From the Preface: The 1163 council at Tours met amidst the most protracted conflict between a pope and a secular ruler in medieval history, the eighteen-year struggle between Alexander III and Frederick Barbarossa. The gathering duly receives a paragraph or so in surveys of that dispute, and it usually is included--and properly so--in lists of the important sources for twelfth- and thirteenth-century canon law. But the meeting has been accorded...