For nearly a century historians have grappled with the problem of how best to characterise the political, social and perhaps especially ecclesiastical change that occurred in Western Europe during the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Classic narratives alternatively saw this period as the beginnings of the ‘commercial revolution’, the ‘crisis of Church and State’, the ‘Investiture Controversy’ and, most especially, as the ‘Gregorian reform’. More recent interpretations have questioned such overarching grand narratives and have suggested that local, regional studies better convey a historical understanding of change, whilst others have explored ecclesiastical reform (and the so-called Gregorian reform) as one element through which broader political and especially social change can be witnessed. Still others have looked to challenge the problematic presented by the older periodisation and have sought to understand historical change and continuity by seeing this epoch as the end of a post-Carolingian world. In this new volume Mary Stroll focuses on popes and antipopes from Clement ii (1046–7) to Gregory vii (1073–85) chiefly as political figures in an effort to investigate what motivated their actions as well as those of their supporters and opponents. She thus in many ways returns to the earlier model of the crisis of Church and State by characterising reform as just one factor that led to a diminution of imperial sacral authority and the creation of a papal monarchy (p. 8).

The volume employs a chronological approach and over fifteen chapters Stroll focuses chiefly on the fortunes of and relationship between the German empire and the papacy, whilst also assessing the roles of other key protagonists such as the Normans in southern Italy, Duke Godfrey of Lotharingia and the house of Canossa, the Roman nobility, the German and northern Italian episcopate and other regional power networks. In chapters i and ii she examines the nature of imperial authority over papal elections and the intervention of Henry iii in the papal succession following the synod of Sutri in 1046. Chapters iii and iv address the pontificates of Leo ix (1049–54), Victor ii (1055–7) and Stephen ix (1057–8), the nature of their elections and relations with the German court and beyond. In chapter v, Stroll turns to the contested election following Stephen ix's death and examines the range of interests involved in the elections of the antipope Benedict x and Pope Nicholas ii. Chapters vi–viii concern the pontificate of Nicholas ii (1058–61), his rapprochement with the Normans and Duke Godfrey and the papal election decree of 1059. Chapters ix and x respectively assess the elections of Alexander ii (1061–73) and the antipope Cadalus of Parma, whom Stroll argues was a more pernicious threat than has previously been underlined in the historiography. Chapters xi–xiii address the political developments in the empire resulting from the coup at Kaiserwerth which saw the young Henry iv come under the control of Archbishop Anno of Cologne and the shifting political alliances that developed, dissolved and redeveloped during the papal schism up to and including the Council of Mantua in 1064 where Alexander ii's claims to legitimacy were upheld. Chapters xiv–xv examine what Stroll characterises as the political instability and ambivalence in the empire and beyond that followed from Mantua especially after Henry iv came to his maturity. In the conclusion, Stroll assesses the end of schism by briefly examining the pontificate of Gregory vii.

Stroll is interested in presenting a far more complex picture of eleventh-century ecclesiastical politics up to the pontificate of Gregory vii by emphasising the ‘contradictions and dissonance’ in the policies and motives of all the important personae (p. xiii). As a consequence she does not simply focus on the relationship of individual popes with the German kings and court, but does well to incorporate a range of interested parties and protagonists such as the Normans, Duke Godfrey, the Byzantine Empire and especially the antipopes. These latter in particular have not figured as prominently in recent historiography in English although they have been the subject of attention from previous German and Italian scholarship which is usefully brought together and analysed here for an Anglo-phone audience. Informed by very detailed readings of an excellent range of primary sources, Stroll builds up a portrait of the range of interests of a large number of protagonists to whom matters of reform, tradition and rights mattered deeply. Yet, in seeking to cover so much and to flesh out the far from straightforward narrative, some sections feel like vignettes particularly given her source-led approach (these are often paraphrased at length) and there is also some repetition and some digressions, for example the long discussion on the coronation ceremony of Nicholas ii, and the two versions of the papal election decree (pp. 96ff). I am also less persuaded that sixteenth-century authors such as the Augustinian canon Panvinius offer as much insight as she contends. More problematic for this reviewer is that whilst Stroll does explicitly recognise the limitations of her often blatantly polemical (and later) sources along with the later commentators, there is a sense that she does read them as transparent accounts. Benzo of Alba is a case in point. Despite his own claims to be a key player, he was obscure in his own time and goes virtually unnamed in other contemporary sources. His Ad Henricum IV, written over several decades but brought together in a final revised form c. 1085, clearly is, as Stroll discusses, a key text for the events of the Cadalan schism for which other accounts are almost entirely lacking. But Benzo's problematic and deeply partisan portrayal of Hildebrand/Gregory vii spills over into Stroll's analysis to the extent that the scurrilous tales of his theft, extortion and poisoning of his predecessors are presented, perhaps not as fact, but as viable readings.

Ironically in the end, for all her fine work at underlining the range of individuals and motives that contributed to ecclesiastical and political developments in Italy and Germany from c. 1046 onwards, we are left with the dominance of Hildebrand/Gregory vii who is frequently described as ‘clearly in charge’. Not only was he the architect of every papal succession and indeed ‘the controller of the papacy’ from the time of Nicholas ii, but Stroll portrays him as the creator of a theocracy that destabilised both the empire and the papacy (for example pp. 149, 247). Whilst Benzo of Alba certainly would have agreed, Stroll's characterisation of an all-powerful Hildebrand brings us back to a ‘great man’ grand narrative.