Medieval

The medieval period in this archive runs from the end of Western Roman political authority to the Reformation, roughly from the founding of the Benedictine order to the eve of Luther. The institutional Christian church across this span was Roman in the West and Eastern (Constantinopolitan) until the schism of 1054.

Documentary survival is uneven. Where it exists — papal registers, conciliar acta, monastic chronicles, judicial inquests — it is generally official-institutional. Counter-records from victims of inquisitions and crusades survive in fragments and through hostile institutional summary. The historical scholarship is correspondingly careful about what the surviving documents can and cannot establish.