16 - Ideas and applications of reform

Summary

The Gregorian reform is perhaps the greatest achievement in the religious history of the Middle Ages.

Students of ecclesiastical history of this period or, more particularly, of the Carolingian period and of the tenth and eleventh centuries, cannot avoid encountering references to “reform” in modern works on the subject: indeed, the pontificate of Gregory VII (1073–85) has been inextricably linked with the term since the nineteenth century. At the same time, however, it is hard to find any analysis of the term or discussion as to the appropriateness of its use. There is a noticeable contrast between the quantity of debate aroused by the word “renaissance” and the word “reform” for the earlier and high Middle Ages. The history of the western church is narrated with “reform” as the storyteller’s framework, but within our period the term itself rarely becomes a theme for discussion. The word “reform” has been used by historians of the Byzantine church for well over a century, but has become a prominent theme in Byzantine church history only fairly recently, and its applicability has only occasionally been discussed. Gerd Tellenbach in his Die westliche Kirche vom 10. bis zum frühen 12. Jahrhundert is almost the only historian of modern times to have complained about the lack of discussion of “reform” in writings on the Gregorian period; listing the many types of composite constructions in which “reform” occurs (reform aims, reform papacy, and many more), he complained, with justification, of a lack of substance: “What church reform in the eleventh century really was is usually defined so inadequately that one can only describe it as an empty formula.”