The Eastern Schism: A Study of the Papacy and the Eastern Churches during the XIth and XIIth Centuries

Steven Runciman's The Eastern Schism, A Study of the Papacy and the Eastern Churches During the XIth and XIIth Centuries, published by Oxford University Press in 1955, is a scholarly history examining the gradual estrangement between the Latin and Byzantine churches across the eleventh and twelfth centuries, treating the 1054 events usually cited as the schism as one moment within a much longer, more gradual process of separation. Runciman was a historian of Byzantium whose work drew on both Latin and Greek sources. Its strength is that longer view, resisting the simpler textbook account of a single break in 1054. Its limit is its age: written seventy years ago, it predates significant later archival and ecumenical scholarship on the schism, so a claim resting on Runciman's specific interpretation should be checked against more recent historical work on Byzantine-Latin relations as well.