A Constellation of Authority: Castilian Bishops and the Secular Church During the Reign of Alfonso VIII
By Kyle C. Lincoln
The Pennsylvania State University Press
ISBN: 9780271094373
This book profiles seven bishops from the reign of Alfonso VIII, King of Castile from 1158 to 1214. It examines their careers and what role they functioned in the Castilian government.
Excerpt:
In this project, I have tried to recover the voices of the bishops of Castile and present them in their own context. By necessity, only the long-serving prelates appear in any detail here, simply because the records preserved from their episcopates were extensive enough suggest how they engaged with the great ideas and movements of their day. The sources do not always answer all the questions one would like to ask, of course. Each of the book’s chapters focuses on a single bishop to flesh out the history of an individual who might provide something of a case study to help build a new, more comprehensive narrative synthesis.
Who is this book for?
If you wanted to know why bishops were considered so important in the Middle Ages, this book can tell you a lot. The bishops of Castile are seemingly involved in every aspect of governing this country, during an era when it was transitioning and growing. We get seven biographies here, and these bishops have interesting life stories. If you want to know more about ecclesiastical history or the history of Spain, this book is for you.
The author
Kyle Lincoln is an Assistant Professor at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, where his research focuses on the Kingdom of Castile. Click here to view his Academia.edu page.
Kyle tells us that the origins of this book date back to his time as a student:
At my undergraduate alma mater, Kalamazoo College, every student is required to do a capstone project, no matter their major. I became interested, after I got back from my Study Abroad term (which about 75% of juniors go on), I was increasingly interested in “what made a person a saint” in the Roman Catholic tradition and how the decision to name someone a saint reflected their world. Because sainthood is so determined by the time people lived in, the stories about their lives hold a mirror up to their world and reflect their ideals and failures in equal measure. My undergraduate advisor, Prof. John Wickstrom, jokingly suggested during an office hours visit to plan my Senior Individualized Project that “everybody studies Francis [of Assissi] but nobody studies [his contemporary] Dominic [of Osma]; you should do that.” I did, for about eighty pages or so, and did well enough on it that I took that project to graduate school. When I was in the Spring of my first year at Saint Louis University, my MA advisor, Prof. Damian Smith, suggested that I should do a thesis, because it would help me learn to write better. (At the time, writing a thesis was an option instead of doing 6-9 extra graduate credits of work.) I expressed a willingness to do so, and he suggested that Dominic’s background in northern Castile seemed like underexplored territory, especially in Anglophone scholarship, so that was the place where I went next. For about another 125 pages or so, I explored Dominic’s early life in the Kingdom of Castile, where I noticed that the bishops that trained and mentored and sponsored Dominic’s early missionary work seemed to be doing an awful lot of political, military, economic, and legal work.
I suggested to Prof. Smith that someone should do a dissertation on these bishops and all the work they were doing that seemed to go unnoticed because they weren’t kings or counts. He declined the idea that someone should do it, and suggested that, since I was interested in it, it should be me. 300 pages later, I realized that I was more right than I could have imagined: minority religious relations, legal proceedings, economic reforms, military campaigns and more were all in the hands of bishops. Here were the people that were doing so much work, but being so underrecognized in most scholarship that their stories weren’t a part of the bigger picture. When I discovered the work of a friend, Prof. Janna Bianchini, on the roll of royal women as “background players” in the same period, I knew that I wasn’t crazy—if royal women were up to some big things, then my bishops were too; both of our conclusions pointed to the idea that beyond the figure of the king, there was a lot going on in the kingdom.
You can learn more about this book from the publisher’s website
You can buy this book on Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk
A Constellation of Authority: Castilian Bishops and the Secular Church During the Reign of Alfonso VIII
By Kyle C. Lincoln
The Pennsylvania State University Press
ISBN: 9780271094373
This book profiles seven bishops from the reign of Alfonso VIII, King of Castile from 1158 to 1214. It examines their careers and what role they functioned in the Castilian government.
Excerpt:
In this project, I have tried to recover the voices of the bishops of Castile and present them in their own context. By necessity, only the long-serving prelates appear in any detail here, simply because the records preserved from their episcopates were extensive enough suggest how they engaged with the great ideas and movements of their day. The sources do not always answer all the questions one would like to ask, of course. Each of the book’s chapters focuses on a single bishop to flesh out the history of an individual who might provide something of a case study to help build a new, more comprehensive narrative synthesis.
Who is this book for?
If you wanted to know why bishops were considered so important in the Middle Ages, this book can tell you a lot. The bishops of Castile are seemingly involved in every aspect of governing this country, during an era when it was transitioning and growing. We get seven biographies here, and these bishops have interesting life stories. If you want to know more about ecclesiastical history or the history of Spain, this book is for you.
The author
Kyle Lincoln is an Assistant Professor at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, where his research focuses on the Kingdom of Castile. Click here to view his Academia.edu page.
Kyle tells us that the origins of this book date back to his time as a student:
At my undergraduate alma mater, Kalamazoo College, every student is required to do a capstone project, no matter their major. I became interested, after I got back from my Study Abroad term (which about 75% of juniors go on), I was increasingly interested in “what made a person a saint” in the Roman Catholic tradition and how the decision to name someone a saint reflected their world. Because sainthood is so determined by the time people lived in, the stories about their lives hold a mirror up to their world and reflect their ideals and failures in equal measure. My undergraduate advisor, Prof. John Wickstrom, jokingly suggested during an office hours visit to plan my Senior Individualized Project that “everybody studies Francis [of Assissi] but nobody studies [his contemporary] Dominic [of Osma]; you should do that.” I did, for about eighty pages or so, and did well enough on it that I took that project to graduate school. When I was in the Spring of my first year at Saint Louis University, my MA advisor, Prof. Damian Smith, suggested that I should do a thesis, because it would help me learn to write better. (At the time, writing a thesis was an option instead of doing 6-9 extra graduate credits of work.) I expressed a willingness to do so, and he suggested that Dominic’s background in northern Castile seemed like underexplored territory, especially in Anglophone scholarship, so that was the place where I went next. For about another 125 pages or so, I explored Dominic’s early life in the Kingdom of Castile, where I noticed that the bishops that trained and mentored and sponsored Dominic’s early missionary work seemed to be doing an awful lot of political, military, economic, and legal work.
I suggested to Prof. Smith that someone should do a dissertation on these bishops and all the work they were doing that seemed to go unnoticed because they weren’t kings or counts. He declined the idea that someone should do it, and suggested that, since I was interested in it, it should be me. 300 pages later, I realized that I was more right than I could have imagined: minority religious relations, legal proceedings, economic reforms, military campaigns and more were all in the hands of bishops. Here were the people that were doing so much work, but being so underrecognized in most scholarship that their stories weren’t a part of the bigger picture. When I discovered the work of a friend, Prof. Janna Bianchini, on the roll of royal women as “background players” in the same period, I knew that I wasn’t crazy—if royal women were up to some big things, then my bishops were too; both of our conclusions pointed to the idea that beyond the figure of the king, there was a lot going on in the kingdom.
You can learn more about this book from the publisher’s website
You can buy this book on Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk
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