Katie's Reviews > The Medieval Papacy

A not-terrible but not-great overview of the medieval papacy. Honestly, I'm not sure there's a way to cover 1500 years of papal history in less than 200 pages, as Barraclough tries to do here. While he does do a pretty good job given the parameters he's working with, it's just much too short, filled with oversimplifications and a lack of necessary context. There are a frustrating amount of times where Barraclough will pass over important details or refrain from giving detailed reasons for his assertions, and the reader just has to take him at his word.

There are some good points, though - Barraclough is relatively fair to most of the popes he deals with, rarely demonizing or idealizing them. He allows for political and social factors to play into the development of the papacy instead of just seeing it as progressive stages of a continuous ideological battle between the papacy and the empire (though some will probably feel Barraclough goes too far in the opposite direction). The book itself is really lovely, filled with lots of great images from medieval manuscripts. But despite all that, it never manages to become a really helpful overview of the papacy because it's too short to weigh all the necessary considerations.