ABSTRACT
Traditional accounts of the battle between Church and State have emphasized the conflict between two important leaders, emperor and pope, and their importance at the top of their respective hierarchies of State and Church. Popes and their supporters presented the Papacy as the sole head of both Church and State-and, in their pictorial schemes, they seem to be presenting the pope as a sole individual. Such hierarchical notions are what are represented in Figure 3.2 (p. 74), where a hierarchical diagram illustrating the writing of Gilbert of Limerick places the pope (papa) on top. More recently, there has been reconsideration and historians have insisted that theories of authority from the central Middle Ages also had strong notions about consultation. King, emperor, and pope were all seen as acting with the consultation of their advisors or councilors in court. This image of the king and his major vassals acting in concert, or of the pope acting with his cardinals, was a reflection of the image of Heaven in which Christ at the Last Judgment would act in consultation with the saints, including his mother, as we see in the cover/frontispiece illustration from the apse mosaic at Santa Maria in Trastevere, Rome. Images of the papal authority consisting of the pope acting in consultation with his court, or their justification, are what Norman Zacour investigates here. What was the Papacy and did it comprise the pope alone? Or was the bishop of Rome’s local college of priests, the cardinals, part of what constituted the Papacy and its universal authority? These are not mere technicalities, but concerned the proper actions of the leader of the Roman Church.
