Overview

Electing the Pope in Early Modern Italy, 1450-1700 offers a radical reassessment of the history of early modern papacy, constructed through the first major analytical treatment of papal elections in English. Papal elections, with their ceremonial pomp and high drama, are compelling theatre, but, until now, no one has analysed them on the basis of the problems they created for cardinals: how were they to agree rules and enforce them? How should they manage the interregnum? How did they decide for whom to vote? How was the new pope to assert himself over a group of men who, until just moments before, had been his equals and peers?This study traces how the cardinals' responses to these problems evolved over the period from Martin V's return to Rome in 1420 to Pius VI's departure from it in 1798, placing them in the context of the papacy's wider institutional developments. Miles Pattenden argues not only that the elective nature of the papal office was crucial to how papal history unfolded but also that the cardinals of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries present us with a unique case study for observing the approaches to decision-making and problem-solving within an elite political group.

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9780198961956

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Reviews

...the book represents a courageous attempt to provide a concise treatment of a topic that continues to arouse the passionate interest of international scholarship. * Maria Antonietta Visceglia, Sapienza University of Rome, Catholic Historical Review * this is a most valuable work in English on broad aspects of papal history, not least in the seventeenth century, which is not particularly well covered in that language. * Oliver Logan, European History Quarterly * an important contribution to scholarship on the early modern papacy * Christopher P. Gillett, Europe Now * This new study offers far more than its title suggests. While this book explores how popes were elected in early modern Italy, it will be remembered more for its discussion of 'the problems selection by election created for the cardinals and others who invested in the papacy as an institution'....As befits such a complex and multifaceted thesis, this study's argument is very carefully positioned in relation to recent research. Anyone looking for a primer on the current historiography of the papacy would do well to read this volume ... [it] builds an interesting new world out of a more holistic interpretation of the current scholarship. This is no small task, but he does it with patience and precision, and to the benefit of the larger field. * Jennifer Mara Desilva, Renaissance and Reformation * fascinating, and extremely well-researched ... It is a study of the making of popes that no future historian of the papal office can afford to ignore. * Michael J. Walsh, Irish Theological Quarterly * an amazing book, which will be an essential tool for serious scholarship on the papacy for many years to come. * Anthony F. D'Elia, History * Miles Pattenden's Electing the Pope in Early Modern Italy, 1450-1700 is a model of scholarship. He bridges topics usually kept apart, deftly ranging across political history and political theory, theology and liturgy, and economic and social history. * Benjamin Guyer, The Sixteenth Century Journal * Electing the Pope makes a critical contribution to scholarship on the early modern papacy, but it offers still more. This is a book on both state-building and local politics; on the process of decision-making and the world of political elites; and on the value of studying constitutions and adopting interdisciplinary approaches to history. It deserves a broad audience and an enduring place in the historiography of early modern Europe. * Emily O'Brien, Renaissance Quarterly *

Author Information

Miles Pattenden, a Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, is a historian of Early Modern Catholicism. He is the author of Pius IV and the Fall of the Carafa: Nepotism and Papal Authority in Counter-Reformation Rome (OUP, 2013) and the co-editor of several volumes, including The Spanish Presence in Sixteenth-Century Italy (2015) and The Companion to the Early Modern Cardinal (2020).

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