A Conversation Across Centuries: Reforming the Secular Clergy in Western Christendom, 800–1200

This paper uses ideas and practices relating to liturgical vestments both to trace connections between long-studied reform movements (the Carolingian and the Gregorian) and to demonstrate how important reform initiatives occurred outside of movements.   Carolingian efforts in the early ninth century to improve the education and training of clerics through liturgical commentaries led to the dissemination of a set of ideas linking specific clerical virtues to discrete liturgical garments.  In the late ninth and tenth centuries, these ideas were developed into devotional practices, and in the first half of the eleventh century the evidence of their diffusion intensifies.   In the second half of the eleventh century, these practices and ideas about liturgical attire and priestly virtue were taken up by reformers in Rome and used to advance aspects of the “Gregorian” agenda.  The long and surprising transformation of this one reform initiative reveals that focusing on specific movements obscures important developments.  The paper will conclude with suggestions for possibly more productive avenues of research.