IMC 2016: Sessions

This session will consider the duties and skills ascribed to and required from bishops. Paper -a will address a specific aspect of the episcopal function: as prominent public office-holders, preachers, teachers, peace-makers and counsellors, early medieval bishops needed to be eloquent speakers. An effective exercise of the episcopal office thus heavily relied on the bishop's skills in the 'art of speech', an art in which Italian bishops were highly praised. This paper will therefore focus on written records hinting at the interest and expertise of Italian bishops in the disciplines of grammar, rhetoric and dialectic as well as on the evidence provided by manuscripts related to their teaching in the episcopal cities of the kingdom of Italy. A survey of school-books dedicated to these disciplines will help shed light on the maintenance, adaptation and further transmission of the late-antique tradition of the trivium. Paper -b will consider the Carolingian promotion of Gregory the Great's writings as indispensable instruments for the correct and successful exercise of episcopal duties. The focus will be on the Regula Pastoralis: its wide-spread circulation provides us with evidence of its understanding, firstly, as a speculum for bishops and, secondly, as a handbook that bishops could themselves use to teach others the specifics of their pastoral office. The Liber Pastoralis attributed to Arno archbishop of Salzburg will offer a case study for a first sampling of the manuscript transmission of Gregory the Great's Regula Pastoralis and its use as a source for new pastoral writings.
Paper -c will address the notion of appropriate episcopal education in the tenth-century kingdom of Italy. What was to be considered an adequate education for a bishop and how was a bishop supposed to implement his culture in his pastoral and political activity? Starting from a marginal note added by bishop Leo of Vercelli (998-1026) to the work of his predecessor Atto (924-960) in MS Vat. Lat. 4322, the paper will investigate, on the one hand, what was Atto's notion of an appropriate episcopal education, as he depicts it in his treatise known under the name De pressuris ecclesiasticis, and, on the other, how he implemented his own education in the composition of his last and most ambitious work, the Polipticum quod appelatur Perpendiculum.