The chapter addresses the history of the Synod of Bishops, created by pope Paul VI in September 1965 and reformed by Francis I between 2018 and 2023, with an analysis of the different phases: from the proposals emerging from the bishops during the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), to the Synods’ assemblies of Paul VI (r. 1963–78), John Paul II (r. 1978–2005), and Benedict XVI (r. 2005–13). After half a century of its life, the Synod of Bishops has changed, especially during pope Francis I’s pontificate, from an expression of episcopal collegiality (representing the bishops only), useful as a device of papal primacy, to an institution of ecclesial synodality, giving voice to all kinds of members in the Catholic Church, including women and lay people.

Did the popes, through the medium of decretals, make law or not? Against a long-established tradition expressed forcefully by Walther Ullmann, Harold Berman, and many others, this chapter argues that the legal authority of the medieval papacy, manifested most spectacularly in the issue of thousands of decretal letters, represented not legislation but jurisdiction; that it was generated by the demands of appellants and consultants from across the whole of the Latin Church, from Trondheim (Norway) to Esztergom (Hungary) and Palermo (Sicily); and that the impetus to compile collections of these papal decisions began not in Rome but in the regions, for use in episcopal courts and in the nascent universities where canon law was studied. A selection of rescripts (replies to judicial appeals) and consultations (answers to questions) offers a fascinating insight into these dynamic processes, which helped to shape the development of European law.

A speech by Isaeus allows us to observe in detail a family chorus caught up in the turmoil of the Athenian civil war. It is at its heart that the heroine of this chapter, Hegeso, lived for most of her life. “Hegeso (daughter) of Proxenus”: her name is engraved on a beautiful funerary monument located in the Kerameikos Cemetery. A woman alone, whose portrait is on display in a public space, without any male presence: It’s a rare enough occurrence that we may be tempted to think this stele is an exceptional document testifying to a particular form of recognition not of womankind, but of an individualized woman. However, this would be wrong. For the very name of Hegeso can only be established through interaction with the other funerary monuments nearby, and this tends to erase the singularity of her presence by confining her to the role of the model wife. Above all, Hegeso finds herself at the crossroads of a family feud between two branches of the family of Proxenus, her father, caught up in the events of 404/3. Far from constituting a zone of withdrawal and intimacy, families were rife with political conflicts. The memorial of Hegeso nevertheless exhibits the harmony of the family sphere in the form of two half-choruses singing in tune: the regulated game of exchanges from which marriage proceeds, as well as the regulated gender divisions within it. Celebrating the fixity and the permanence of family lineage, this portrayal masks, or staves off, political turbulence by presenting the oikos as existing in an unchanging temporal space: that of its cyclic reproduction from one generation to the next.

This chapter comes in two related but distinct parts. The first presents general trends in the neurosciences and considers how these impact upon psychiatry as a clinical science. The second picks up a recent and important development in neuroscience which seeks to explain mental functions such as perception and has been profitably extended into explanations of psychopathology. The second part can be viewed as a working example of the first’s overarching themes.

Three factors – Rome’s peripheral position, its rivalry with other sees, and the role of Roman aristocrats – shaped the ecclesiastical policy of the popes in late antiquity. Their claims to ecclesiastical authority across the empire were based on the reputation of the City of Rome. In addition, the Petrine tradition became crucial for the representation of late antique popes. From an Eastern perspective, however, they were no more than the patriarchs of the West. As they were not under the direct grip of the emperor, the popes possessed more agency than Eastern bishops, but this made it more difficult for them to influence imperial politics directly. Therefore, they composed treatises about the relationship between emperor and bishop, which answered concrete challenges, but were interpreted as fundamental texts later. In retrospect and in retrospect only, late antique papacy was the first step of a scale towards universal papacy.

