Throughout its history, the papacy has engaged with the world. Volume 1 addresses how the papacy became an institution, and how it distinguished itself from other powers, both secular and religious. Aptly titled 'The Two Swords,' it explores the papacy's navigation, negotiation, and re-negotiation, initially of its place and its role amid changing socio-political ideas and practices. Surviving and thriving in such environment naturally had an impact on the power dynamics between the papacy and the secular realm, as well internal dissents and with non-Catholics. The volume explores how changing ideas, beliefs, and practices in the broader world engaged the papacy and lead it to define its own conceptualizations of power. This dynamic has enabled the papacy to shift and be reshaped according to circumstances often well beyond its control or influence.
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.
