Power and the Holy in Latin Christendom

3 units

This course focuses on the conflicts for legitimization between popes and emperors in late medieval Europe. We will explore the various discourses through which power was legitimated and reproduced throughout Latin Christendom. The weakening of imperial control in northern and central Italy in the eleventh century allowed for the creation of new forms of organization: city communes. As new structures of social aggregation emerged within the urban landscape of late-medieval Europe, city elites experimented with new forms of power. Religion and heresy were indissoluble elements of the new discourses deployed to claim legitimate authority. Some of the questions we will pose through our discussion of primary sources and secondary readings will impinge on the relation between political and religious discourses in shaping the world of late medieval Europe. Can we separate between the secular and the religious? Are these adequate categories for an historical analysis of the ways in which medieval people experienced their world?