Keith Sisson and Atria Larson have produced a work promoting deeper understanding of papal authority and its development in the Middle Ages. In this substantial volume, they have edited sixteen essays composed by a distinguished scholarly team from across Europe and North America. Larson identifies their goal clearly at the outset: the contributions are meant to provide an updated introduction and guide for students and nonspecialist scholars interested in the medieval papacy defined in legal, religious, and political terms. Together, the authors present a story of growth, but one decidedly different from the mid-twentieth-century view of Walter Ullmann. His ways of thinking about the growth of medieval papal power were tied almost exclusively to a conflict of ideas about authority, as all studying medieval history in the 1970s learned well. He saw conflict between empire and papacy as inevitable on two levels: an inevitable struggle between incompatible notions of authority, and a contest to be won—and in seemingly inevitable fashion—by the greater, papal power. While now passé, defended in full by no serious scholars, Ullmann’s interpretation remains, as Thomas Noble says here, a “ghostly presence” (17), if only as the foil against which the team of Sisson and Larson fence. Together these scholars illustrate with great persuasion that the medieval papacy, especially though the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, is comprised of many different histories contingent upon myriad local, regional, and European-wide circumstances.

These historians marshal impressive evidence, and their collected essays will surely be useful for the intended audience. Readers become familiar with the context of the Gregorian reform, and thus the rebellious Pataria association, not just the investiture crisis. In the essay on the Papal States, plenty of evidence is provided to show the inconsistent, discontinuous nature of both papal political authority and territorial control. Readers see too that the iconographic claims of papal power in art, architecture, and liturgy reached a high point of bluster during the reign of Innocent III, but could not necessarily be considered matched by effective authority. Many will have their eyes opened by the excellent chapters on canon law, papal decretals, and councils. The authors of these chapters point out the slowly developing self-awareness of popes as creators of papal law separate from episcopal rule making. Readers may be surprised not just by the impact local circumstances could have on the application of papal laws stereotypically understood as absolute, but also by the lack of any articulated papal plan for law and its implementation. Individual popes apparently made decisions with cognizance of precedent and concern for their place in history. Similarly, readers will find that when medieval popes expected canons produced by councils under their control to be observed outside of Rome, their expectations butted up against complex local politics limiting implementation. And while sometimes local conditions mitigated against broadened effective implementation of papal power, sometimes the opposite was the case. In the essays on the development of papal legates and on the growth of administration through the Camera Apostolica, readers will find that delegated jurisdiction significantly contributed to increased papal authority outside of Rome, and that the apostolic household was able to efficiently do what no other ruler could: tax the whole of Europe, and with a tiny number of employees.

Chapters on the contemporary papal chancery, the apostolic penitentiary, and the Roman Rota provide more surprises: the vast production of papal briefs and letters shows that popes acted, Andreas Meyer explains, as “not the hunter, but the hunted” (256). Hence, documents from these offices tell much more about what individual appellants sought than what pope or curia thought about any case. The final essays further illuminate the variety of goals pursued by popes in the medieval period: not only a crusade agenda that died after reaching a high point under Innocent II, but also a missionary vision once essentially abandoned but renewed in the thirteenth century, one destined to grow throughout the early modern era. These essays promote sophisticated, nuanced understanding of the medieval papacy, and deserve wide readership.