Joëlle Rollo-Koster

No holistic history of the Great Western Schism has been published since George Jefferis Jordan’s The Inner History of the Great Schism of the West: A Problem in Church Unity in 1930. And his was limited to the confines of the historiography available at the time. Popes and Intruders: A History of the Great Western Schism (1378-1417) will be the first English-written academic history of the Schism in the past few generations. A comprehensive analysis of the Schism is long overdue; most previous works have been either overly general or narrowly focused on the course of events, a single pontificate, or the negotiations that eventually led to its resolution. As interest in the Catholic Church continues to grow with Pope Francis, so does interest in the history of the institution.

In 1378 two competing conclaves elected one pope respectively, Urban VI and Clement VII, who each established their own group of followers (that is their obedience) and court in Rome and Avignon. After 1378, and up to 1417, the Christian world effectively had two popes. The crisis was without precedent. Of course, since Howard Kaminsky’s evaluation, the institutional culture that grew from the Avignon papacy can be made directly responsible for the development of the Schism. The Avignon popes’ beneficial system (the endowment of various forms of incomes to ecclesiastical charges or offices that allowed the grantee to subsist, and often thrive) anchored their ecclesiastical networks, often staffed by "interested" parties all inclined to see the machine run efficiently. The Avignon popes’ financial centralization and efficient tax collection led to and eventually clashed with the growing oligarchic pretensions of their College of Cardinals. Thus, it is highly possible that a schism would not have developed without an Avignon papacy. Still, the Schism stood on its own. It came after catastrophic demographic crises (plague, war), intense questioning of Catholic hierarchy over the Spiritual Franciscan question, and maybe rode the wind of "liberty" that marked the end of the Middle Ages (as argued by Samuel K. Cohn, jr.).

My work aims at refreshing a historiography that has not produced an all-inclusive history of the Schism for the past three generations. Traditional historiography has scrutinized events under a politico-institutional lens. I would like to open the field with a more encompassing approach, analyzing not only religion and politic, law and theology, but also symbols, performance, and the conceptual apparatus of this period of crises.