Pope's Body, The

The Pope's Body. By Agostino Paravicini-Bagliani. Translated by David S. Peterson. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000. xxii + 352 pp. $28.00 (cloth).

Agostino Paravicini-Bagliani, Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Lausanne, explores in this fascinating book several tensions within the role and person of the medieval pope. Beginning his narrative in the eleventh century, but focusing on the thirteenth century, Paravicini-- Bagliani uses various sources-ceremonial books and the writings of theologians, saints, doctors, and alchemists-to demonstrate and examine the tremendous medieval interest in the pope's body. The "essential question" the book engages is "beyond the contradiction between the pope's physical transience and the church's institutional continuity, how did the Roman church articulate the relationship between the pope's mortal condition and the ongoing exercise of his office?" (pp. xvii-xviii). The author answers this question by reconstructing the metaphors and images by which medieval ecclesiologists theorized and symbolized the pope's power, office, and body.

One vivid example must stand for many others: During a pope's lifetime, the urgent tension between his body's morbidity and the great power he wields was forcefully rendered by the "throne" to which a new pope was conducted by the cardinals, the series stercorata or "bedunged" seat, "perhaps the most radical symbol ever applied to the Roman pontiff. . . . Having reached the summit of grandeur and wealth, the pope was obliged to recall his basic human condition and to humble himself" (pp. 44-45).

When a medieval pope died, elaborate ceremonies transferred his power to the cardinals who would elect the next pope. The dead pope "returned to being a man" (p. 163), losing his potestas papae. Stripped of his robes and abandoned by his retinue, his possessions plundered, the dead pope's ritually dressed corpse was then publicly displayed. The amazing practice of robbing deceased popes' garments and household objects "began to decline only in relatively recent times with the progressive establishment of impersonal professional relationships concurrent with the modern bureaucratization of the Roman curia" (p. 132).

A review of this length can only suggest the wealth of detail supporting the author's narrative. The reader's first impression may be that the book's subject is highly arcane. Yet the history described is the history of the present papacy. Readers may wish that the author were more explicit about which practices and symbolisms continue to the present, but that, in fairness, is not his topic. A must-read for medieval historians, the book will also be of great interest to anyone who seeks to understand the Roman papacy, the symbolic center of difference between Roman Catholics and Protestants.

MARGARET R. MILES

Graduate Theological Union

Berkeley, California

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