Bishops between ‘reforms’ in the long tenth century : the case of Verdun

Now that we see Carolingian bishops as the king’s natural partners in governing the ecclesia, and those of the decades around 1100 as increasingly aligned to an agenda and a discourse no longer centred on kings, how should we best interpret the bishops ‘in between’? And how can we assess them on their own terms, and not simply as either post-Carolingian or proto-Gregorian? This article considers this question using the tenth-century bishops of Verdun in Lotharingia as a case study. It argues that these bishops were responding creatively to changes not of their making, and doing so in ways that the historiography of reform finds difficult to capture.