Joëlle Rollo-Koster invites the reader to look at the Great Western Schism, when two and then three papacies competed for preeminent obedience for almost forty years, through lenses different than the standards. The author builds on her prolific prior work concerning the topic's performative aspects and lived experience, notably in Raiding Saint Peter (2008) and Avignon and Its Papacy (2015).
It is easy to read the schism in clinical legal terms, but the schism was far more than an institutional struggle. It was fundamentally emotional and dramatic, even frightening in terms of its danger to the hallmark unity of Christianity. The schism was a risky moment: what if you backed the wrong papal horse? A measure of this hedging of bets is found in a Toledo liturgy at the spot in the Eucharistic prayer where the pontiff was named: there it reads pro illo qui est verus papa—a judicious and even clever phrase. This personal experience of confusion has been Rollo-Koster's interest for two decades. As she puts it in her introduction, prior historiography “has somewhat disincarnated the crisis, focusing on institutions rather than the people behind it. The present monograph will complement this historiography by ‘incarnating’ it, grounding the analysis of the Schism's events within the framework of cultural anthropology” (8).
Most twentieth-century studies, building on earlier medieval partisan accounts, discussed the schism in traditional terms: ecclesiological, intellectual, political, and canonical considerations of papal and conciliar legitimacy and authority. More recently, borrowing from social, economic, cultural, and anthropological methodologies, scholars have asked how the schism was received, challenged, and felt among not only the religious and civil power players but also among the people. The author leads just such an exploration through archival materials, up-to-date scholarship, and reconsiderations of prior historiographical approaches. She is looking particularly at reception in terms of emotions, sights, and smells, and theatrical expressions of papal authority through written, sung, and performed words. She does this by walking through the progressive steps of break, division, redress, and reintegration.
The volume begins with a narrative retelling of the schism as social drama. The second chapter considers the ways that competing popes demonstrated their legitimacy in administrative and liturgical gestures, especially via Marian feasts and the rituals involved in petitions, the granting of bulls, and the annual bestowal of the Golden Rose during Lent to a favored (and obedient) lay supporter. The third chapter completes the second by considering reception of these gestures as evidenced in two illuminated manuscripts and a tapestry. Here there is frustration given the author's close analysis of their images. Only four appear from Ulrich Richenthal's Chronicle and none from Antonio Baldana's De magno Schismate, although footnotes indicate where they may be found digitized online; another hints that the Chateau Angers did not grant permission to use images from the Apocalypse tapestry housed there, although a printed edition is listed.
Chapter 4 puts the schism in the broader context of the late medieval crisis of authority by considering questions of papal and royal legitimacy, authority, and removal. We have multiple popes at the same time that England's nobles deposed Richard II in 1399 and the Burgundians assassinated Duke Louis of Orléans in 1407 during France's civil war. In far less brutal terms, the French Church twice subtracted its obedience from the Avignon pope by withholding tax revenue. Rollo-Koster sees these events of a piece, although the worst that was said of a pope was that even though he was a usurper acting tyrannically, deposition and not murder was the solution despite some early military maneuvering. On this comparison, there is an intriguing table of accusations against Richard II and Popes Urban VI, Benedict XIII, and John XXIII (172–73). Chapter 5 considers the political theology and performance aspects of papal funerals, while chapters 6 and 7 are studies of the urban spaces of Rome and Avignon. Throughout, Rollo-Koster's creative framing, extensive citations, and granular research open the subject fruitfully.
