The Papacy and the Historian

Extract

It is easy for a historian to write about the papacy indifferently but very difficult to write about it very well. It is even more difficult to write well about individual popes. If we console ourselves for the inadequacy of the current biographers of Pius xii or John xxiii with the thought that the passage of time will mend matters our optimism is misplaced. There is no outstanding biography of any pope. The first known original literary composition by an Englishman was a Life of Gregory the Great: in the thirteen hundred years since he wrote it he has been surpassed but not by very much. Gregory VII is a household name in every ecclesiastical history seminar but there is no modem scholarly biography in any language that I know of. The standard work, Martens’ Gregor VII, is a collection of foot-notes of incredible pedantry to which the author never provided a text. Even the basic facts of the life of Peter had to wait until 1952 before they were established on a scholarly basis. There is, however, a basic scholarly consensus about the papacy as an institution, a consensus expressed in a brilliant and compelling book, Professor Walter Ullmann’s Growth of Papal Government. There are, of course, dissenting voices, and distinguished ones, over this or that issue, but most of what is written and taught about Church history still does not stray far from the guide-lines laid down by Dr Ullmann.