La lotta per le investiture. Una rivoluzione medievale (998-1122)

In recent historiography, the hypothesis has emerged that the investiture contest was the first revolution in the West: a forcing due to yet another analogical or metaphorical use of an effect expression, or did epochal and sudden changes take place in the eleventh century such as to disprove the idea that revolutions are only a product of modernity? The struggle between popes and emperors for control of ecclesiastical appointments was only one of many conflicts that shook the West after the year 1000. While the central role of the papacy, new forms of religious life and the celibacy of the clergy redesigned the face of the Church, the desacralization of political power sanctioned the separation between spiritual and temporal and with it the birth of the specificity of the West. It was a revolution that was literally unspeakable for its protagonists, forced to hide it under the veil of a return to the past, of reform.