Although its subtitle sounds like that of a monograph, this volume is in fact a collection of ten articles by the late Brigide Schwarz, originally published in German between 1983 and 2018. Schwarz herself chose the articles for English translation while she was alive. Although the book is a collection, some important themes nevertheless bring together one or more of these pieces; indeed, these articles often cite other work of Schwarz, often in this volume. Why bring these articles together, and why translate them? The book’s editor and translator, Wolfgang P. Müller, explains that Schwarz’s work is largely unknown outside German scholarship. A quick look in Google Scholar confirms this. Consider the first essay. It is frequently cited, but nearly all the citations are by historians writing in German or writing in other languages but on German or Livonian topics. I myself can attest to what Müller says: I wish I had read some of these pieces before writing my own publications on benefices, even though they concern England in a somewhat earlier period. Indeed, Schwarz herself complains that work in German gets too little attention outside Germany.
Müller’s brief introduction does some important work. He sets up the larger historical context for Schwarz’s articles and also the archival and publication context in which she worked. He concludes with an appreciation of Schwarz’s strengths. He also draws out some larger themes from the articles. Since I cannot do a better job at this last than he does, I will largely follow his lead, amplifying certain points in ways that will also, I hope, give a more precise indication of the book’s contents.
Historians have long attended to the campaigns against simony that echoed from the Gregorian Reform into the Late Middle Ages. A concern of these essays is what Schwarz bluntly calls the “benefice market” (Essay 1) of the late Middle Ages, a usage that may raise eyebrows of some such historians. Schwarz acknowledges that rules against simony prohibited the sale of benefices, but makes a distinction here between canonically illegal sales, which she sees as a black market in benefices, and canonically valid sales (perhaps, to borrow from the economists, a better and neutral term for these might be “transfers,” a term Schwarz herself uses at one point [53]). The latter market, in Schwarz’s account, was very much centered in the papal curia in her period. The papacy’s well of grace (by, for example, dispensing for the requirement of a benefice-holder with cure of souls to be resident) and increasing claims to control over the bestowal of benefices (such as through papal provision), meant the papacy had both a large supply of benefices to give and plenty of petitioners seeking those benefices. These petitioners paid the fees for parchment work (and the douceurs to help things along) that served as a revenue source for the papacy, along with annates often paid from the benefice itself. A trade also developed in benefice futures, such as expectancies (promises to bestow benefices that might become available at a later date) and “resignations in favor of a third party” (the right of benefice holders to designate their successors, hence the term “vacable benefice”). These practices will be familiar to those acquainted with the papacy after ca. 1300, and even before.
Where Schwarz distinguishes herself is in uncovering the workings in the trade in such things. Markets work on information. The curia served as a center of information about what benefices were vacant and what benefices were likely to become so. The curia was a hive of such intelligence. So it was not only papal power to bestow benefices that made the curia the great market for benefices, but also the information that flowed into it. (One wonders whether, in this regard, papal surveys of the values of benefices for tax purposes, for all their inaccuracies, might have added to the curia’s attraction as an information hub.) In addition, those who gained benefices had to be prepared to face down competitors, both when it came to intrigue at the curia and in local courts. Both meant that instruments had to be carefully drafted, laden with maneuvers, in particular non obstante clauses, to head off possible challenges.
Schwarz’s examination of the curial benefice market, including as a center for information, allows her to discuss how that market responded to external shocks, in particular in Essay 5. So, for example, the Council of Basel functioned as a second benefice market, as clergy from all over Christendom, and so communication across all Christendom, intensified exchange of information about vacant benefices, although petitions for those benefices still had to go to the curia. The Council’s debate on eliminating the pope’s right to reserve vacancies to his own disposal triggered even more petitions for such reservations while they were still possible. Papal acceptance of secular pressure for local control of benefices, on the other hand, reduced the supply of those benefices in the curial marketplace. Another such external shock was the Schism of 1378-1417. It created two, then three, curial benefice markets, thus segmenting groups of clients and, in Schwarz’s view, facilitating the kind of clerical “rope teams” that concern her (Essay 7 and see below for more on rope teams). Schwarz also makes the instructive point that the rise of the “chopchurch” (a broker for clergy who wanted to exchange benefices) in England shows the transfer of one aspect of the curial market from the curia to that country, and so reinforces the thesis that the market is a useful concept when thinking about benefices.
Even bracketing secular pressures, the above conclusions do not mean that the curia controlled all. Aside from local challenges to papal provisions and deals with secular rulers, Schwarz’s case study of the career of Nicholas of Cusa shows a man getting his start, where benefices were concerned, from local patronage. But his ascent to the curia, and the cardinalate, gave him wider scope. He became a patron in his own right, using his influence in that benefice market to benefit his own hangers-on, what Schwarz calls his clients, among whom expectancies and resignations in favor of third parties were presumably the means by which benefices circulated among his clients. Schwarz identifies this phenomenon as having been common among the followings of great men at the curia. Here it might be noted that similar phenomena can be found, at least in England in at least the thirteenth century, even without benefit of such instruments. But such documents must have lubricated such transfers.
Thirteenth-century curial offices were not benefices. Such offices were, in theory, at the pope’s free disposal and, despite changes to be discussed below, they never carried the cure of souls. But I suspect it is Schwarz’s deep knowledge of the benefice market that positioned her to observe how late-medieval curial offices increasingly came to be modeled on the benefice and to be transferred in ways analogous to it, in turn creating a market for curial offices. Hence, as with benefices, some classes of curial officials were in the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries able to obtain dispensation from having to carry out their duties in person or able to obtain the ability to transfer their offices to third parties. They could also gain the right to hold their offices for life. That package made offices benefice-like. Schwarz also sees a tendency for such officers to organize into colleges (e.g., papal scribes, papal abbreviators, and papal couriers) as also a kind of tell betraying the “beneficization” (my ugly term) of curial offices, evidently on the model of others sorts of colleges of the beneficed, such as cathedral chapters (Essays 6-8). I am a little hesitant to follow her on this last point, as a tendency to define legal orders and corporations and their rights seems to have been a general one in the period. A point in her favor, however, is the practice of officials being assigned a share of the fees coming to the college; canons’ shares in a cathedral common is an analogue. In any case, on the larger point--beneficization--Schwarz is persuasive.
