The title of this book, Rome and the Invention of the Papacy, uses the word ‘invention’ in the original Latin sense of inventio (discovery), as well as the more recent one of an original creation with a function. I intend it to be a more evocative, or even provocative, word than ‘formation’ or ‘development’. Indeed, I shall not be offering a straightforward history of the early medieval papacy in this book. Instead, my theme is the power of a text, with an extended case study of a particular text that charts the history of the early medieval papacy, namely, the Liber pontificalis or ‘book of the pontiffs’.