Between the years of 1447 (Nicholas V) and 1572 (Pius V), the Vatican became the official home of the Church, and a succession of Renaissance Popes — who were statesmen, warriors, and patrons of the arts as well as churchmen — turned Rome into an unparalleled center for culture, and turned the Church into the world's largest bureaucracy. These mercurial popes, such as Alexander VI, the infamous Borgia patriarch, and Julius 'Il Terrible' II, contributed to cultural achievements — the Basilica of St. Peters and Michaelangelo's Sistine Chapel — through the sale of indulgences, and targeted heretics with Inquisitions and witchhunts. In the midst of this explosion of great culture and violent debasement, Alexander VI, father of the ruthless Cesare and jezebel Lucrezia, came to be seen as the embodiment of this iniquity. But Gerard Noel shows that Alexander's legacy was tainted by false confessions and historical myth. In fact, Alexander created the blueprint for reform — the first of its kind — that would eventually lead to the Counter-Reformation. In his survey of the colorful reigns of the seventeen Renaissance Popes and his examination of the great Borgia myth, Noel brings to light the true legacy — political, artistic, religious — of an extraordinary time.

An exciting interdisciplinary study based on new literary, historical, and bibliographical evidence, this book will appeal to students and scholars of the Italian Renaissance, the Reformation, and the history of the book.

This work is concerned with the activities of the Florentine merchants active in Rome during the mid-sixteenth century, and their connections and relations with the Apostolic Chamber, particularly during the pontificate of Pope Paul III.

How was the history of post-classical Rome and of the Church written in the Catholic Reformation? Historical texts composed in Rome at this time have been considered secondary to the city's significance for the history of art. The Invention of Papal History corrects this distorting emphasis and shows how historical writing became part of a comprehensive formation of the image and self-perception of the papacy. By presenting and fully contextualising the path-breaking works of the Augustinian historian Onofrio Panvinio (1530-1568), Stefan Bauer shows what type of historical research was possible in the late Renaissance and the Catholic Reformation. Crucial questions were, for example: How were the pontiffs elected? How many popes had been puppets of emperors? Could any of the past machinations, schisms, and disorder in the history of the Church be admitted to the reading public? Historiography in this period by no means consisted entirely of commissioned works written for patrons; rather, a creative interplay existed between, on the one hand, the endeavours of authors to explore the past and, on the other hand, the constraints of ideology and censorship placed on them. The Invention of Papal History sheds new light on the changing priorities, mentalities, and cultural standards that flourished in the transition from the Renaissance to the Catholic Reformation.

The stories of seven popes who ruled at seven different critical periods in the 600 years leading into the Reformation.

Probes the basic attitudes, the underlying values and the core convictions that Rome's intellectuals and artists experienced, lived for, and believed in from Pope Eugenius IV's reign to the Eternal City in 1443 to the sacking of 1527.