Moreover, although she is somewhat tentative on this point, she gives good reason to think that fifteenth-century French kings, in particular, began to model the rights of royal officials on those of curial officials, a practice which students of absolutism in the seventeenth century have studied as venality in offices (Essay 6). Hence, arguably, a common practice of early-modern European secular governments ultimately derives from the ecclesiastical benefice. In this regard, Müller makes explicit a nice point about curial officials (and by implication about the secular officials modeled on them): by selling offices that generated income to the buyer, popes were effectively selling bonds, making themselves the debtors of the very men who worked for them. When considering matters in this longue-ish durée, it may also be worth looking the other way, backward in time: a tendency to “privatize” (to use an anachronistic term) offices stretched many centuries before Schwarz’s period. The Gregorian Reform itself can be seen as an attempt, always only partially successful, to reverse that development. What Schwarz captures here is the latter part of that failure, which in turn made possible a vigorous marketization of the benefice and the offices modeled on it.
I have stressed benefices and their ramifications here because Schwarz does. But there are other matters. Schwarz’s deep knowledge of the curia’s operations is evident in her discussion of its procedures and the rights of its officials, no more so than of papal couriers, abbreviators, and scribes (Essays. 8-9). Readers can also learn about the ceremonial and ritual aspects of, among other things, the office of the papal vice chancellor (Essay 9).
While Schwarz is thus perfectly capable of describing offices and the rules that governed them, she was, at least as exhibited in this volume, very much a prosopographer. And prosopography’s stress on relations among individuals tends to dissolve institutions. That tendency is evident in her attitude toward the late-medieval curia. She comments that the papal vice-chancellor’s office grew to be “not unlike a modern bureaucracy [so bureaucratic in the sense of scale?], but which it did not resemble in any other respect” (267). A key to the contrast, in her view, is evidently the conduct of business: in the residences of the vice chancellors and--although she is a bit less clear about this--by hangers on, often household members, of the vice chancellors. One suspects that she would draw the same large conclusion about other aspects of curial administration.
I have focused on the big. But Schwarz also works on a smaller scale, drawing conclusions that will interest a range of scholars. To give some indication: recovering transfers of benefices allows Schwarz to explain a small explosion of clergy from Hanover occupying high ecclesiastical positions over much of northern Germany and Livonia between 1410 and 1460. Her detailed prosopographical analysis identifies a “rope team” of clergy from Hanover using their presence at the curia to support each other across generations to acquire benefices in these regions (Essay 3). Schwarz supplies a similar case study of the curial networks of Nanker, the fourteenth-century bishop of Kraków and Wroclaw (Essay 4). In several cases, her investigations, often prosopographical, allow her to correct historians’ accounts, sometimes based on medieval narrative sources, of various figures, from the famous to the lesser known. Thus, she makes the case for Nanker’s personal relationship with Pope John XXII in Nanker’s rise and debunks the case for Nanker’s study of canon law at Bologna (Essay 4). She corrects the historiography regarding appointments of bishops of Meissen and accounts of those bishops’ relationship with their metropolitan (Essay 5). Some art historians are persuaded that Leon Battista Alberti had a role in forming the curia’s college of abbreviators. Not so!, argues Schwarz--and historians have misunderstood Alberti’s relationship with one of his curial opponents. More prosaically, Alberti’s architectural and artistic activities were subsidized by income derived from his curial life (Essay 9).
Schwarz’s immersion in the massive papal archives of the late Middle Ages--thousands of volumes with millions of entries--may help explain Müller’s perhaps gentle note that “the prose of Dr. Schwarz primarily addresses expert audiences interested in conducting archival research” (24). In order to expand that audience, Müller has acted not only as a translator, but as an unusually interventionist editor: explaining or even replacing some technical vocabulary, rewriting what often had appeared as bullet points into clearer, less compressed form, and so on. Readers should be grateful to Müller for these efforts as well as the more usual work of translation. That said, this book makes for some dense reading. That is often the case when it comes to prosopography, but readers of other parts should probably also expect some slow going. Schwarz’s style, or perhaps her subject matter, could probably be massaged only so much. At times, details and excursuses threaten to overwhelm larger points. While the translation generally reads correctly, it could at times be improved by a more aggressive Anglophone copyeditor. The German use of “Dom” for cathedrals presumably lies behind cathedrals being referred to here as “domes” (at, e.g., 67), but “cathedral” is more natural English. Other examples: “couriers needed a strong health” (213); the members of the papal chancery on certain occasions “wear non-liturgical dresses” (275). But while such instances may occasionally throw English readers, Schwarz’s meaning is clear. Such a copyeditor might also have caught a short-form citation of “Meyer, ‘The Law of Benefices’” (19, nn 11, 14), which appears neither in long form nor in the bibliography. (I suspect this ghostly citation is of Andreas Meyer, “The Law of Benefices,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval Canon Law, eds. Anders Winroth and John C. Wei [Cambridge University Press, 2022], 368-395.)
Historians concerned with ecclesiastical, and even non-ecclesiastical, administration, including its social history, will find real rewards in this book. Even leaving aside the translation for those whose English is stronger than their German, historians who are guided by Müller’s introduction will also be in his debt.