The Investiture Controversy: Church and Monarchy from the Ninth to the Twelfth Century

Uta-Renate Blumenthal's The Investiture Controversy is a scholarly history of the eleventh and twelfth century conflict between the papacy and secular rulers over who had the authority to appoint bishops and invest them with the symbols of their office, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Blumenthal is a recognized medieval historian and the book is a standard academic treatment of the controversy's causes, course and long term significance for the relationship between church and state in medieval Europe. Its authority rests on close engagement with the medieval documentary record, papal letters, chronicles and legal texts from the period. Its limit is the ordinary one for a synthetic academic history, covering a broad sweep of decades and multiple kingdoms, so a claim about a specific local dispute or a single ruler's motives benefits from a narrower specialist study alongside this general account.