John Howe

Select Publications

A Professor in the Wilderness

In the eleventh century a small group of clerical reformers based in Rome launched a fight for the liberty of the Church. The consequences ultimately included a politically powerful papacy and stronger kingdoms with their own more secular laws and bureaucracies. One way to understand what happened is to examine the life of Peter Damian, the most prolific Latin writer of the mid eleventh century and a pioneer in the reform movement. He has never before received a comprehensive critical historical biography.

Peter was an orphan boy from Ravenna who became a successful professor of rhetoric. Then he abandoned that career to join a community of penitent hermits living in the high Apennines at Fonte Avellana. He did not actually manage to leave the world behind because he was chosen as prior of his hermit community and had to employ his rhetorical and legal skills to protect it from predatory local lords and "bad bishops and abbots." He cultivated contacts with the emperor and the pope. In 1057 he was named bishop of Ostia, the leader of the cardinal bishops. As a high official in the Roman Church, aided by his prolific writings, he promoted a reforming agenda. He proved to be a formidable papal legate. At the end of his career, he retired to Fonte Avellana where he remained active until he died on a final legatine mission, probably in 1073.

Peter advanced the movement known today as the "Gregorian Reform" not only by strengthening papal power and canon law but also by helping to develop a powerful curial bureaucracy with new means of communication that gave the Roman curia more control over local churches. His successes, failures, and misadventures illuminate a major turning point in Western civilization.

Learn more at The Catholic University of America Press (Page 4)

Before the Gregorian Reform: The Latin Church at the Turn of the Millenium

Historians typically single out the hundred-year period from about 1050 to 1150 as the pivotal moment in the history of the Latin Church, for it was then that the Gregorian Reform movement established the ecclesiastical structure that would ensure Rome's dominance throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. In Before the Gregorian Reform John Howe challenges this familiar narrative by examining earlier, "pre-Gregorian" reform efforts within the Church. He finds that they were more extensive and widespread than previously thought and that they actually established a foundation for the subsequent Gregorian Reform movement.

The low point in the history of Christendom came in the late ninth and early tenth centuries—a period when much of Europe was overwhelmed by barbarian raids and widespread civil disorder, which left the Church in a state of disarray. As Howe shows, however, the destruction gave rise to creativity. Aristocrats and churchmen rebuilt churches and constructed new ones, competing against each other so that church building, like castle building, acquired its own momentum. Patrons strove to improve ecclesiastical furnishings, liturgy, and spirituality. Schools were constructed to staff the new churches. Moreover, Howe shows that these reform efforts paralleled broader economic, social, and cultural trends in Western Europe including the revival of long-distance trade, the rise of technology, and the emergence of feudal lordship. The result was that by the mid-eleventh century a wealthy, unified, better-organized, better-educated, more spiritually sensitive Latin Church was assuming a leading place in the broader Christian world.

Before the Gregorian Reform challenges us to rethink the history of the Church and its place in the broader narrative of European history. Compellingly written and generously illustrated, it is a book for all medievalists as well as general readers interested in the Middle Ages and Church history.

Learn more at Cornell University Press.

Church Reform and Social Change in Eleventh-Century Italy: Dominic of Sora and His Patrons

At the dawn of the second millennium, new churches and castles sprang up throughout Western Europe. In central Italy, St. Dominic of Sora (d. 1032) and his patrons played a key role in this process. John Howe mines the surprisingly rich but heretofore neglected sources that reveal their story, offering an absorbing case study of an ecclesiastical reform that was earlier—if less literate and less centralized—than the Gregorian Reform that would soon follow.

Learn more at University of Pennsylvania Press.

Inventing Medieval Landscapes: Senses of Place in Western Europe

Far from the forest primeval of popular imagination, the historians and literary scholars in this book describe a Western European landscape just as consciously constructed by its inhabitants as any modern landscape--physically, conceptually, and spiritually. All appearing for the first time in print, their essays provide a wealth of detail on this "deep ecology" of the Middle Ages and a better understanding of the creativity and skill of our cultural ancestors.

Learn more at University Press of Florida.