Developing Definitions of Reform in the Church in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries
There is a noticeable gap between the use of ‘reform’ terminology (reformo, reformatio) in the pre-1100 period and modern usage: in the earlier Middle Ages the terminology was essentially used to refer to the restoration of peace, buildings, and property or in a spiritual sense, as a change of heart (as established by Gerd Ladner on the basis of patristic writings); it is also noticeable that reform terminology was used much less by medieval authors, especially pre-1215, than by modern historians writing about the Middle Ages and above all on the medieval church. Nonetheless, ‘reform’ terminology did begin, very slowly, to be used about change in medieval ecclesiastical institutions in the tenth and early eleventh centuries, first in the diocese of Rheims and Lotharingia and later in Burgundy, and this chapter attempts to show how this process began, tracing the earliest moves towards this in records of Carolingian church councils and tenth-century historical narratives.