How Papal History Was Invented
Stefan Bauer, The Invention of Papal History. Oxford University Press, 2020. $90.00 (hardback) The papacy has survived heresy, schism, the Protestant Reformation, and internal challenges to papal authority—to say nothing of scandals both financial and sexual. And, like most institutions of such longevity, it has evolved and adapted itself along the way. The ups and downs of the “bishops of Rome” (as protestant reformers insisted on referring to popes in the sixteenth century) are legion, and they run through history, like a basso profundo against which both the high politics and religi...
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