In the course of the 11th century, the Papacy increasingly claimed a universal authority over all Christians. Even if this programme was not fully implemented, it is still the most successful example of territorial claims being staked in medieval Europe.
The present volume of collected papers approaches this topic from a number of directions, dealing above all with the organisation of papal power, legal processes and the ways in which religious ideas were communicated. The basic approach of the papers is to examine the history of communication and to analyse the paths of information exchange and the barriers to communication in a Church which regarded itself as having universal authority and laboured to establish this claim.