“Deeds of bishops” and the adaptation of the Roman Liber Pontificalis beyond the scope of 8th- to 10th-century episcopal biography

Research on clerical conceptions of episcopal authority in the early Middle Ages is quite common, but it also often focuses on a single episcopal see or narrow regional collection of sources in a limited time frame. In my quest to understand how these smaller microhistories fit into the longer view of early medieval episcopal roles, I began to see some patterns in the ways in which bishops found resolution of conflict, both political and clerical, by relying on divine agency. However, I had only anecdotal examples and the number of texts made a clear answer hard to come by using traditional historical close-reading techniques.

Instead, I turned to modeling to find an answer. I began my modeling with Rome’s Liber Pontificalis (“Book of the Popes”), the first catalog of episcopal lives in Western Europe. It describes the live of each Roman bishop since St. Peter, and includes basic biographical data. Early medieval authors then adapted this Liber Pontificalis model, but they did not adopt it wholesale. These adaptations contributed to the gesta episcoporum genre (“deeds of bishops”), which historians generally describe as a collection of similarly serial catalogs of episcopal lives composed in Carolingian Europe between the eighth and tenth centuries.

To give myself a foundation from which to begin my analysis, I made a list of the features that most commonly appeared in the Liber Pontificalis and a list of the features that most commonly appeared in the Carolingian gesta and then checked each episcopal life in all of the texts for that list of features.

My goal was to analyze two sets of differences.

1. I wanted to examine the major differences between the Liber Pontificalis–both its earliest sixth-century form and its later eighth-century redaction– and two Carolingian texts commonly included in the historiographic category of gesta episcoporum: the Liber Pontificalis Ravennatis from ninth-century Ravenna (Italy) and the Historiae Remensis Ecclesiaefrom tenth-century Reims (France).
2. I wanted to compare the adaptations the Carolingian texts made to the initial Liber Pontificalis model to the adaptations made by non-Carolingian authors, both before and after the Carolingian period and outside of the Carolingian Empire: The Vitas Sanctorum Patrum Emeretensium from seventh-century Merida (Spain) and the Gesta Pontificum Anglorum from twelfth-century England.

Reading the infographic

I chose a box-plot chart based on Edward R. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Second Edition; Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press), 125.

• The filled-in aqua bars show the variance between the two Carolingian gesta in a single feature’s appearance.
• The extended narrow lines show the variance between all currently selected sources.
• Each source is marked by color, but sources that should show similarity based on existing historical research are grouped by color:
  • The two redactions of the Liber Pontificalisare paler colors so they recede.
  • The two Carolingian gestaare cool colors (blue and green) and darker so they can be seen and compared easily.
  • The two non-Carolingian sources in warm colors (bright orange and pink) so they stand out.

Interacting with the infographic

My goals were twofold, so there are two different preset options, both shown in percentage form, with accompanying analysis:

1. A comparison of the two Roman LP redactions to the two Carolingian gesta to see how accepted gesta adaptations differ from the Liber Pontificalis
2. A comparison of the two Carolingian gesta and the two non-Carolingian sources, to see whether the non-Carolingian sources show similar adaptation patterns, and if so, in which areas.