Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
The church of Cambrai sat at the heart of a region whose religious and political life illuminates very well some of the key tensions and developments of the 11th century - itself an axial period in medieval European history. The imperial church remains an important topic for students looking at the relationship between church and state in this period - still, despite changing historiographical fashions, a key problem. Cambrai offers an especially illuminating case-study in the position of imperial bishops at a time when Church reform was beginning to call traditional claims and assumptions into question. The region was an economically vibrant one, and one in which other major political powers, such as the countship of Flanders, were on the rise: Cambrai was the opposite of a backwater, and that fact assures the importance of chronicles produced there in the period. However, the source-text, which is very rich and detailed, also has insights to offer in a range of other major fields, including the practice of medieval warfare, the impact of external attacks on Latin Europe, and the cult of saints and their relics, as well as having important things to say about 11th-century conceptions of social order."
Synopsis
First commissioned by Bishop Gerard I of Cambrai (1012-1051) in 1023 or 1024, the Gesta episcoporum Cameracensium was the work of two authors, the second of whom completed the text shortly after the death of Bishop Gerard. The three books of the Gesta shed considerable light on the policies and actions of many of the key political and religious figures in an economically and intellectually vibrant region on the frontier between the German and French kingdoms. The Deeds of the Bishops of Cambrai, translated in this volume into English for the first time, provides unique insights into the relationship between the German king and the bishops within the context of the so-called imperial church system, the rise of both secular and ecclesiastical territorial lordships, the conduct of war, the cult of the saints, monastic reform, and evolving conceptions of the proper social order of society. Including extensive commentary, apparatus of explanatory notes, maps, genealogies, this text will be of considerable value both in undergraduate and graduate courses as well as to scholars.