Description: Historically, the papacy has had - and continues to have - significant and sustained influence on society and culture. In the contemporary world, this influence is felt far afield from the traditional geographic and cultural center of papal authority in western Europe, notably in the Global South. Volume 3 frames questions around the papacy's cultural influence, focusing on the influence that successive popes and various vectors of papal authority have had on a broad range of social and cultural developments in European and global societies. The range of topics covered here reflects the vast and expanding scope of papal influence on everything from architecture to the construction and contestation of gender norms to questions of papal fashion. That influence has waxed and waned over time as successive popes have had access to greater resources and have had stronger imperatives to use their powers of patronage and regulation to intervene in society at large.
Brief description: Joëlle Rollo-Koster has published widely on the social, cultural, religious, and political history of the late Middle Ages. She is a specialist of the Avignon Papacy and of the Great Western Schism and is a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America. Her most recent publications are Avignon and its Papacy, 1309-1417: Popes, Institutions, and Society (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015); The Great Western Schism, 1378-1417: Performing Legitimacy, Performing Unity (Cambridge University Press, 2022); and, as editor, Death in Medieval Europe: Death Scripted and Death Choreographed (Routledge, 2016). She was knighted Chevalier de l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques in 2016.