The Myth of the Church: Religious Networks and Institution-Building in the Latin West, 250-1215

Lecture by Conrad Leyser (Oxford University). Event is free and open to the public.

Institutional change is fundamentally retrospective. It tends to happen after the event, in the telling of the story. It was by making claims about the past that medieval Christians willed into being an institutional structure: the Church. We have too often mistaken these aspirational narratives for a record of historical development.

This is not to say that ‘the myth of the Church’, as we might call it, had no basis. Across the millennium surveyed here, Christianity evolved from minority cult to world religion. A drastic shift of polity took place, from a scattering of local household associations to a trans-regional corporate structure, an institutional Church at the centre of what came to be known as Christendom. It is usually assumed that this transition from network to institution began in the third century, and was all but complete before the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century. In fact, we will argue, the process took much longer—at least another five hundred years.

We can pinpoint the key moment of institutional becoming in the tenth century, in the generations after the fall of the Empire of Charlemagne. For churchmen, the political vacuum created an opportunity. The community of the faithful did not need emperors to flourish, they proclaimed: it needed bishops. It was thanks to episcopal leadership, the story went, that the Church had survived imperial devolution once before, when Rome fell: now it could do so again.

CONRAD LEYSER focuses on the religious and social history of western Europe and North Africa, from the fall of Rome to the rise of Latin Christendom after the first millenium. He has studied the problem of moral authority in the post-Roman West and currently is working on a project that traces the relationship between institutional identity and cultural memory across the late ancient and early medieval period. In a study entitled The Myth of the Church, Leyser plans to follow the development — slow and late — of a professional, celibate clerical hierarchy.

Recent publications include “Augustine in the Latin West, 430-c.900,” in Mark Vessey ed.,Blackwells Companion to Augustine (2012) and “From Maternal Kin to Jesus as Mother: Royal Genealogy and Marian Devotion in the Ninth-Century West,” in Motherhood, Religion, and Society in Medieval Europe, 400-1400: Essays Presented to Henrietta Leyser, ed. Conrad Leyser and Lesley Smith (Farnham, 2011).