Paperback. Black and pink title on the cream cover.

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The history of the Western church in the Middle Ages is the history of the most elaborate and thoroughly integrated system of religious thought and practice the world has ever known. It is also the history of European society during eight hundred years of sometimes rapid change. This authoritative history shows how the concept of an organized human society, both religious and secular, as an expression of a divinely ordered universe, was central to medieval thought. Professor R. W. Southern’s book covers the period from the eighth to the sixteenth century, highlighting the main features of each medieval age and studying the Papacy, the relations between Rome and her rival Constantinople, the bishops and archbishops and the various religious orders in detail, providing a superb study of the period.

Review: Visit any European city and you will inevitably be struck by the majesty of its huge cathedral. You might occasionally wonder what they all really represent. Professor Southern’s Church history as an aspect of secular history’ explains the way in which the medieval church was effectively the state. He describes how the Roman Church replaced the Roman Empire in Western Europe as the latter declined, and went on to develop in power between the eighth and fourteenth centuries. Capitalising on the regional unity established by the Romans, the papacy was able to grow in stature, and by the 12th and 13th century, was the dominant secular force in Europe.

Professor Southern sifts through the documentary evidence cataloguing the activities of popes, cardinals, bishops, monks, and lesser clerics – effectively the politicians, judiciary, police, and workforce of the church. Running alongside their religious activity ( not examined here) was a strong secular identity. Rulers were coerced, by the threat of excommunication, to maintain the pope’s edicts. No war could be declared unless the church first decreed its cause to be sacred. The Pope himself waged war on `unbelievers’. Heresy was a capital offence. Non-Christians such as Jews were denied citizenship. Monks devoted themselves to praying for the souls of prominent landowners, who in return bequeathed swathes of their estates.

The church’s influence declined during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as non-religious thought and action gradually separated out and overcame it. But, by then, those cathedrals were built.

Sir Richard Southern (1912-2001) was an expert on the medieval church and author of the renowned text, The Making of the Middle Ages. He taught at Oxford and was President of St John’s College there. He was knighted in 1974.