These essays were first delivered in 2015 at the celebrated Power of the Bishop conference. Papers that seek to reveal bishops’ personalities and do so often in their exercise of power inevitably argue for episcopal agency. Readers of this volume will thus discover at least some of the range of episcopal activity in medieval Europe. That is especially the case because, as some of the contributors remark, often the only evidence of what bishops’ personalities were is what bishops did. Indeed, some of the contributions treat the life course of a bishop and his personality as nearly interchangeable.
Many things could influence what bishops did. Arguing that personality was at work in their deeds can mean sifting out possible alternative influences; the residue can thus be regarded as the bishop’s personality. Such is the approach Mercedes López-Mayán takes to two fifteenth-century pontificals commissioned by Archbishop Alfonso Carrillo de Acuña of Toledo. Her sensitive analysis of the illuminations and text leads her to conclude that the first manuscript was revised and completed for Carrillo, so only the second entirely reflects his desires. Those desires seem to have been rooted in an admiration of both French and Castilian decorative styles: neither tradition fully explains the second manuscript, so one must turn to Carrillo himself to do so (assuming, of course, that Carrillo closely directed his illuminator). This conclusion is reinforced by the inclusion of Carrillo’s heraldic emblem--not at this point a Castilian practice.
What about bishops’ actions other than as patrons? Kyle Lincoln finds bishops driving the reform of their cathedral chapters ca. 1200 in the ecclesiastical province of Toledo. He is cautious about attributing these reforms to these bishops’ personalities--not really recoverable beyond their actions themselves--but he can at least say that his bishops wanted these reforms, or at least largely did. Lincoln also argues that capitular reform was at least in part a result of bargaining. Bishops wanted various reforms. Chapters wanted reforms that would bring them greater financial security (e.g., by eliminating the portioning out of prebends, a topic which Lincoln expects to explore further elsewhere) and authority in the see. Both sides got at least some of what they wanted. Although Lincoln does not explicitly point to a personality trait here, it does look his bishops were compromisers or at least manipulative.
Antonio Antonetti is less tentative on the personality question. He argues that Bishop William II of Troia’s combative nature was central to his building up Troia’s political independence from Norman Sicily as well as centralizing his see’s finances, rebuilding the cathedral, and bringing the local liturgy in line with Roman practice. While Antonetti is able to make delicate use of some evidence to get at the image this bishop tried to project, and so to recover his personality in that way, that evidence is thin compared with the evidence of William’s actions. It is primarily there that he finds a pugilistic, ambitious man.
It can be hard for historians to tell whether they are looking at a bishop’s actual personality or that personality as constructed (invented?) by some medieval writer or by the larger culture. Mónika Belucz’s examination of the monk-bishop Gerard of Csanád illustrates the problem. Belucz has two later vitae of this saint with which to show how Gerard’s life was used to deal with the shortage of saints in early Christian Hungary compared with old Chistian Europe. Hungarians could catch up by casting Gerard in the molds of the educated aristocratic bishop saint, the ascetic monastic saint, and the missionary and martyr saint--fulfilling three older models in one! But Belucz also holds that hagiographers latched onto Gerard because his varied career and background--noble family, educated man, monk, missionary, and martyr--which she reads as denoting his personality, lent themselves to these models. Indeed, she writes that Gerard’s “noble birth would not only influence his level of education and connections but also his notion of bishopric and idea of a virtuous life as an ascetic” (128).
This kind of ambiguity between a model of sanctity on the one hand, and the actual life course or personality of a bishop on the other, marks Ian Bass’s discussion of two bishop saints: Thomas Becket and the late-thirteenth-century Thomas Cantilupe. Bass argues that Becket set a model for English saint bishops: stand up against the king, suffer for it, but also be a good pastor. (That last element may not be traditionally seen as a major element of Becket’s image; I wish Bass made the case in more detail than appears here in a throwaway line that Becket preached [174].) The pastoral element in the Becket model is part of Bass’s case that Cantilupe was the perfect embodiment of the Becket model. Cantilupe was very much concerned with the pastoral care. And he was at odds with his king (albeit, Bass observes, before he became bishop). One might add that he was a doughty warrior for the rights of his church (in his case against the archbishop of Canterbury), just as Becket was for those of the Church. Perhaps more broadly it could be observed that they were both men of public affairs, acting on principle and undergoing adversity for it. Perhaps that was the Becket model. More explicitly than Belucz, Bass sees these models as shaping episcopal behavior (162).
Brian A. Pavlac takes a similar approach to prince-bishops of the twelfth-century empire. In a very nice discussion of sources and their themes, he identifies three personality types--one may also say models--to be found in episcopal vitae or gesta: the scholar, the saint, and the warrior. His examination of three actual examples of such prince-bishops (one of them Albaro of Trier, who inspires the title of this piece) concludes that any of these personalities could produce a successful bishop. (It might have been helpful to produce here a working definition of “success.” Indeed, Pavlac’s scholar bishop, Otto of Freising does not appear to have met much success in the kinds of endeavors undertaken by the warrior Albaro of Trier.)
