<i>England and the Papacy in the Early Middle Ages: Papal Privileges in European Perspective, c.680–1073</i> , by Benjamin Savill

Ben Savill was—like the current reviewer and several other British scholars of the medieval papacy—at one time a student of David d’Avray at University College London. The debt which his students owe d’Avray is significant, as is the recognition which d’Avray gives his former students. The book under review here is frequently credited in d’Avray’s 2023 monograph—The Power of Protocol: Diplomatics and the Dynamics of Papal Government, c.400–c.1600— as ‘transforming our understanding of Anglo-Papal relations in the early Middle Ages’ (p. 30, 90n). Savill’s focus is on papal privileges sent to England—not all documentary productions of the early medieval papal chancery, but specifically privileges (Savill’s observation that the category of ‘privilege’ is subjective is a useful one). Privileges were the most visually striking and remarkable outputs of the early medieval papacy. Written on papyrus in an archaic form of writing, and often physically vast (seven metres long seems to be the record), early medieval papal privileges are impossible to overlook (when seen in the original—Savill is right that printed editions can easily rob them of their mystique). The overall argument is that the early medieval papacy did not possess a monopoly of shaping its own narrative(s); the petitioners and beneficiaries of papal documents led the way in interpreting what the successor of St Peter was and meant in their regions. Savill here fits into a broader trend of emphasising ‘beneficiary-influence’ in the activities, and even the physical outputs, of the papacy. Most privileges, letters and mandates of the papal curia were issued in response to petitioners’ requests, and were heavily shaped by what they asked for. The language and physical documents themselves were shaped by what petitioners desired and expected from the papacy, as Hans-Henning Kortüm, Jochen Johrendt and Judith Werner have shown. Savill shows how privileges to English recipients fit into that trend, but also how, when those privileges arrived ‘on the ground’, English figures used them to sculpt their own image of the papacy and the authority of St Peter.

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