Rethinking England and the Papacy in the Early Middle Ages

On Thursday, 18 January, the fourth appointment of the permanent seminar on the History of the Papacy will be held in room F007. On this occasion, Benjamin Savill, Humboldt Foundation Scholar at the Freie Universität Berlin, will address the topic of the relations between the Papacy and England during the early Middle Ages.  Savill will explore the role of the Papacy in early medieval England (c. 600-c. 1070) with a long-term perspective. Focusing on the enormous potential of the papal record for comparative history, he will set the traditional narrative of the supposed 'special relationship' between England and Rome in a broader, European and Mediterranean perspective. The scholar will consider the ways in which English attitudes towards the papacy in this period were, if not unique and important, certainly peculiar: shaped by experimentation, false starts, amnesia, a growing archaism, and perhaps even a sense of 'Eastern' exoticism. In the light of this analysis the Anglo-papal relationship, rather than being intimately close, emerges as often tense, complicated, distant and plagued by communication problems - but no less interesting