The Popes and Britain: A History of Rule, Rupture and Reconciliation

ISBN-13: 9781784534936 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 264 str.

Stella Fletcher

Opis

When the British thought of themselves as a Protestant nation their natural enemy was the pope. Rome's perspective was always considerably wider and the popes' view of Britain was almost invariably positive. No Christians were as devoted to St. Peter and his successors as the Anglo-Saxons who made their pilgrimages to Rome and supported the papacy by means of Peter's Pence. In the high medieval period, popes suffered opposition and attempted deposition at the hands of emperors, but England's King John placed his kingdom under papal overlordship, compounding his villainy in Protestant eyes. For its part, the Church in Scotland was recognized by the popes as a "special daughter" of the Holy See. When both kingdoms broke with Rome in the sixteenth century it was something of a sideshow in comparison with Spain's political dominance in the Italian peninsula. Thereafter, assertions of French nationalism at Rome's expense made England and Scotland appear as useful potential allies against Europe's strongest state. This was confirmed when eighteenth-century Britain emerged as a major power and its kings acquired Catholic subjects around the globe. Nothing caused a greater convergence of interests than the French Revolutionary wars and the contempt with which successive popes were treated by Britain's French enemies. Steadily overlapping interests required increasingly formal dialogue. For generations there were contacts at the elite level, much to the disgust of Britain's middle class Protestants, with diplomatic relations being formalized in the twentieth century, before the pastoral visit of John Paul II in 1982 and the state visit of Benedict XVI in 2010. As the twenty-first-century papacy looks ever more firmly beyond Europe, this new history examines political, diplomatic, and cultural relations between the popes and Britain from their vague origins to the present day, with particular emphasis on the contributions of individual pontiffs.

Recenzje

The most striking features of this text are these: its truly remarkable scope and its ability discern relatively coherent narratives across more than a millennium and a half. It is, therefore, an extremely welcome addition to scholarship on the relationships of the popes in the already rich year ... [a] truly excellent work. It tells a fascinating and little understood story, which will be of interest to specialists and nonspecialists alike. The Popes and Britain should be read by everyone interested in the history of the church in the Atlantic archipelago. Church History

Spis treści

Introduction 1. I Follow Peter 2. Papal Monarchs and their Subjects 3. Rome, Capital of the World? 4. Of Swords and Roses5. Converging Interests 6. 'God Bless our Pope, the Great, the Good' 7. From Hard Choices to Soft Power

O autorze

Dr Stella Fletcher has taught for the Continuing Education departments of the universities of Bath, Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester. She is currently Associate Fellow of the University of Warwick's Centre for the Study of the Renaissance. Her publications include the Longman Companion to Renaissance Europe and a history of the archbishops of Canterbury, The Mitre and the Crown (with Dominic Aidan Bellenger).