Historically, the papacy has had – and continues to have – significant and sustained influence on society and culture. In the contemporary world, this influence is felt far afield from the traditional geographic and cultural center of papal authority in western Europe, notably in the Global South. Volume 3 frames questions around the papacy's cultural influence, focusing on the influence that successive popes and various vectors of papal authority have had on a broad range of social and cultural developments in European and global societies. The range of topics covered here reflects the vast and expanding scope of papal influence on everything from architecture to the construction and contestation of gender norms to questions of papal fashion. That influence has waxed and waned over time as successive popes have had access to greater resources and have had stronger imperatives to use their powers of patronage and regulation to intervene in society at large.
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.
