Best Books on the Medieval Church and the Papacy

The medieval papacy was not a religious institution that occasionally meddled in politics. It was one of the most powerful political entities in Europe for five hundred years, with the ability to excommunicate kings, launch crusades, and mobilize armies. At the same time it was a religious institution operating under genuine theological pressure, trying to reform a church riddled with simony and clerical concubinage while managing the competing claims of emperors, kings, and local lords over church appointments. The books below cover both dimensions.

Why the Medieval Church Is Harder to Understand Than It Looks

Modern readers tend to project either a cynical or an idealistic frame onto medieval Christianity. The cynical version sees everything as power politics dressed in theological language. The idealistic version takes all the theological claims at face value. The best historians of the medieval church do neither: they take the theology seriously as a genuine force shaping decisions while also analyzing the material and political interests at stake. Getting that balance right is what separates the good books from the mediocre ones.

The Essential Books

The Papal Monarchy: The Western Church from 1050 to 1250 by Colin Morris

Morris covers the period when the papacy built its claim to universal spiritual authority, from the Gregorian Reform under Gregory VII through the pontificate of Innocent III, the most powerful pope of the medieval period. He traces how canon law, theological argument, and political maneuvering combined to produce an institution that could plausibly claim to stand above temporal rulers. The Investiture Controversy, the struggle between Gregory VII and Emperor Henry IV over who had the right to appoint bishops, is covered in detail: it is the central episode in the church's assertion of independence from secular control, and Morris explains why it mattered as clearly as any English-language historian has.

The Crisis of Church and State 1050-1300 by Brian Tierney

Tierney's book is a collection of primary sources with scholarly commentary, which makes it a different kind of read from Morris. The documents themselves are short, readable excerpts from papal bulls, imperial edicts, conciliar decrees, and theological treatises, with Tierney explaining what each one means in context. It is the best single-volume way to hear the medieval argument directly rather than having it summarized. Useful alongside rather than instead of a narrative history.

The Avignon Papacy and the Great Schism

Between 1309 and 1377, the papacy moved from Rome to Avignon in southern France, under heavy French royal influence. When it finally returned, a disputed election produced two claimants to the papacy simultaneously, then eventually three, a situation called the Great Schism that lasted from 1378 to 1417. The Schism did more damage to papal authority than any single military defeat could have, because it forced the question of whether the pope really was the supreme head of the church when there were three of them simultaneously excommunicating each other.

Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror covers this period as part of a broader account of the fourteenth century, and her treatment of the Schism is the most readable English-language account for general readers. She places it in the context of the Black Death, the Hundred Years War, and the general catastrophe of the fourteenth century, which is the right context: the papacy's authority was collapsing at the same moment as everything else was falling apart.

Monasticism and the Regular Clergy

The story of the medieval church is not only a story about popes and emperors. The monastic orders shaped European culture, preserved classical manuscripts, ran hospitals and schools, and maintained the institutional memory of Latin learning through the early medieval period. The Benedictines, the Cistercians under Bernard of Clairvaux, the Franciscans and Dominicans in the thirteenth century: each wave of monastic reform responded to a perceived corruption of the previous wave, and each produced a different model of religious life.

C.H. Lawrence's Medieval Monasticism is the standard academic overview and is accessible enough for non-specialists. It covers the major orders chronologically with enough context to understand why each reform movement thought the previous one had failed.

Three Books to Start With

• The Papal Monarchy by Colin Morris, the most thorough account of how the papacy built its claim to supremacy in the central medieval period.
• A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman, for the fourteenth-century crisis of church and state told as narrative history.
• The Crisis of Church and State by Brian Tierney, for the primary sources that made the argument in the medieval participants' own words.

Further Reading

For books on the Crusades, the Reformation, and other episodes in Christian history, see the full collection in our history books category.