Authority and Resistance in the Investiture Contest: The Polemical Literature of the Late Eleventh Century

A well-crafted study of a pamphlet war waged in the late 11th century between the supporters of the secular power and those of the papacy. The introduction gives a history of scholarly definition of the Investiture Contest, a survey of the surviving polemical literature, and a good summary of the political situation in the Empire. The first two chapters consider the polemic in behalf of Gregory VII and Henry IV. A new advance is made in showing the degree of Gregory VII's indebtedness to the thought of Gregory I. As interesting is the portrayal of the manner in which the schismatic cardinals turned the fruits of Roman canonical research against Gregory. The next two chapters deal with the literature for and against the regnum. Robinson shows the extent to which canonical texts originally intended to describe the powers of the episcopal office were used by Henrician polemicists to define royal rights. The ambiguity in the Gregorian ideas about kingship, which fluctuated between seeing royal power as originating in greed and conceiving the king as typus Christi, is explored against the background of assumptions about kingship held by both sides in the dispute. Final chapters consider the role of local issues in determining the polemic of those imperial bishops who were caught between king and pope in their allegiances, and 12th-century Bamberg codices on investiture. --The late 11th century witnessed the first major conflict between the Church and the secular power in Western Europe. For centuries churchmen and kings had enjoyed a relationship of harmonious cooperation, kings protecting the persons and property of the clergy, churchmen conferring legitimacy on royal government. In the 1070s, to the bewilderment of many contemporaries, churchmen began to preach rebellion against royal government, and the Salian king of Germany and Italy, the most powerful ruler of the West, sought to depose the Pope and punish churchmen who opposed royal control over the Church...