This book explores the relationship between the papacy and reform against the backdrop of social and religious change in later tenth and eleventh-century Europe. Placing this relationship in the context of the debate about 'transformation', it reverses the recent trend among historians to emphasise the reform developments in the localities at the expense of those being undertaken in Rome.
It focuses on how the papacy took an increasingly active part in shaping the direction of both its own reform and that of society, whose reform became an essential part of realising its objective of a...