Description: 'I study power' - so Robert Louis Benson described his work as a scholar of medieval history. This volume unites papers by a number of his students dealing with matters central to Benson's historical interests - ecclesiastical institutions and administration, emperorship and papacy, canon law, and political ideology. Ranging from Late Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages, the contributors discuss the political uses of hagiography, the suppression of heresy, the juridical authority to bind and loose, church administration of the ordering of society, the territorial limits of jurisdiction, charity and power, natural law theory, and the historiography of political theology. A final chapter presents a reflection on Benson's skills as a historian.
Review Quotes: 'The nine chapters in this volume highlight the extent and breadth of Benson's scholarly legacy. They are wide-ranging, yet highly technical, in content; all but a few comment inductively, from narrow case studies, on the broader uses of authority in the Church between late antiquity and the fifteenth century. All are characterized by scholarship of the first order... The achievement of this volume is its interdisciplinarity: it forces readers to engage with scholarship outside their disciplines, surely the true aim of 'intellectual history', or Geistegeschichte. In this way it is a truly fitting tribute to Robert Benson.' Church History