Being a fruit of many years of research, The Latin Church in Norman Italy is a true gem of scholarship by a distinguished scholar who has already published extensively on medieval southern Italy. It is a volume that packs in an enormous amount of original research and knowledge and is a great resource for both historians of medieval Italy and of the medieval Church and religion.

At the time of the Norman conquest of southern Italy, while the mainland south consisted of predominantly Greek-rite Christians, the island of Sicily had a majority population of Muslims. Hence, the Normans were faced with the task of establishing and strengthening the Latin Church amid the followers of the Eastern Church and of Islam. This was quite a different task than the one early medieval rulers had embarked on among the pagans of northern Europe. As Loud writes in the introduction, “If one fundamental theme can be identified in the history of Southern Italy under the Norman Rulers, it would probably be the growing predominance of the Latin Church” (4) and, in 577 pages, he tells precisely the account of the rise of the Latin Church in Norman Italy at a time when the Roman Church itself was going through very significant changes.

Loud starts by setting the scene with an account of the institutional Church and monasteries in southern Italy before the Normans. We are confronted with a region of “cultural, linguistic and religious confusion” (15) that remained politically unstable before the coming of the Normans, suffering from the invasions of Lombards, Muslims, and the occasional alliances of the German kings and local princes against the Byzantine rule. The survey of monastic establishments in this period concentrates more around a few great ones like Montecassino or St. Vincent on Volturno, whose extensive lands made them a popular attraction to the Muslim invaders. The Latin episcopal organization still had a long way to go, due to competition from the better established Byzantine Church.

The Norman conquest in the first half of the eleventh century, the subject of the second chapter of the book, had both positive and negative aspects with regard to the Church in southern Italy. Initially, it was so destructive to both the old monastic establishments and papal lands that Pope Leo IX found the remedy in a military expedition against Normans in 1053 that resulted in the defeat of the papal forces. The papal recognition given to Robert Guiscard afterward, however, slowly changed the Norman relations with the Church. In fact, the second half of the chapter presents Normans as founders, patrons, and endowers of monasteries. While Loud suggests that this was not just due to spiritual motives, he does not get into a discussion of what other possible reasons might have affected such benevolence and patronage.

Certainly, the papacy figures largely in any discussion of the Church in southern Italy, and Loud devotes two separate chapters to this subject, exploring the symbiotic relationship between the papacy and the Norman rulers, as well as between the papacy and the Church in Norman Italy. The reforming popes of the eleventh century paid many visits to the South, which sometimes took the form of a refuge, and Norman rulers used their alliance with the popes to legitimize their rule, although Loud is careful to iterate that they had in no sense depended on such approval. Both of these chapters are of great interest to scholars studying the Church reforms of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as southern Italy makes a perfect case study of the ambitions of reforming popes.

In the last chapter, titled “Latins, Greeks and non-Christians,” Loud surveys interactions between the Greek and Latin clergy, which testifies to his argument that “whatever the theological problems that sometimes complicated relations between Rome and Constantinople, both Latins and Greeks still considered themselves to be part of the same Church” (500). The accounts of the conversions of Muslims to Christianity, and Muslim officials in the Norman palaces who were only nominally Christians, are of great interest.

The other chapters in the book are titled “The Kings of Sicily and the Church,” “The Church and Military Obligation,” “The Secular Church,” and “Monasticism.” In the conclusion, Loud reads the bitter fallout of Frederick II and Innocent III as an anticlimax of a “golden” period of a warm relationship forged between the kings of Sicily and the papacy, particularly after the Treaty of Benevento in 1156 (524).

Overall, The Latin Church in Norman Italy is a marvelous read, written in consistently clear prose, full of interesting detail and anecdotes. The volume comes with an impressive bibliography featuring primary sources of the greatest variety, particularly rich in chronicles, six appendices, and a subject index. Perhaps the only desideratum on the part of the reader is a separate chapter surveying what is now fashionably called “popular religion.” While Loud covers the institutional church and monastic organization most admirably, it would have been nice to know whether the heterogeneity of religious establishments in southern Italy gave way to some pious practices peculiar to its Christian inhabitants, or whether the surviving sources allow an in-depth study on this topic at all. Nonetheless, this is a book that will deservedly be mined by scholars of diverse interests for many generations.