Otto of Freising is a reminder that bishops were often intellectuals, intellectuals who often left writings of their own that illuminate personality, at least as understood as interests or commitments. Such work provides fodder for Andrew Buck’s examination of William of Tyre’s history of the crusader states. Buck finds that William manipulated his history in order to stress the importance of legitimacy to claims to power and to defend the prestige of the kingdom of Jerusalem. That agenda does not, Buck shows, make his history untrustworthy in all things. William grounded his vocabulary regarding important men at Antioch in that of Antiochene documents of practice rather than impose a lexicon, unlike the writer Walter the Chancellor. Moreover, other sources confirm William’s views on requirements of military service at Antioch, a point that also corrects existing historiography.
Jack P. Cunningham is able to take this sort of inquiry further. Robert Grosseteste’s work as an intellectual left a very large body of material. Cunningham handily demonstrates the role of Pseudo-Dionysian ideas about hierarchy in his thought, in particular, theosis, in which those immediately below God acquire divine characteristics, and thus make it possible for those immediately below them to do so too, and so on. This conception also means that those above in the hierarchy are responsible for leading those below them to experience this sort of divinization. Thus, Cunningham argues, while Grosseteste’s uncompromising stance on the pastoral care and his own authority can be read as stemming from a truculent belligerence, it really should be seen as a result of his intellectual commitments. It takes nothing away from this argument to acknowledge that attempts to join Grosseteste’s theology with his work as bishop are indeed not without precedent.
Christine Axen deploys a similar strategy regarding another thirteenth-century bishop: Zoen Tencarari of Avignon. Zoen was also perceived as being a harsh man, heavy-handed in his governance of the diocese. Unfortunately, he did not leave the wealth of writings that benefits a student of Grosseteste, but his gloss on the papal decretals collected in the Compilatio Quinta does survive. In addition, Axen finds contemporary praise for his legal learning, and a concern to encourage clergy of his see to study at Bologna evidenced in his will. Axen uncovers no specific doctrines in such evidence like those found by Cunningham. She instead concludes that Zoen’s legal interests suggest something more like what most people think of as personality: in this case, character traits such as deliberativeness and circumspection. To Axen, Zoen’s actions as bishop, often characterized as simply combative, were instead the kind of “thoughtful, calculated wagers” (97) that a legal scholar would make.
Of course, larger forces influenced episcopal action and so modern attempts to recover episcopal personality by examining action. That lesson can be drawn from Sam Janssens’ consideration of the Peace of God in the ecclesiastical province of Reims in the first half of the eleventh century. Jansssens argues that the movement there operated on the cycle of six years established elsewhere, but in Reims’ case these cycles were initiated by bishops, starts that were then followed up by comital authority some some six years later. In this way, episcopal activity is set within the framework of a broader movement, although bishops did take the first step in bringing the Peace of God to the province.
Another approach to bishops’ personality is to bracket, or at least partly bracket, what bishops actually did or what their personalities actually were and focus on how their personalities were constructed by others. Thus, Adrea Vanina Neyra examines the very negative depiction in Thietmar of Merseburg’s Chronicle of Giselher, bishop of Merseburg (975-1018), as an ambitious cleric whose greed, Neyra stresses, Thietmar compares with that of the Slavs. Neyra also finds that this negative evaluation had some connection with Thietmar’s reality: that Giselher presided over the destruction of the see, a see which Thietmar had to rebuild, still with dangerous Slavs nearby.
In a similar vein, Radoslaw Kotecki and Jacek Maciejewski consider courage, a trait valued among the laity, in particular among Poland’s warrior aristocracy, as it applies in commentators’ discussion of twelfth-century Polish bishops. The anonymous author known as “Gallus” had plenty of opportunities to describe or depict bishops as courageous, but did not often take them. Gallus thus embraced reformist views stressing the distinction between laity and clergy. Gallus’s views contrast with those of Master Vincentius’ Chronica Polonorum. This earlier work reflects local and aristocratic views; its bishops, like its nobility, are courageous. Moreover, Vincentius explicitly condemns cowardice and even works to excuse one of his bishops from that charge. All this does not mean that Vincentius’s bishops are merely nobles in vestments. Rather, bishops were personae mixtae, with prayer as their chief weapon.
Sara Ellis Nilsson examines the images of Scandinavian bishops who interacted with saints, ca. 1000-1300. As bishops gained a greater role in determining whether a saint was a saint, they became more prominent in hagiography. Good bishops--who support saints--have all the virtues. Bad bishops--who did not support saints--were the reverse. Good or bad, bishops could be seen as manipulative; that trait was itself neither good nor bad, at least in a bishop.
Images can, of course, deceive. Paul Webster examines bishops who stood by King John of England in his conflict with archbishop and pope. Despite castigation by the chroniclers, they had the right personalities to faithfully administer their dioceses and seem to have been reasonably acquainted with scripture, to judge from the documents they produced. As Webster points out, the reputations of these bishops suffered because history was written by the victors in John’s ecclesiastical conflicts.
In their introduction, the editors consider various ways of defining “personality.” That discussion and the contributions to this volume point to how slippery a thing personality is when it comes to the Middle Ages and to how hard constructs can be to distinguish from actual fact. Such are the valuable lessons to be had from this diverse collection of articles, for which readers should be grateful.
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Note:
1. I have in mind here R.W. Southern, Robert Grosseteste: The Growth of an English Mind in Medieval Europe, second edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) and Philippa Hoskin’s work published after the conference at which the present collection of papers was delivered, albeit before their publication: Robert Grosseteste and the 13th-Century Diocese of Lincoln: An English Bishop’s Pastoral Vision (Leiden: Brill, 2019).