This volume engages with the centrality of the popes within the Catholic Church and the claim of papal authority as it was exercised through the institution's various governing instruments. Addressing the history of the papacy in the longue durée, it highlights developments and the differences between the first and second millennium of the papacy. The chapters bring nuance to older historiographical models of papal supremacy, focusing on how apostolic primacy was contested and re-negotiated, and how the contours of power relationships shifted between center and periphery. The volume draws attention to questions about papal supremacy across time, place, and transnational lines; the function of law in the exercise of papal authority; the governance of the church in the form of the Curia, synods, and regional and ecumenical councils; the governance of the Papal States; the management of finances and church-state relations; and the relationship between papal temporal and spiritual authority.
Author Biography:
Joëlle Rollo-Koster has published widely on the social, cultural, religious, and political history of the late Middle Ages. She is a specialist of the Avignon Papacy and of the Great Western Schism and is a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America. Her most recent publications are Avignon and its Papacy, 1309–1417: Popes, Institutions, and Society (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015); The Great Western Schism, 1378–1417: Performing Legitimacy, Performing Unity (Cambridge University Press, 2022); and, as editor, Death in Medieval Europe: Death Scripted and Death Choreographed (Routledge, 2016). She was knighted Chevalier de l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques in 2016. Robert A. Ventresca has published widely on a diverse range of topics including the papacy in the era of the two world wars and the Holocaust. His book Soldier of Christ: The Life of Pope Pius XII (Harvard University Press, 2013) was awarded the 2014 Harry C. Koenig Prize by the American Catholic Historical Association. He is a member of the Committee on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Melodie H. Eichbauer is Professor of Medieval History at Florida Gulf Coast University. Her research focuses on the dissemination of legal knowledge and the interpretation of law, and the ways in which social, political, and intellectual developments and trends shaped both between c.1000 and c.1500. She is the author of Medieval Canon Law, 2nd ed. (an expanded and revised version of the 1st edition by James A. Brundage) (Routledge, 2022); editor of A Cultural History of Genocide, vol. 2, The Middle Ages (Bloomsbury Academic Publishers, 2021); the co-editor, with Danica Summerlin, of The Use of Canon Law in Ecclesiastical Administration, 1000–1250 (Brill, 2018); and the co-editor, with Kenneth Pennington, of Law as Profession and Practice in Medieval Europe: Essays in Honor of James A. Brundage (Ashgate, 2011). Miles Pattenden has published widely on the papacy and the Catholic Church in the Counter-Reformation and Enlightenment. He is the author of Pius IV and the Fall of the Carafa: Nepotism and Papal Authority in Counter-Reformation Rome (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Electing the Pope in Early Modern Italy, 1450–1700 (Oxford University Press, 2017), and is writing a general history of the Catholic Church for Princeton University Press.
