This book explores the astonishing extent of the influence of a vestment which came to embody considerable power. The pallium is simply a narrow strip or band of white wool which surrounds the shoulders with a dangling strip front and back. As early as the fourth or fifth century it was in use as a papal insignia and a liturgical vestment. When bestowed by a Pope upon a selected bishop, normally a metropolitan archbishop, it came to be regarded in the eighth to ninth centuries as a holy thing, a proper object of veneration, by kissing the cross with which the fabric was embellished.
Increasingly, its granting was seen as a mark of papal recognition, for it was not automatically given to every archbishop or metropolitan. In due course it came to be widely regarded as a token of personal papal approval. In Part I (741‐882) the variation of opinion on the implications of its bestowal is carefully mapped, with detailed textual reference and quotation, first for the ‘obtaining’ of the pallium, then for its actual bestowal, then for the uses to which it might be put and finally for the interpretations which might be put on it when determining what it ‘meant’ and could ‘do’.
From 882–1046, it is suggested, it became possible to play more widely with its possibilities. Bishops who desired it might even attempt to strike a deal with a Pope. There were rivalries as to the standing of palligers. It is even possible to speak in the heading of one chapter of ‘creativity’ in its bestowal and use. It became a point of controversy whether the pallium should be given by the hands of the Pope or taken from the altar by the recipient as in token of his having received it directly from St. Peter.
By now the pallium was becoming potentially an instrument of papal control, operating to create a special papal bond with the bishop who received it and it left the bishop without a pallium out in the cold. Between 1046 and 1119, as the Investiture Contest reached its height, it was remembered that it had been said the pallium had originally been given to the Pope by the Emperor Constantine. Not only popes but kings and bishops made active use of the pallium as a means of establishing more firmly a centralised and supreme papal power in the West or seeking to take into lay hands some of the sacramental acts of the Church.
Questions arose as to whether a bishop who would not make his loyalty and obedience quite clear could expect to receive the pallium. For Anselm of Canterbury, with a King who favoured one claimant to the papacy while he supported another, the problem was not merely academic. Anselm, characteristically forced to learn with painful difficulty what was right and proper for a bishop to do, acknowledged that he should have appeared in the Pope's presence to receive the pallium and wrote to explain why he had not been able to do so; because of current warfare it had had to be brought to him by Walter, Bishop of Albano.
By the thirteenth century the pallium and its sometimes paradoxical and inventive uses had acquired a considerable jurisprudence, to which full attention is given in the Epilogue, with discussion of the contributions of Gratian and the Decretists, the Decretals and the Decretalists.
This is a monumental work, of immense learning and interest, into which are skilfully woven together both the threads of significant change and development in the history of the medieval papacy, and innumerable lively details of the forces shaping the lives and endeavours of the Metropolitans and other bishops of Western Europe. There is an extensive bibliography and index of papal letters and an index of canonical works, all adding to the value of the book as a definitive work of reference.
