Manning The Church

Between the eleventh and early sixteenth centuries, Christianity, in its specifically Western variant of Catholicism, spread and consolidated across the whole of Western and Central Europe. By 1500, only the remotest parts of Northern Scandinavia retained pockets of lingering paganism; elsewhere, there were clear religious land frontiers, either with Islam or Orthodoxy. The building of Catholic Europe over these centuries had required considerable institutional development, embodied in a geographical and organisational system of dioceses and parishes. The priests and bishops who provided the manpower for that system (it was, indeed, man power) are the focus of attention here, both in abstract – episcopacy and priesthood as roles and offices – and more concretely in individual and collective lives and careers.¹