Article: Bishops, priests and ecclesiastical Discipline in tenth and eleventh-century Lotharingia

The first output of the project I am currently working on has finally been published in the journal Frühmittelalterliche Studien. Together with my colleagues, we wrote a series of articles on priests in the long tenth century, using different types of source material and methodologies to better understand their role in the organisation of pastoral care in the post-Carolingian period. We devote special attention to priests and kinship, tithing, ecclesiastical discipline, and changing normative frameworks surrounding priests....

October 18, 2023 · 1 min · Bastiaan

Traces of use and the possibility of singing bishops

In this blog post for the ‘Post-imperial priests’-project, I discuss traces of use and what they can tell us about how manuscripts were used. I examine three sets of neumes specifically (see the dots and scribbles in the image above), which are examples of an early medieval notation system for music. The blog post is a byproduct of the research I have done in the past months on the group of manuscripts that I have discussed in a previous post on the same blog....

February 22, 2023 · 1 min · Bastiaan

A network of episcopal handbooks

Today I wrote a new blog post for the ‘Post-imperial priests’-project, where I delve deeper into a network of episcopal handbooks. After working on the manuscript Troyes, MJC, Ms. 1979 for a while, I noticed that there are various other manuscripts with comparable contents from the same period. In the coming months, I will examine this network further to hopefully know more about tenth-century bishops and their priests. The blog post can be seen as a first step in that direction....

July 15, 2022 · 1 min · Bastiaan

How diocesan synods helped priests to stay sharp

Building on my last post for the ‘Post-imperial priests’-project, I have written a new entry for the blog. This time I’m looking into the organization of local synods in the tenth and eleventh century and how priests were examined at these events. The manuscript I’m using is Troyes, MJC, Ms. 1979. Read the blog entry here.

November 1, 2021 · 1 min · Bastiaan

What local priests were supposed to know

On the blog of the ‘Post-imperial priests’-project, I wrote a short post on my most recent research questions. The post is about Atto of Vercelli’s (ca. 885-957/8) episcopal statutes and what kind of knowledge he expected his priests to have. Read it here.

May 31, 2021 · 1 min · Bastiaan