The bishop: power and piety at the first millennium

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While monasticism is often seen as the definitive expression of early medieval Christendom, it was in fact the episcopacy that served as the cultic and political backbone of European society in the first millennium. Despite their central role, however, bishops as a group have received far less attention from modern scholars than other contemporary social and religious institutions, such as monarchy, lay lordship, or reformed monasticism. This book, therefore, is intended as an open invitation to a more comparative, synthetic history of early medieval bishops and the early medieval episcopacy. Written by scholars from a variety of regional, theoretical, and disciplinary perspectives, it provides a rich portrait of the political, religious, intellectual, and artistic dimensions of the episcopacy around the year 1000, revealing the many ways in which all roads led through the bishops, their churches, and their institutions