Bishops’ soft power: a shared concept of political practice all aroud the Post-Carolingian world?
During the 9th century, the bishops became aware of their position as a compact group, also from a political and administrative point of view, within the aristocracy of the Carolingian Empire. A few years later, during the reign of Louis II (844-875), also in the Kingdom of Italy, the episcopal group began to play a more decisive role as intermediaries between local societies and royal power. The link between royal power and the bishops was a novelty of the Carolingian period and had no comparable precedent in Lombard Italy. But new initiatives and different strategies also had to be implemented at the local level, where episcopal churches were only one of several actors in the field. Bishops did not use violence in disputes over control of resources with aristocratic groups and other churches and monasteries. On a theoretical level, we can frame the bishops' way of acting through the concept of 'soft power'. That is, bishops knew how to use books, saints, narratives, and images to condition the ideas and beliefs of their interlocutors to their political ends. Is it possible to identify relational patterns through which these ideas and strategies were circulated by Carolingian bishops? What was the relationship between the canons produced by episcopal synods across the Alps in the 820s and the ability of Italian bishops to build their new authority? How did these new ideas of episcopal authority circulate throughout Carolingian Europe? How was this authority received and possibly resisted by the episcopal churches' competitors at the local level?
The project aims to explore these questions through two specific case studies: the church of Modena in the Po Valley and the episcopal church of Amiens at the heart of the Carolingian Empire.