The Vacant See in Early Modern Rome

The papal conclave was—and is—one of the great set-piece events of the Catholic Church. While it was customary, in the early modern period at the least, to view the election of a pope ideally as the work of the Holy Spirit moving through the cardinals as the electors, for many outsiders, the conclave resonated with secrecy and insider politicking (despite the porous nature of the conclave’s boundaries). This study by John M. Hunt, though, is not about the wheeler-dealing of the conclave itself—it is not a study from behind the closed doors of the Vatican Palace, where, from the sixteenth century, elections took place. Rather, it is a view from the outside, or, more particularly, from the streets of Rome. As the book’s subtitle suggests, this study of the papal interregnum—the sede vacante—is also much more a piece of social history than a high political history of voting practices. In some senses, Hunt’s book follows on naturally from the work of another American scholar, Laurie Nussdorfer, who examined in comparable terms the stormy sede vacante following Pope Urban VIII’s death in 1644. However, Hunt’s study is more expansive in its chronological framework, as he points out, ranging from the equally turbulent interregnum of 1559 until that of 1655. Its archival core to a degree reflects Nussdorfer’s work, and also the scholarship of the German historian Peter Blastenbrei who has worked on parallel problems of criminality and violence in early modern Rome, and on whom Hunt also draws. Aside from a selection of strategically selected diplomatic correspondence from other Italian states, principally from Florence, Turin and Mantua, and the avvisi (news reports) for the periods of the conclaves in this period, Hunt has also looked in more detail at trial and deposition records of Rome’s Governor located in Rome’s Archivio di Stato, alongside the records of the city’s Senate, whose responsibility it was, in part, also to examine criminal matters. While Hunt willingly notes that these senatorial records in particular are occasionally patchy, they nevertheless represent a rich, and relatively unused, set of sources, and provide a strong, and original, foundation for this book as a whole

Ancient history · Art · Interregnum · Political science · Politics · Byzantine Studies and History · Classics · Historical and Religious Studies of Rome · History · Law · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity