This article challenges the view that canon law was insignificant in the development of tenth-century English administrative and judicial institutions through a new study of Oda of Canterbury's Constitutiones, an important but neglected episcopal capitulary. Particular attention is paid to Oda's sources, the text's place in the legislative programme of King Edmund and the influence of wider European approaches to episcopal justice. The article shows that Oda's statutes endorsed an emerging system of collaborative justice between secular and ecclesiastical elites, thus demonstrating that tenth-century English governance was informed by a wider range of normative legal traditions than usually thought.

Agimund's Homiliary is extant in two eighth-century manuscripts in BAV, Vat. lat. 3835 and 3836 and is one of the very few Roman texts actually written in Roman script surviving from the early Middle Ages. This article argues that the Homiliary is a crucial piece of evidence for early medieval Roman liturgical and cultural life and the patristic resources of Rome. Agimund's Homiliary, and the late eighth-century additions which are actually part of another, hitherto unidentified Roman Homiliary, together constitute evidence of the degree to which patristic theology and exegesis were embedded in Roman culture, of the interchange between the Latin- and Greek-speaking communities in Rome and the Lateran in the early Middle Ages, and of the intellectual productivity and cultural versatility of early medieval Rome.

Amulo, one of the earliest western witnesses for the Toledot Yeshu, uses ‘adulterata’ to describe the mother of Jesus. Some scholars have claimed that the word ‘adulterata’ implies that she was raped either by force or by deception. Forcible rape is questionable based on a linguistic argument: Latin usage of ‘adultero’, both classical and Christian, normally refers to a woman with the accusative case or the passive voice and distinguishes clearly between adultery and violent rape. It is possible that narratives such as the one about Jesus’ mother played a role in the conversion of the palace deacon Bodo to Judaism.

The letter sent by Kyros of Alexandria to Sergios of Constantinople in 638 appears to contain a chronological contradiction: it implies that Sergios was aware before his death of the election of Severinus as the new bishop of Rome two months earlier. Given the travelling times in the seventh century, this is impossible. The problem originates in a mistake made by Louis Duchesne when calculating the chronology of the popes for his edition of the Liber pontificalis: for the period 619–49, all his dates are one year too late. This change of the chronological framework affects the interpretation of a number of documents.

Examination of shrine and idol destruction stories included in three hagiographic texts rewritten by élite Carolingian authors shows that this thematic element may illuminate the concerns and horizon of expectation of the revisers. Destruction episodes contributed to stories of eponymous heroes that shaped the heritage and identity of monastic communities, and even seemed worth projecting into the ancient Christian past. In the absence of uniform disciplinary and doctrinal guidance regarding relics, stories of the destruction of unholy matter may also have delineated the boundary separating legitimate from illegitimate devotional objects and practices.

This article builds upon recent scholarship on the role of church ‘reform’ and the cult of saints in English royal politics around the turn of the second millennium, arguing that the infamous ‘St Brice's Day massacre’ of 13 November 1002 may have been planned for that date in part because of the associations of the cult of Brice/Brictius. After outlining this hypothesis, the article explores the broader implications of the emergence of a universal martyrological calendar for historical writing and political action, and for the exercise and communication of violence in particular.

The Epistola Widonis, or ‘Letter of Guido’, is a key source for the simony debates of the eleventh century, since it is usually considered the first major text to cast doubt on the validity of simoniacal ordinations. After examining the grounds for the letter's conventional dating to c. 1031 and attribution to Guido of Arezzo, this article makes the case for instead locating the letter's origins in the 1060s, and explores the implications of a re-dating for the dynamics of the eleventh-century ‘moral panic’ about simony.

The Monothelete controversy, a Christological dispute that seemingly consumed the Eastern Roman Empire in the seventh century, also left its mark in Latin texts composed in Merovingian Gaul. By integrating the western evidence and recent revisions to the controversy's history, this study presents a new overview of how Frankish observers viewed the eastern ‘heresy’ and papal efforts to condemn the doctrine in 649. Though negative on the surface, western attitudes towards this Christological debate in the 650s are much more mixed and new evidence can be adduced for the continuation of positive exchanges between the empire and the Franks.

The article establishes that the role of the Rus Archbishop Peter at the First Council of Lyon (1245) was not limited to conveying sensational information about the Tatars, as is usually believed. Peter was willing to resume negotiations between the Apostolic See and the rulers of the Byzantine (Nicene) Empire on the union of Churches, which continued with varying success throughout the thirteenth century. In the mid-1240s the Rus church hierarchs, who headed the Kiev (all Rus) Metropolitanate of the Byzantine Church, played an important, yet underestimated by researchers, role in establishing direct contacts between the Byzantine and Roman Churches and resuming negotiations for church unity.

This article examines the ceremonial reception of papal legates in the early Middle Ages. It offers a precise, distinctive and normative portrait of their ritualised practice well before the existence of written canonical rules and procedures. The customs, principles, gestures and symbols conditioning legatine activities in this historical era became necessary pre-conditions to political communication, interaction and exchange. Their expression and representation, it is argued, help to explain the manifestation of Roman authority in distant Christian provinces, its varied meaning to contemporaries and the formative rules of political governance and diplomacy.

In her seventh-century vita of St Radegund, Baudonivia refers in passing to the attendance of a layman named Leo at an Aquitanian ecclesiastical council. This Leo may be identifiable with the ‘Leo of Poitiers’ named by Gregory of Tours as a partisan of Chramn, the rebellious son of King Chlothar i (r. 511–61). If so, then Leo's attendance suggests that the council assembled during the brief period of alliance between Chramn and Childebert i, 555/8. This long-neglected council thus provides insight into one of the major events of a comparatively obscure decade in the history of the regnum Francorum.

This study argues that contemporary historical works are an unparalleled source for charting the neglected subject of the implementation and impact in northern Italy of the crusade that was launched against Frederick II in 1240; and that a mostly uncritical acceptance of that crusade became a topos in works by laymen as well as clerics across the region. Above all, those works reveal that, while pro-papal factions are a fixture of scholarship on the Italian cities during the central and late Middle Ages, adherence to the Church actually became an explicit and distinguishing feature of Lombard factions only when the crusade was launched against Frederick II.

Based on one of the few surviving records of marriage cases brought before ecclesiastical courts in fourteenth-century Portugal, this article offers a rare glimpse of marriage practice in a small village in a remote corner of Western Europe and the complex ties that bound its inhabitants and which secular and ecclesiastical authorities sought to regulate. Clear parallels can be drawn with the patterns of marriage litigation observed in England and Northern France, but evidence also suggests that royal legislation played an important part in the resolution of marital disputes and in the shaping of conjugal behaviour.

That the priests of the Anglo-Saxon royal household functioned as a primitive chancery is a popular and reasonable hypothesis, corroborated both by contemporary continental practice and by the overlap between chancery and chapel evident from the twelfth century to the fourteenth. Evidence for an Anglo-Saxon chancellorship as such, however, remains frustratingly elusive. This paper argues for the existence of a special tier of priests entrusted with the king's reliquary and archive. It examines their role in the royal household, resolving conflicts in the evidence, to argue that the later office of chancellor evolved from their office.