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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Electing the Pope in Early Modern Italy, 1450–1700 by Miles Pattenden Maria Antonietta Visceglia Electing the Pope in Early Modern Italy, 1450–1700. By Miles Pattenden. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2017. Pp. xvi, 309. $112.50. ISBN 978-0-19-879744-9.) In his introduction, Miles Pattenden, author of an earlier work on the fate of the Carafa family after the death of Paul IV (Pius IV and the Fall of the Carafa: Nepotism and Papal Authority in Counter-Reformation Rome [Oxford University Press, 2013]), explains his approach to the subject of his present book: papal elections in the early modern age. Conclaves, the rules governing them, and their conflicts have recently received a good deal of attention from international scholars and especially in Italy. The author draws widely on available works but unlike other studies he makes it clear that his "aim is to present a holistic argument rather than to inform about the activity that took place in and around conclaves on its own terms" (p. 7). In keeping with this approach, which seeks to "capture" the essence of the conclave, the author has included a seventh chapter, immediately preceding the conclusion, which aims to consider "how the papacy's identity as an elective monarchy affected the development of the governmental practices that we commonly associate with early modern Absolutism" (p. 218). The sections of this chapter dealing with venality, the development of the papal bureaucracy, the legislative [End Page 362] activity of the popes as measured statistically (Table 7.1, p. 234), the phenomenon of public debt, and papal nepotism are rather descriptive, with few references to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. So the proposal to construct an interpretational theory of how papal institutions developed between 1500 and 1800 based on these categories and with the help of the ideas contained in Douglass North's Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge University Press, 1990) appears to be overly ambitious. Moreover, it might have been a better idea to locate this chapter—which the author intends to be strategic—at the beginning of the book. The work's contribution is essentially to be found in chapters 2–6, which focus on papal elections as a political process, identifying the motivations, skills, and results achieved by those who played a major role in them. As is well known, for centuries the bishops of the Roman Church were elected by the clergy and the people, and it was only in 1059 that Nicholas II decreed that the cardinals should be the sole electors of the pope, a measure that was confirmed in the Third Lateran council by Alexander III (1179, Licet de vitanda), which added the clause of the two- thirds majority. The three canonical methods of election per scrutinium (ballot), per compromissum (a small group of cardinals designated by the college elected the pope), per inspirationem (electors unanimously acclaimed a cardinal) were set out explicitly in the conciliar constitution promulgated by Gregory X on November 1, 1274. Thus, the Middle Ages bequeathed to the modern era an institutional mechanism which in its essential features (those having the right to vote, two-thirds majority, electoral procedures) would endure, though not without a few important changes, down to the present day (on this topic of the continuity/innovation of these rules over time see Agostino Paravicini Bagliani and Maria Antonietta Visceglia, Il Conclave. Continuità e mutamenti dal Medioevo ad oggi [Viella, 2018]). Chapter 2 deals with the figure of the cardinal as it evolved between 1417, the year the popes returned to Rome, and the end of the eighteenth century. This chapter adopts a highly statistical approach that takes into account variables such as cardinals' family extraction, geographical origins (increasingly Italian over the centuries), wealth, piety, and links with external secular powers (Italian princes and the great monarchies, especially France and Spain). Professor Pattenden considers cardinals not just an oligarchy but a political class—a group held together by affinities and relationships—and he uses these two categories to shed light on individual aspects of the cardinalate and how these were related to evolving electoral practices. For example, he asks whether the bureaucratization of the cardinalate "affected...