Our systems are now restored following recent technical disruption, and we’re working hard to catch up on publishing. We apologise for the inconvenience caused. Find out more

Recommended product

Popular links

Popular links


The Cambridge History of the Papacy 3 Hardback Book Set

The Cambridge History of the Papacy 3 Hardback Book Set

The Cambridge History of the Papacy 3 Hardback Book Set

Joëlle Rollo-Koster, University of Rhode Island
Robert A. Ventresca, King’s University College at Western University
Melodie H. Eichbauer, Florida Gulf Coast University
Miles Pattenden, University of Oxford
July 2025
Available
Multiple copy pack
9781108680950
$420.00
USD
Multiple copy pack
3 Hardback books

    The papacy is commonly referred to as the world's oldest surviving institution and its capacity for survival and residual strength have long fascinated historians. This Cambridge History explores how and why the papacy has endured across the centuries. It examines its role as an instrument of authority, governance, and social and cultural influence, even as many other powerful institutions, empires, and states have disappeared or been reduced to largely ceremonial functions. Topics discussed include the papacy's relationship to secular power, including global events and political movements throughout history; its place in the governance of the Catholic Church, including its own internal structures and relationship with the Catholic hierarchy; and its entanglement in histories of art, culture, spirituality, gender, sexuality, bioethics, the environment, fashion, science, medicine, and the body. Providing new insights into how successive popes have interpreted the role of the papacy, this Cambridge History also reveals how that papal power has been contested in each historical period.

    • Provides cross-disciplinary and intersectional history of the papacy as an actor in European and global history
    • Provides a sustained analysis of the origins and nature of papal power and authority, and its evolution over the centuries
    • Provides new and original insights into the papacy's role in and response to such processes as globalization, decolonization and movements for social and reproductive rights around the world

    Product details

    July 2025
    Multiple copy pack
    9781108680950
    2400 pages
    235 × 159 × 122 mm
    4.14kg
    Available

    Table of Contents

    • Part I. Christendom and Empire
    • Part II. Crises, Schisms, and Dissent
    • Part III. Reformations and Revolutions
    • Part IV. Theopolitics and Religious Diplomacy
    • Part V. Inter-Faith Relations
    • Part I. The Pope within the Church
    • Part II. The Roman Curia
    • Part III. Canon Law
    • Part IV. Finance
    • Part V. Papal States
    • Part I. Spaces, Liturgies, Travels
    • Part II. Women, Gender, Sexuality
    • Part III. Science, Medicine, Technology
    • Part IV. Education, Culture, Arts.
      Contributors
    • Joëlle Rollo-Koster, Robert A. Ventresca, Melodie Eichbauer, Miles Pattenden, George E. Demacopoulos, Hartmut Leppin, Thomas F. X. Noble, Brett Edward Whalen, Uta-Renate Blumenthal, John Howe, Eugene Webb, Irene Bueno, Rebecca Rist, Blake Beattie, Bénédicte Sère, Nelson Minnich, Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, Shaun Blanchard, Ambrogio Caiani, Daniele Menozzi, Robert P. Kraynak, David Alvarez, John Pollard, Justine Walden, Elizabeth Foster, Michael E. Lee, Toby Osborne, Edward Siecienski, Joshua Bennett, John Tolan, Alexander Mallett, Kenneth Stow, Adrian Ciani, Jessalynn Bird, John Moorhead, Christian Sorrel, Gilles Routhier, Massimo Faggioli, Robert Swanson, Roberto Regoli, Peter Clarke, Kriston Rennie, Vincenzo Lavenia, Wolfgang Reinhard, Kenneth Pennington, Greta Austin, Anne J. Duggan, Norman Doe, John Beal, Peter Platen, Benedict Wiedemann, Guidi-Bruscoli, Christophe Masson, Catherine Fletcher, Irene Fosi, Christoper Korten, Louis I. Hamilton, Antonella De Michelis, Jan De Volder, Jennifer DeSilva, Nicolas Bock, Tiffany A. Ziegler, Jan Machielsen, Kate E. Bush, Vanessa Corcoran, Fernanda Alfieri, David d'Avray, Lucia Pozzi, Umberto Grassi, Vincenzo Lagioia, Jo Renée Formicola, Caley McCarthy, Rebecca Messbarger, Don O'Leary, Matteo Duni, C. Philipp E. Nothaft, Daniel R. DiLeo, Christopher Hamlin, Raffaella Perin, Elizabeth McCahill, Ambrogio Maria Piazzoni, Paolo Sachet, Arnold Witte, Richard Sherr, David Salomoni, Clare Monagle

    • Editors
    • Joëlle Rollo-Koster , University of Rhode Island

      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 , King’s University College at Western University

      Robert A. entresca 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 , Florida Gulf Coast University

      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 , University of Oxford

      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.