The two centuries covered in this volume were among the most creative in the history of the Church. Colin Morris charts the emergence of much that is considered characteristic of European culture and religion, including universities and commercial cities, the crusades, the friars, chivalry, marriage, and church architecture. In all these developments, the Roman Church played an important and often fundamental role. A re-evaluation of that role is now particularly apt given the dissolution of Christendom in its old form witnessed by today's generation.

An ardent, thorough examination of the devolution of Rome's legitmate primacy fo honor in the ancient Christian Church into the ill-founded, problematic and divisive doctrine of papal infallibility. ? synthesize the welter and important evidence on the issue of papal authority.

This book surveys royal marriage cases to explore how popes dealt with the marriage problems of kings, especially dissolutions and dispensations.

Historians commonly designate the High Middle Ages as the era of the "papal monarchy," when the popes of Rome vied with secular rulers for spiritual and temporal supremacy. Indeed, in many ways the story of the papal monarchy encapsulates that of medieval Europe as often remembered: a time before the modern age, when religious authorities openly clashed with emperors, kings, and princes for political mastery of their world, claiming sovereignty over Christendom, the universal community of Christian kingdoms, churches, and peoples. At no point was this conflict more widespread and dramatic than during the papacies of Gregory IX (1227-1241) and Innocent IV (1243-1254). Their struggles with the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II (1212-1250) echoed in the corridors of power and the court of public opinion, ranging from the battlefields of Italy to the streets of Jerusalem. In The Two Powers, Brett Edward Whalen has written a new history of this combative relationship between the thirteenth-century papacy and empire. Countering the dominant trend of modern historiography, which focuses on Frederick instead of the popes, he redirects our attention to the papal side of the historical equation. By doing so, Whalen highlights the ways in which Gregory and Innocent acted politically and publicly, realizing their priestly sovereignty through the networks of communication, performance, and documentary culture that lay at the unique disposal of the Apostolic See. Covering pivotal decades that included the last major crusades, the birth of the Inquisition, and the unexpected invasion of the Mongols, The Two Powers shows how Gregory and Innocent's battles with Frederick shaped the historical destiny of the thirteenth-century papacy and its role in the public realm of medieval Christendom.

The pallium was effective because it was a gift with strings attached. This band of white wool encircling the shoulders had been a papal insigne and liturgical vestment since late antiquity. It grew in prominence when the popes began to bestow it regularly on other bishops as a mark of distinction and a sign of their bond to the Roman church. Bonds of Wool analyzes how, through adroit manipulation, this gift came to function as an instrument of papal influence. It explores an abundant array of evidence from diverse genres - including chronicles and letters, saints' lives and canonical collections, polemical treatises and liturgical commentaries, and hundreds of papal privileges - stretching from the eighth century to the thirteenth and representing nearly every region of Western Europe. These sources reveal that the papal conferral of the pallium was an occasion for intervening in local churches throughout the West and a means of examining, approving, and even disciplining key bishops, who were eventually required to request the pallium from Rome.