distinguished successor, Otto-

Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora , ed. H. R. Luard, Rolls Series (London, 1872-1883), III, 414-420.

Ibid. , 419; Revelations 4:6; the canons (glossed) of Otto's council may be found in Constitutiones Legatinae . . . D. Othonis et D. Othoboni Cardinalium . . . (Oxford, 1679), 3-73, printed with William Lyndwood's Provinciale ; they are also printed in David Wilkins, Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae (London, 1737), I, 649-656. (Also see F. M. Powicke and C. R. Cheney, Councils and Synods with Other Documents Relating to the English Church , II. i [Oxford, 1964], 237-259.)

For legates to England through Guala (1216-1218) see Helene Tillmann, Die päpstlichen Legaten in England bis zur Beendigung der Legation Gualas (1218) (Bonn, 1926); it is hoped that this book will do something toward substantiating the extravagant claim for the English bishops; I think that my estimate's being higher than, say, that of Miss Gibbs' and Miss Lang's book is due to my looking at English bishops in comparison with the bishops of another church: cf. Marion Gibbs and Jane Lang, Bishops and Reform, 1215-1272 (Oxford, 1934), 174-179.

buono Fieschi, later briefly Pope Hadrian V, scion of a brilliant but morally rather ambiguous Genoese-papal family, caught the wracked England of the 1260's and helped to raise it toward the ideal of the Christian feudal kingdom.4 Otto's predecessor, Nicholas, cardinal bishop of Tusculum, had, in 1213, with an Italian Cistercian abbot in his train, descended upon the abbey of Evesham and rid it of Roger Norreys, its disgustingly immoral abbot, who had been plundering it and deforming it for years.5 These men cut through petty local boundaries and fought to make the universal church work. They were, at their best, great men of high purpose, and their most serious work knew no nationality.

In the spring of 1238 the legate Otto came to Oxford and stayed in the abbey at Osney. His presence and that of his Italian, trans-Alpine, Roman household excited the clerks of Oxford to nationalist riot. The riot started, according to Matthew Paris, with the raised Roman voice of an Italian porter.6 The riot of Oxford and the council of London, it must with difficulty be remembered, circled around the same man. The international church of the thirteenth century was also for the most part an Italian church; and the presence of the international church's representatives in England meant the presence of Italian clerks who had been brought up in its ways and taught to think in its terms—although it is possible that some

For Ottobuono see particularly F. M. Powicke, King Henry III and the Lord Edward (Oxford, 1947), I, 246 n. I; II, 557-558, 562-563; for Ottobuono's unpopularity because of his connection with the tenth of 1266, ibid. , II, 559-561.

Chronicon Abbatiae de Evesham , ed. W. D. Macray, Rolls Series (London, 1863), 230-256, particularly 250; for the legate Giovanni of Ferentino's activities, C. R. Cheney, "The Papal Legate and English Monasteries in 1206," English Historical Review , XLVI (1931), 443-452; and "Cardinal John of Ferentino, Papal Legate in England in 1206," English Historical Review , LXXVI (1961), 654-660.

Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora , III, 482; and see Powicke, Henry III , I, 353, and Dorothy M. Williamson, "Some Aspects of the Legation of Cardinal Otto in England, 1233-41," English Historical Review , LXIV (1949), 145-173, particularly 171-173.

of them, perhaps Guala or Ottobuono, prepared no doubt by the pervasive thought of Paris, may have come to prefer the ways of the English church.

Just before the beginning of the century a sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued monk and proctor from Christ Church, John Bremble, wrote back to Canterbury to tell the monks at home what the curia, in which they had become involved, was like. "This I'll tell you," he wrote, "at Rome I have found all Romans, and the pope [Clement III, Paolino Scolare] is a Roman, both by birth and by type."7

John Bremble meant that the pope was greedy. Greed is the quality that Matthew Paris most constantly connected with Italians. Matthew created, in his Chronica Majora , an intensely and critically observed England-centered world for the years from 1235 to 1259, and in it he watched Otto at last set sail from Dover leaving a kingdom desolated by him as a vineyard might have been by a wild boar. Matthew's Otto had, with quadruple greed, extorted English money and dispersed English livings for himself and for the pope.8 Greed and nationalism are both major themes in Matthew's work; and Matthew is particularly interesting on the international church as an Italian church because it upset him in both guises. He was made intensely uncomfortable by any sort of central reform that threatened or might seem to threaten the heavy properties of the rich houses of the old religious orders, and he was a xenophobe. Directly and in quotation Matthew's sulphurous billows of disturbed image find bellow-mouths and sponge-bellies at Rome and Italian spies poking into and discovering the secret treasury of England.

Matthew was, however, not more concerned than Robert Grosseteste. Grosseteste, from 1235 to 1253 the scholar bishop of Lincoln, of all bishops most thoughtfully aware of the pastoral function and like Stephen Langton the mirror of thirteenth-century episcopal excellence, found the provided Italian

Epistolae Cantuarienses (vol. 11 of Chronicles and Memorials of the Reign of Richard I ), ed. William Stubbs, Rolls Series (London, 1865), 194.

Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora , IV, 84-85; for a considerably fuller discussion of Matthew Paris as historian see Chapter V, below.

and the Italian legate a threat to the cure of souls and to the integrity of ecclesiastical administration.9 The careful, painful letters with which Grosseteste tried, in obedience, to resist Otto's provisions have none of Matthew's facility and bombast.10 They preserve a quite different...