Electing the Pope in Early Modern Italy, 1450–1700, by Miles Pattenden

In recent years, early modern papal elections and interregna have been the subject of important historical studies by scholars such as Günther Wassilowsky, Maria Antonietta Visceglia and John M. Hunt. Miles Pattenden’s ‘extended essay’ (as he describes it, p. 7) complements these seminal social, cultural and cultural-political studies. Pattenden offers a political and constitutional perspective on early modern papal elections by concentrating on the problems which they caused for popes and their electors—the cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church—as well as for the papacy and the Papal States more widely. Pattenden approaches early modern papal elections from a thematic rather than a chronological angle. He emphasises that, when electing a pope, cardinals had to consider the diverse and sometimes conflicting interests of the College of Cardinals, their families, the Catholic faith and secular powers (Chapter Two). He discusses the formal, practical and logistical problems of electing a new pope (Chapter Three) as well as the potential threat which papal interregna posed to the authority of cardinals and new popes in Rome and the Papal States (Chapter Four). Since supporting the wrong candidate could entail disastrous consequences for a cardinal, Pattenden also reflects on the difficulties that cardinals experienced in obtaining, evaluating and acting on information when electing a pope (Chapter Five). In a chapter entitled ‘The New Pope’, Pattenden highlights that the elective nature of the papacy required newly elected popes to demonstrate their authority to everyone in symbolic displays and to exert authority in practice by means of patronage, nepotism and coercion (Chapter Six).

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