ABSTRACT
If late eleventh-century Europe can be considered a ‘Europe of bishops’, it was also a ‘Europe of bishoprics’ – the territories, dioceses, over which those bishops exercised their jurisdictional and spiritual authority.1 As Catholic Christianity became increasingly entrenched after 1050, and expanded geographically, so Europe became a Europe of even more bishoprics, with the standard diocesan model being planted beyond Europe – briefly in Beijing, and eventually in the New World and elsewhere – as missionary activity took Catholicism to new corners of the globe.
