Uni-Tübingen

Sub-Project A01: Violent Protests in Cities and Clerical Institutions: The Age of the Investiture Controversy in a European Perspective

Abstract

Project A01 compares violent protests in cities and religious communities in the German-speaking regions in the southwest of the Holy Roman Empire, Anjou, and northern Italy around 1100 A.D. It aims to 1) identify more sophisticated explanations to account for the severity and protracted length of the Investiture Controversy, 2) examine the social changes that occurred around 1100 as a European phenomenon extending beyond the boundaries of national master narratives, and 3) further develop the field of medieval conflict studies and its methodology by overcoming the dichotomy of “modern” and “pre-modern.”

Project Team

Project Leader:

Prof. Dr. Steffen Patzold

Post-doc and Ph.D. Student:

Dr. Thomas Kohl

Katrin Getschmann, M. A.

Academic Disciplines and Orientation

History / Medieval History

Project Description

This project comparatively examines threats to social order in cities and clerical institutions generated by instances of violent protest in three European regions. The time frame for the project is the so-called “Age of the Investiture Controversy” that lasted from around 1075 to 1125 A.D. Contemporaries at the time perceived and described this period as a phase of "perturbatio" and "confusio". The borders between lay and sacral spheres, as well as the inner structures of both spheres, were in the process of being re-negotiated – with far-reaching consequences for the political, legal, and economic foundations of social life in most of Europe.
Parallel to these developments, reform movements took hold in numerous religious communities and new forms of civic communes were formed. These three interwoven processes not only launched a profound social transformation with long-term consequences for the history of Europe, but also they repeatedly triggered violent protests in religious communities and cities. Three closely related goals guide the investigation of these moments of violent protest in Project A01.

Firstly, the project as a whole seeks to answer the question of how local interests, factionalisations and disruptions within the framework of small-scale disputes in clerical institutions and cities were interconnected with larger conflicts resulting from the redefinition of lay and sacral spheres and how this may have led to a process of mutual intensification. In doing so, the project suggests a new way to explain the length and severity of the so-called Investiture Controversy.

Secondly, through a comparative analysis of three regions in Europe – the German-speaking southwest, western France and northern Italy – the project intends to show that the social transformation occurring around 1100 must be seen as a truly pan-European phenomenon. Through this perspective, the so-called Investiture Controversy can be even further disentangled from traditional German master narratives of the Middle Ages than it has been done in scholarship so far.

Thirdly, the project intends to further develop the methodology associated with the field of medieval conflict studies. This line of research, which was initially established in the 1970s, has primarily rested on the assumption that European communities in the late Middle Ages were hardly, if at all, organized as states. Its basic analytical frameworks and models have thus been inspired by (rightist) ethnological and social-anthropological studies on traditional communities. But, in keeping with the premises of the CRC, Project A01 abstains from setting up a dichotomous opposition between pre-modern/traditional and modern constellations of social order. This allows for the development of new, more differentiated perspectives in Medieval conflict studies and simultaneously creates a new way to link this field of research to scholarship on violent protest in the Early Modern, Modern, and Contemporary eras as it is being done in the other projects in Project Area A.

Project-related Lectures and Publications

Getschmann, Katrin

Kohl, Thomas

Patzold, Steffen

Congresses, Workshops, and Conferences