Squeezed among the pugnacious pontiffs who stud the narrative of twelfth-century papal reform, Pope Honorius II (r. 1124–1130) cuts a nondescript figure. However, as Enrico Veneziani demonstrates, this “cautious innovator” (186) deserves greater attention. While cardinal and legate, Lambert of Fiagnano played an active role in the Concordat of Worms, an inflection point of the “Investiture Controversy” and one that preceded his accession to the See of Rome by only two years. The turbulent papacy of Gregory VII notwithstanding, it was the period immediately after the Concordat that proved transformative for papal claims of primacy and enabled their actualization in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Veneziani details the contributions of Honorius's papacy to this transformation, highlighting the creativity and pragmatism with which his chancery developed new ecclesiological formulas and reconfigured older hierocratic claims. To enhance these contributions, the author has also produced a calendar of Honorius's letters.
Veneziani's opening chapter focuses on the activities of the papal chancery rather than just the pope. Through new combinations of older formulas and metaphors, Honorius's correspondence consolidated the eleventh-century reformist claim of Petrinity: the primacy over the church that Christ had conferred on Peter now carried through to Peter's successors in the Roman See. These letters put into practice imagery such as patrimonia (the territory under the control of the saint) and speculum (the papacy as watchtower), making them standard markers of papal protective intervention. Honorius's chancery also invested anew in ecclesiological metaphors of eyes, body, and family. Veneziani notes how maternal imagery of nourishment and love become especially vivid in Honorius's correspondence. While the effect was an overarching claim of papal primacy, the metaphor combinations were tailored to meet different situations. Veneziani also argues for a tempering of reformist formulas: in Honorius's letters the term utilitas (usefulness) takes over from necessitas (exigency) to signal a quieter phase in the struggle over investitures.
In his second chapter, Veneziani transitions to the practical politics of Honorius's papacy, especially the way this pope positioned the See of Rome as the church's “jurisdictional apex” (79). Keeping with his thesis that Honorius routinized reforms that antedated his papacy, Veneziani argues that the right of appeal to Rome now became more prominent and was extended to the laity. Honorius's chancery kept detailed records of trials and referred explicitly to the Justinian code. Veneziani also hints at an articulation of papal sovereignty in Honorius's willingness to make himself an exception from the law. He thus describes a papacy deeply invested in instruments of primacy, including Gregory VII's most effective innovation, the legatine office. In each case, Honorius adopted, adapted, and made sustainable the reform measures that his predecessors had conceived.
Veneziani's nuanced reading of Honorius's papacy sometimes finds itself thinly stretched, especially in chapter three, where the author must confront the lack of correspondence detailing Honorius's relationship with lay princes. Working from chronicle accounts, Veneziani argues that contemporaries remembered Honorius for his strategic consolidation of a triangle of Petrinity: Saint Peter, the pope, and the See of Rome. Juxtaposing the sparse correspondence with these narrative accounts, he suggests that Honorius's “silences” indicate that later popes claimed credit for many interventions.
Veneziani presents Honorius as an energetic pope who balanced interventionist impulses against practical possibilities. It is a testament to these qualities that Honorius secured himself in Rome, a city that was rarely a power base for twelfth-century pontiffs, and that he chose to impose himself within the environment that he could control. Appropriately, then, the author closes this study with a description of Honorius's intervention in a dispute at Montecassino, showing how Honorius put ecclesiology into practice, using legates and formulas of Petrinity to restrict the autonomy of great monasteries.
Despite his own interventions in the conversation around Honorius's papacy, Veneziani remains as circumspect as his protagonist. The term “embryonic” appears repeatedly, to qualify the pope's role in this transformative period after the Concordat of Worms. He also acknowledges the uneven spread of Honorius's activities; interactions with the empire remain especially muted. And yet, by giving us an insight into the routine maintenance of papal primacy, the author has done us a great service. The “success” of the Concordat of Worms should not be taken for granted, and it makes sense to seek that success in the work done immediately after 1122. In this reading of a post-Concordat pope, the reform movement was not a series of individual clashes, with parts greater than the whole but rather a layering process, often undertaken in response to immediate circumstances but with continuity as a strategic choice.
By focusing on governance by chancery from a stable location, Veneziani allows us to contrast Honorius II with later popes like Alexander III, whose vast correspondence was produced in exile from Rome but whose tempestuous relationships with lay powers render his impact much more palpable. With this imaginative, careful and worthwhile study, Enrico Veneziani prompts us to consider the equal importance of quiet radicals, who work in the interstices of greater upheavals but provide the connective tissue.