The Cambridge History of the Papacy is organized to provide readers with a critical–historical survey of the structural development of the papacy as an institution and as an actor in Church history, and in world history. It is hard to imagine a sphere of human activity over the past two millennia that has not been influenced by, and influenced in turn by, papal action – be it in the domains of religious belief and practice; social, cultural, and political thought; art, science, medicine, ethics, diplomacy, and international relations. Four questions – each addressed throughout the three volumes of the present work – have framed that vision across vast chronological and geographical expanses: the pope’s centrality within the Catholic Church, the primacy of papal power as an instrument of governance, the papacy’s cultural influence in society and culture, and the implications of secularity for its place in the lives of believers and non-believers alike. Each question – and the search for answers – converges around the fundamental question of papal authority: its original claims; the ebbs and flows of its effective reach; and the numerous ways in which claims, and expressions of papal authority and supremacy, have been contested within the Catholic tradition, and from without.

Through patronage of art, architecture, and classical scholarship and through development of classically inspired rhetoric and ceremonies, the popes of the medieval and early modern periods promoted the recovery and reinterpretation of ancient Greek and Roman culture. Critics (including Roman civic leaders, Renaissance humanists, and Protestant reformers) pilloried the papal court as a symbol of corruption and cultural stagnation, but pontiffs and their advisers continued to adapt ancient and early Christian precedents to support their traditional claims to authority and to justify their new initiatives. This chapter argues that the papacy played a vital role in recovering and using the classical legacy throughout the (long) Middle Ages. It also argues that the venues and motivations for this appropriation remained more consistent than standard periodization of the medieval, Renaissance, and Counter Reformation papacy has suggested.

This chapter surveys the papacy’s struggles and historiography in the fourteenth and fifteen centuries, which were rich in far reaching events, questioning the “rhetoric” of crisis often attached to the period. Barred from Rome by widespread turmoil in Italy, seven consecutive popes – all of Gallic origin – resided at Avignon between 1309 and 1375. Criticized equally for “abandoning” Rome and for their perceived subservience to the French crown, the popes labored valiantly to end the Hundred Years War (albeit unsuccessfully) and to maintain an effective international ecclesiastical administration. The Schism (1378–1417) arose from the cardinals’ uncanonical attempt to depose the volatile Urban VI (r. 1378–89) and to elect Clement VII (r. 1378–94) in his place; eventually, three lines of popes (Roman, Avignonese, and Pisan) would bring deep divisions to Europe with their competing claims to legitimacy. The crisis only ended with the sui generis Council of Constance (1414–18) and the election of Martin V (r. 1417–31).

“Papal Rome” is an idea constructed through Rome’s physical topography and the built environment that enabled popes to govern Rome and its environs, and to project power outward. Rome cannot be called a papal city until the eighth century, but throughout the Middle Ages, the papacy’s control was regularly challenged and marginalized. The idea of Rome, its ideological, political, and religious significance, central to papal authority, was intertwined with Rome’s shifting and refashioned topography. Papal authority relied on a history invented in the early Middle Ages, and re-invented in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. To create “papal Rome,” popes rebuilt portions of Rome, and reshaped and reimagined Roman topography, the physical reality of Rome, and that idea, in turn, reshaped Europe and the Mediterranean. The Roman aristocracy and communal movement would draw from and attempt to redirect that symbolic topography as they challenged papal authority for control of the city.

Two recent trends in scholarship necessitate a reevaluation of the persistent myth of a unitary, teleologically secular Enlightenment. The first is the recognition that a unitary Enlightenment with a preordained set of goals is a later ideological construction. A second trend problematizes the relationship between religion and Enlightenment by pluralizing the Enlightenment, thus making more space for the “religious” motivations and inspirations of so many of the men and women typically denominated as “enlightened.” This chapter explores the ambivalent relationship between the popes and a “Catholic Enlightenment” that was engaged in theology, secular scholarship, and political and societal reform. On one hand, the papacy is often cast as the primary enemy of enlightened Catholicism. And yet Italy, and indeed Rome itself, boasted very significant enlightened Catholic intellectuals, rulers, and networks throughout the eighteenth century, including, arguably, certain popes. This chapter seeks to make sense of this seemingly paradoxical situation.