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Johannes XXII. Avignon und Europa. Das politische Papsttum im Spiegel der kurialen Register (1316-1334) . By Sebastian Zanke . (Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions, 175.) Pp. xxiii + 418 incl. 4 graphs and 3 tables. Leiden-Boston : Brill , 2013. 978 90 04 25898 3 ; 1543 4188
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This is a lightly revised Augsburg University dissertation. In principle all German doctoral theses must be published in some form. The lucky ones find a series with international diffusion, as has Zanke. The author had the advantage of periods of research, funded by studentships, at the German Historical Institutes in London and in Rome. By going to Rome and studying papal history with a diplomatic spin Zanke places himself in a long and distinguished German scholarly tradition, going back to the opening of the Vatican Archives in the nineteenth century and developed by Protestant as much as, or more than, by Catholic scholars. Quite properly, Zanke's affiliation (if any) is not evident. A consequence of this tradition, and of a somewhat similar one in France, is that the scholarly bibliography on the medieval papacy is of colossal dimensions. A secondary merit of this book is to bring the reader up to date with the latest work at least on John xxii, a remarkable and much misinterpreted pope, who certainly deserves all the attention that he is beginning to receive. The book is particularly useful - though this is not its primary aim - as an up-to-date analysis of the changes in record-keeping at the Curia under John.
The primary aim of the study is to explore John xxii's relations with different parts of Europe at the level of high politics insofar as these connections are...