This book studies the proprietary church with coverage of most of Western Europe, from the end of the Roman Empire in the West to about 1200. The book provides a broad survey in varying degrees of intensity and with a shifting geographical focus; and it asks questions that are as much social and religious as legal or administrative. The book vindicates, for village and estate churches, Ulrich Stutz's basic concept of a church with its possessions, revenues, and priestly office as an object of what we can reasonably call property. However, it largely rejects his and his followers' application o ... More

This book studies the proprietary church with coverage of most of Western Europe, from the end of the Roman Empire in the West to about 1200. The book provides a broad survey in varying degrees of intensity and with a shifting geographical focus; and it asks questions that are as much social and religious as legal or administrative. The book vindicates, for village and estate churches, Ulrich Stutz's basic concept of a church with its possessions, revenues, and priestly office as an object of what we can reasonably call property. However, it largely rejects his and his followers' application of this to great churches, and sees the position of intermediate churches (such as small or middling monasteries) as various, changeable, and ambivalent. Above all, it turns away from Stutz's view of the property relationship as a distinct institution or system of ‘Germanic church law’, presenting it rather as a fluid set of assumptions and practices taking shape as customary law.