Archival evidence of dramatic activity throughout Great Britain in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries from the Records of Early English Drama (REED) project significantly augments what we can learn through the study of literary texts. REED’s Patrons and Performances database enables targeted searches of evidence about travelling performers, allowing us – for example – to trace the influence of the Reformation on the development of theatre as a business. The recently launched REED Online makes possible a wider range of analyses by allowing the edited records to be searched for any topic. REED helps to reveal when and how drama changed, as well as the continuities between what has been considered medieval drama and Shakespeare, especially through evidence of dramatic activity from which no texts survive. The biblical cycles of York, Chester, and Coventry were suppressed in the 1570s, but records tell us that Preston’s Corpus Christi play lasted until 1595, Kendal’s until 1605, while quite near Shakespeare’s Stratford, Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire put on three plays involving Christ and the apostles in 1600. Seasonal festivities with dramatic elements that probably never had written texts lasted even longer in some places: Wells held an elaborate Robin Hood play in 1607, and Wootton St Lawrence in Hampshire held elaborate ales with king plays every few years until 1612. This chapter explores many of these details, answering some questions and asking new ones, opening up new avenues for exploring the traditions of early English drama.

Many elements and individuals contributed to the emergence of the papacy as the indisputable leader of the Church, and in many ways leader also of the Latin West, during the course of the eleventh century. Throughout the course of the eleventh century, the papacy underwent nothing short of a phenomenal transformation. Various developments contributed both to the elucidation and amplification of papal authority in the early middle ages. The elevation of Bishop Bruno of Toul as Pope Leo IX on 12 February 1049 has long been seen as the decisive moment in the fortunes of both the papacy and the movement for ecclesiastical reform. Just as important as the theoretical and practical articulations of papal authority during the eleventh century were the changes in administrative practices, even if it is anachronistic to speak of a 'papal government' before the twelfth century.

Georges Duby argued that at the heart of changes in marriage, from the looser arrangements of the earlier middle ages to the monogamous tradition increasingly supervised by the Church, there was an important new emphasis on hierarchy. Throughout the earlier middle ages and well into the eleventh century, marriage was not considered to be a sacrament, and in fact was something over which the Church had little if any control. Multiple marriages and widespread concubinage, however much the Church might protest, were essential requirements that established and maintained social order. The reformers' rhetoric was accompanied by increasing accusations of sexual misconduct, more frequent allegations of both spiritual and genealogical incest, and at the same time an increasing exaltation of chastity, continence, asceticism and even spiritual marriage.

This chapter explores how the clergy were rhetorically persuaded to embrace reform. In many ways, it was the issue of lay investiture that made the reformers' efforts to find a clear rhetoric of purity far simpler. It would be easy to dismiss the language of bodily purity and pollution as nothing more than a convenient rhetorical strategy on the part of ecclesiastical and especially monastic writers. Apart from Humbert of Silva-Candida, the reformers continued to insist on the integrity of the sacraments of clerics compromised by simony, their rhetoric often blurred fine theological lines. In contrast to the position of contamination stood Gregory VII who, as with simony, tended to treat clerical marriage or concubinage as an issue of obedience. Clerical marriage and concubinage likewise unleashed a torrent of polemic, chiefly focusing on the perceived contamination and confusion engendered by a cleric's sexual activities.

This chapter reviews both traditional and revisionist interpretations of the 'peace of God' movement in order to have a better understanding of its connection with eleventh-century reform as well as its repercussions for eleventh-century society. The 'peace of God' has been seen as something of a 'war on war', in other words, as a reaction to the disorder that resulted from the disintegration of the Carolingian Empire during the later ninth and tenth centuries. Among the chief difficulties in assessing both the nature and the significance of the 'peace of God' is that of the documentary evidence. In many ways what is most striking about the 'peace of God' has little do with the promotion of 'peace' at all. Rather it is the fact that churchmen were able to begin to persuade the ruling classes to accept their dictates and thereby prove their fitness to exercise power.

Around the year 1000, the Latin Church was grappling with changing socio-political, economic and cultural realities. The Latin Church was itself to be transformed and defined in its attempts to consolidate its hold over the different peoples of western Europe. One of the problems which the Church faced in the year 1000 was that it was often organized around competing local institutions or power structures, be they rural churches, local monasteries or private chapels. In many ways the papacy around the year 1000 was just another centre of local power in a western Europe where power emanated from many localized centres. The higher orders in the Roman Church were somewhat different than those found elsewhere in western Europe. Despite centuries of political decline, the organization of the Church in Rome had nonetheless developed an immensely elaborate liturgical life with its own peculiar grades of churches and officials.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book addresses what some historians have called 'the religious revolution of the eleventh century'. It explores how reform and the papacy developed in the eleventh century, and how these changes affected the rules by which medieval society functioned. The book considers the role of the papacy as a social institution that articulated a distinctive ordering on earth and sanctioned the hegemony of the powerful over the poor while protesting against it. It looks to achieve two fundamental objectives: a deeper understanding of why the papacy developed in the way that it did during the eleventh century. Another objective include why the vision of reform that was adopted by popes from Leo IX onwards came to be articulated in the specific way that it was.

For Rodulf Glaber, spiritual reform and material renewal were the rightful accompaniments to the millennial anniversaries of Christ's birth and passion. Reform encompassed material renewal, and relied as much on the mustering of popular indignation as on the work of legates and the promulgation of canons promoting free election and clerical chastity. The practice of the lay investiture of bishops and abbots, like simony and clerical marriage, had a long history in the Western Church. As his letters after 1075 show, Gregory VII increasingly began to see lay investiture as an unwarranted intrusion of laymen into ecclesiastical affairs. Although the issue would not finally be resolved until the Concordat of Worms in 1122, lay investiture became the contentious topic around which the reformers framed and waged their campaign for a freely established clergy especially after Gregory's death.