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True Lies: Canossa As Myth, Frederick Mark Gedicks
True Lies: Canossa As Myth, Frederick Mark Gedicks
Faculty Scholarship
This essay is a response to Paul Horwitz, “Freedom of the Church without Romance,” published as part of a symposium on “The Freedom of the Church.” The essay endorses Horwitz’s central thesis that advocates of a contemporary “freedom of the Church” have overlooked historical complexities in marking the 11th-century investiture conflict between Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII, often simply referred to “Canossa” after the small Emilian village where Henry sought absolution from Gregory, as the birth of that freedom.
The essay goes beyond Horwitz to argue that the historical account of “Canossa” presupposed by freedom-of-the-Church advocates is literally false. …