Nearly five years ago, John Ott first published his study of the formation, coherence, and transmission of bishops’ authority throughout the province of Reims from the mid-eleventh century to the mid-twelfth. Two years later, Cambridge University Press issued a paperback edition of Ott's work. Unfortunately, despite the existence of two editions, it has not been widely reviewed—even by this journal—until now. Ott's study merits careful reading and appreciation because of the important contribution it makes and, indeed, the exemplary model it sets for reconstructing and understanding episcopal culture within a particular region during the central Middle Ages.
Most simply put, the central question driving Ott's study is what did it mean to be a bishop during the so-called Gregorian reforms, roughly spanning the century between Pope Leo IX's council at Saint-Remi in October 1049 and Pope Eugenius III's general council in 1148—a period of intense and pervasive social, religious, and institutional changes promoted by the papacy and its supporters. From the outset, however, Ott avoids labeling individual bishops with the terms “reformer” or “reformist.” Such appellations, he argues, tend to obscure the many different and often local influences that shaped bishops’ identities and actions as individuals and as collectives. He is interested instead in articulating what he calls “a regional ecclesiology of episcopal office, that is, a set of ideas and values concerning church stewardship and episcopal conduct that resonated with the social, religious, and political transformations catalysing the civic and clerical communities of northern France and Flanders on either side of 1100” (16). To this end, Ott focuses on the bishops in the province of Reims because of the prominent position of its archbishop (he was responsible for consecrating the kings of France), its large size (twelve dioceses in 1050 and fourteen by 1150), its geographical location bordering the German kingdom, and the rich repositories of evidence still extant in its diocesan archives. Ott has clearly spent many years digging through and carefully studying these repositories. This is medievalist spadework at its best. He culls a variety of sources—prescriptive (e.g., canon law collections, conciliar degrees, and treatises on pastoral care), liturgical (e.g., pontificals and psalters), and narrative (e.g., letters, sermons, charters, annals, gesta, saints’ lives, and miracle collections)—in order to profile the episcopate in Reims in its idealized and actual forms.
In the eight chapters that follow his introduction, Ott articulates both the universal and particular features of bishops’ identities in Reims, arguing in chapters 2–4, 8, and 9 that they “possessed a recognizable, professional homogeneity, and that they often—though by no means uniformly—spoken in a shared historical and symbolic language about the duties and qualities of their office” (22) and in chapters 5–7 that “whatever commonalities contemporary prelates shared, each diocese possessed a collection of places, social groups, memories, and histories unique to itself, in whose context bishops crafted usable visions of their office, authority, and role in their local communities” (22). In chapter 2, he examines the social and cultural formation of bishops, mainly those who were secular clergy. He details their professional background, social status, and education and highlights how bishops’ commitments to the reform efforts affected their relationships with the cathedral chapters through which they usually climbed the ranks of officers. In chapter 3, he seeks to capture the responses of bishops to “the dilemmas and opportunities” presented by some of the larger societal changes witnessed during the long twelfth century: changing fashions of dress, wandering monks and preachers, and popular movements (e.g., relic delations, pilgrimages, crusades, and communes) (71). In chapter 4, he builds on his work in chapter 2 to trace the bonds of solidarity uniting the bishops of Reims, specifically those that were forged at provincial councils and which converged around Lambert of Guines, bishop of Arras (1095–1115). Ott's findings challenge previous characterizations of the episcopate in the province as shaped primarily, or even exclusively, by the monarchy or the papacy and show instead that “the bishops shared concerns particular to their ordo and to the regional context in which they lived” (112). In chapters 5, 6, and 7, Ott provides case studies of bishops—Gervais, archbishop of Reims (1055–1067); Lietbert, bishop of Cambrai (1051–1076); and the bishops of Amiens from 1073 to 1164—which recount in exquisite detail how these prelates, each in ways determined by their locales, textually (re)inscribed, physically memorialized, spatially demarcated, and/or ritually celebrated the histories of their predecessors in order to secure and strengthen their authority against conflict and change. In chapters 8 and 9, Ott returns to studying the more homogenous features of episcopal identity in the province of Reims, carefully examining the texts its bishops likely read on the proper exercise of pastoral care in word (i.e., preaching) and in deed (i.e., laboring as paterfamilias).
Throughout his book, Ott repeatedly and effectively argues for the importance of conducting a regional study of a certain facet of religious life during the Middle Ages, especially for a period of time that has been, and continues to be, susceptible to universalizing historical narratives, such as the long twelfth century. I can only hope that other scholars take up the implicit charge of Ott's book: to endeavor similarly circumscribed investigations of episcopal culture in Europe during the Middle Ages, thereby expanding our knowledge of the normative ideals and lived experiences that constituted bishops’ identities and guided their care of souls.
