H. E. J. Cowdrey, Emeritus Fellow, St Edmund Hall, Oxford

"No one has treated the famous Dictatus papae more convincingly than Cowdrey, to whom they mark an early and undeveloped stage in the Pope's thinking ... Gregory's personality was so towering, many of his acts so dramatic and the reactions to him so complex that writing his biography is like climbing an academic Everest. Everything Cowdrey has done in a very distinguished career has been leading up to this. It is the culmination of a life's work, and in my view it is a masterpiece." - Jonathan Riley-Smith, Times Literary Supplement 14/05/99

"since the 1930s there has been no major monograph to gather together new knowledge and new points of view. The present volume fills that need. Its author, the Reverend H. E. J. Cowdrey, is amon g the two or three living scholars mostly qualified to write it, his publications in the field having begun thirty years ago and remained standard ... The appearance of his Gregory VII is therefore itself a historical event, likely to establish a canon for m any years ahead ... a substantial read ... What drives the reader on is not only the intrinsic interest of the subject-matter but admiration for the book's all-but-perfect degree of organization ..." - Alexander Murray, Reviews in History

"This thorough re-examination of the sources will leave even Gregory aficionados abuzz with new ideas ... It is, in fact, a pe arl of great price. What the reader gets for his modicum of industry is a picture of finer resolution than any other available, or indeed that could be available without Cowdrey's patient method and acquaintance with secondary scholarship. The outcome i s like a magnified scientific photograph, which reveals at a glance the lineaments of an otherwise mysterious and invisible natural process" - Alexander Murray, Reviews in History

"Gregory's challenge to Henry and the status quo was compared by a contemporary to an earthquake. Cowdrey's fine-resolution picture - a moving picture, registering subtleties of change - allows the observer to watch the geological processes behind that earthquake, as the elusive tectonic plates creaked into their new positions, in those critical twelve years, to form the foundations of subsequent European politics and culture." - Alexander Murray, Reviews in History