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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
One feature of late medieval life always strikes the modern student as most strange: the Roman Church was an institution which you could, if you had the courage, opt out of, but you did not opt in, or rather, it was assumed that you were in unless you took steps to make dissent clear. Here I would want to add that being ‘in’ included accepting the papacy. My object in this paper is to discuss aspects of this situation, to ask how the papacy was perceived before opinions were distorted by the need to accommodate the impact of Luther. There are few areas where it is more important not to write history from the Reformation backwards; between Protestant polemic and Catholic apologetic the late medieval papacy remains in need of an impartial historian. Textbooks are few and detailed studies of many aspects non-existent. In this paper I will merely try to illuminate a few questions which arise when one begins to consider what it meant to say that in the late Middle Ages all orthodox Latin Christians accepted the papacy.
I would like to thank Dr R. Britnell and Dr J. Britnell for helpful discussions of many matters in this paper.
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43 Ibid., pp. 498-9.
44 Crowder, Unity, Heresy, pp. 29-31. Several works by A. Black are pertinent, most recently, ‘The conciliar movement’, in J. H. Burns, ed.. The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought (Cam bridge, 1988), pp. 573-87.
45 Interesting discussion in A. Black, Council and Commune. The Conciliar Movement and the Fifteenth Century Heritage (London, 1979), pp. 215-22.
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63 Ibid., Augustine: pp. 32, 34, 35; Jerome: p. 40; Cyprian: p. 41.
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79 Rotuli Parliamentorum, 6 vols (London, 1767-77), 6, p. 336, quoted by B. Wolffe, Henry VI (London, 1981), p. 95.
80 D’Amico, Renaissance Humanism, p. 48. In general: D. S. Chambers, A Renaissance Cardinal and His Worldly Goods: The Will and Inventory of Francesco Gonzaga (1444-1483), Warburg Institute Surveys and Texts, 20 (London, 1992), esp. ch. 2; K.J. P. Lowe, Church and Politics in Renaissance Italy. The Life and Career of Cardinal Francesco Soderini (1453-1524) (Cambridge, 1993), esp. chs. 15, 16, 17, 18, 19.
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105 Ibid., 1, pp. 176, 343.
106 Ibid., 1, p. 387.
107 Harvey, England, Rome, pp. 236-7; E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars. Traditional Religion in England c. 1400-c. 1580 (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1992), pp. 287-98; Swanson, Church and Society, pp. 227-8 and 292-4.
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