In Servitio Dei: The Bishops of France in the Fourteenth Century. a Prosopographical Study

This book is the first modern study of the French episcopate during the period of the Avignon papacy. Specialized studies have dealt with important individuals, but no previous study has examined fourteenth-century French bishops as a group. Of one thing we can be sure, provision to a bishopric was too important an appointment, both in political and ecclesiastical terms, and too valuable a benefice to be given to non-entities. By tracing the careers of more than four hundred individuals using documents such as the records of the French royal chancery and the papal registers, the author has uncovered the sequence of benefices that led to positions of ever-increasing responsibility in papal and royal service culminating in the office of bishop. This book suggests new ways to view medieval careers by analyzing the networks of affiliation that individuals used to obtain appointments as royal clerks and preferment in the church. These channels of patronage are important because they provided university-trained men to the king’s administration and the papal curia. In a larger context, this study also has implications for other analyses of the emergence of merit-based bureaucracies in Europe from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries and reflects the pervasive reliance on and importance of patronage networks in pre-modern societies.