Per omnia ecclesiastica officia promotus. A normative perspective on the career of bishops in the church province of Reims (888-1049) Dr. Jelle Lisson Postdoctoral Researcher KU Leuven - Faculty of Arts Blijde Inkomststraat 21 - PO Box 3307 3000 Leuven “Let no person force this metropolis, contrary to canonical tradition, to be deprived of a shepherd who possesses the qualities required by ecclesiastical regulations” 1 This quotation in Flodoard’s Historia Remensis Ecclesiae about the vacant archiepiscopal see of Reims in 882 suggests that certain expectations towards episcopal office holders circulated in post-Carolingian society. Indeed, when early medieval sources record the appointment of a new bishop, the authors occasionally provide extra information on the social, geographical, educational or ecclesiastical background of the appointee. These details were not randomly chosen, since they reflected ideas that emerged in the previous centuries and culminated in a disparate corpus of texts commonly referred to as ‘canon law’. In this article, I shall take a closer look at the bishops in the church province of Reims between 888 and 1049. I will zoom in on a particular feature of the episcopal profile that frequently surfaces in narrative, diplomatic and epistolary sources: the pre-episcopal career. The church province of Reims consisted of ten episcopal sees: Amiens, Beauvais, Châlons-en- Champagne, Cambrai-Arras, Laon, Noyon-Tournai, Senlis, Soissons, Thérouanne and Reims itself. These sees were situated in the area of present-day northern France and the western half of Belgium, traditionally regarded as the heartlands of Carolingian power and thus the centre of the West Frankish realm. 2 Of the one hundred bishops in this area and period, in forty-two cases we are informed about their pre-episcopal career. Although the lack of evidence for more than half of the bishops calls for caution, the available data still constitutes a reasonable foundation for identifying interesting patterns and irregularities. Research on the tenth- and early-eleventh-century episcopate in West Francia has been burdened by outdated preconceptions. The few studies dealing with these bishops reiterate the negative assessments made by the supporters of the eleventh-century Church reform, painting an pessimistic picture of a 'church in the hands of the laity', of an inferior transition phase between two apogees: the ‘Carolingian Renaissance’ and the ‘Gregorian Reform’. The post-Carolingian era supposedly saw the decline of Carolingian kingship, territorial fragmentation, the rise of powerful magnates, a stagnation of cultural and intellectual 1 My gratitude goes out to Prof. Dr. Rosamond McKitterick, Prof. Dr. Brigitte Meijns and Dr. Fraser McNair for their feedback. Eandem metropolim non ultra constititionem canonicam sine regulis ecclesiasticis conveniente pastore manere cogat: Historia Remensis Ecclesiae, MGH, Scriptores, SS36 (Hannover, 1998), 373. Title quotation from: Cyprian, Epistle 55.8, Cyprianum Antoniano fratri, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, 3.2, 629. 2 Emile Lesne, Histoire de la propriété ecclésiastique en France, III, (Lille, 1938); Helmut Hoffmann, “Der König und seine Bischöfe in Frankreich und im Deutschen Reich 936-1060,” in Bischof Burchard von Worms, 1000-1025, ed. Wilfried Hartmann (Mainz, 2000), 85; Olivier Guyotjeannin, “Les évêques dans l'entourage royal sous les premiers Capétiens,” in Le roi de France et son royaume, autour de l'an Mil: actes du Colloque Hugues Capet 987- 1987, La France de l'an Mil, Paris-Senlis, 22-25 juin 1987, ed. Michel Parisse and Xavier Barral I Altet (Paris and Senlis, 1992), 93.